An Empire Across Three Continents

This chapter opens Section II, Empires, of Themes in World History. The section introduction surveys some two thousand years of empire-building after Mesopotamia; Timeline II sets c. 100 BCE to 1300 CE side by side for six regions; and Theme 2 studies one empire in depth — Rome, which spread across Europe, Asia and Africa, hence ‘three continents’. (The next chapter, Nomadic Empires, on the Mongols, completes the section.)

• Links within this book: Theme 1 (Mesopotamia) gave Rome the time divisions NCERT says passed through Alexander’s successors; Theme 3 (Nomadic Empires) studies the Mongols named at the end of the section introduction; Theme 4 (The Three Orders) begins where the western ‘post-Roman’ kingdoms leave off; Theme 5 shows how Greek and Roman learning returned to Europe.
• Links to the Indian books: Themes in Indian History – I covers the same centuries in India — Indo-Greeks, Shakas, Kushanas, Satavahanas and long-distance trade with the Roman world; Timeline II’s South Asia column lists them.
• UPSC — be realistic: GS1 world history is officially from the 18th century, so Rome is rarely asked head-on. It matters for Prelims questions on Indo-Roman trade and its decline, for Mains questions comparing ancient civilisations, and for essays and GS4 examples (law and civil rights, women’s property, labour, the rise and fall of empires).

• Section II: from Iran and Alexander (Hellenistic world) to Rome, the Arab caliphates and the Mongols — empires built to control trade networks, helped by religions that crossed languages.
• Rome and Iran (Parthians, then Sasanians) were the two superpowers; Rome ringed the Mediterranean, bounded by the Rhine, Danube and Sahara; ~60 million people in the mid-2nd century.
• Principate of Augustus (27 BCE): emperor as ‘Princeps’, the Senate and a paid army (25 years’ service) were the three players; cities and provincial elites ran and taxed the provinces.
• Third-century crisis: Sasanians in the east, Alamanni, Franks, Goths on the Rhine–Danube; 25 emperors in 47 years.
• Society and economy: nuclear family, women’s property rights and easy divorce; amphorae trace Spanish then African then eastern oil; slavery plus debt bondage and wage labour.
• Late antiquity: Diocletian’s reforms, Constantine’s gold solidus and Constantinople, gradual Christianisation; the West splits into ‘post-Roman’ kingdoms; the East prospers under Justinian until the Arab conquests (633–42).

The chapter’s opening promise: the empire held a wealth of local cultures and languages; women had a stronger legal position then than in many countries today; but much of the economy ran on slave labour, denying freedom to large numbers. From the 5th century it fell apart in the west but stayed intact and prosperous in the east, whose wealth the later caliphates inherited.

Two superpowers. From the birth of Christ to the 630s, Rome and Iran ruled most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. They were rivals, often at war, separated only by a narrow strip along the Euphrates. Rome dominated the Mediterranean — ‘the heart of Rome’s empire’ — and all lands around it; its northern boundaries were the Rhine and Danube, its southern the Sahara. Iran held everything south of the Caspian down to eastern Arabia and often much of Afghanistan. The Chinese called this western world Ta Ch’in (‘greater Ch’in’).

NCERT divides the empire into an early phase (down to the main part of the 3rd century) and a late one. Unlike Iran, whose Parthian and Sasanian rulers governed a largely Iranian population, Rome was a mosaic of territories and cultures held together by a common system of government. Latin (west) and Greek (east) were the languages of administration; the boundary ran across the middle of the Mediterranean, between Latin-speaking Tripolitania and Greek-speaking Cyrenaica. Everyone was subject to one ruler, the emperor.

The Principate. Augustus, the first emperor, founded it in 27 BCE. Though sole ruler, he kept up the fiction that he was only the Princeps, out of respect for the Senate — the aristocracy’s body, which had controlled Rome under the Republic. Most surviving Roman histories were written by men of senatorial background, so emperors were judged by how they treated the Senate; many senators longed for the Republic but knew it could not return. The army was paid and professional (minimum 25 years’ service), unlike Iran’s conscripted army; the largest organised body in the empire (600,000 by the 4th century), it could make or break emperors and often mutinied for better pay. The Senate hated and feared it, especially in the tense 3rd century.

Stability and succession. Except for 69 CE — four emperors in quick succession — the first two centuries were largely free of civil war. Succession followed family descent, natural or adoptive: Tiberius (14–37), the second emperor, was Augustus’s adopted son. Foreign wars were rarer: the ‘Augustan age’ is remembered for peace after decades of strife; the only major expansion was Trajan’s fruitless occupation beyond the Euphrates (113–17), abandoned by his successors. More typical was absorbing client kingdoms of the Near East into provinces — all west of the Euphrates gone by the early 2nd century.

Provinces and cities. Apart from Italy (not a province then), all territories were provinces and taxed. At its peak in the 2nd century the empire ran from Scotland to Armenia and from the Sahara to the Euphrates, with some 60 million people by the mid-2nd century. How could it be governed without a modern government? NCERT’s answer: urbanisation. The great Mediterranean cities — Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch the biggest — were ‘the true bedrock of the imperial system’: through them the state taxed the countryside, and local upper classes collaborated in administering and taxing their own territories. In the 2nd–3rd centuries provincial elites supplied most governors and commanders and, backed by emperors, became more powerful than the Senate; Gallienus (253–68) barred senators from army command. Citizenship spread beyond Italy; senators of provincial origin became a majority in the 3rd century — a sign of Italy’s decline and the rise of southern Spain, Africa and the east.

Urban life: public baths were a striking feature (an Iranian ruler who tried to introduce them faced the clergy’s anger — water was sacred to them); and city people enjoyed far more entertainment — one calendar lists spectacula (shows) on 176 days of the year.

If the 1st and 2nd centuries were largely peaceful and prosperous, the 3rd brought ‘the first major signs of internal strain’. From the 230s the empire fought on several fronts. In Iran a more aggressive dynasty, the Sasanians, emerged in 225 and within 15 years was expanding towards the Euphrates; in a famous rock inscription in three languages, Shapur I claimed to have annihilated a Roman army of 60,000 and captured the eastern capital, Antioch. Meanwhile Germanic tribal confederacies — Alamanni, Franks, Goths — pressed on the Rhine and Danube; from 233 to 280 provinces from the Black Sea to the Alps and southern Germany were repeatedly invaded, and much territory beyond the Danube was abandoned. Emperors were constantly in the field against those the Romans called ‘barbarians’. The rapid turnover — 25 emperors in 47 years — was an obvious symptom.

Family. The nuclear family was widespread: adult sons did not live with their families, and adult brothers rarely shared a household — but slaves counted as part of the family. By the late Republic (1st century BCE) the typical marriage left the wife outside her husband’s authority, with full rights in her natal family’s property; her dowry went to the husband only for the marriage’s duration; she remained a primary heir of her father and became an independent property owner on his death. In law the couple was two financial entities. Divorce needed only a notice of intent by either partner.

Literacy. Casual literacy — reading and writing in everyday, often trivial contexts — varied greatly by region. At Pompeii, buried by a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, street walls carried advertisements and graffiti everywhere. In Egypt, by contrast, contracts were usually written by professional scribes, who often note that X or Y cannot read or write — though literacy was more common among soldiers, officers and estate managers.

Cultural diversity showed in religious cults and local deities, languages, dress, food, social organisation (tribal and non-tribal) and settlement. Aramaic dominated the Near East west of the Euphrates; Coptic was spoken in Egypt; Punic and Berber in North Africa; Celtic in Spain and the north-west. Many were purely oral until scripts were made: Armenian was written only from the 5th century, while a Coptic Bible translation existed by the mid-3rd century. Elsewhere Latin displaced written forms — Celtic ceased to be written after the 1st century.

The empire had an economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards and olive-oil factories. Wheat, wine and olive oil were traded in huge quantities, mainly from Spain, Gaul, North Africa, Egypt and, less, Italy. Liquids travelled in amphorae; Monte Testaccio in Rome is said to hold the remains of over 50 million of them. By matching clay to clay pits, archaeologists can say where each jar was made.

The jars’ story. Spanish olive oil was a vast enterprise peaking in 140–160, carried in Dressel 20 jars; their wide distribution shows Spanish producers took markets from Italian ones — which, NCERT reasons, would only happen if Spain supplied better oil at lower prices. Then North African estates dominated through most of the 3rd and 4th centuries; after 425 the East (the Aegean, southern Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine) became the major exporter of wine and oil in the later 5th and 6th centuries, while African jars became scarce. Regions rose and fell with how well they organised production, transport and quality.

Not primitive. NCERT warns against assuming an ‘ancient’ economy was backward: water power and water-mills, hydraulic mining in Spain’s gold and silver mines on an industrial scale (output not matched again until the 19th century, about 1,700 years later), well-organised commercial and banking networks, and widespread use of money show how often the Roman economy is underestimated.

Slavery was deeply rooted in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and NCERT notes that not even Christianity, when it became the state religion in the 4th century, seriously challenged it. But the bulk of labour was not done by slaves across the empire as a whole. Slaves were probably dominant in large parts of Republican Italy — under Augustus there were still 3 million slaves in an Italian population of 7.5 million. Slaves were an investment: one agricultural writer advised against using them where too many were needed (harvests) or their health could be damaged (malaria) — out of economic calculation, NCERT stresses, not sympathy.

Managing labour. Columella, a 1st-century writer from southern Spain, advised keeping a reserve of tools twice as many as needed, ‘for the loss in slave labour-time exceeds the cost of such items’, and recommended work squads of ten, where shirkers were easy to spot. Supervision was considered essential for free workers and slaves alike. Pliny the Elder, author of the Natural History, condemned slave gangs as the worst method because their workers were usually chained together by their feet. NCERT comments that this looks draconian, but most factories today enforce similar principles of labour control. In the frankincense factories of Alexandria, Pliny says, workers’ aprons were sealed, they wore a mask or close net on their heads, and were stripped before leaving.

Other forms of control. A famous early-3rd-century edict mentions Egyptian peasants deserting their villages to avoid farm work; a law of 398 refers to workers being branded so they could be recognised if they ran away. Private employers cast agreements as debt contracts to keep tighter control; a 2nd-century writer says thousands ‘surrender themselves to work in servitude, although they are free’ — poor families entered debt bondage to survive. A recently discovered letter of Augustine shows parents sometimes sold children into servitude for 25 years; he asked a lawyer friend whether they could be freed when the father died. Rural debt was so widespread that in the great Jewish revolt of 66 CE the rebels destroyed the moneylenders’ bonds to win support.

Yet NCERT again warns against concluding that most labour was coerced: the emperor Anastasius built the eastern frontier city of Dara in under three weeks by offering high wages to workers from all over the East, and papyri show how widespread wage labour had become in parts of the Mediterranean by the 6th century, especially in the East.

Early empire (Tacitus). Five groups: senators (patres, ‘fathers’); leading equestrians; the ‘respectable’ people attached to the great houses; the ‘unkempt’ lower class (plebs sordida), whom he calls addicted to circus and theatre; and slaves. In the early 3rd century the Senate numbered about 1,000, half still from Italian families.

Late empire (from Constantine, early 4th century). Senators and equites merged into one expanded aristocracy, at least half of African or eastern origin — enormously wealthy, but in many ways less powerful than the military elites, who came almost entirely from non-aristocratic backgrounds. The ‘middle’ class now meant people in imperial service (bureaucracy and army) and prosperous merchants and farmers, especially in the East — sustained by the state rather than as clients of senatorial houses. Below them were the humiliores: permanent estate workers, industrial and mining workers, migrant harvest and building labour, self-employed artisans (said to eat better than wage labourers), casual labourers in big cities — and many thousands of slaves, especially in the west.

Bureaucracy, corruption and law. The late-Roman bureaucracy was comparatively affluent, paid largely in gold. Corruption was common, especially in the courts and military supplies; the extortion of high officials and greed of governors were proverbial. But governments repeatedly intervened — we know of the abuses because of laws against them and because writers denounced them, an element of ‘criticism’ NCERT calls remarkable. The Roman state was authoritarian: dissent was rarely tolerated, and protest — especially in eastern cities where people mocked emperors fearlessly — was met with violence. Yet by the 4th century a strong tradition of Roman law acted as a brake on even fearsome emperors and protected civil rights; hence powerful bishops such as Ambrose could confront emperors who were excessively harsh to civilians.

Late antiquity describes the final period of the empire’s evolution and break-up, broadly the 4th to 7th centuries. It saw momentous religious change — Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the official religion, in NCERT’s words, and the rise of Islam — and changes in the state.

Diocletian (284–305) cut back over-expansion by abandoning territories of little strategic or economic value, fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries (into 100 provinces in 297, says the chapter timeline) and separated civil from military functions, giving military commanders (duces) more autonomy and power. Constantine consolidated these changes and added two of his own: the solidus, minted in millions, and a second capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul, formerly Byzantium), sea-girt on three sides. The new capital needed a new senate, so the governing classes expanded rapidly. Monetary stability and a growing population fuelled growth: investment in rural establishments, oil presses and glass factories, screw presses and multiple water-mills, and a revival of long-distance trade with the East. Elites were wealthier than ever; Egyptian papyri show an affluent, money-using society — Egypt paid over 2½ million solidi (about 35,000 lb of gold) a year in taxes under Justinian. Large parts of the Near Eastern countryside were more densely settled in the 5th–6th centuries than in the 20th.

Religion. Traditional Greek and Roman religion was polytheist — Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars and many Greek and eastern deities in thousands of temples and shrines; polytheists had no common name for themselves. The other great tradition was Judaism, itself diverse, ‘not a monolith’. So the Christianisation of the empire in the 4th and 5th centuries was gradual and complex: polytheism did not vanish overnight, especially in the west, where bishops fought beliefs and practices they condemned more than the Christian laity did. The boundaries between religious communities were far more fluid in the 4th century than they became after powerful bishops worked to enforce a more rigid set of beliefs and practices.

East and West. Prosperity was marked in the East, where population kept growing until the 6th century despite the plague of the 540s. In the West the empire fragmented as Germanic groups (Goths, Vandals, Lombards and others) took the major provinces and founded ‘post-Roman’ kingdoms — the Visigoths in Spain (destroyed by the Arabs 711–720), the Franks in Gaul (c. 511–687), the Lombards in Italy (568–774) — foreshadowing the ‘medieval’ world. In the East, Justinian’s reign was the high-water mark: he recaptured Africa from the Vandals (533), but his recovery of Italy from the Ostrogoths devastated it and opened the way to the Lombards. In the early 7th century the Sasanians invaded all the major eastern provinces, Egypt included; Byzantium (as the empire was increasingly called) recovered them in the 620s — only a few years before the final blow from the south-east.

The rise of Islam. The expansion of Islam from Arabia has been called, as NCERT quotes, ‘the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world’. By 642, barely ten years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, large parts of both the eastern Roman and Sasanian empires had fallen to the Arabs; a century later conquests reached Spain, Sind and Central Asia. NCERT stresses that they began with the unification of the Arab tribes by the emerging Islamic state, first within Arabia and then in the Syrian desert and on the fringes of Iraq — the key factor in the expansion.

Q1–4 are brief answers (about 100 words); Q5–6 are short essays (250–300 words). Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• Empires rose to control trade networks; religions crossing languages held them together (Section II).
• Rome and Iran: two superpowers separated by the Euphrates.
• Augustus ruled as Princeps; the Senate was flattered, the army was paid.
• Cities and provincial elites were the bedrock of the empire.
• The third century: Sasanians east, Germanic confederacies north, 25 emperors in 47 years.
• Roman wives owned property and could divorce — yet married young and were often beaten.
• Amphorae tell the story: Italy → Spain → Africa → the East.
• Slavery was deep-rooted, but most labour across the empire was not slave labour.
• Silver ran out; Constantine’s gold solidus outlived the empire.
• Christianisation was gradual; bishops were stricter than the laity.
• The West broke into ‘post-Roman’ kingdoms; the East peaked under Justinian.
• Arab unification of the tribes was the key to Islam’s rapid expansion (NCERT).

Traps to avoid

• Augustus (Octavian) was the first emperor (27 BCE); Julius Caesar was not.
• Rome’s army was paid and professional; Iran’s was conscripted.
• Denarius = silver; solidus = gold.
• Augustine of Hippo (354–430, North Africa) ≠ Augustine of Canterbury (England, 596–97).
• The crisis was 3rd-century; the western collapse was 5th-century.
• Slaves were 3 of 7.5 million in Italy, not across the whole empire.
• Dressel 20 = Spanish olive-oil amphora; Monte Testaccio = hill of broken jars in Rome.
• Constantine converted in 312; Christianity became the state religion under Theodosius I (380) — NCERT’s ‘official religion’ wording compresses this.
• Colosseum: NCERT gives both ‘50–1 BCE’ (Timeline II) and ‘79 CE’ (caption); standard: completed 80 CE.
• Sasanian founding appears as 224, 225 and 226 in NCERT — the same event.
• Constantinople was the site of Byzantium, modern Istanbul.
• The Franks ruled Gaul, the Visigoths Spain, the Lombards and Ostrogoths Italy, the Vandals Africa.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Rome and India is UPSC’s angle on this chapter: UPSC 1999 asked where Indian merchants turned after the Roman trade declined (key: South-East Asian trade). The key is standard, but the stem’s premise — a third-century Hun invasion that ‘ended the Roman Empire’ — is historically inaccurate: the 3rd century brought a crisis, not an end; the Huns peaked under Attila (434–53); the western empire ended in 476 and the eastern lasted to 1453. Answer the question, but know the real chronology from sections 4 and 9.
• Not yet asked, but low-cost if they come: name–date pairs (Augustus 27 BCE, Constantine and Constantinople, Justinian), the denarius and solidus, Rome’s frontier rivers (Rhine, Danube, Euphrates), and Timeline II firsts (paper, printing, paper money in China). Ancient Rome is a low-frequency area — revise it lightly.
• Related questions that belong to other chapters: the Roman settlement at Arikamedu (1991) and the Indo-Greek kingdom of Bactria (1999) are taught in Kings, Farmers and Towns; Gandhara art’s Roman debt (Mains 2014) is in the art chapters.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2015: ‘Indian civilisation, unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, preserved its traditions without a breakdown.’ Use this chapter for the Greco-Roman side: Hellenistic culture survived Alexander’s empire for about three centuries; the western Roman Empire broke into ‘post-Roman’ kingdoms; Latin displaced written Celtic; and polytheism gave way to Christianity. Yet there was continuity too — Roman law, Greek learning passed to the caliphates (Section II), and the eastern empire lasting to 1453. Balance this against India’s own breaks.
• Essays and GS4: rule of law restraining rulers (Ambrose and the emperors), labour control and dignity (Columella, Pliny, debt bondage), women’s legal rights versus social practice, corruption checked by laws and public criticism, the city’s exploitation of the countryside (Galen), and the decline of empires through over-extension (Diocletian’s ‘cutting back’).
• Answer frame: institution → evidence (name the source: Tacitus, Galen, Olympiodorus, papyri, amphorae) → interpretation (NCERT’s or a named historian’s) → contrast (Rome versus Iran, East versus West, law versus practice).

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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