Military, Civil Administration, Taxes, Politics and Economics of the Roman Republic and Empire
The evolution of the Roman republic and later of the Roman empire is interesting because of the interplay between social, military and poltical dimensions as the drivers of change. To that extent, this post is probably best understood in the context of the other two on the rise and fall of the Roman republic and on the fall of the Roman empire. To that effect, it recaps the political and economic insights described in those two posts and adds some further facts I stumble across while reading about Roman antiquity.
The post is divided in 5 sections that discuss the main issues I was interested in:
The military structure of Rome
The Civil Administration
Taxation
Political Stability
Economic structure
Military Administration of the Roman Republic, Principate and Dominate
As the animation below shows, the Roman Republic slowly grew from a small city state on the border between Latins and Etruscans at the centre of the Italic peninsula to progressively dominate the very peninsula by the end of the third century BCE, at which point its expansion exploded into the Mediterranean Sea, encompassing Iberia, North Africa, the Balkans, Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant and eventually Egypt.