"Introductio", Roman Empire

The Romans are always around you if you live in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East or North Africa. When I ride my bike through my hometown, I pass a 2-foot-high Roman wall, built into the walls of a 19th-century mansion. When I speak to my wife in her native language, we converse in a corrupted form of Latin, handed down from the shivering legionnaires posted in Dacia. And when I travel from London to the North of England, the motorway I drive along is laid right on top of Ermine Street, the Roman road that connected their old provincial capital Londinium with the rest of Britannia.

Why do Moroccans build their beautiful houses around a central courtyard? The Romans. Why do people in the Balkans hang red and white twine around blossoming trees at the end of March? The Romans. Why do Americans call their upper chamber of lawmakers the Senate? The Romans. For so many people around the world, the Romans echo all around us. This might be why we think about the Romans every day; it might even be why you picked up this challenge, out of all the wonderful challenges created by The Conqueror. 

Now, how about the bit at the end of the question, the bit that reads ‘Roman Empire’? The word “empire” here refers not to the whole span of Roman history but to a very specific point - a time when Rome was not ruled by gods, kings, or its people, but by emperors.

At the start of our story, Rome is not an Empire; it is a Republic. An energetic and competitive place, no one man rules here. Instead, a complex constitution governs the city’s political life. Men who wish to direct the state’s affairs must run for office in elections similar to those familiar to us today, and may only hold office for limited terms. This was the Roman Republic - the res publica. 

The city’s most prestigious political institution is the Senate, made up of the city’s most elite citizens. Magistrates in the Senate have executive power, they can prosecute wars and issue decrees. However, voting on laws is in the hands of the citizen body who congregate in the city's assemblies to debate and legislate. To traditional Romans, the Senate is the guiding hand that steers the Roman ship of state. The rich landowners who sit in the Senate are bound by strict laws and moral precepts that prevent any one man from taking primacy over the others. The political rights of the Republic are fiercely guarded, and the very idea of a king ruling Rome is an outrage to any right-minded Roman. 

It is the 130s BCE, and Rome has emerged from a series of foreign wars as the most powerful polity in the Mediterranean. The families who led the city’s conquests now sit on top of a vast empire, and many are becoming inordinately, dangerously powerful. Gold flows in from Spain, whilst art and ideas percolate from Greece. Exotic lapis lazuli and aromatic spices enter the Mediterranean from Phoenicia, flooding the marketplaces with luxury, whilst grain from Carthage fills both the city’s granaries and the pockets of senators. Rome sits at the top of the world, and her elite balance precariously on top of Rome.

Yet the spoils of empire are not distributed equally. Those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy become more and more destitute as the elites buy up all the land, armies of imported slaves take their work, and wealth inequality spirals out of control. As the contemporary politician Gaius Gracchus said, the Roman people were ‘called masters of the world but have not a patch of earth to call their own’.

Some of these men of politics appeal to the disenfranchised masses, hoping to end the people’s exploitation, but also using popular anger and frustration as a springboard to power. Others, traditionalists and conservatives, work to preserve the privileges of the elites and oligarchs that guide the Roman state in the Senate House, to guard the political liberty of the Romans and to prevent a reversion to kingship or one-man rule.

This great conflict deepens throughout our narrative, as civil strife escalates into civil war, power concentrates in the hands of fewer and fewer people, until eventually, one-man rule is established over the empire. 

Our story is about men (and some women, behind the scenes) who attempted to surmount the old order of the Roman Republic. It is about how the swelling ambition, greed and wealth of the powerful led to the death of a system that had governed Rome for centuries. It is about the rise of the Roman Empire.