Rome from Kingdom to Repubic.docVIP

Rome:　from Kingdom to Republic The Roman Empire succeeded the 500-year-old Roman Republic (510 BC – 1st century BC), which had been weakened by the civil wars of the Late Republic, and continued as the Byzantine Empire until 1453. Several dates are commonly proposed to mark the transition from Republic to Empire, but most historians would ascribe it to January 16, 27 BC when the Roman Senate granted to Octavian the honorific Augustus. The land and the people Italy is a peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean west of Greece. Unlike Greece, Italy is poor in mineral resources and surprisingly devoid of useful harbors. However, the most stunning difference between Greece and Italy is the exponentially larger amount of fertile land. So the two peoples developed very differently; the Italians began and remained largely an agrarian people. Even in its latest stages, Roman culture would identify its values and ideals as agrarian. The earliest people in Italy were Cro-Magnons (Homo sapiens), but by the Neolithic stage, they seem to be displaced by waves of migrations from Africa, Spain, and France. These peoples were themselves displaced by a new set of migrations in the Bronze Age, which began in Italy around 1500 BC, which violently displaced many of the populations already there. These new peoples came from across the Alps and across the Adriatic Sea to the east of the Italian peninsula. They were a nomadic people who were primarily herdsmen; they were also technologically superior. They were a war-like people. We call these people Italic , and they include several ethnic groups: the Sabines, the Umbrians, and the Latins. Somewhere between 800 and 700 BC, two new groups of people began to settle the Italian peninsula. Unlike the earlier immigrants, these new colonists brought with them civilization: the Greeks and the Etruscans. The Etruscans Somewhere between 900 and 800 BC, the Italian peninsula was settled by a mysterious peoples called the Etruscans