Quotes About Roman Empire

in 212 A.D. making citizens of all freemen in the Empire

If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.

in AD 286 it was split

Roman engineering The Romans accomplished amazing feats of engineering as they built roads, bridges, and aqueducts (bridges for water conduits) across their empire. This 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct at Segovia, in central Spain, has 128 arches. No mortar was used to cement the large blocks of granite together. Good roads were one of the reasons for the success of the Roman Empire. They allowed troops and supplies to be moved swiftly, before the enemy could either attack or escape.

Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?' Who indeed?

Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier. SPQR

all hail to the Roman flounders

Eventually, as Christians gained political influence in the Roman empire, they succeeded in getting laws passed outlawing infanticide (in AD 374). They also passed laws granting government aid to poor families who did not have the means to raise their children, so they would not be tempted to abandon or expose them.

Sacramental attachments to a dying a resurrected savior was a common idea in the Roman Empire. The religion of Mithraism, very popular in the army and open only to males, bathed the initiate in the blood of a bull.

The most important fact to know about the Christian Church in the two hundred years after Jesus' death is that only at the end of this period did the Church comprise as many people as the far-flung Jewish community numbered (five million) in the Roman Empire. Christianity developed an intense rivalry with Judaism, and for many decades was compared to the Jews as a minority. This accounts for the intense anti-Semitism that became enshrined in Christianity by 200 A.D.

Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire; Christianity was not until the first Christian emperor ascended the throne in the fourth century A.D. There were periodic persecutions of the Christians by the imperial state and local officials. The resulting martyrs, often upper-class women of unusual devotion, only served to draw more attention and converts to the Church.

An economy built on slave labor is vulnerable in two ways. One, availability of forced labor discourages technical innovation. The very wealthy [Roman]empire experienced no industrial revolutions. Two -- even more crucial -- slaves do not reproduce their own numbers. As Rome's wars of conquest ended, the slave population began to shrink, leading to a shortage of agricultural laborers by 200 A.D.

I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.