The Roman Empire under Trajan 117 AD – by Tataryn for Wikipedia “Roman Empire” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

(1) ROMAN EMPIRE

(27 BC – 330 / 395 / 476 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 would rank on top. By Roman Empire, I mean the ‘classical’ Roman Empire – what most people think of as the Roman Empire.

Of course, it’s not the whole of the Roman Empire – as I did for the Roman Empire in top spot in my Top 10 Empires, spanning from the legendary founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople. However, as I stated in my introduction, this top ten is essentially my Roman Empire iceberg, in which I look at different permutations of the empire beneath the surface of that span or fundamental continuity, becoming more remote or wild breakaway or vestigial states the deeper we go.

Usually the classical Roman Empire 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, typically from the division of empire into its western and eastern imperial halves – as defined by Constantine founding Constantinople as the capital of the eastern empire in 330 AD, more usually when the division of imperial administration became permanent in 395 AD, or when the western empire fell (or more precisely, the last western emperor was deposed) in 476 AD. 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 of the empire from ‘classical Roman empire’ to ‘medieval Greek empire’, typically either the end of the reign of Justinian in 565 AD or that of Heraclius in 641 AD.