Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the phase of the ancient Roman civilization characterized by an autocratic form of government. It succeeded the 500 year-old Roman Republic (510 BC - 1st century BC), which had been weakened by the conflict between Gaius Marius and Sulla and the civil war of Julius Caesar against Pompey. Several dates are commonly proposed to mark the transition from Republic to Empire, including the date of Julius Caesar's appointment as perpetual dictator (44 BC), the victory of Caesar's heir Octavian at the Battle of Actium (September 2, 31 BC), and the Roman Senate's granting to Octavian the honorific Augustus. (January 16, 27 BC).

The Latin term Imperium Romanum ("Roman Empire"), probably the best-known Latin expression where the word "imperium" denotes a territory, indicates the part of the world under Roman rule. From the time of Augustus to the Fall of the Western Empire, Rome dominated Western Eurasia and northern Africa and composed the majority of the region's population. Roman expansion began long before the state was changed into an Empire and reached its zenith under Emperor Trajan with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106. At this territorial peak, the Roman Empire controlled approximately 5 900 000 km² (2,300,000 sq.mi.) of land surface. Rome's influence upon the culture, law, technology, arts, language, religion, government, military, and architecture of civilizations that followed continues to this day.

The end of the Roman Empire is traditionally, if not strictly accurately, placed at 4 September AD 476, when the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustus, was deposed and not replaced. However, Diocletian, who retired in AD 305, was the last sole Emperor of an undivided Empire whose capital was the City of Rome. After the division of the Empire by Diocletian into East and West, each branch continued to style itself as "The Roman Empire." The Western Roman Empire declined and fell apart (see Decline of the Roman Empire) during the 5th and 6th centuries. The Eastern Roman Empire (which would later adopt Greek as its main language), known largely today as the Byzantine Empire, preserved Greco-Roman legal and cultural traditions along with Hellenic and Orthodox Christian elements for another millennium, until its eventual collapse at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1453.