The First Kingdom

Archaeological traces too leave little doubt that by the sixth century BCE Rome had public buildings, temples and a ‘town centre’, which are clear indications of urban living, even if, in our terms, on a small scale.

For some modern historians the most important sentences are the couple that report the results of his censuses of Roman citizens, recording a total head count of 4,063,000 in 28 BCE, rising to 4,937,000 in 14 CE. These are the most reliable data we have for the size of the ancient Roman citizen body at any time, largely because, inscribed on stone,

Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and explo