ABSTRACT
Rome, the city that would become the centre of a vast empire, was not built in a day. It took the better part of a millennium for it to reach its apex, then several more centuries to devolve and deteriorate into a series of smaller empires. The period of time between the foundation of the city in 753 BC to the ultimate destruction of her empire (for the purposes of this work, on the death of the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustus) in AD 476 spans nearly 1250 years. To put this era in perspective, roughly the same amount of time elapsed between the actual fall of the Roman Empire and the publication of the modern era’s first comprehensive history of Roman civilization, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published the same year as the American Declaration of Independence was signed (1776). That the Romans continue to play a crucial role as a benchmark for the successes and failures of modern society, both in Gibbon’s time and today, demonstrates the power and influence that the legacy of Rome continues to hold in Western society.
