The Roman civilization (Ancient Rome) arose from a small agricultural community founded in the Italian peninsula, city of Rome, in the tenth century BC (according to tradition in 753 BC) located on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea became one of the greatest empires of the ancient world.
Rome was a monarchy. Later (509 BC) was a Latin Republic, and in 27 a. C. became an empire. The period of greatest splendor of Roman culture is known as Roman Pax (Roman Peace), due to the relative state of harmony that prevailed in the regions that were under Roman rule, a period of order and prosperity that met the Empire under the dynasty of the Antonines (96-192 AD) and, to a lesser extent, the Severians (193-235 AD). It marked the golden age of the West and the awakening of the East.
In its centuries of existence, the Roman civilization passed from a monarchy to an oligarchic republic and then to an increasingly autocratic empire that added many territories through conquest and cultural assimilation. The Romans came to dominate in their heyday from Britain, the Sahara desert and from the Iberian Peninsula to the Euphrates, causing an important cultural flourishing in each place where he ruled
Rome was plagued by internal instability and attacked by several migrant barbarian peoples that detached the western part of the empire where independent barbarian kingdoms were founded in the 5th century, including in Italy, Hispania, Gaul, Britannia and Africa.
The Eastern Roman Empire, which was ruled from Constantinople, comprising Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, survived this crisis. Despite the subsequent loss of Syria and Egypt due to the power of the Islamic Arab empire, the Eastern Roman Empire survived almost a millennium more compared to the Western Roman Empire, until its last remnants were finally annexed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire that emerged as a power in the eastern region. This Eastern Christian empire of the medieval period is usually known as the Byzantine Empire by historians.
Roman civilization is often grouped into "classical antiquity", with ancient Greece, a civilization that inspired much of the culture of ancient Rome. Ancient Rome contributed greatly to the development of legal science (law), war, art, literature, architecture, technology, religion and language in the Western world, and its history continues to have a great influence on the today's world.
