The Roman Empire, with its powerful — and sometimes bizarre — leaders, magnificent buildings, luxurious clothing, and bloody amusements, has long fascinated people. Politicians and historians have closely studied the reasons for its successes and have even more closely analyzed the weaknesses that led to its eventual collapse. Despite the efforts of emperors and other leaders, the Western Roman Empire slowly broke apart and by the fifth century C.E. no longer existed. By the fourteenth century European scholars were beginning to see the fall of the Roman Empire as one of the great turning points in Western history, the end of the classical era. That began the practice of dividing Western history into different periods — eventually, the ancient, medieval, and modern eras. Those categories still shape the way that Western history is taught and learned.

This three-part conceptualization also shapes the periodization of world history. As you saw in Chapter 4 and will see in Chapter 7, China is also understood to have had a classical age, and, as you will read in Chapter 11, the Maya of Mesoamerica did as well. The dates of these ages are different from those of the classical period in the Mediterranean, but there are striking similarities among all three places: successful large-scale administrative bureaucracies were established, trade flourished, cities grew, roads were built, and new cultural forms developed. In all three places — and in other countries described as having a classical era — this period was followed by an era of less prosperity and more warfare and destruction.

No large-scale story of rise and fall captures the experience of everyone, of course. For many people in the Roman world, neither the change from republic to empire nor the end of the empire altered their lives very much. They farmed or worked in cities, and hoped for the best for their families. They took in new ideas but blended them with old traditions. And for some, the judgment of later scholars that there was a pax Romana would have seemed a cruel joke. These people might have agreed with the statement the Roman historian Tacitus put in the mouth of Calgacus, a leader of the Britons, right before a battle with Roman invaders of his homeland: “They make a desert and call it ‘peace.’”5