Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican state of ancient Rome, conventionally dated from Octavian's assumption of the title Augustus in 27 BC through the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, while its eastern half, later known as the Byzantine Empire, continued for nearly another thousand years until 1453. At its territorial height under Emperor Trajan around 117 AD the empire covered roughly 5 million square kilometers around the Mediterranean basin, spanning Britain, Iberia, Gaul, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and North Africa. Rome governed this territory through a professional standing army, an extensive road network, and a body of Roman law that shaped later European legal systems, while Latin served as the empire's administrative language in the west and Greek retained wide use in the east. Emperor Theodosius I permanently divided the empire between his two sons in 395 AD; the western half collapsed under sustained pressure from Germanic peoples, and the deposition of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 AD marks its traditional end, while the eastern half endured as the Byzantine Empire.