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THE FORMATION OF NEW CULTURAL COMMUNITIES

An Age of Empires: Rome and Han China, 753 B.C.E.–330 C.E.

I. Rome’s Creation of a Mediterranean Empire, 753 B.C.E.–330 C.E.
1. Italy and Sicily are at a crossroads of the Mediterranean and serve as a link between Africa
and Europe. Rome is at a crossroads of the Italian peninsula.
2. Italy’s natural resources included navigable rivers, forests, iron, a mild climate, and
enough arable land to support a large population of farmers whose surplus product and labor
could be exploited by the Roman state.
A. A Republic of Farmers, 753–31 B.C.E.
1. Rome was inhabited at least as early as 1000 B.C.E. According to legend, it was ruled by
seven kings between 753 B.C.E. and 507 B.C.E. Kingship was eliminated in 507 B.C.E. when
representatives of the senatorial class of large landholders overthrew the last king and established
a republic.
2. The centers of political power in the republic were the two consuls and the Senate. In
practice, the Senate made laws and governed.
3. The Roman family consisted of several generations living under the absolute authority of
the oldest living male, the paterfamilias.
4. Society was hierarchical. Families and individuals were tied together by patron/client
relationships that institutionalized inequality and gave both sides of the relationship reason to
cooperate and to support the status quo. Nevertheless, periodic conflicts emerged between the
patrician elite and the plebeian majority.
5. Roman women had relatively more freedom than Greek women, but their legal status was
still that of a child, subordinate to the paterfamilias of their own or their husband’s family.
Eventually procedures evolved that made it possible for some women to become independent
after the death of their fathers.
6. Romans worshiped a large number of supernatural spirits as well as major gods such as
Jupiter and Mars. Proper performance of ritual ensured that the gods continued to favor the
Roman state.
B. Expansion in Italy and the Mediterranean
1. Rome began to expand, at first slowly and then very rapidly, in the third and second
centuries B.C.E. until it became a huge Mediterranean empire. Possible explanations for this
expansion include greed, aggressiveness, the need for consuls to prove themselves as military
commanders during their single year in office, and a constant fear of being attacked.
2. During the first stage of expansion, Rome conquered the rest of Italy (by 290 B.C.E.).
Rome won the support of the people of Italy by granting them Roman citizenship. As citizens,
moreover, these people then had to provide soldiers for the military, providing Rome with the
advantage of an ever-increasing army.

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3. In the next stages of expansion, Rome first defeated Carthage to gain control over the
western Mediterranean and Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain (264–202 B.C.E.). Next, between 200 and
30 B.C.E., Rome defeated the Hellenistic kingdoms to take over the lands of the eastern
Mediterranean. Between 59 and 51 B.C.E., Gaius Julius Caesar conquered the Celts of Gaul.
4. The Romans used local elite groups to administer and tax the various provinces of their
rapidly expanding and far-flung empire. A Roman governor, who served a single one-year term in
office, supervised the local administrators. This system was inadequate and prone to corruption.
C. The Failure of the Republic
1. As Rome expanded, the social and economic bases of the Roman republic in Italy were
undermined. While men from independent farming families were forced to devote their time to
military service, large landowners bought up their land to create great estates called latifundia. This
meant both a decline in Rome’s source of soldiers and a decline in food production because
latifundia owners preferred to grow cash crops like grapes rather than staple crops such as wheat.
2. Because slave labor was cheap in an expanding empire, Italian peasants, driven off the
land and not employed by the latifundia, drifted into the cities where they formed a fractious
unemployed underclass.
3. As the independent farming family that had been the traditional source of soldiers
disappeared, Roman commanders built their armies from men from the underclass who tended
to give their loyalty, not to the Roman state, but to commanders like Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony. This led to generals taking control of politics, to civil wars, and finally to the end of the
republican system of government.
D. The Roman Principate, 31 B.C.E.–330 C.E.
1. Julius Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian (also known as Augustus) took power in 31
B.C.E., reorganized the Roman government, and ruled as a military dictator.
2. During the reign of Augustus, Egypt, parts of the Middle East, and Central Europe were
added to the empire. He created a paid civil service from a class of wealthy merchants and
landowners to manage the growing empire.
3. After Augustus died, several members of his family succeeded him. However, the
position of emperor was not necessarily hereditary; in the end, armies chose emperors.
4. Rather than laws developing through a senate and assemblies, as it had during the
Republic, the emperor became a major source of laws during the Principate. The development of
Roman law culminated in the sixth century C.E. and became the foundation of European law.
E. An Urban Empire
1. About 80 percent of the 50 to 60 million people of the Roman Empire were rural
farmers, but the empire was administered through and for a network of cities and towns. In this
sense, it was an urban empire. Rome had about a million residents, other large cities had several
hundred thousand each, while many Roman towns had populations of several thousand.
2. In Rome, the upper classes lived in elegant, well-built, well-appointed houses; many
aristocrats also owned country villas. The poor lived in dark, dank, fire-prone wooden tenements

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in squalid slums built in the low-lying parts of the city. The Roman satirist, Juvenal, depicted this
dichotomy in his work.
3. Provincial towns imitated Rome both in urban planning and in urban administration. The
local elite, who served the interests of Rome, dominated town councils. The local elite also served
their communities by using their wealth to construct amenities such as aqueducts, baths, theatres,
gardens, temples, and other public works and entertainment projects.
4. Rural life in the Roman Empire involved lots of hard work and very little entertainment.
Rural people had little contact with representatives of the government. By the early centuries
C.E., absentee landlords who lived in the cities owned most rural land, while the land was worked
by tenant farmers supervised by hired foremen.
5. Manufacture and trade flourished under the pax romana. Grain had to be imported to
feed the huge city of Rome. Rome and the Italian towns (and later, provincial centers) exported
glass, metalwork, pottery, and other manufactures to the provinces. Romans also imported
Chinese silk and Indian and Arabian spices.
6. One of the effects of the Roman Empire was Romanization. In the western part of the
Empire, the Latin language, Roman clothing, and the Roman lifestyle were adopted by local
people; and indigenous cultures had an effect on Rome through cultural interaction. In the
eastern half of the Empire, however, Hellenistic culture, expecially the use of Greek language,
persisted. As time passed, Roman emperors gradually extended Roman citizenship to all free
male adult inhabitants of the empire.
F. The Rise of Christianity
1. Jesus lived in a society marked by resentment against Roman rule, which had inspired the
belief that a Messiah would arise to liberate the Jews. When Jesus sought to reform Jewish
religious practices, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem turned him over to the Roman governor
for execution.
2. After the execution, Jesus’ disciples continued to spread his teachings; they also spread
their belief that Jesus had been resurrected. At this point, the target of their proselytizing was
their fellow Jews.
3. The target of proselytizing changed from Jews to non-Jews in the 40s–70s C.E. First,
Paul of Tarsus, an Anatolian Jew, discovered that non-Jews were much more receptive to the
teachings of Jesus than Jews were. Second, a Jewish revolt in Judaea (66 C.E.) and the subsequent
Roman reconquest destroyed the original Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem. The
cosmopolitan nature of the Empire and its urban centers was key to the spread of these new
religious teachings.
4. Christianity grew slowly for two centuries, developing a hierarchy of priests and bishops,
hammering out a commonly accepted theological doctrine, and resisting the persecution of
Roman officials. By the late third century, Christians were a sizeable minority in the Roman
Empire.
5. The expansion of Christianity in the Roman Empire came at a time when Romans were
increasingly dissatisfied with their traditional religion. This dissatisfaction inspired Romans to

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become interested in a variety of mystery cults and universal creeds that had their origins in the
eastern Mediterranean.
G. Technology and Transformation
1. The Romans were expert military and civil engineers. Among their accomplishments were
bridge-building, ballistic weapons, elevated and underground aqueducts, the use of arches and
domes, and the invention of concrete.
2. Following Augustus’ death, the army was organized primarily for defense. The Rhine-
Danube frontier was protected by a string of forts; long walls protected the frontiers of North
Africa and Britain. On the eastern frontier, the Romans fought for centuries against the
Parthians. Neither side made any significant gains.
3. The state system constructed by Augustus worked well until what historians call Rome’s
third-century crisis. The symptoms of this crisis were frequent change of rulers, raids by German
tribesmen from across the Rhine-Danube frontier, and the rise of regional power when Rome
seemed unable to guarantee security.
4. Rome’s economy was undermined by the high cost of defense, debasement of the
currency and consequent inflation, a disruption of trade, reversion to a barter economy,
disappearance of the municipal aristocracy of the provincial cities, and a movement of population
out of the cities and back into the rural areas.
5. The emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305 C.E.) saved the Roman state by instituting a series of
reforms that included price controls and regulations that required certain people to stay in their
professions and to train a son to succeed them. Some side effects of these reforms include a
flourishing black market and a growing feeling of resentment against the government.
6. Constantine (r. 306–37 C.E.) formally ended the persecution of Christians and patronized
the Christian church, thus contributing to the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the
empire after his death. Constantine also transferred the capital of the empire from Rome to the
eastern city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople.
II. The Origins of Imperial China, 221 B.C.E.–220 C.E.
A. The Qin Unification of China, 221–206 B.C.E.
1. By 221 B.C.E., the state of Qin had unified all of northern and central China into the first
Chinese “empire.” The name “Qin” may be the basis for the name “China.” Success for the Qin
came from long experience in defending against “barbarian” neighbors, the adoption of severe
Legalist methods, and the ambition of the ruthless young king Shi Huangdi and his advisors.
2. Upon uniting China, the Qin established a strong centralized state by eliminating rival
centers of authority, establishing primogeniture, and creating a strong bureaucracy. It
standardized law, measurements, coinage, and writing. Following the advice of his prime minister,
Li Si, Shi Huangdi followed the Legalist view and suppressed Confucianism.
3. To secure the empire’s borders from northern raiders, the Qin sent a large military force
to drive the nomads north. To ensure they would not lose the newly gained territory, they
constructed connections and extensions to walls built earlier to defend the kingdoms, the
ancestor of the Great Wall of China. Shi Huangdi’s attack on the nomads inadvertently united the

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fragmented nomads under the Xiongnu Confederacy, and thus created a source of threat to
China for centuries to come.
4. To fill their military and labor needs, the Qin government instituted an oppressive
program of compulsory military and labor services.
5. Shi Huangdi died in 210 B.C.E. and was buried in a monumental tomb guarded by a
terracotta clay army of seven thousand soldiers. His son secured the throne but proved to be a
weak leader who could not withstand the uprisings that broke out from the resentment of
different groups. Qin rule was over by 206 B.C.E.
B. The Long Reign of the Han, 202 B.C.E.–220 C.E.
1. Gaozu (the throne name of Liu Bang) was a peasant who defeated all other contestants
for control of China, establishing the Han dynasty. The Han established a political system that
drew on both Confucian philosophy and Legalist techniques.
2. Han rulers faced challenges at first from residual resentments of the ruthless rule of the
Qin. To ease their transition and help the economy, the Han reduced taxes and government
spending, and collected and stored surplus grain for times of shortage. For those who had aided
him, Gaozu restored the system of feudal grants abolished by the Qin.
3. Confrontation with the Xiongnu confederacy nomads of the north revealed the
inadequacy of Han troops, leading Gaozu to develop a policy of appeasement, buying them off
with annual gifts.
4. The Han went through a period of territorial expansion under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87
B.C.E.) who increased the power of the emperor. During his rule, he expanded the empire into
areas as far as northern Vietnam, Manchuria, and North Korea. Instead of appeasing the
Xiongnu, he built his military to fight the northern nomads.
5. Wu’s reign saw the expansion of Chinese territory into the northwest and the foundation
of the Silk Road, which would later affect the economic health of Asia. To pay for the military
buildup, Wu instituted controversial government monopolies on high-profit commodities. The
state also adopted Confucianism, using Confucian scholars as officials of the government, who in
turn expected exemplary ethical behavior from their rulers.
C. Chinese Society
1. The family was the basic unit of society. The family was conceived as an unbroken chain
of generations, including ancestors as well as current generations. Ancestors were thought to take
an active interest in the affairs of the current generation, and they were routinely consulted,
appeased, and venerated.
2. Chinese society believed that a hierarchy in the family, dominated by the elder male,
reflected a hierarchy in society, dominated by rulers, with interdependent relationships more
important than the individual. The status and authority of women depended upon their social
status. Women of the royal family could have some political influence. A young wife was
expected to be obedient and recognize her mother-in-law’s authority over her. All women were
expected to be obedient, but their quality of life depended upon their socio-economic
circumstances.

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3. During the Western Han period (202 B.C.E.–8 C.E.) the capital was at Chang’an. During
the Eastern Han (23–220 C.E.) the capital was at Luoyang. Chang’an was an easily defended
walled city with easy access to good arable land. The population in 2 C.E. was 246,000. Other
cities and towns imitated the urban planning of Chang’an.
4. The elite of Chang’an lived in elegant multistoried houses arranged on broad, well-
planned boulevards. They dressed in fine silks, were connoisseurs of art and literature, and
indulged in numerous entertainments. The common people lived in closely packed houses in
largely unplanned, winding alleys.
5. Local officials largely came from a class of moderately wealthy, educated local landowners
whom historians refer to as the gentry. The gentry adopted Confucianism as their ideology and
pursued careers in the civil service, most often paying to have their sons trained in the same
profession. Merchant families also tended to be based in cities. Chinese men were required to
give two years of military service and often spent their time stationed on distant frontier posts.
D. New Forms of Thought and Belief
1. The Han period was rich in intellectual developments. Scholar-officials read and wrote in
a range of genres in their free time. Sima Qian, the chief astrologer of Emperor Wu (ca. 109–90
B.C.E.), could also be called the father of history in China. He wrote an exhaustive history of
China, beginning with the Yellow Emperor of the third millennium B.C.E.
2. Relative to technological innovations, the Han era saw the development of the watermill,
a usable horse collar, paper, horse breeding to supply cavalry forces, and a reliable crossbow
trigger. The Qin and Han also built thousands of miles of roads to facilitate army movement and
a network of canals connecting northern and southern river systems.
3. The Chinese believed in a number of nature spirits whom they worshipped and tried to
appease. Daoism, which emphasized the search for the dao, or “path,” emphasized harmony with
nature. Because Daoism tended to question tradition and reject hierarchy, charismatic Daoist
teachers led a number of popular uprisings during the last decades of the dynasty. Buddhism was
introduced to China in the first century C.E., probably spread by merchants on the Silk Road.
Because Buddhism called for monks to withdraw from families and abstain from sex, it came into
conflict with Confucian beliefs in family and procreation of children to maintain the cult of
ancestors, leading to its gradual reshaping for acceptance in Chinese culture.
E. Decline of the Han
1. An ambitious high official seized power from 9 to 23 C.E. but was killed in his palace,
and a member of the Han royal family was again installed as emperor. At this time the capital was
moved east to Luoyang.
2. The Han Empire was undermined by a number of factors. First, the imperial court was
plagued by weak leadership and court intrigue. Second, nobles and merchants built up large
landholdings at the expense of the small farmers, and peasants sought tax relief, reducing
revenues for the empire. Third, the system of military conscription broke down and the central
government had to rely on mercenaries whose loyalty was questionable.

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3. These factors, compounded by factionalism at court, official corruption, peasant

uprisings, and nomadic attacks, led to the fall of the dynasty in 220 C.E. China entered a period
of political fragmentation that lasted until the late sixth century.
III. Conclusion
A. Similarities
1. The Han and Roman Empires were similar relative to agriculture being their fundamental
economic activity. Both empires received revenue from a percentage of the annual harvests. And
both empires strengthened their central rule by breaking the power of old aristocratic families,
reducing their land holdings. Yet both empires saw their authority eroding at the end of their
reigns by the reversal of this process.
2. Both empires spread out from an ethnically homogeneous core to encompass widespread
territories of diverse cultures. Many in the conquered lands adopted the cultural elements of the
core, and the core also adopted some of the cultural traditions of their far-flung regions. The
extent of their empires forced both empires to create a well-trained bureaucracy and to make use
of local officials to administer their interests.
3. Both empires built roads to facilitate military movement that later became routes to
spread commerce and culture. While the majority of populations in both empires lived in the
countryside, those living in urban centers enjoyed the more cosmopolitan advantages of empire.
4. Both empires faced common problems in terms of defense and found their domestic
economies undermined by their military expenditures.
5. Both empires were overrun by new peoples who had been so deeply influenced by the
imperial cultures of Rome and of China that they maintained some of that culture during their
own reigns.
B. Differences
1. In China, the imperial model was revived and the territory of the Han Empire re-unified.
The former Roman Empire was never again reconstituted.
2. Differences between China and the Roman world can be located in the concept of the
individual, the greater degree of economic mobility for the middle classes in Rome than in Han
China, the make-up and hierarchy of their armies, and the different political ideologies and
religions of the two empires.

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