The history of Roma is commonly treated in three great divisions corresponding to the different forms of government which prevailed –the Monarchy, the Republic and the Empire–. These main divisions may be subdivided in different ways. Mommsen, whose great history reaches only down to the fall of the republic, divides his work into five periods. Of these, the first stretches from the earliest times down to the abolition of the kingship. The ancient historians have a good deal to tell us of this period, the names and characters, for instance, of the seven kings, beginning with Romulus, who is said to have founded the city in the year 753 B.C., and ending with Tarquinius Superbus, whose tyrannical conduct led to the abolition of the monarchy. In modern times, however, most of what the ancient historians have to tell us about the regal period is discredited. They all of them lived long after the events the regal period is described, in an age when the sifting of evidence was not considered the historian's chief duty, and it is thought now that much of what they wrote down as history of the earliest times is, as regards detail, no more authentic than the story of King Alfred and the burnt cakes. The tradition on which they built is nevertheless valuable for all conjectures concerning the general conditions prevailing in the earliest days of Rome.
The next of Mommsen's periods runs from the abolition of the monarchy (traditional date 510 B.C.) until the unification of Italy. When she first appears in history, Rome is a small city-state, but already occupies a pre-eminent position in the confederation of kindred city-states known as the Latin League. The relationship between Rome and her confederates was not always that of peace, but in the wars against the Latins it was Rome who was finally successful, as she was also, but only after centuries of hard fighting, against the other nations of Italy. The last great war of this period was one in which the Greek city of Tarentum in South Italy (where there were many Greek colonies) was allied with a non-Italian power in the person of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus. With the final defeat of Pyrrhus in 275 B.C., the conquest of Italy was virtually complete. Roman colonies (1) had been planted at most of the points of strategic importance, and of her late enemies, some were forced to accept direct Roman rule, while others were bound by treaties in which Rome was so much the predominant partner that they were, in fact, under her dominion. They could have no treaties with other foreign states and were bound to supply contingents to serve with the Roman armies.
The internal history of Rome during this period was hardly quieter than her external history, being taken up mainly by the "struggle between the orders", i.e. between the patricians and plebeians. The patricians were the nobility or privileged citizens, the plebeians the unprivileged citizens, and the struggle was that of the plebeians for political equality. Originally unable to intermarry with patricians and excluded from all high offices, both civil and religious, the plebeians finally succeeded in obtaining all the political privileges which they had made their object, but the last act in the drama was not played until the year 287 B.C.
The third period sees Rome at grips with non-Italian powers against whom she has to fight, not only in Italy but abroad. Chief among these powers were Carthage and Macedonia, and Mommsen ends the period with the decisive victory over the Macedonian forces at Pydna in 168 B.C. The result of Rome's victories was that she now acquired territories outside Italy which came to be known as "provinces". The first province was Sicily, which fell to Rome after the first Punic war, in 241 B.C. The later wars with Carthage brought Rome the greater part of Spain and finally "Africa", i.e. the Punic possessions in North Africa which were formed into a province after the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. Macedonia itself had become a province in 148 B.C. This was but the logical consequence of Pydna; already at the beginning of the second century B.C. Roman influence both in the Eastern and in the Western Mediterranean had been supreme.
The fourth period Mommsen calls "the revolution". Its history is that of the breakdown of the old republican form of government, and it is characterised by fierce political strife leading on several occasions to civil war. Mommsen ends it with the temporary triumph of the conservative party under Sulla, dictator 81-79 B.C., who re-established the constitution on an entirely undemocratic basis.
The fifth period, the last in Mommsen's book, stretches from Sulla to 46 B.C., in which year the victory of C. Julius Caesar over the Pompeians at Thapsus left him master of the Roman world. This period Mommsen calls "the foundation of the military monarchy". It was one of renewed civil conflict, accompanied by expansion abroad, and in the extraconstitutional positions assumed by such leaders as Pompeius and Caesar it already foreshadows the empire. But, though Caesar was, in fact, a military autocrat for the short remainder of his life, and in a sense the founder of the Roman empire, it is not he who is usually regarded as the first emperor. There was no real revival of the republic after his assassination in 44 B.C., but there was a revival of civil war, ending only in 31 B.C. with the battle of Actium, won by C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, the greatnephew and adopted son of C. Julius Caesar, over his rival M. Antonius. It is this Octavian, better known by the title of "Augustus", which he received in 27 B.C., who is generally spoken of as the first Roman emperor.
The long centuries of the empire fall naturally into two periods, which are not, however, marked off from each other by any very definitive dividing line. In the earlier period, usually known as the "principate", though the emperor is in fact supreme, his power is disguised under republican forms; but the disguise becomes ever thinner, and in the third century A.D. vanishes altogether. It is common to refer to the succeeding period of undisguised autocracy as the "dominate", because the emperor is now no longer even in theory merely the princeps, or "first citizen", he is dominus –"master"– of his subjects. If we must choose a specific date for the beginning of the "dominate", we can take A.D. 284, in which year, after about half a century of confusion during which emperors followed each other in rapid succession, Diocletian ascended the throne. This emperor introduced important reforms amounting to a change in the constitution. From his time until its end, the Roman empire remained an absolute monarchy, but no simple answer can be given to the question, "when did it end?" Diocletian himself, among his reforms, instituted an administrative division between the Western and Eastern halves of the empire. This cleavage was accentuated when the Emperor Constantine transferred his residence to Constantinople, and became final in A.D. 395. But by that time already the end of the Western empire was nearing. The invasions of the barbarians could no longer be kept in check, and the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in A.D. 476.
The Eastern empire, on the other hand, had a long future still before it, which was only to end with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in A.D. 1453. Of all the emperors who reigned during its remaining thousand years of life, there is one who is of supreme importance for lawyers, the Emperor Justinian, who came to the throne in A.D. 527 and died in 565.
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(1) The Roman, unlike the Greek colony, remained closely bound to the mother city, and served as a military garrison in conquered territory.
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Source:
Historical introduction to the study of Roman law, H. F. Jolowicz, pages 1 - 4.
