History.
The civilization of ancient Rome originated in the 8th or 9th century BC, when the tribe of the Latini migrated to the Italian peninsula to settle around the River Tiber. For almost a thousand years, Rome was a very important city in the Western world and possibly the largest city in the world, with around 1.5 to 2 million inhabitants, as the capital of the expansive Roman Empire.
With the rise of Christianity, Rome became the center of the Roman Catholic Church and the home of the popes. The slow decline of the Roman Empire heralded the beginning of the Middle Ages, but the city regained prominence as the cultural capital of Western Roman Empire for several hundred years leading up to the Renaissance. Rome remains influential today, as the capital of Italy, as center of the Catholic Church, and as a major metropolis.
In Roman mythology, Rome was built on April 21, 753 BC by the twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. Romulus killed Remus in a quarrel over where their city was to be located and became the first of seven Kings of Rome, as well as the source of the city's name.
Central Rome is dominated by the traditional seven hills that hark back to the Latin founding myth of the city. These seven hills are the Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine, Capitoline, and Palatine Hills. The Tiber River and its islands are an important additional component of the city, flowing south through the western portion of the central zone.
Roman history begins in a small village in central Italy; this unassuming village would grow into a small metropolis, conquer and control all of Italy, southern Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt, and find itself, by the start of AD time, the most powerful and largest empire in the world.
They managed what no other people had managed before: the ruled the entire world under a single administration for a considerable amount of time. This imperial rule, which extended from Great Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Mesopotamia, was a period of remarkable peace.
The Romans would look to their empire as the instrument that brought law and justice to the rest of the world; in some sense, the relative peace and stability they brought to the world did support this view.
They were, however, a military state, and they ruled over this vast territory by maintaining a strong military presence in subject countries. An immensely practical people, the Romans devoted much of their brilliance to military strategy and technology, administration, and law, all in support of the vast world government that they built.
Rome, however, was responsible for more than just military and administrative genius. Culturally, the Romans had a slight inferiority complex in regards to the Greeks, who had begun their city-states only a few centuries before the rise of the Roman republic. The Romans, however, derived much of their culture from the Greeks: art, architecture, philosophy, and even religion.
However, the Romans changed much of this culture, adapting it to their own particular world view and practical needs. It is this changed Greek culture, which we call Graeco-Roman culture, that was handed down to the European civilizations in late antiquity and the Renaissance.
