Two thousand years ago, on August 19, 14 AD, Caesar Augustus died. He was Rome’s first emperor, having won a civil war more than 40 years earlier that transformed the dysfunctional Roman Republic into an empire. Under Augustus and his successors, the empire experienced 200 years of relative peace and prosperity. Here are 40 maps that explain the Roman Empire — its rise and fall, its culture and economy, and how it laid the foundations of the modern world.
In 500 BC, Rome was a minor city-state on the Italian peninsula. By 200 BC, the Roman Republic had conquered Italy, and over the following two centuries it conquered Greece and Spain, the North African coast, much of the Middle East, modern-day France, and even the remote island of Britain. In 27 BC, the republic became an empire, which endured for another 400 years. Finally, the costs of holding such a vast area together become too great. Rome gradually split into Eastern and Western halves, and by 476 AD the Western half of the empire had been destroyed by invasions from Germanic tribes. The Eastern half of the empire, based in Constantinople, continued for many centuries after that.
At its height around 100 AD, the Roman Empire stretched from Britain in the Northwest to Egypt in the Southeast. To get a sense for how big that is, it’s helpful to compare it to the contemporary United States. The Roman provinces of Britain and Egypt were about as far apart as the American states of Florida and Washington. One obvious difference is that the Roman Empire had the Mediterranean in the middle of it, which helped move people and supplies over vast distances. Still, it’s remarkable that emperors operating many centuries before the railroad and the telegraph — to say nothing of airplanes and the internet — were able to hold together such a vast domain for so long.
