(1) ROMAN EMPIRE
(27 BC – 395 AD / 476 AD / 1453 AD)
There it is – Roman Empire original recipe. Why’d you have to go and mess with the classics?
But of course you must have been expecting this – that in a list of Top 10 Roman Empires, THE Roman Empire or the classical Roman Empire – what most people think of as the Roman Empire – would rank on top.
Usually that is at least what historians have termed the Principate or the empire founded by Augustus from the Roman Republic in 27 BC, essentially by making as little fuss as possible about it being an empire with himself as emperor, although his successors made a lot more fuss about it.
Generally, it also extends to what historians term the Dominate, the empire as reformed by Diocletian, anywhere from the start of his reign in 284 AD onwards.
As to where it ends, there are a number of points of demarcation, although typically in 395 AD when the empire was divided into eastern and western empires, or in 476 AD when the western empire fell (or more precisely, the last western emperor was deposed). Of course, one can simply continue on with the eastern Roman empire to its fall in 1453, or perhaps some earlier point to mark the transition from classical Roman empire to medieval Greek empire, usually either the end of the reign of Justinian in 565 AD or that of Heraclius in 641 AD.
And for those who know my list of Top 10 Empires, you’d know I also rank it as THE Empire, “the grandeur that was Rome” – enduring both as empire, and in its influence or legacy.
The empire that set the template for, and defined the concept of, empire in Western civilization. Literally, with the word empire originating in the Latin imperium, as well as the word emperor originating from Latin imperator – with the title of Caesar (from the man and his imperial family) as the origin of the German Kaiser and Russian or Slavic Czar.
It may lack the size of other empires but as the saying goes, it’s not the size but what you do with it, and in this case the Roman Empire both as an empire of itself and in its influence or legacy – “there was once a dream that was Rome”. A dream that at its peak in the second century under Trajan – second of the so-called Five Good Emperors – extended from the Atlantic to the Tigris, and from Scotland to the Nile.
As for its enduring legacy, let me count the ways – “language, religion, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, law, and forms of government”. Latin and Greek. Christianity – Catholic and Orthodox, with the former inheriting the capitol, pontifex, many of the trappings, and much of the mystique of the western empire. “The Roman Empire’s afterlife in European cultural and political memory is no less significant and important than its actual physical and temporal power in its height.”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)