Roman history is a thousand-year history made up of just men and tyrants, which sees the longest-lived civilization in human history as the protagonist, it was a model and a source of inspiration for any other people who lived after its end.
In its primordial phase it was a monarchy, which became a republic unique in its form, and then, it turned into an empire that would affect the political evolution of the whole of Europe for over two thousand years.
Romulus, Numa, Tullio Ostilio, Anco Marcio, Tarquinio Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinio the Superb, last king, who according to tradition was exiled from the city, and after him Rome would have sworn that it would never again be ruled by a monarch, thus leading to the birth of the largest republic ever known.
The peculiarity of the Roman Republic lies in its balance of forces determined by Senate, Consuls and Magistrates, which represented the perfect combination of the three pre-existing forms of government, namely the oligarchy, which was impregnated by the senate, the monarchy, of which the two consuls were an expression, and democracy, manifested by the public election of the magistrates. br /> This balance, however, was far from stable, and the power struggles between one or the other office did not fail to upset this balance, "fortunately" the rise to power of numerous righteous men ( but also aspiring tyrants ) led to an ever greater equilibrium, aiming more and more towards the social equality of all wealth classes, from the richest to the poorest, including even those who possessed nothing but themselves.
In this sense, Rome will prove to be very elastic from a social point of view, nourishing the dream of a social rise ( which today we would trivially call, the "American dream" ) where a man, of humble origins, who possesses nothing but himself, can enrich himself to become the most powerful man in the most powerful "empire" of the emperor himself. And of "new men" external to the political tradition who managed to climb the heights of power, the political and military history of Rome will be full of them, and among the many, one name resounds on everyone, that of the nephew of a debt collector, and son of a usurer, who became Tribuno Laticalvo ( the second highest office of a Legion ) then Quaestor of Crete and Cyrene, Praetor in Germania Magna and finally Emperor, following the triumph in the civil war that broke out after the assassination of Caligula, and his name was obviously Titus Flavius Vespasian.
But Vespasian was not the only protagonist of Roman history to have "humble origins", and staying here to list them all would take longer than it should. But it must certainly be mentioned the central role that the Freedmen of Emperor Claudius had in the administration of the imperial "bureaucracy", remembering that the freedmen were freed slaves, and therefore ex-slaves, who from possessing nothing, not even themselves, they found themselves administering the Empire for Claudius, holding some of the most prestigious positions of their time, de facto, former slaves were among the most powerful men in the empire.
The great social mobility, characteristic of the republican age, underwent a further acceleration in the imperial age, with the progressive extension of Latin and subsequently Roman citizenship, to all the inhabitants of the empire, simultaneously fueling the social and economic crisis, which began with the Marian reform of the army in the first century BC, which transformed the army from a volunteer into a mercenary, and which, if in the conquest phase was self-sufficient and perfectly capable of self-feeding, in times of peace or in any case during the static or defensive phases of the territorial history of Rome, its mammoth nature, due to the presence in the ranks of Rome of thousands of soldiers to whom the empire had to provide food, water, wine and compensation, proved in the long term a burden rather than a resource , leading to the inevitable collapse of a semi-millennial system.
The decline of Rome at this point appears to us as inevitable, only a scapegoat was needed to declare the end of the empire, now crossed by centuries of permanent deterioration, and this announcement came at the hands of Odoacer who, by conquering and sacking Rome, was able to declare officially the end of the Western Empire.
In fact, by the fourth century the empire had been divided between West and East, and if the two "empires" represented a single state entity, in practice they followed different evolutionary realities, both on a political, military and cultural level, and so, while in the east a new empire took shape wearing the traditional colors of Rome, Rome was sinking in on itself, devoured by an out-of-control evolution that would have led it to overcome political borders, impregnating different cultures and populations that in those years were beginning to define themselves, marking thus the beginning of the Middle Ages and with it, of the formative processes of the future national states.