# Roma — Imperium Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-roman-empire Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-history-roman-empire/raw Category: History Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:54.230Z Tags: catalog, history, roman, empire ## Summary ROMA Imperium ❖ S P Q R Senātus Populusque Rōmānus — The Senate and People of Rome A thousand years, in thirteen acts. 753 BC — 476 AD. Key sections include: ROMA; The She-Wolf and the Twins; The Republic is Born; Rome vs. Carthage; Gaius Julius Caesar; Augustus & the Principate; Greatest Extent; The Engineers' Empire; The Crisis of the Third Century; Reform, Faith, a New Capital. ## Slide Outline 1. ROMA 2. The She-Wolf and the Twins 3. The Republic is Born 4. Rome vs. Carthage 5. Gaius Julius Caesar 6. Augustus & the Principate 7. Greatest Extent 8. The Engineers' Empire 9. The Crisis of the Third Century 10. Reform, Faith, a New Capital 11. Sack & Deposition 12. What Rome Left Behind 13. Further Reading & Watching ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: ROMA - Imperium - ❖ - S P Q R - Senātus Populusque Rōmānus — The Senate and People of Rome - A thousand years, in thirteen acts. 753 BC — 476 AD. ### Slide 2: The She-Wolf and the Twins - 753 BC · The Founding Myth - By legend, twin princes Romulus and Remus were cast into the Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf, and raised by a shepherd. Grown, they fought to found a city on the Palatine Hill. Romulus killed Remus. The city took his name. - Beyond the myth: a cluster of Iron-Age villages on seven hills, perched above a river crossing, gradually fused into a town — Latin in tongue, Etruscan in early kings, mercantile in instinct. - "From a small thing, mighty things." — Lucretius ### Slide 3: The Republic is Born - 509 BC · Res Publica - The last king, Tarquin the Proud, was overthrown. Rome became res publica — "the public thing." Power was deliberately split, balanced, and term-limited. - Senate - Three hundred elders. Advisory in theory, dominant in practice. The institution that outlived everything. - Consuls × 2 - Two annually elected magistrates. Each could veto the other. Power feared itself. - Cursus Honōrum - Quaestor → Aedile → Praetor → Consul. A ladder of office, age-gated and earned. - A constitution mostly unwritten, mostly observed — until it wasn't. ### Slide 4: Rome vs. Carthage - 264 — 146 BC · The Punic Wars - First (264–241): Sicily. Rome learns to build a navy by copying a wrecked Carthaginian ship. - Second (218–201): Hannibal crosses the Alps with elephants, annihilates Roman armies at Cannae — and still loses. Scipio Africanus takes the war to Africa and wins at Zama. - Third (149–146): Carthage is razed. "Carthāgō dēlenda est." Salt, allegedly, on the ground. - After Carthage, Rome had no peer in the western Mediterranean — and a hundred years of provincial wealth that the Republic could not digest. ### Slide 5: Gaius Julius Caesar - 100 — 44 BC - 58–50 BC Conquest of Gaul. Eight years, a million dead, a million enslaved — and a private army loyal to Caesar, not Rome. - 49 BC Ordered to disband, he crosses the Rubicon. "Ālea iacta est." The die is cast. - 48–45 BC Civil war. Pompey killed in Egypt. Caesar emerges dictator perpetuō. - 44 BC The Ides of March. Twenty-three knife wounds on the Senate floor. "Et tū, Brūte?" - He was not the first general to march on Rome. He was the one who made it stick. - Reformed the calendar — 365.25 days, the Julian. - Wrote his own dispatches: "Vēnī, vīdī, vīcī." - His name became a title — Caesar, Kaiser, Tsar. ### Slide 6: Augustus & the Principate - 27 BC — 14 AD - Caesar's grand-nephew Octavian outlasted Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (31 BC). Returning to Rome, he did something subtler than crowning himself king: he kept the Republic's furniture, called himself "first citizen" (prīnceps), and quietly held every meaningful office at once. - The Senate voted him the name Augustus — "the revered one." - Standing armies, professional bureaucracy, an imperial post. - Pax Rōmāna: roughly two centuries of relative peace across the Mediterranean. - "I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble." - The Republic did not fall in a day. It was hollowed out, then ceremonially preserved — a constitutional taxidermy that lasted three hundred years. ### Slide 7: Greatest Extent - 96 — 180 AD · The High Empire - Trajan (117 AD): Empire at maximum — from Britain's Tyne to the Persian Gulf, 5 million km², ~70 million people. - Hadrian: Pulled back. Built the Wall across northern Britain. Drew a line and meant it. - The Pantheon (c. 126 AD): Largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. Still standing, still working. - The Five Good Emperors — Nerva to Marcus Aurelius — chose successors by adoption, not blood. ### Slide 8: The Engineers' Empire - Ingenium Rōmānum - Roads: ~400,000 km, of which 80,500 paved. Designed for the speed of a courier. Omnēs viae Rōmam dūcunt. - Aqueducts: 11 served the city alone. Some still flow. The Pont du Gard has stood 2,000 years. - Concrete: opus caementicium — volcanic ash + lime + seawater. It cures harder over centuries. - The Legion: ~5,000 men, drilled to the point where battles were the easy part. They built the roads they marched on. ### Slide 9: The Crisis of the Third Century - 235 — 284 AD - For half a century the empire nearly came apart. Roughly fifty emperors in fifty years; most died by the sword of their own troops. The currency collapsed. Plague. Inflation. Frontier breaches on every border. - Generals' Anarchy - Legions made and unmade emperors as a matter of pay raises. - Breakaway States - Gallic Empire in the west. Palmyrene Empire under Zenobia in the east. For a decade, three Romes. - Debasement - The silver denarius lost ~95% of its silver content. Trade reverted to barter in places. - That Rome survived at all is the surprise. It did — transformed. ### Slide 10: Reform, Faith, a New Capital - 284 — 337 AD - Diocletian - The Tetrarchy: two senior Augustī, two junior Caesarēs. Empire too big for one man. - Price edicts, tax reform, a hardened bureaucracy. - The last great persecution of Christians. - Constantine - 312: Battle of the Milvian Bridge. "In hōc signō vincēs." - 313: Edict of Milan — toleration of Christianity. - 325: Council of Nicaea defines orthodox doctrine. - 330: Founds Constantinople — New Rome on the Bosphorus. - Two reformers bought the empire two more centuries in the west, and a thousand more in the east. ### Slide 11: Sack & Deposition - 410 — 476 AD · The Fall in the West - 378: Emperor Valens dies at Adrianople — a Roman emperor killed by Goths in pitched battle. The frontiers are no longer holding. - 410: Alaric and the Visigoths sack Rome itself. The city had not been taken in 800 years. Jerome wept in his cell in Bethlehem. - 455: Vandal sack — longer, more thorough. - 476: The Germanic general Odoacer deposes a teenage emperor named — with mythic symmetry — Romulus Augustulus. He sends the imperial regalia to Constantinople. There is no longer a Western emperor to send them to. - "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness." — Edward Gibbon - In the east, the empire continues. They keep calling themselves Rōmaîoi — Romans — for another thousand years, until 1453. ### Slide 12: What Rome Left Behind - Hērēditās - Law - Justinian's Corpus Iūris Cīvīlis is the trunk of every European civil-law tradition. Habeas corpus, contract, property — Roman scaffolding. - Language - Latin became Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian. Half the English dictionary still arrives via Latin or French. - Infrastructure - Roads still followed in modern motorways. The week. The calendar. The senate. The republic itself, as an idea. - The Church - The bishop of Rome inherited the city's prestige. Latin liturgy preserved Roman texts through the long medieval night. - Architecture - Domes, arches, concrete. Every capitol building, every triumphal arch, is a quotation. - The Idea - "Rome" became the word every later empire wanted to claim — Holy, Russian, Ottoman, American. They are all arguing with the same ghost. ### Slide 13: Further Reading & Watching - Fīnis - Books - Mary Beard — SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome - Edward Gibbon — The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Tom Holland — Rubicon - Peter Heather — The Fall of the Roman Empire - Adrian Goldsworthy — Caesar - YouTube - Fall of Rome — YouTube - Julius Caesar — YouTube - Visit - The Forum, Rome - The Pantheon, still in use - Pont du Gard, southern France - Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland - SPQR - "Sīc trānsit glōria mundī." — Thus passes the glory of the world. ## Related Decks - [The Roman Empire — The Deck Catalog](https://shipslides.com/d/history-roman-empire) - [The Mongol Empire](https://shipslides.com/d/history-mongol-empire) - [The Ottoman Empire](https://shipslides.com/d/history-ottoman-empire) - [The Persian Empire](https://shipslides.com/d/history-persian-empire)