Roman Empire and the Eruption of Vesuvius, History

From village to Republic

According to legend, twin brothers Romulus and Remus, raised by a she-wolf, founded Rome in 753 BC. Archaeology shows that villages stood on the hills by the eighth century BC, and the legend is a later story. Rome began with kings. Then in 509 BC, say Roman historians, the citizens drove out the last king and founded a Republic. Power was shared between the Senate and two consuls elected for one year only. This system was designed to prevent any single man from ruling. For centuries it worked, while Rome conquered Italy and then lands across the sea.

The first emperor

Wars between ambitious generals tore the Republic apart. Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, and his adopted heir Octavian won the last civil war. In 27 BC the Senate gave him the name Augustus, “the revered one”. He claimed to have restored the Republic and called himself only “first citizen”, but in fact one man now held the power. Historians count him as the first emperor. His rule began a long period of relative peace, called the Pax Romana, that lasted about two centuries.

Roads, water and “our sea”

In the first century AD the Empire is a network. Soldiers, traders and messengers travelled on more than 80,000 kilometres of main paved roads at their peak. Aqueducts on tall stone arches, such as the Pont du Gard in France, carried fresh water to cities, and Rome alone had eleven of them. The Romans called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, “our sea”, because it was ringed by their provinces, and grain from Egypt crossed it to feed the capital. Latin spread with the army and became the ancestor of Italian, Spanish and French.

AD 79: the mountain wakes

Mount Vesuvius had been quiet for centuries, and its fertile slopes above the Bay of Naples were covered with farms and vineyards. In AD 79 it erupted. We have an eyewitness: Pliny the Younger, then seventeen, watched from across the bay and described a cloud like an umbrella pine. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, sailed to help and died. Tradition says it happened on 24 August, but in 2018 archaeologists found a charcoal inscription at Pompeii that seems to carry a date in October. Experts still debate which month it was.

Buried towns

For hours pumice rained on Pompeii, until roofs collapsed under the weight. Then hot clouds of ash and gas, called pyroclastic surges, swept through the towns. Pompeii lay under four to six metres of ash and pumice, and Herculaneum was sealed under even more. Many people escaped, but over a thousand bodies have been found. The ash preserved loaves of bread, wall paintings, shop signs and graffiti. Herculaneum was rediscovered in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748. Hollows left by bodies in the ash were filled with plaster in the 1860s.

The Empire at its largest

In AD 117 the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent under the emperor Trajan. It stretched from Britain to the Euphrates, covering about five million square kilometres. Estimates say it held several tens of millions of people, perhaps a fifth of all humanity. Trajan’s Column in Rome still tells his victories in stone. The edges were already hard to defend, and his successor Hadrian gave up part of the new lands in the east. The story of how the Empire changed and ended is a story for later.

Rome: From City to Empire