Roman Empire
Classical Mediterranean empire, 27 BCE – 476 CE (Western) / 1453 CE (Eastern)
Also known as: Roman Empire, Imperium Romanum, Rome
The Roman Empire — the imperial polity established by Augustus in 27 BCE on the institutional ruins of the Roman Republic — is, for Quigley, the textbook case of his civilizational schema. In The Evolution of Civilizations it is the example through which his stage-model is developed and tested: the Age of Conflict (the Republican civil wars of the second and first centuries BCE) resolved into the Universal Empire of the Principate, which then entered a long Decay culminating in the fifth-century barbarian invasions and the eventual collapse of imperial authority in the West. The Eastern half, centered on Constantinople from 330 CE, persisted as the Byzantine Empire until 1453.
Foundation: From Republic to Principate
Quigley's account of the Roman transition is institutional. The Republic's structure — annual magistrates, the Senate, the popular assemblies — was designed for a small Latin city-state and adapted with increasing strain to govern an Italian peninsula, then a Mediterranean hegemony, then a sprawling multi-ethnic empire. The first-century BCE civil wars (Marius–Sulla, Pompey–Caesar, Octavian–Antony) progressively concentrated military and political authority in successive individuals, until Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 BCE and his 27 BCE settlement with the Senate produced a sustainable balance: the Senate retained its dignified functions, the consuls and praetors retained their judicial roles, but command of the legions and the central revenues passed to a single individual styled Princeps. Augustus's solution worked for two and a half centuries.
The Quigley Framing: Universal Empire as Resolution of Conflict
For Quigley, the Roman case is the cleanest historical illustration of how a civilization's Age of Conflict — the period in which the original instrument of expansion has lost its efficacy and rival centers of power compete violently for control — can be resolved by a successful Universal Empire that imposes peace by absorbing all rivals. The Evolution of Civilizations uses Rome as the prototype: the Republican expansion through the second and third Punic Wars, the second-century BCE crisis of agrarian dispossession (the Gracchi), the first-century civil wars, the establishment of the Principate. The Pax Romana of the first and second centuries CE is the archetypal Universal Empire — substantial peace, prosperity, and demographic growth across the Mediterranean basin and its hinterlands, sustained by an integrated administrative apparatus, a professional army, a common legal system, and a network of paved roads and supplied harbours.
The Decay: Third-Century Crisis to the Fall in the West
Quigley follows the standard Gibbonian narrative for the Empire's decline, recast through his stage-model. The third-century crisis (235–284) — a half-century of military emperors, civil wars, plague, currency debasement, and barbarian incursions — was the structural inflection point at which Universal Empire began to fail. Diocletian's reforms (284–305) and Constantine's continuation (306–337) restored centralized control through tetrarchic devolution, a new gold-and-bronze currency system, and the institutional Christianization of the state. But the underlying problem — that the Empire's resources were inadequate to defend its frontiers against the demographic and military pressure of the Germanic peoples beyond — was not solved. The fifth-century West collapsed under successive Germanic invasions: the Visigothic sack of Rome (410), the Vandal sack (455), the deposition of Romulus Augustulus (476). Quigley reads the Western collapse not as a single catastrophe but as the institutional acknowledgment of a long structural failure.
The Eastern Continuation: Byzantium
Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations and his lectures treat the Byzantine Empire — the Greek-speaking, Orthodox-Christian polity centered on Constantinople from 330 CE until 1453 — as a separate civilizational unit that emerged from the Eastern Roman institutional structures. The Justinianic reconquests of the sixth century, the Heraclian crisis with Persia and the Arab conquests of the seventh, the long mid-Byzantine recovery under the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056), the fourth-crusade catastrophe of 1204, the Palaeologan twilight, and the final fall to the Ottomans in 1453 are the principal episodes. The structural argument is that Byzantium was the institutional bridge by which the late-Classical inheritance was preserved long enough for Western Civilization to emerge as an independent civilizational unit in the post-Carolingian Latin West and for Islamic Civilization to emerge in the post-conquest Levant and North Africa.
Legacy in the Quigley Argument
The Roman Empire's significance in Quigley's larger work is double. First, as a historical institution, it is the structural ancestor of the entire later European political vocabulary — "empire," "senate," "republic," "citizen," "law," "province" — and the source of much of the institutional template inherited by both the Catholic Church (through which Roman administrative continuity in the West survived 476) and the Byzantine successor states. Second, as the textbook case of his civilizational stage-model, the Roman example is the implicit reference against which his analyses of every other civilization — Western, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Andean — are calibrated. When Quigley writes of "Universal Empire" or "the Age of Conflict" or "Decay," Rome is the unspoken default referent. The corollary diagnostic question — whether Western Civilization is itself approaching its Universal Empire stage — is, for Quigley, the most urgent contemporary question his framework can pose.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 70 Quigley
it reached its greatest peak in the century divided at 400 B.C., and finally culminated in the Roman Empire. It was destroyed, as is generally known, by the Germanic 'barbarian invaders' in the fifth century of our era.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 157 Quigley
Classical civilization, especially as it grew into the Roman Empire, was the culmination of these influences. They were reflected in the term 'Our Sea' (Mare nostrum), applied by the Romans to the Mediterranean.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 263 Quigley
the split between the Western Roman Empire (which disappeared in the fifth century) and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire (which disappeared only in the fifteenth century), as well as the schism of the Christian church into Roman and Orthodox branches.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 302 Quigley
In a full universal empire, such as existed in the Roman Empire under the Antonines, this would have been carried on to include a single monetary system, a unified legal system, and other aspects of unified rule.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 424 Quigley
simultaneously Holy Roman, Catholic, Universal, and Imperial.
- book-reviews Quigley
Reviews of works on the late Republic, the Principate, and the Constantinian transition.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
The Roman legions as the prototypical heavy infantry instrument of expansion.