Legend tells us that Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, the god war, were left to drown in a basket on the Tiber river but were rescued by a she-wolf.
They grew up, defeated a king, and founded a city in 753 BC, after which Rolumus killed his brother and declared himself king.
Rome’s seventh king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was cruel and tyrannical, and after a public uprising Rome was claimed as a “res publica”, meaning “property of the people”, from which we get the term Republic.
However the “property of the people” proved over time to be in name only. The Senate long continued to be dominated by the patricians, who were elite descendants of the early governors.
The plebeians, or common people, struggled for influence, eventually gaining a small measure through their own tribunal bodies that could initiate and veto legislation.
The Roman code of law was inscribed on 12 bronze tablets called the Twelve Tables in 450 BC.
After the sacking of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, over the next 250 years the Romans rose and engaged in a series of wars that expanded their state through the Mediterranean and into Africa, where they destroyed Carthage and sold its inhabitants into slavery.
After several hundred years of expanding complexity, the gap between the rich and the poor widened, the poor were driven from their land and lost access to government, and the political institutions began to crumble resulting in internal strife and violence.
A series of warlords and military dictators rose in the first century BC and competed for leadership, including Julius Caesar, who crossed the Rubicon to invade Italy, sparking a civil war that resulted in his victory and ascension to the throne as dictator of Rome.
After his murder a year later in 44 BC on the Ides of March, power was divided into a Second Triumvirate, which devolved into war in 31 BC.
Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, rumored to be a lover of Julius Caesar, joined forces with Mark Antony. They were defeated by Octavian, and committed suicide.
Octavian assumed the title of Augustus and consolidated power while establishing a public show of restoring the institutions of the republic, and became the first emperor of Rome, usher in two centuries of peace known as the Pax Romana.
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