Why Did The Roman Empire Collapse With Mary Beard | Empire Without Limit | Odyssey

This channel is part of the historic hit Network this is the main gate of a great Roman city when the northern border of the

empire

in Germany announces the presence and impact on Rome and is still here two thousand years later Rome was built to last one of The The biggest puzzles about the Roman Empire have always been what caused its decline and fall. Historians have been debating that since the 5th century AD. and we still haven't agreed on an answer. There are all kinds of theories that are sensible even to the most foolish. the invasion of barbarian hordes was either rampant inflation, it's public and private corruption, too much sex or perhaps too little sex, or it's bleeding into the water pipes, gradually sending everyone angry and happy.

This is not a multiple choice test and one thing is for Sure it's all intriguingly complicated, so bear with me, thanks from its mythical origins to the reality of the Empire that stretched from Britain in the north to the margins of the Sahara in the south, Spain, Israel, the Nile and the Rhine, the Roman world was more culturally diverse. more productive and connected than anything that had existed before, we tend to joke, we say that all roads lead to Rome, but in reality they did, it seemed that Rome had discovered the art of imperial longevity, prospering not only through exploitation but also through the creation of citizens and at the top of life. the stack was the emperor, we'll probably have to kiss his feet, but the Roman Empire was more vulnerable than it seemed conflict and there was resistance from both outside and inside, it was Romans attacking Romans, so why did the Empire Romano came to an end?

Or was it a historic success? It's like Netflix just for history buffs with exclusive historical documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you. Our extensive catalog of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious Treasures of King Tut. So sign up today to watch broadcast-quality documentaries that uncover the mysteries of the ancient world and aren't just documentaries. We have a network of amazing history podcasts bringing you new episodes every day. Sign up now for a free trial and Odyssey fans will get 50 off your first one. three months just make sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout foreigner no one will know for sure what caused the decline of Rome it's not the kind of question you can answer once and for all but I'm going to unravel a story that makes sense to me and I'm starting with one of the Roman world's most recognizable and baffling monuments: the 115-kilometre-long Hadrian's Wall stretching across northern Britain, built in the 2nd century AD, when the

empire

was at its widest point. , what its construction suggests.

For me it is a change in the way the Romans saw the Empire and what happened on their borders. Foreign Britain was Rome's Afghanistan. The Romans always found it terribly difficult to get the upper hand, especially in the north of the country, not that there were many. of pitched battles between Romans and barbarians but there were decades of terrorism and guerrilla warfare the wall must have had something to do with controlling that but it was never a direct defense against the enemy it was more of a Roman declaration this really is an aggressive structure plowing through across the country from one side to the other three, there are two things that happen here, firstly, it is an important symbol of Roman power and it speaks to the people to the north below those to the south, but there are also a new idea of ​​what an Empire is, what is at stake here, they are starting to say that the Empire has an advantage, it has a

limit

, when they do it here and in other places in the Empire, this is the beginning of mapping the empire and That made a big difference, as we know now that the moment there is a physical barrier, whether it be a wall, a fence or a river, it not only keeps people out, but it also draws them in and there was an urgency additional in that when almost everyone inside the Empire was a full Roman citizen, almost everyone outside, no, it was not a simple confrontation between those inside and those outside.

Romans and barbarians, the borders of the empire were always quite porous in our terms and the so-called barbarians are even found serving in the Roman army. There were a whole series of flashpoints that put the Empire on the defensive like Vaders against waves of refugees and against economic immigrants and, to be honest, it was quite difficult to distinguish between those three; The effect of all that was to somehow change the situation. The empire from the inside out, the center of things was now on the margins, that's where more and more Roman money was spent, it's a place where more and more Roman resources were consumed and it's where the decisions that really mattered were made. in a way that the Romans on the frontiers Soldiers and generals became the key power intermediaries.

The change was dramatic in the 3rd century AD. Emperors were usually elevated to power by the legions with little or no reference to the authorities in Rome and they didn't last long either, most of them barely. He had time to wish us some coins and put up some statues before they disappeared. They were often killed by supporters of the next guy on the throne. One of this group was Ella Gabbales, parachuted to the throne by her grandmother and a Legion army, if you believe stories it was a nasty job that made Nero or Caligula look like Pussycats Kelly, known for his extravagant banquets, a meal with he was an experience to die for and literally the food was as far away as you could get - nightingale claws and ostrich brains in particular. favorites, but he was also clever, he was particularly interested in the colour-coded banquets, all the food in blue or green, but there were risks, if you were at the bottom of the pecking order, you didn't get real food at all, you just got model food in wood or plaster the only thing he could do was look at it and on one occasion he spilled so many rose petals on his lucky guests that they suffocated and did not come out alive the emperor was a complete fan of fashion he never wore the same pair of shoes twice he had his mother in the Senate and he loved having naked women drag him around in a wheelbarrow he even had a sex change and had a vagina surgically built now this is not at all true literally to begin with Ella Gabbolis was only 14 years old when she came to the throne at best it is a fantasy about what it would be like to have a very difficult teenager as emperor at worst it is black propaganda invented after being deposed but it has a logic it is a The fantasy about a threatened system, the idea That the man on the throne was completely insane said more about the way the system was imploding than about the man or boy themselves, but the Romans didn't sit back and watch it all happen and for the best.

The way to explain how they tried to restore order is with another food, it's called Roman Pizza and one thing's for sure, no Romani ever read it because they didn't have tomatoes to begin with, but if you suspend disbelief for a moment, it's a good one. manner. to visualize the problems facing the Roman Empire the Pizza Empire Rome Marta in the middle problem number one the empathic is very big The communications through him are very slow but Rome is really here there are weeks left to send his commandos to the Borders What are they doing well about it? as usual, the Romans improvised, they decided that it was okay, that the empire is quite difficult to divide an empire and even go further and you can say divide the empire into three with three joint Empress, you can even divide it, you even have it, you can even divide it into four with four giant emperors the advantages of this are obvious you get manageable parts to manage uh one Emperor for that one for that one for that one the disadvantages are also obvious this guy decides he wants to have this person's part to generate conflict and what It seemed like it was some kind of devolution, it turns out to be disintegration, the other problem they face is what to do with Rome and here we have another kind of devolution, a series of mini capitals and these are the olives, uh, but different parts of the Empire, let's say it's in the East, that's good, we see Trier in Germany, Ravenna or Milan in Italy and those cities can be administrative centers for the different parts and that makes all kinds of communication problems and so on much more easy to do. about Rome in the middle when all the decisions are really made in these other capitals, well the answer is that Rome still looks beautiful, it's still a great symbolic center, but is it doing anything?

No way, it's the tomato Paul, it's turned a little white. The Elephant The city of Romulus no longer controls the Roman world. Bullock. Some emperors ruled their portion of territory without even going to Rome. The one-man rule established by the first Emperor Augustus was transferred for a time to multiple emperors in a divided Empire and this is the The great imperial throne room of the mini-capital in Trier in Germany is a building with some powerful messages. On the one hand, it tells us that Rome was no longer the center of Roman power, but in its modern reincarnation there is a hint of an even greater revolution that was taking place within the empire, then became a church and, as we will see, not It was a bigger accident than any of those problems in the Borders.

Mad Emperors and rival Legions, the entire Roman belief system was being challenged and to understand that we have to go back further into Roman history to see how the relationship between the gods and the Roman state had traditionally worked. This is a Roman temple you wouldn't come here for services or to be preached to, you wouldn't come to get married or to be part of a congregation, chances are it would be locked up most of the year anyway, guarded by some custodian grumpy, but if you walked in, one thing you would certainly have seen is a statue of the gods, which is the basic function of a Roman Temple to house the Divine image, that's what temples were called in Latin times.

Houses and temples were everywhere, so why do they need so many? This was built for the golden Hercules in the middle of the 2nd century BC. C., almost certainly with the prophets of the Roman conquest in the east and that was a common pattern: a general in the middle of battle would swear a temple to the God if that God granted him victory and when the general returned to Rome with success uses part of the loot to finance the construction of temples in a way are public reminders of God's support for the Roman state and underline the axiom that Rome can only be successful if it keeps the gods on its side and the gods are, of course , plurals, may seem obvious, but there were many things. of them and to us the interaction between them and the Romans can seem a bit contractual even mechanistic the Romans did not believe in their gods they had no internal faith in our sense they simply took it for granted that the gods existed and would exist help them as long as they do their part of the deal by erecting temples or, above all, sacrificing animals to them, be they bulls, pigs or sheep, and we can glimpse how important that was in this splendid sculpture now a bit stranded in a Roman.

Here in Backstreet we have a scene of sacrifice to the gods, in the bottom panel there is a ball being sacrificed and above it the emperor is pouring some kind of libation on an altar. You can find hundreds of scenes like this throughout the Roman Empire and the What they mean is that one of the emperor's functions was to manage the relationship between humans and the gods. Religion and politics were united. Abroad, there is a decidedly public and decidedly practical side to all this, but that does not mean that the gods had no personal impact, on the contrary, they permeated the lives of the Romans.

It was a world full of gods. This collection of miniature gods and goddesses takes us directly into the world of personal religion. These are private objects. thousands of them throughout the Roman Empire in people's pockets, on the pieces of their cloaks at home, in temples and shrines, they are like anything from refrigerator magnets to objects of devotion all rolled into one. This was an incredibly complicated religious world we lived in. We are not dealing here with 12 gods and goddesses sitting on Mount Olympus, each with their own job to do Venus, the goddess of love, Mars, the god of war, that's what I learned in school, but it's very misleading, it's much more a question of a whole range. of different Divine Powers that control the world in different ways and help us make sense of it, which could be questions about where human life began or much more practical things like will I cross the sea safely?

In that case, it is possible that you have decided to turn to the god Neptune, the god of the sea, but you could equally have approached Minerva who had to do with the craft of sailing or Hercules who protected Humanity in its fights against adversity or you could equally have turned to Mercury The God whoIt helped you get places. and helped you make profits, this was an extraordinarily flexible religious system in which people made their own religious decisions and created their own world religion. Religion was fundamental to the success of the Empire and the Romans made sure their gratitude was manifest, but the growth of the Empire brought new and different gods to Rome, just as the Romans brought in new citizens from the newly conquered territories, too.

They incorporated divine citizens. One of these new religions is believed to have originated in what is now Iran, it did not have large temples, at least not above. Foreign Terrain This is a wonderfully preserved Temple of the God Mithras in an absolutely standard pattern throughout the Roman Empire. They look a bit like this dark enclosure and it was almost as hidden then as it is now. In reality, everything has been done a little. The cheapness of this marble floor seems pretty impressive but it obviously came for the Romans to skip and here they even did. Their small steps cannibalizing some ancient inscription using anything they could get their hands on created an underground religious world a cave that was thought to It was an image of the cosmos itself this was a place where people gathered to worship the worshipers would have reclined Here, um, as if they were having dinner and presumably whatever ritual was taking place took place in the middle, judging by the image of Mithras himself usually shown killing a bull, animal sacrifice was central, even if other details are quite mysterious, what we do know is that it was entirely male, it was the most vulgar religion of the Roman Empire , which is saying something, it was also a religion of initiation, you went through a series of stages or degrees of initiation and all the time you came closer to a vision of Divine truth.

The best clues about the strange world of Mythrust come from the rescue footage of several of its temples. You have Mithras himself plunging his dagger into the side of the sacrificial bull and he is wearing a Persian hat with a very distinctive shape that indicates that he comes from the margins or outside of the Roman world and there is something that I think about the exoticism of all this that must be there been part of its appeal, but exotic or not, it still fits comfortably into the Roman world of polytheism. The real problems began when monotheistic religions came into contact.

With Rome, the worship of one God and the exclusion of all others was something that went against basic Roman assumptions. Judea became a province of the empire in 6 AD. The people here have their own way of life under a distinctive relationship with one God, so when the Romans took power with a very different set of assumptions - a clash was almost inevitable - a mix of politics, local infighting and religious conflicts that ended when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and that triggered a large-scale Jewish revolt that lasted six years abroad. of that war occurred at an outpost in the desert called Masada, in this remote sport King Herod, one of Rome's first allies or collaborators in Judea, had built an extravagant palace where he could dine and bathe in the purest Roman style. .

We know that the place is now famous for much bloodier events. reasons why the final confrontation between Jews and Romans occurred hours away from Jerusalem here in the middle of the desert there was a splinter group of about a thousand Jewish extremists who were terrorists in the eyes of some Jews as well as the Romans and had taken over of Asada and resisted years after the fall of the temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish rebels made this rock their base and eventually met their death when the Romans caught up with them to understand what happened next. I will meet historian Greg Wolff at the The ruins of the ancient palace, these forts look very impressive as they are below, but by the time they were built, Jerusalem had fallen, the temple was destroyed, there is no opposition anywhere else Instead, there was still a small group of people resisting here for years.

They are almost forgotten until a Roman governor decides he should really sort it out and sends the legions here and this is what we see here, it is a trace of a clearing operation that you can still make out where the forts and the siege wall are. Another weak point in the cliffs a ramp was built for a battering ram and the Romans broke through the rebel defenses a Jewish rebel turned traitor then a Roman historian recorded what happened next, although his version of events has long been disputed, we have this extraordinary story told by a very, very unreliable source that says that when the Romans came here, when they built their ramp, they took over and they came, what they found was not any living people, almost a thousand people who had been here had some kind of suicide mix.

The Covenants and the Slaughter cell had just disappeared and there was no one left for piles of bodies and enough food to prove that they could have held out forever, but if this is true, who knows, it has become a powerful modern myth, so which depends on the story of heroic self-sacrifice for the cause, self-sacrifice and non-surrender, and that is what Masada means now, no surrender was found here and who they were is not clear, but the story of the rebels who preferred suicide to Slavery is still alive and Masada is still a symbol of the Jewish resistance, the conflict behind it all is often framed in religious terms, but the truth is more complex: one would expect some kind of clash, right?

Because there is a culture in Judaism that insists that there is only one God dealing with a Roman imperial power that insists that there are many gods and that seems irreconcilable, yes, although there are things in what Jews do that seem very familiar to us. the Roman eye, they perform animal sacrifices, they have a huge temple in the center and perhaps, above all, it is a religion based on a ritual landscape a sense of place is a religion of somewhere that they can always manage, right? , you can have a religion, it's quite foreign to them, as you can imagine, as long as it belongs to them. someone, so they are happy with Goddess Isis because she is the Egyptian God.

Yes, the Romans did not expect those they conquered to abandon their own gods. Part of the point of polytheism is that it can accept and incorporate new and different Divinities. powers, but they did expect them to recognize the relationship between the Roman state and religion, it is much more difficult for the Jews to accommodate the Romans because their own history is now a history of being subjected to one empire after another and of being subject to persecutions of different types and that is why it is much more difficult for the Jews to fit the Romans into the system than in the room that fit the Jews into their system and that is where things fell apart for the next 200 years, there were more bloody chapters in the history of the Jews. and the Romans, but if we look at it from the Roman point of view, what is equally remarkable is the extent to which they managed to accommodate Judaism within the Empire.

They used taxes as a means of control. The Roman emperors received delegations and complaints from the Jewish communities. Individual Jews rose to the top of power. Roman administration and in many ways Judea was a small and prosperous Roman province, but for one branch of Judaism, Christianity, history was to be very different in the turmoil of the conflict between Rome and Judea, a Jewish rabbi had developed new ideas , his name was The Sayings of Jesus about Jesus, as they called him, were only written down later, but it is quite clear that to the Jews he was preaching blasphemy and at first, at least to the Romans, he was just another troublemaker, however, exactly the story was that he was arrested and tried. and sentenced to death Roman style by crucifixion.

The Romans must have thought the problem was solved, but it was only at the beginning, it was near here that Jesus came to be crucified, probably under some charge of civil disobedience. It is very difficult to know exactly what was going on because history has been rewritten, reinterpreted and embroidered since then, but we can be pretty sure that the real Jesus was the leader of some small dissident Jewish group and that in the decades after his crucifixion was almost reinvented as the founding symbol of a new religion that attracted followers more widely throughout the Empire, at first there were not that many of them and they believed in a variety of different things that we would not now recognize as Christian, but at the center of it all was a new ideology that challenged from within the Empire itself the old Roman certainties about how the world worked before today.

Christian pilgrims from around the world flock to Jerusalem to visit the site where Jesus was buried in the appropriately named Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a foreign church being an understatement. One Roof, a bewildering array of Christian sects fight to be heard, foreigners and curious tourists gather by the shrine surrounding Jesus' tomb. This is the most sacred site in Christianity. The idea that Jesus rose from the dead would have been the least baffling part of Christian teaching. For most Romans there was a combination of ideas much more radical than that there was not just one God;

Those who followed Jesus could not participate in the sacrifice and had to prepare for the kingdom of God that transcended the earthly. power of Rome that might soon come to that, the very strange notion that poverty was a virtue, not a disgrace, and some pretty harsh views on sex, but it's not hard to see how some Romans might have been curious and even felt attracted by Christian teachings. Others would have been bewildered or offended by what must have seemed like an assault on their world order versus what the Romans had traditionally thought of as religion, and that contradiction may be one of the reasons Christianity was initially slow to take off.

But when did the same communications network that united the Roman Empire explode? One of the key figures in the spread of the word was a small-time Roman salesman from Turkey, better known as one Paul. Jesus himself was not a great traveler, but Paul didn't just get everywhere. In the Eastern Mediterranean they also used long-distance mail as a form of transmission to remote Christian communities and the letters he wrote are still part of the Bible to the Corinthians. That is the letter that he wrote to the Christian church in Corinth and that he is writing to the people of Thessalonica, to the people of Ephesus, to the Ephesians and to the Christian church in Rome, that part is a pep talk, part instruction and not all It is entirely to my liking, the man is the head of the woman, he says that will never be my motto, but what is it that draws attention?

In terms of the geographical horizons that these letters show, it talks about being in Macedonia and going to travel to Ephesus and then moving on to Corinth, it is the connectivity of the Roman Empire that these Christians are exploiting. Christianity was born within the Roman Empire and the people who became its followers took advantage of its connectivity in port cities such as Corinth and Thessalonica where goods jobs and new spiritual guidance could be found the trade routes of the Empire became the Broadcasting Service of the Christianity Abroad In the years after the crucifixion of Jesus there were small groups calling themselves Christians throughout the Empire and in Rome itself, although there were not many in total, perhaps 200,000 out of an empire of 50 million and there were also very different shades of Christians, this is a tombstone that really flaunts its Christianity and the key word is written in Greek, it is an excuse that means fish.

It is not just a fish because the letters of that word or also the first letters of a famous Christian slogan that says Jesus Christ the Son of God our savior now why they use that slogan absolutely clear it is possible that they wanted a little secrecy but if so The excuse is not a terribly clever disguise, it is much more likely an attempt to represent God and ask how God should be represented. The idea of ​​encoding God in language and in visual symbols, but there is more to this and there are more gods to this.

Tombstone up here, these two letters DM stand for dismarnibus to the gods of the departed spirits, the absolutely classic traditional pagan gods of the dead, so here we have both Christianity and paganism in the same stone and it's a wonderful encapsulation of that boundary blurred. between Christianity and paganism in the early Christian centuries, thank you, most Christians in the Roman Empire probably inhabited that blurred border, but some were much harsher, extremists, you could almost call them, who came into conflict with the Roman authorities and they went to death for refusing to sacrifice to the traditional gods on a foreign day in 203 AD.

A young Roman woman, mother of a small baby, was thrown to the wild beasts in an amphitheater not unlike this one, the object of mockery, whipping andmutilations by animals, but not killed. Gladiator came to finish her off. After a painful blow from Miss, she calmly took her sword in her hands and guided it to her throat. Her name was Vivia perpetua. Her only crime was being a Christian. These were Romans attacking Romans. We tend to assume that the Romans loved the spectacle of thrown Christians. to the lions in the amphitheater but in reality it was not that simple the amphitheater was a highly ordered microcosm of Roman society Spectators sat in a rigid hierarchy according to their social place you could not choose to simply pay for a good seat in the front row as can be done now and the victims at the center, the slaves and convicted criminals were, by definition, outsiders, they should never have been young Roman mothers like the perpetual ones of their own, it is not surprising that her prosecutor tried to force her to do it.

She thinks of her little baby and tells of her faith, and no wonder the crowd as she watched her perpetually die mocked and shuddered. The perpetual story of pious resistance and brutal execution has become part of the Christian narrative of good versus evil in which many non-Christians. They must have seen stubborn and stubborn self-destruction. Christians saw martyrdom as a powerful advertisement of their faith long after their moment in the arena. The stories of the killings, torture and unbearable suffering were told again and again in meticulous and sometimes absurd detail. The bravery of the martyrs in the face of sadistic cruelty seemed to validate the faith for which they died and offer other Christians an example they could glorify, although not fully understanding why the Roman authorities decided to send them to their deaths remains something of a mystery. an enigma that is largely due to the fact that almost all the evidence we have comes from the Christian Romans themselves.

It is an extreme example of History written by the winners. We try to see it from the side of the Roman authorities. The fact that the Christians refused to sacrifice threatened to upset the good relationship between the Romans. State and the divine powers that ensured the success of the Empire was pure betrayal.In the middle of the 3rd century, less than 50 years after the death of Perpetual, an emperor decided to put things back in order and restore order with a piece of paper. These are pieces of papyrus from a ruined bin in the province of Egypt and They are some of the most important things ever found in a bin and it is also a wonderful example of Roman bureaucracies.

They are personal certificates that prove that their owner has sacrificed to traditional gods. The essence of the message is here saying that. and then he's been sacrificed, it's been witnessed here and then one of the witnesses signed that his name was Hermes and this guy actually signed several of these certificates. The reason why he did it is because the Empress had ordered that everyone in the Empire must prove that they were one. sacrificed to the gods, this is often treated as a centralized persecution of Christians because of course true Christians could not sacrifice to traditional gods and we know, in fact, that some of them did not and supposedly went to the death, but even Christians The writers tell us that many of them and this is where I think they would have sacrificed me anyway or just kept their heads down.

What's going on in the emperor's mind is also quite different. I think I'm sure he's not planning any more bloody spectacles of Christians versus Lions. What he wants to do is make sure that each of his subjects publicly subscribes to the institution of sacrifice, which is the ritual that guarantees the proper relationship between the state Roman and his gods and ensures the success of the Romans, I mean in a way, this is a clumsy and heavy-handed attempt to restore political and religious order in the Roman world. His project didn't last long and neither did he. Decius was not dealing alone with the Christians but between the invasion of the barbarians and internal rivals his reign only lasted two years and he ended up killed on the battlefield.

It would have been beyond the wildest dreams of Perpetual and those who died like her that in less than a hundred years Rome would turn in exactly the opposite direction after a century. out of chaos, an emperor made a pact with the same religion that seemed to be undermining the empire. His name was Constantine and he eventually became the sole Emperor once again and aligned his power with that of the soul God, the Christian God, who are these fragments. They are what remains of a colossal statue of Emperor Constantine. It cannot have been all marble, it could never have been erected if it were, we have to imagine a brick and a bronze core and these pieces as if glued on the end, it is completely New Vision of Imperial power, of course, there have been colossal statues of Emperors before, but just look at that almost abstract looking superhuman face, this is not an emperor who could possibly be one of us, this is an emperor we have to worship, probably we have to kiss his feet Constantine is a surprising mix of old and new.

He comes to power in the Civil War. He celebrates a Triumph. He recognizes divine assistance. He has a large building program in the city of Rome. All of that is very traditional. The new thing is that. The god whose help he recognizes is the Christian God and what he builds in the city are not temples, but his churches have no idea why Constantine became a Christian. He could have been a sincere spiritual conversion. It could have been a calculated decision. On what seemed to be the winning side, the political logic of everything going on inside Constantine's head is that the circle has been squared: the universal Empire instead of fighting.

The Universal Church has reached an agreement with him. From now on, the Empire and the church will walk. Side by side one way to look at this is as a revolution fundamental aspects of being Roman have changed hierarchy faith morality sex but in another way Constantine has reinvented the original model of Roman power around a new foreign God by building a new capital which eventually became the new Rome, Constantine's city was Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, here he ordered his own versions of some of Rome's most important buildings. The site of the Hippodrome of Constantine, his Circus Maximus has been preserved complete with some of the monuments he and later Emperors placed throughout its Center Robin Cormack my tour guide and my husband know more than I do about art and culture of the Eastern Empire.

I think this is a really impressive monument. They are very proud of him. The amazing achievement is getting that Obelisk. Luxor at this booth and they were so proud of what they had done that they have two inscriptions saying how difficult it was and they have photographs of how it was set up. You can see the ropes here to lift it. This is Roman technology. as it always was, but why did Constantine choose to build his city here? It only happened because he had won his last battle against his rival Roman emperors and is a victorious city.

He looked around him and chose a city near where the battle was. the city of Byzantium and turned it into a huge and powerful new city named after him Constantinople, thus showing that he is now the only Roman emperor. So did he feel like a specifically Christian city? Did you feel different? No, it looked like it was a Roman city. city ​​with all the trimmings and what he did was bring many pagan statues here, so that you have them in the Hippodrome and in other places, to the point that there is the famous saying that this city was built by stripping all the other cities. of the Roman Empire, we must have been a little strange to see an emperor who patronized Christianity decorating his city with pagan gods, great works of art that he had absorbed to decorate it from all other parts of the Empire.

He is a powerful Emperor. This is a demonstration of power. He made this a traditional Roman city with all the characteristics of the largest city he knew in Rome. They didn't call themselves Byzantines, they called themselves Romans and they are absolutely convinced that they were Romans. In fact, the emperor here in the East, the Christian Roman Empire, lasted until 1453, when the Ottomans conquered Byzantium in the west. It was a different story. Rome was still Rome, but it was more a showcase of architecture and culture than the capital of power, but the northern borders were more porous than ever.

The outsiders pushed towards them and, although now a hollow symbol, the city of Rome was still a prize driven by the Huns. Various tribes such as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals headed towards the Western Empire. The legendary sack of Rome happened not once, but three times, the Roman armies were defeated, the citizens were killed, and the city itself was sacked and plundered. The very words barbarian and vandal now conjure up an image of wanton destruction of all that is civilized but that popular image no matter how powerful. It's quite unfair, this is a wonderfully vivid attempt at the 19th century, the image of the barbarian hordes in action destroying the city of Rome, long hair, funny braids and mustaches, and a couple of them are trying to take down one of the symbols of the imperial power that the Knights are gaining. their torches ready to set fire to the place in reality the world of the new West was nothing like this, it is true that political unity had

collapse

d and there were many destructive military conflicts, but what emerged was a series of rival powers that in They were actually many vagabonds who were trying to buy the prestige of Rome and Romanity rather than trying to buy it, they patronized poetry, developed traditions of Roman law, and were more likely to be restoring the monuments of the Roman past, not trying to tear them down.

Empire. In a political sense it had disappeared, but the cultural hegemony of Rome remained even in the West these people were not Romans but they were imitating Rome in much the same way that many modern empires have done since. Were these barbarians imitating the Romans so closely that we can really call it the fall of the Roman Empire? How is it decided how or when an Empire begins or ends? That says? Is it territorial control? Is it law or culture? Is it the Roman mark? There has been an enormous transformation and in many ways this is no longer the Empire that I looked back to Romulus with his definition of what it meant to be Roman, a transformation almost that I see clearly here in what was once the mini capital of Rome, Trier in Germany, in the large imperial throne room which later became a church.

Christendom is not an empire of political domination or not only that, but an empire of the mind and, in its own ambitions, at least it remains an empire without

limit

s, oblivious to the political and military systems that allowed expansion; It is the image of Rome that, for better or worse, it has. It acted as a reference point for many later empires: Great Britain, Russia, the United States, even Nazi Germany, have tried to recreate what they considered the glory of ancient Rome and have not avoided some of the same problems, dilemmas and conflicts of the current imperial dominance in the West.

We still wonder where our limits are and what limits should be placed on inclusion. The Romans' ambivalence also questions whether the ends ever justify the means. Tears alongside victory parades abroad. Years ago, the Roman historian Tacitus offered a picture of the consequences of the Roman conquest they made. a desert, he wrote and they call it peace. I first read it when I was a slightly awkward teenager and I still remember the moment because it was the first time the Romans seemed to speak to me, it was brutal clarity. that we are so striking and I guess since then, as much as I admired the Romans, as much as they repelled me, they always caught my attention, it is the conversation that we can still have with the Romans that is such an important conversation that It makes us think more about ourselves and the ideas and problems we have in common with them.

It's a little bit of the Romans in the heads of each of us, which is why Rome still matters.