From the principate of Augustus in 27 BCE to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE — five centuries that taught Europe what an empire could look like.
Rome is the empire against which every later European state has measured itself. Charlemagne crowned in 800. The Holy Roman Empire that lasted to 1806. The Tsars who took the title from Caesar. Napoleon's eagles. The eagles of the Wehrmacht. Mussolini's fascio. Each was an attempt to inherit something Rome had been.
Rome's legacy is not nostalgia. It is law (the Corpus Juris Civilis underwrites continental civil law); language (Latin's daughters are spoken by 850 million); the calendar (July, August, the months that follow); the alphabet on this page; the road network across Europe whose alignments survive in modern motorways; the concept of the city.
This deck takes the empire from the late Republic through the fall of the West, with thirty leaves of figures, dates, and arguments. The premise is that the more carefully you read it, the less foreign it becomes.
The Roman Republic — res publica, the public thing — ran from 509 BCE, the traditional date of the expulsion of the last king Tarquinius Superbus, to its dissolution in the civil wars of the first century BCE. Five centuries of consuls, the Senate, the assemblies, and the slow constitutional improvisation that the Romans called the cursus honorum.
The Republic conquered Italy, fought three wars with Carthage (264–146 BCE; the second under Hannibal nearly ended Rome), and acquired the Hellenistic east. By the time of the Gracchi (133 and 121 BCE) — populist tribunes both murdered by senatorial reaction — the institutions designed for a city-state were already failing under the weight of empire.
The hundred years from the Gracchi to Augustus is the long Roman revolution: Marius and Sulla, civil war, military reform, the substitution of generalissimos for magistrates. The Republic ended not in a single stroke but in a generation of defeats by its own discipline.
The First Triumvirate (60 BCE) — Pompey, Crassus, Caesar — was the working partnership that bypassed the Senate. Crassus died at Carrhae in 53 BCE; the alliance collapsed; civil war between Caesar and the Pompeian Senate followed.
10 January 49 BCE. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the small stream that marked the legal boundary of his Cisalpine Gaul command. To bring an army across was treason. Alea iacta est — the die is cast. Pompey fled to Greece; Caesar pursued; Pharsalus on 9 August 48 BCE settled it.
Caesar accumulated offices: dictator perpetuo by February 44 BCE, Pontifex Maximus, Imperator. On 15 March 44 BCE — the Ides — he was stabbed twenty-three times in the Theatre of Pompey by a senatorial conspiracy of which Brutus and Cassius were the figureheads. The assassination ended the man, not his cause. The Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus prosecuted the murderers; the proscriptions of 43 BCE killed perhaps 2,000 senators and equestrians, including Cicero.
Octavian — Caesar's grand-nephew and adoptive son — defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium on 2 September 31 BCE. By 27 BCE, the Senate granted him the title Augustus ("revered"). He held tribunician power, proconsular imperium, and the title princeps ("first citizen"). The Republic, formally, continued; in practice, an emperor governed.
The settlement of 27 BCE was a constitutional fiction so successful it lasted three centuries. Augustus paid the Republican forms — the consulate, the Senate, the assemblies — careful respect while emptying them of independent power. Res publica restituta, the restored Republic, was the regime's official self-description.
Augustus reigned forty-one years. He pacified the frontier (with one major exception — Varus's three legions destroyed at the Teutoburg Forest, 9 CE — that fixed the Rhine as the limit), reformed taxation, codified the law, and rebuilt Rome in marble. He died in August 14 CE, succeeded by his stepson Tiberius.
The two centuries from Augustus's accession in 27 BCE to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE are the Pax Romana — Roman peace, in the sense that the empire's internal trade flowed without major interruption and the frontier wars were limited.
The figures are speculative but indicative: an empire of perhaps 50–70 million people; an army of around 350,000 across thirty legions plus auxiliaries; a road network of more than 80,000 kilometres of paved highway; sea-lanes from Alexandria to Ostia carrying the grain that fed Rome's million inhabitants.
The paradox of the Pax is that it was peace at the cost of conquest, and discipline at the cost of liberty. The historian Tacitus puts the indictment in the mouth of the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus, on the eve of Mons Graupius (83 CE): "Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant — they make a desert and call it peace."
Five emperors from Augustus's family, 27 BCE – 68 CE.
Tiberius (14–37 CE). Capable general, melancholic ruler. Withdrew to Capri after 26 CE, ruled by letter through the Praetorian prefect Sejanus, whom he eventually executed.
Caligula (37–41 CE). Reigned three years and ten months. The historians' portrait is a madman; modern scholarship suspects political theatre. He proposed making his horse Incitatus a consul. Murdered by his Praetorian Guard.
Claudius (41–54 CE). Limped, stammered, was thought a fool, was acclaimed emperor by the Praetorians who found him hiding behind a curtain. Conquered Britain (43 CE). Wrote a 41-book history of Etruria, now lost. Probably poisoned by his fourth wife Agrippina.
Nero (54–68 CE). Murdered his mother (59 CE), kicked his pregnant wife to death (65 CE), persecuted Christians after the great fire of Rome (64 CE — there is no evidence he started it). Forced to suicide by Senate decree at thirty.
Nero's suicide left no Julio-Claudian heir and exposed what Tacitus called "arcanum imperii" — the secret of empire — that emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome.
Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, marched on Rome and was acclaimed in June 68. Murdered in the Forum on 15 January 69 by the Praetorians of Otho, who succeeded him. Otho lost the First Battle of Bedriacum to Vitellius's Rhine legions in April; killed himself the next day. Vitellius ruled six months. The Danube and eastern legions proclaimed Vespasian, the commander suppressing the Jewish Revolt; Vespasian's general Antonius Primus defeated Vitellius at the Second Battle of Bedriacum in October.
The lesson — that Roman emperors were chosen by armies — would recur. The third century would see fifty emperors in fifty years, most of them generals raised by their troops.
Vespasian (69–79 CE). A practical Sabine soldier-emperor; rebuilt the treasury, began construction of the Colosseum (the Flavian Amphitheatre, 70–80 CE) on the site of Nero's drained lake. Famous for the urine tax (pecunia non olet — money does not stink). Suppressed the Jewish Revolt; his son Titus took Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE.
Titus (79–81 CE). Ruled twenty-six months. Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79 CE (or, on recent dating from a charcoal inscription at Pompeii, in October), burying Pompeii and Herculaneum and preserving them for excavation from 1748. A great fire and a plague struck Rome in 80. Titus opened the Colosseum in 80 with 100 days of games. Died young, possibly poisoned by his brother.
Domitian (81–96 CE). Authoritarian, efficient, and despised by the senatorial historians who survived him. Built the Domus Flavia on the Palatine — the model for every later imperial palace. Assassinated by court conspiracy in September 96. The Flavian dynasty ended; the Senate appointed the elderly senator Nerva.
Edward Gibbon's verdict on the period from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (96–180 CE): "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." He may have been wrong about humanity, but the empire's internal stability is undeniable.
Nerva (96–98). Reigned sixteen months. Critical move: adopted Trajan as heir.
Trajan (98–117). The optimum princeps; conqueror of Dacia (the modern Romanian territory) and the eastern reaches. Empire at maximum extent under him.
Hadrian (117–138). Consolidator, traveller, builder. Withdrew from Trajan's eastern conquests; built the wall.
Antoninus Pius (138–161). Twenty-three years of unbroken peace; the only emperor whose reign included no significant military expedition.
Marcus Aurelius (161–180). Philosopher-emperor; wrote the Meditations on campaign. Spent most of his reign defending the Danube frontier against the Marcomanni and Quadi.
The pattern was succession by adoption, not blood. Marcus Aurelius broke it by leaving the empire to his biological son Commodus.
Born in Italica, Spain (53 CE); the first emperor of provincial origin. Adopted by Nerva in 97; succeeded in January 98. Reigned almost twenty years.
The two Dacian Wars (101–102, 105–106) annexed the gold-rich Dacian kingdom north of the Danube. The triumph paid for Trajan's Forum in Rome (inaugurated 112), and for Trajan's Column (113), whose 155-scene spiral relief is the most detailed surviving narrative of any Roman military campaign.
The Parthian War (114–117) added Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria as briefly-held provinces — the empire reached the Persian Gulf for the first and last time. Trajan died at sixty-three on the way home (in Selinus, Cilicia, August 117). His successor Hadrian abandoned the eastern provinces almost immediately as indefensible.
Trajan was officially declared optimus princeps by the Senate. The phrase, in inscriptions, was the standard with which subsequent emperors were compared, almost always unfavourably.
Hadrian (76–138 CE) was the consolidator. He spent more of his reign than any other emperor outside Italy, inspecting and reorganising the provinces. The frontier strategy was defence, not expansion.
Hadrian's Wall, built 122–130 CE, ran 73 miles across northern Britain from the Solway Firth to the Tyne. Stone in the east, turf in the west, with milecastles every Roman mile and turrets between. Eleven thousand auxiliary troops garrisoned it. Most of the wall stands; the central section, between Birdoswald and Housesteads, is among the best-preserved Roman military monuments.
Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon (the present building, with its 43.3-metre concrete dome — the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built — was completed around 126 CE). His villa at Tivoli covered 120 hectares. His grief at the death of his lover Antinous in the Nile (130 CE) produced a city — Antinopolis — and a god; statues of the deified Antinous fill modern museums.
Adopted by Antoninus Pius in 138 CE; emperor 161–180 CE. Co-emperor with Lucius Verus until 169. The reign is dominated by external pressure: the Parthian war (Verus 161–166), the Marcomannic wars on the Danube (166–180), and the Antonine Plague (almost certainly smallpox), which killed perhaps five million across the empire from 165.
The Meditations — twelve books of private notes in Greek, written on campaign at Carnuntum and Sirmium — is the founding text of Stoic practical philosophy. Not published, not edited; the text we have is what the historian Constantine V's archive preserved. Modern editions: the Hays translation (2002) is the popular one, the Hard (Oxford World's Classics) the literal.
The line that survives: "You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength." The reign that produced it ended at Vindobona (modern Vienna) in 180 CE, with the empire passed to Marcus's eighteen-year-old son Commodus.
Commodus (180–192 CE) is conventionally the marker that ends the Pax Romana. Twelve years of erratic rule, intermittent absence from public business, and a pathological self-identification with Hercules. He fought as a gladiator in the Colosseum (the Senate paid him a million sesterces per appearance). His mistress Marcia, the chamberlain Eclectus, and the Praetorian prefect Laetus had him strangled in his bath on 31 December 192 — the wrestler Narcissus did the work.
The next year — 193 — saw five emperors. Pertinax, an honest reformer, was murdered by the Praetorians after three months. The Praetorian Guard then auctioned the office; Didius Julianus bought it for 25,000 sesterces per soldier. He reigned sixty-six days. Three provincial governors marched: Septimius Severus from Pannonia, Pescennius Niger from Syria, Clodius Albinus from Britain. Severus prevailed.
The pattern of generals raised by armies, civil war, and restoration would repeat with growing frequency.
Septimius Severus (193–211) was the first African emperor, born in Lepcis Magna (modern Libya). Soldier-emperor; raised army pay, allowed soldiers to marry, expanded the Praetorian Guard. Died in York (211) campaigning against the Caledonians.
His sons Caracalla (211–217) and Geta (211) were left as joint emperors. Caracalla had Geta murdered in their mother Julia Domna's arms in December 211. The Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 — Caracalla's most consequential act — extended Roman citizenship to almost every free person in the empire, fundamentally changing the legal architecture of the imperial population.
Caracalla was murdered by a soldier in 217. His successor Macrinus was the first non-senatorial emperor (an equestrian Praetorian prefect); his successor Elagabalus (218–222) was a Syrian teenager whose religious reforms — installing the Emesene sun-god as supreme — produced four years of scandal. Murdered, dragged through the streets, dumped in the Tiber. The dynasty ended with the assassination of Severus Alexander in 235.
235–284 CE. The empire nearly broke. Roughly fifty men claimed the imperial title; only one died of natural causes. Persian invasion (the emperor Valerian captured by Shapur I in 260 — the only Roman emperor ever taken prisoner — and used as a footstool until his death). Gothic raids reached Athens. The empire fractured into three: the Gallic Empire in the west (260–274), the Palmyrene Empire under Zenobia in the east (270–273), and a much-reduced Roman state in the middle.
Plague returned. Inflation collapsed the silver-content currency: the antoninianus, nominally a double denarius, fell from 50 percent silver under Caracalla to less than 5 percent by 270.
The recovery began with the Illyrian emperors — soldier-emperors from the Balkans, hard men. Aurelian (270–275) reunited the empire in five years, defeated Zenobia, walled Rome (the Aurelian Walls survive), and was murdered by his own staff. Diocletian (284–305) is the figure who solved the crisis structurally.
Diocletian (284–305) reorganised the empire on the premise that one man could not rule it. The Tetrarchy, formalised in 293, paired two senior emperors (Augusti) with two junior ones (Caesars). Each had a region — Diocletian in Nicomedia, Maximian in Mediolanum (Milan), Galerius in Sirmium, Constantius in Augusta Treverorum (Trier). The city of Rome ceased to be the empire's centre of administration; it would never recover its primacy.
Diocletian doubled the army (to perhaps 500,000), reformed the tax system on a quinquennial census, restructured the provinces from about fifty to over one hundred, and tried to fix prices and wages by the Edict on Maximum Prices (301), which failed. He instituted court ceremonial — purple, prostration, the title dominus rather than princeps — that cast the emperor as the equivalent of an eastern monarch.
His Great Persecution of Christians (303–311) was the empire's last and most systematic. He retired voluntarily in 305 to grow cabbages at his palace in Split, where his mausoleum still stands as the cathedral of the city.
Diocletian's tetrarchy collapsed within years of his retirement. Civil war from 306 to 324 ended with Constantine sole emperor. He had been acclaimed at York in 306 on his father's death; defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (28 October 312), where he is said to have seen a chi-rho in the sky and the words In hoc signo vinces; defeated Licinius at Chrysopolis in 324.
The Edict of Milan (313, with Licinius) granted Christianity legal toleration. Constantine increasingly favoured the church: tax privileges for clergy, basilicas at Rome (Old St Peter's, the Lateran) and Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the Council of Nicaea (325) that produced the creed and condemned Arianism. Whether Constantine was a Christian during his reign or only on his deathbed (he was baptised in 337 by an Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia) is a question for theologians; the political effect was the same.
He founded Constantinople on the site of Byzantium, dedicating it on 11 May 330. The new capital would outlive the western half of the empire by almost a thousand years.
Theodosius I (379–395) was the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire as a single unit. His Edict of Thessalonica (380) made Nicene Christianity the state religion; the Edict of 381 banned heretical Christian sects; the Edicts of 391–392 banned pagan worship outright. The Olympic Games, last held in 393 CE, were among the casualties.
The Battle of the Frigidus (5–6 September 394) defeated the western usurper Eugenius and the pagan general Arbogast. It also destroyed the army Theodosius would have needed to defend the western empire. He died at Mediolanum on 17 January 395.
His sons divided the empire — Arcadius took the East at Constantinople, Honorius took the West at Mediolanum (later Ravenna, after 402). The split was nominally administrative; in practice, the two halves drifted apart and never reunited. The eastern emperor Justinian's western reconquests (533–554) are the partial exception that proves the rule.
The barbarian incursions across the Rhine in the winter of 406–407 (frozen river, opportunistic Vandals, Alans, Suevi) breached a frontier the empire could no longer hold. The Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome on 24 August 410 — the first time the city had fallen to a foreign army in eight centuries. Saint Augustine wrote The City of God in response.
The Vandals took North Africa (429–439); Carthage, the empire's grain basket, fell to Geiseric in 439. Attila the Hun ravaged the Balkans and Gaul in 451–452; the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (Châlons, 451) checked him. He invaded Italy in 452; Pope Leo I famously persuaded him to withdraw. Attila died in 453 of a nosebleed on his wedding night.
Rome was sacked again by the Vandals in 455. The last Western emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic general Odoacer on 4 September 476 CE. Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The conventional date for the fall of the Western Roman Empire is 476; the lived reality of decline had been at least a century.
The empire's economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. Roughly 80 percent of the population worked the land; perhaps 10–20 percent lived in cities. Slavery was structural: estimates of the slave population at the height of the empire range from 2 to 12 million, perhaps 10–20 percent of the total.
The grain dole — the annona — fed perhaps 200,000 of Rome's residents at state expense from 58 BCE. Egypt and (later) North Africa were the breadbaskets; the loss of Africa to the Vandals in 439 was a fatal economic blow to the Western Empire.
The currency was the silver denarius (with the gold aureus for large transactions). Inflation in the third-century crisis broke the silver coinage; Diocletian's gold solidus (introduced 301, refined by Constantine in 312) became the empire's stable money and was still being struck — under the same name and weight standard — by the Byzantines in the eleventh century. A solidus weighed 4.5 grams, was 95+ percent gold, and held its purchasing power for seven hundred years.
The Twelve Tables (c. 450 BCE), the foundational legal code of the early Republic, were displayed in the Forum. By the early empire, Roman jurisprudence had developed into a sophisticated discipline; the jurisconsults — Gaius (mid-2nd c. CE), Papinian (d. 212), Ulpian (d. 223), Paul, Modestinus — produced the analyses that shape continental civil law to this day.
Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (528–534), the great Byzantine codification, distilled the entire Roman legal tradition into four parts: the Institutes (an introductory textbook), the Digest (50 books of jurists' opinions), the Codex (imperial legislation), and the Novellae (Justinian's own new laws).
Rediscovered at the University of Bologna in the late 11th century, the Corpus became the basis of medieval civil law instruction across Europe and underwrites — directly — the legal systems of France (Code Napoléon, 1804), Germany (BGB, 1900), Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Scotland, Quebec, Louisiana, much of Latin America, and Japan. English common law diverged; almost everywhere else, Roman law is the foundation.
The legion was the central unit. About 5,000–5,500 men at full strength; ten cohorts of six centuries each (the first cohort double-strength); a small cavalry contingent; engineers, artillery, medical staff. Twenty-five to thirty-three legions during most of the empire — about 150,000 legionaries plus an equal number of auxiliary troops drawn from the provinces.
Service was originally six years, then sixteen, then twenty (twenty-five for auxiliaries). On honourable discharge, soldiers received a cash payment, a plot of land, and Roman citizenship for auxiliaries. The diploma of citizenship — a bronze plaque issued at discharge — survives in many examples.
The legion's tactical doctrine — heavy infantry in three lines, the pilum (heavy javelin) thrown to disrupt enemy formations, the gladius (short sword) for the close fight — gave Rome battlefield dominance for centuries. By the late empire, the heavy infantry legion was being superseded by mobile field armies (comitatenses) and frontier garrisons (limitanei); cavalry rose in importance; barbarian foederati became a structural part of the army.
The Roman road network at its peak ran over 80,000 kilometres of paved highway across the empire — a network not matched in Europe until the 19th century. The Via Appia (begun 312 BCE) is the oldest major road; the Via Egnatia (mid-2nd c. BCE) crossed the Balkans from the Adriatic to Byzantium. Most modern European motorway alignments overlap, in part, with Roman ones.
The aqueducts brought water to the cities. Eleven major aqueducts served Rome itself, delivering perhaps a billion litres a day at the empire's height; the longest (Aqua Marcia) ran 91 kilometres. The Pont du Gard in southern France (mid-1st c. CE), 49 metres tall, three tiers of arches, is the iconic surviving fragment.
The empire was also a builder of harbours (Caesarea Maritima's hydraulic concrete moles), monumental architecture (the Colosseum, the Pantheon, Hadrian's Mausoleum, the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, Trajan's Markets), and frontier works (Hadrian's Wall, the Antonine Wall, the German limes, the Saxon Shore forts).
Roman religion before Christianity was civic, public, and ritualistic — concerned with right practice (pax deorum) more than belief. The state religion centred on the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva), the Vestals, the augural college, and the imperial cult — emperors deified after death (or, after Caligula, sometimes during life). Foreign cults were tolerated when they did not threaten public order: Cybele, Isis, Mithras (especially popular in the army), Sol Invictus.
Judaism had a special protected status as religio licita. Christianity initially fell within Judaism's protections; once it emerged as distinct, it was illegal but rarely systematically persecuted. The major persecutions were Nero (64), Decius (250), Valerian (257–259), and Diocletian's Great Persecution (303–311).
The Constantinian shift after 312 made Christianity tolerated; Theodosius's edicts (380, 391–92) made it mandatory and pagan worship illegal. The closure of the Athenian Academy by Justinian in 529 is sometimes taken as the symbolic end of pagan classical antiquity.
Western Europe spent the centuries after 476 trying to reconstruct what had been lost. Charlemagne's coronation by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 CE explicitly revived the western imperial title; the Holy Roman Empire survived in some form until Napoleon dissolved it in 1806.
The eastern empire — the Byzantine — kept the Roman name, the Roman law, the Roman administrative continuity, until the Ottoman Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453. The Russian Tsars (caesars) inherited the legitimacy claim through Sophia Palaiologina's marriage to Ivan III in 1472. Moscow as the "Third Rome" was a 16th-century Russian theological-political construct.
The empire's cultural inheritance: Latin's daughters (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, etc.); Roman law's continental continuation; the alphabet; the calendar; the network of cities (London, Paris, Vienna, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Barcelona, Mérida, Seville, Lisbon, Milan, Florence, all founded or re-founded as Roman colonies); the architectural vocabulary of the West; the entire idea of "the West" itself.
Mary Beard (b. 1955) is the most-read living historian of Rome in English. Cambridge classicist, professor at Newnham; SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) is her one-volume narrative — opinionated, careful, allergic to romanticisation.
Beard's argument, in SPQR and elsewhere, is that the modern fascination with Roman emperors as figures of biography misses what made Rome durable. The interesting story is institutional: how an obscure central-Italian city, in the course of seven centuries, manufactured a model of imperial citizenship, urban administration, and provincial integration that no successor in the West has matched.
Other historians who shaped the modern English-language picture: Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939, on the Augustan settlement); Peter Brown (The World of Late Antiquity, 1971; The Body and Society, 1988); Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–1788); Tom Holland (the popular trilogy Rubicon, Dynasty, Pax).
↑ Mary Beard on SPQR · the history of ancient Rome
Watch · Europe in the wake of the fall of Rome
Watch · History vs. Augustus · Greenfield & Gendler
Read Beard's SPQR first; it is the best modern one-volume history. For the late empire, Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006) is the sober account; Bryan Ward-Perkins's shorter The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) makes the materialist case that the West really did collapse.
The conventional question is why Rome fell. The more interesting question is why it lasted. Five hundred years of imperial continuity, in a Mediterranean world of constantly shifting frontier pressures, climatic variation, and dynastic instability, was the achievement.
The answer is roughly: a flexible citizenship that absorbed conquered peoples (the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 simply formalised a process that had begun with Rome's expansion through Italy in the 4th century BCE); a professional army with predictable career terms; an administrative class drawn from across the provinces; a legal system that integrated provincials' contracts and disputes with metropolitan ones; a road and sea-lane network that allowed Mediterranean-wide trade; a civic ideology — eventually religious — capacious enough to accommodate enormous regional variation.
These are also, in different forms, the constituents of every successful modern state. Reading Rome carefully is reading a long, careful, often-failed argument about how to build durable institutions across a large territory and a diverse population. The argument is not finished; we are still in it.
The Roman Empire — Volume III, History, of The Deck Catalog. Set in Cormorant Garamond with small-caps display in the Trajan tradition. Parchment at #f0e5cc; ink in deep wine and gilt.
Thirty-one leaves on five centuries that taught Europe what an empire could look like, and one century — the fifth — when half of it stopped looking like one at all.
↑ Vol. III · History · The Roman Empire