After Carthage fell, Rome stood
the master of the Middle Sea,
and what had been a farmers' town
now ruled from Spain to Thessaly.
The Republic had been built for farms,
for citizen-assemblies small,
for consuls chosen year by year,
for Senate giving voice to all.
But empire cracked the ancient forms.
The legions served the generals now.
The conquered provinces sent wealth
that drowned the old Italian plough.
The Gracchi Brothers, Tiberius
and Gaius, saw the danger clear:
the landless poor, the latifundia,
the veterans with naught to cheer.
Tiberius proposed reform,
to give the soldiers land again.
The Senate killed him in the streets.
His brother fell the same way then.
The Republic learned that reason died
when wealth was threatened at its root,
and after that the path was set
toward civil war and bloody fruit.
Marius reformed the legions whole,
made volunteers the fighting core,
tied soldiers' loyalty to their chief
and not the state they fought for.
Sulla marched his legions in
upon the sacred city's ground,
the first Roman to make such war,
and dictator for life was crowned.
He purged his enemies with lists,
proscriptions stripping wealth and breath,
and when he thought his work was done
he calmly walked away toward death.
But what he'd done could not be back.
The precedent was set in stone:
armies belonged to generals now,
and politics meant swords alone.
Pompey rose, the golden boy,
who cleared the pirates from the sea,
who conquered eastward to the Nile
and gave Judea subsequently.
Crassus rose, the wealthiest man,
who crushed the Spartacus revolt,
whose gold bought armies, bought the Senate,
bought whatever he assault.
Julius Caesar rose, the third,
who claimed descent from Aeneas,
who claimed descent from Venus herself,
and was the ablest of the three.
The First Triumvirate was formed,
unofficial, power-sharing pact.
They carved the Roman world between them
and ruled by this unwritten act.
Crassus died in Parthia, shot
with arrows at the battle's close.
His head was used as stage-prop in
a Greek tragedy, or so it goes.
Then Pompey and Caesar turned to war.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon small
with legions, saying "die is cast,"
and brought the Republic to its fall.
He chased Pompey to Egypt, where
the boy-king Ptolemy beheaded
the Roman general, thinking thus
Caesar's gratitude was threaded.
Caesar wept. Then met Cleopatra,
who rolled inside a carpet's pack,
and made alliance with her bed
and put her on the Egyptian track.
He conquered Gaul across the Alps,
wrote Commentaries on his war,
"veni, vidi, vici" at Zela,
and dictator for life he bore.
The Ides of March came. Brutus struck,
with Cassius and the Senate's knives.
"Et tu, Brute?" — then Caesar fell,
and Rome was torn among his wives.
Mark Antony gave the funeral speech
("I come to bury, not to praise"),
roused the crowd against the killers,
and started civil war's new phase.
Octavian, Caesar's grandnephew,
adopted as his heir by will,
revealed himself the cold-eyed one
with patience and political skill.
The Second Triumvirate formed:
Antony, Octavian, Lepidus.
They hunted Brutus down at Philippi,
then turned upon each other thus.
Lepidus was marginalized.
Antony went east to Cleopatra.
Octavian stayed in Rome to build
his reputation bit by bit.
Antony lost himself in Egypt,
living as pharaoh with his queen,
alienating Roman sentiment,
the conqueror gone Alexandrine.
At Actium the fleets collided.
Octavian's admiral Agrippa won.
Antony and Cleopatra fled,
and soon enough their lives were done.
She with the asp, the royal cobra,
the uraeus of Egyptian crown.
He with his sword, the Roman way.
The Ptolemaic line went down.
Octavian stood the sole Roman,
and took the title Augustus then,
the "revered one," princeps, first,
and ruled for forty-five years again.
He said he'd restored the Republic,
but everyone knew the truth:
the Senate met, the consuls served,
but emperor ruled, and that was sooth.
The Pax Romana had begun.
Two centuries of peace and law.
Roads, aqueducts, courts, and coins.
The greatest empire men ever saw.
From Britain to the Tigris reach,
from Rhine to the Saharan sand,
one law, one coin, one road-network,
one citizenship across the land.
The emperors came, some good, some mad:
Tiberius grew dark on Capri.
Caligula made his horse a consul.
Claudius the limping one was wily.
Nero burned and fiddled — or
perhaps that part was later slander.
But he killed his mother, killed his wife,
killed Christians, killed with grand meander.
The Year of Four Emperors came
when Nero fell upon his sword.
Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian —
four imperial purples poured.
Vespasian stabilized the state,
built the Colosseum in Rome,
and founded the Flavian dynasty
to give the empire fresh new home.
His son Titus sacked Jerusalem
in seventy of the Common Era,
destroyed the Second Temple whole,
and changed Judaism's era.
The menorah was carried west
upon the Arch of Titus' face.
The Jews were scattered through the empire.
The Temple cult had lost its place.
But Rome rolled on, the Five Good Emperors:
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius,
who was both emperor and Stoic man.
Trajan pushed to Dacia, took the gold,
reached the greatest extent of the realm.
Hadrian pulled back to the walls,
built Hadrian's Wall across the helm.
Marcus wrote his Meditations
in Greek, for his own private eye,
a Stoic emperor's private journal,
one of the great books that will not die.
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself:
I shall meet with the busybody, ungrateful,
arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial..."
and yet still serve them all, faithful.
He fought the Marcomanni on the Danube,
plague was ravaging the troops,
and when he died, the empire was
already starting to lose its loops.
His son Commodus was the break.
He fought in the arena, thought himself Hercules,
was strangled by a wrestler in his bath,
and after him came crises.
Rome had reached its high plateau.
From here, the slow decline began.
But for two hundred years it held
the greatest empire made by man.
Stand.