Introduction | The emergence of Rome | The beginning of empire
The power of the myth | Pax romana | Seeds of destruction | Find out more

Seeds of destruction

Another foreign Roman citizen was Herod the Great of Judaea. He was one of the satellite kings who ruled in the grace and favour of Roman power – from his deathbed, in 4 BC, he sent his seal to Augustus in recognition of that.

Trading routes
When factional riots broke out after his death, two of his sons set off for Rome to ask for help, and the Roman procurator in the region was sent in to sort things out. The Jews were generally allowed to run civil matters without interference, and there was no more trouble until the rather heavy-handed Pontius Pilate turned up around AD 25. To keep the lid on local disturbances, he allowed a man from Nazareth to be put to death.

Ironically, it was the very openness of empire and the ease of communications within it that allowed the tiny offshoot of Judaism called Christianity to spread so quickly after that execution. Indeed without the empire, it might never have spread at all. Along the trading routes to Africa and Europe, the new teachers peddled their story, and soon an important branch office had been established in Rome itself.

As the good emperor Augustus gave way to more and more wayward successors, and the vanity and corruption of the heroic Roman myth became more evident to ordinary people, so this new religion expanded to fill the void in people's belief.

The legacy
It took nearly 400 years before the old gods were finally disestablished (see Pagans and Christians), but when it happened, the end wasn't long in coming. By the time the Visigoths surged across the northern frontiers, there were only other German tribes co-opted under the Roman banner to oppose them. Rome was sacked while the so-called Roman emperor sat in Byzantium, having become the oriental potentate that his ancestors had so long despised.

Although the noble image they tried to reconstruct for themselves proved useless, the legacy of the Romans is astonishing. Not just the network of Romance languages and vocabulary, engineering and laws, but a sense of how an empire can be made to work by even the most war-like people: through tolerance, justice and inclusiveness.

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