The Romans For Dummies

The Etruscans built Rome’s first walls, its temple to Jupiter, and also the great sewer called the Cloaca Maxima.

By the first century BC, Rome was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. (

The basis of the division was between the East and the West. The Eastern Empire managed to survive until 1453 but it was a mere shadow of its former self. The Western half had really ceased to exist by the mid-400s, a thousand years earlier.

Egypt to an end and the longest-established of all civilisations ever became just another Roman province.

The Phoenicians were brilliant seafarers, which incidentally the Romans never were, and one story is that they might even have sailed right round the coast of Africa.

Today, the Greeks are still heralded as the fathers of modern democracy and civilisation.

This corruption of the Roman ideal flew right in the face of everything the Roman world was supposed to be: honest, law-abiding, self-disciplined.

That’s what the Romans believed in – their Golden Age as farmers.

Of course, the original Romans did, but over time their Empire became made of conquered peoples who were awarded Roman status and privileges and who often fought to get them. People in the Roman Empire saw themselves as Roman, while they proudly maintained their own national and ethnic heritages.

This Empire, they believed, was their reward from the gods for being such a worthy people