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Rome has been called the Eternal City, but its history has had enormous ups and downs.
It went from being the largest, most important city in the world to a small backwater, then made a remarkable turnaround, becoming once again the most important city in Italy.
It has been a center of power, religion, and commerce, and it has also been used as a quarry for people seeking materials for their villas.
Learn more about the three-thousand-year history of Rome and its dramatic comeback on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Rome has been one of the world’s most important cities for close to 3,000 years. While it has remained important, the city’s fortune has risen and fallen dramatically over that period.
The traditional founding date of Rome is 753 BC, specifically April 21, according to later Roman chronology. While the exact date may or may not be accurate, it is an oddly specific date for a city’s founding.
The familiar legend tells of the twins Romulus and Remus, sons of the god Mars and the priestess Rhea Silvia, who were abandoned beside the Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf, and eventually founded a settlement. After a dispute, Romulus killed Remus and became Rome’s first king.
The archaeological picture broadly supports the idea of a settlement forming in the eighth century BC. Communities had existed on and around each of Rome’s seven historic hills before that time. During the eighth and seventh centuries BC, these settlements gradually coalesced into a single urban community.
Rome’s location was favorable considering the conditions on the Italian peninsula at the time. It sat near a convenient crossing of the Tiber, and it was roughly 25 kilometers inland from the sea. It controlled a trade route connecting northern and southern Italy and was positioned between the cultural zones of the Etruscans to the north and Greek colonies to the south.
The low ground between the hills was originally marshy. Drainage projects, traditionally associated with the early monarchy and especially the Cloaca Maxima, its famous sewer, which helped transform the valley into the Roman Forum, which became the city’s civic, political, commercial, and religious center.
By around 550 BC, Rome may already have contained roughly 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest urban settlements in Italy.
Roman tradition says Rome was ruled by seven kings between 753 and 509 BC. The later kings were strongly associated with the Etruscans. Under them, Rome acquired major temples, fortifications, and a more developed political and religious organization.
According to tradition, the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, was expelled in 509 BC after the rape of Lucretia by his son Sextus Tarquinius. The monarchy was replaced by a republic governed by annually elected magistrates.
During the early Republic, Rome was still primarily an Italian city-state rather than the capital of an empire.
Rome’s population grew as the Republic conquered neighboring communities and absorbed people from throughout Italy. By around 300 BC, the city may have contained perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 people.
While it was far from its peak population, it was already an enormous city for antiquity.
After Rome defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars and began expanding throughout the Mediterranean, the city’s character changed dramatically. Between roughly 200 and 30 BC, enormous quantities of wealth, slaves, grain, and migrants poured into Rome.
Victorious generals displayed captured treasure and built temples and monuments. Aristocrats competed to construct increasingly lavish houses. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported into Italy, many eventually becoming freedmen and Roman citizens.
Rome also developed enormous working-class neighborhoods dominated by insulae, multistory apartment buildings. Fires, collapses, overcrowding, sanitation problems, and traffic became chronic urban problems.
By the first century BC, estimates generally place Rome somewhere between 500,000 and one million inhabitants.
Starting in about 83 BC and continuing for several decades, Rome experienced a series of civil wars. Octavian was the last man standing and later became Augustus in 27 BC. The Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire.
The imperial period saw dramatic changes to the city. Augustus famously claimed that he had found Rome built of brick and left it clothed in marble. The statement was rhetorical, but it reflected a genuine transformation.
Ancient documents record hundreds of thousands of people receiving grain distributions or cash gifts. Extrapolating from these numbers has led many historians to estimate that there were approximately 750,000 to 1 million inhabitants under Augustus and the early emperors in the first century. Modern scholarship still often uses a figure of nearly one million.
Successive emperors reshaped Rome. Under the Julio-Claudians came enormous palaces on the Palatine. After the Great Fire of 64, Nero constructed his extraordinary Domus Aurea, or Golden House.
Following Nero’s fall, the Flavian emperors built the Colosseum, completed around AD 80, partly over Nero’s former palace complex. Trajan created perhaps the most spectacular imperial forum, including the Forum of Trajan, Trajan’s Markets, and Trajan’s Column.
Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon in approximately its present form and constructed the massive mausoleum now known as Castel Sant’Angelo. Caracalla and Diocletian constructed enormous public bath complexes.
By the second century, Rome contained aqueducts, theaters, amphitheaters, circuses, baths, fountains, temples, apartment blocks, and palaces on a scale unmatched in Europe.
Many of these things have been covered individually in previous episodes.
Some scholarship places Rome’s maximum ancient population in the second century at perhaps as many as 1.5 million people.
The second century was peak Rome in the ancient world.
During the third century, however, several long-term changes weakened the city.
The Empire suffered civil wars, invasions, epidemics, and political instability. Emperors increasingly spent their time near frontier armies rather than in Rome.
The Aurelian Walls, constructed beginning around 271, reflected Rome’s changing circumstances. For centuries the city had been so secure that major fortifications were unnecessary. Now invasion had become conceivable.
The walls enclosed roughly 14 square kilometers and remained Rome’s principal defenses for more than 1,500 years.
The event that accelerated Rome’s decline was the rise of Emperor Constantine. After defeating Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine became increasingly associated with Christianity. He sponsored enormous Christian basilicas, including the original St. Peter’s Basilica.
But Constantine also founded a new imperial capital at Constantinople in 330.
This marked a major shift as the empire’s political focus moved away from Rome. Rome remained enormously prestigious, but the emperor no longer normally lived there.
The city’s population probably declined gradually. One modern estimate still puts fourth-century Rome at above 500,000 inhabitants. The exact number isn’t known, but the population clearly declined.
Rome’s decline was similar to how Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.
In 410, the Visigoths under Alaric entered and sacked Rome. It was the first time the city had fallen to a foreign enemy in roughly eight centuries.
The symbolic shock was enormous. In 455, the Vandals sacked Rome again. The imperial government in the West increasingly operated from Ravenna rather than Rome.
In 476, the Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus. Conventionally, this marks the end of the Western Roman Empire.
The Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great, who ruled Italy beginning in 493, attempted to preserve Roman institutions and repair monuments, but it was a shell of what it once was.
By the end of the 5th century, the population had crashed from 500,000 to 100,000.
The Eastern Roman emperor Justinian attempted to reconquer Italy from the Ostrogoths beginning in 535.
Rome changed hands several times between Byzantine and Gothic forces. Sieges damaged aqueducts, disrupted the grain supply, destroyed neighborhoods, and drove inhabitants away. Large areas inside the Aurelian Walls became fields, vineyards, gardens, ruins, and pasture.
The population collapsed even further.
A city that had perhaps contained close to a million people several centuries earlier may have fallen to something like 30,000 to 50,000 by the sixth century.
Whatever you think of ancient Rome, medieval Rome was nothing like it. From roughly the seventh through fourteenth centuries, Rome was a very different city.
Its ancient walls enclosed an area far larger than the population required. Settlement concentrated near the Tiber and around important churches.
Ancient buildings were reused in almost every conceivable way. Temples became churches. Mausoleums became fortresses. Theaters and baths became quarries. Marble was stripped from ancient structures and either reused in new buildings or burned to produce lime.
The Colosseum itself became partly a fortified complex and later a source of building stone, which is why so much of it is missing today.
While Rome’s population crashed, it never became completely irrelevant because of the papacy, and also because Rome contained what Christians believed were the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul; it drew pilgrims from across Europe.
When the Lombards threatened Rome, the popes increasingly sought protection from the Frankish kings.
In 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Rome thereby became intimately connected to the concept of the Holy Roman Empire, even though emperors rarely controlled the city effectively.
Political power within Rome was often fragmented among the pope, aristocratic families, popular factions, and occasionally emperors.
The Avignon Papacy began in 1309, when the popes resided in southern France rather than Rome. For over 70 years, Rome wasn’t even the seat of the Bishop of Rome.
The Black Death and other epidemics worsened the city’s demographic problems. By around 1400, Rome may have had only about 17,000 to 20,000 inhabitants.
This was probably Rome’s lowest population since just after its founding. A stunning collapse for what was, 1400 years earlier, the largest city in the world.
The return of the papacy to Rome permanently in the fifteenth century initiated a remarkable revival.
Popes began transforming Rome into a capital worthy of the Catholic Church. Nicholas V, Sixtus IV, Julius II, Leo X, and other Renaissance popes sponsored enormous artistic and architectural projects.
Streets were rebuilt, aqueducts were restored, and palaces and churches appeared.
The Vatican became one of Europe’s great artistic centers. Under Julius II, work began in 1506 on the new St. Peter’s Basilica.
By 1527, a census recorded roughly 54,000 to 55,000 inhabitants.
Rome was slowly starting to grow again, but that growth hit a snag. In May 1527, mutinous troops of Emperor Charles V stormed Rome.
For months they looted, murdered, raped, and extorted the inhabitants. Pope Clement VII fled to Castel Sant’Angelo.
Rome’s population may have dropped from about 55,000 to somewhere around 30,000 or even lower immediately afterward.
But the decline was temporary.
During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rome became one of Europe’s great artistic capitals.
By 1600, Rome’s population had recovered to more than 90,000.
During the seventeenth century, architects and artists such as Bernini and Borromini created much of the cityscape now associated with central Rome.
St. Peter’s Basilica was completed, and Bernini created St. Peter’s Square. Fountains, churches, palaces, and public spaces turned Rome into the great showcase of the Counter-Reformation.
By 1700, Rome probably had around 130,000 to 150,000 inhabitants.
During the eighteenth century, Rome was still the capital of the Papal States, but its political importance was much smaller than during antiquity.
Its cultural importance, however, remained enormous. The city became one of the principal destinations of the Grand Tour. Wealthy British, French, German, and northern European travelers came to study classical antiquity and Renaissance art.
By 1800, the population had increased slightly to 160,000 to 170,000.
During the nineteenth century, the movement for Italian unification increasingly focused on Rome. Nationalists argued that no other city could legitimately serve as the capital of a united Italy.
Italy unified under King Victor Emmanuel II in 1861, but Rome remained outside the new kingdom because French troops protected the pope.
When the Franco-Prussian War forced Napoleon III to withdraw his troops in 1870, the Italian army moved against Rome.
On September 20, 1870, Italian troops breached the Aurelian Wall near Porta Pia. Rome was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy and became the national capital in 1871.
When Rome became the capital of unified Italy, its population was 220,000.
The transformation after 1870 was explosive.
The new Italian government needed ministries, parliament buildings, bureaucratic offices,and infrastructure.
Neighborhoods expanded outside the traditional inhabited areas. Ancient villas and gardens disappeared beneath new streets. Government buildings and apartment blocks rose rapidly.
The city’s population approximately doubled between 1870 and 1900.
The 20th century saw the greatest increase in Rome’s population in its history. Sometime in the 1930s, Rome once again surpassed its population at the height of the Roman Empire.
Benito Mussolini built monuments and completely rebuilt new neighborhoods. He also recognized Vatican City as a separate, independent state.
After the war, Rome’s population exploded again, and by the early 1980s it reached just under 3 million, where it stands today.
Rome’s long history is unlike that of any other city in the world. It went from a village on the Tiber River to the most important city in the world, back down to an almost insignificant regional town, and back to a major world city and the capital of a unified Italy.