Tag Archives: Top 10 Roman Empires

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (1) Roman Empire

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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.

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires

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A Roman Legion (from Trajan’s Column), from “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae” (The Mirror of Roman Magnificence) – public domain image, Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Roma Eterna!

At the time of writing this, a meme from social media has come to the attention of mainstream media that men think about the Roman Empire a lot (from the viral trend of asking how often they did).

It reminds me of that old anecdote (of dubious authenticity) that the average male thinks of sex one in every seven seconds, which always begged the question to me of what all those other males were thinking about in those other seconds. Well, I guess we know the answer now.

So given its enduring topicality, I thought I’d compile my Top 10 Roman Empires.

Wait – what? Top 10 Roman…Empires? Plural?! Wasn’t there only the one Roman Empire?

Well, yes – except perhaps when there wasn’t.

My tongue is (mostly) in my cheek, but there has been a tendency to demarcate the Roman Empire into different parts, even while maintaining the fundamental continuity between those parts.

The foremost demarcation is the division of the Roman Empire into its western and eastern halves, reflecting the empire’s own division of imperial administration, with the latter enduring for a millennium after the fall of the former but which was named retrospectively by historiographical convention as the Byzantine Empire to distinguish it from being the direct continuation of the Roman Empire.

For that matter, the ‘classical’ Roman Empire is sometimes demarcated into two parts, the Principate to describe the empire instituted by Augustus in 27 BC, and the Dominate to describe the empire as reformed under Diocletian in 284 AD – the latter ultimately overlapping with the division of imperial administration into western and eastern halves.

The eastern Roman Empire is similarly often demarcated into two parts – its original ‘Latin’ empire (literally by its official imperial language) and its transition to its ‘Greek’ empire from the seventh century or so.

One could also parse either the ‘classical’ Roman empire or eastern Roman Empire further by imperial dynasty (or periods when there was no dynasty).

This top ten mostly won’t be concerned with such academic divisions, but don’t be surprised if those eastern and western divisions feature prominently. Rather, it will be concerned with the exceptions to the rule of the Roman Empire – the various breakaway or vestigial states that were either substantial claimants to the Roman Empire or usurping it. Indeed, you could think of it as my Roman Empire iceberg meme – in this case my iceberg of Roman Empire continuity.

Hence I won’t be doing my usual top ten countdown but just counting them out, mostly in chronological order albeit with some exceptions. The top three entries are all within the fundamental continuity of the Roman Empire as the iceberg above the surface, with the subsequent entries as the iceberg beneath the surface becoming more remote or wild breakaway or vestigial states. Don’t worry – I’ll have even wilder entries in my special mentions as we follow the iceberg all the way down claimants to the succession of the Roman Empire.

Note that reference to substantial – arguably the various breakaway states or claimants might extend to any territory controlled by any rivals or usurpers to the imperial throne but let’s not go crazy here. It’s not like we’re just any with delusions of imperial grandeur in the Crisis of Third Century or something. This top ten must have some standards beyond the local barracks emperor.

So that said, these are my Top 10 Roman Empires…