The dictator Julius Caesar, the first to try to deal with the problems of Rome in a systematic way, did not live long enough to carry out his plans, which included canalizing the Tiber and building up the Campus Martius. His adopted son and successor, Augustus, attempted to transform Rome into a worthy capital for the new Roman Empire. Although his claim that he found the city brick and left it marble is exaggerated, Augustus and his colleagues did provide it with many fine public buildings, baths, theatres, temples, and warehouses. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a friend and supporter of Augustus, used his own immense wealth to enhance the city’s beauty and improve its water supply. Such construction projects, together with the restoration of old buildings, provided employment for the urban masses, but the lack of any overall city planning left them to live in the unsafe and unsanitary tenements amid the narrow winding streets and alleys of old Rome.

Nonetheless, Augustus’s reorganization of the administration of the city and his institution of certain public services were a significant break with the republican past. In 7 bc he divided Rome into 14 regiones (wards) and these into vici (precincts), each with officials who performed both administrative and religious functions. The office of urban prefect, which Augustus revived about 26 bc, did not become permanent until later, but in the late empire the post became the most important in Rome.

In response to an obvious need, Augustus organized a fire brigade in 21 bc: a number of public slaves were placed under the command of aediles, officials in charge of streets and markets. After a bad fire in ad 6, he established a corps of professional firemen (vigiles), comprising seven squads, or cohorts, of 1,000 freedmen apiece. The vigiles also had minor police duties, especially at night. He sought to impose order in the often violent streets by creating three cohorts under the command of the urban prefect; their main duty was to keep order in the city, and they could call on the emperor’s Praetorian Guard for help if necessary. Altogether, Augustus saw to it that the amateur system of Roman municipal administration was replaced by a more professional and permanent set of institutions—a work that probably contributed more to making Rome a great city than all his marble monuments.

Contributions of later emperors

For the most part, the successors to Augustus continued his administrative policies and building program, though with less innovation and more ostentation. Claudius began a great port near Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, to facilitate grain shipments directly to Rome. Commerce remained largely in private hands, with public officials acting to ensure a regular supply and to prevent speculation.

Nero can be credited with introducing the most up-to-date ideas on town planning, though at a terrible price. The great fire of ad 64 destroyed large sections of the city. In the devastated areas, Nero built new streets and colonnades as well as his fabulous Golden House, and he encouraged private citizens to build more spacious and more fireproof houses and apartment buildings with better access to the public water supply. Although Nero made Rome a more pleasant city in which to live, his measures did not prevent other devastating fires, such as the one in 191 that gave Septimius Severus the opportunity to rebuild the city.

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Other emperors in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries ad added to the glory of the imperial house and the amenities of Roman life with their own grandiose imperial forums, temples, arches, baths, and stadiums. Trajan’s Forum, with its complex of buildings and courtyards, and his market, with its tiers of shops and its great market hall, represent in the judgment of many historians the supreme achievement of city planning in Rome. Trajan’s Column, which narrates his victories beyond the Danube, was recognized as without peer even in the Christian Middle Ages. Hadrian left two enduring structures in Rome: the great domed Pantheon and his mausoleum, which in ad 590 was renamed Castel Sant’Angelo.

In the late 1st and early 2nd centuries Rome was at the peak of its grandeur and population, which has been estimated at more than one million persons but was probably less. The population was kept at a high level by a steady stream of immigrants, both slave and free, from the provinces and beyond—although life expectancy in the city was probably lower than elsewhere in the empire. Rome’s famous paved streets, water supply, and sewage system, however, should not be overestimated; even after the reforms of Nero, large numbers of the urban inhabitants continued to live in expensive, poorly built, overcrowded, and unheated slums without water or cooking facilities. The arena and the public bath relieved some pressures of high density and physical squalor, but Rome’s refined technology was applied haphazardly to the problems of urban social organization. Garbage was usually dumped into the Tiber or pits on the city’s outskirts.

Rome was a city of consumers, both rich and poor, and never a great industrial or commercial centre. The small shop was the basic unit of production and distribution throughout the imperial period, and the numerous trade associations served social and religious functions until they were enveloped in the economic regimentation of the late empire. Although Rome far surpassed any other ancient city in size and monumental splendour, its minimal economic and social achievement augured ill for the future.

Slow decline of the late empire

Rome’s population probably began to decline in the late 2nd century. At the height of an outbreak of the plague in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, 2,000 persons a day are thought to have died. The economic and political disasters of the 3rd century did little good for Rome. In the 270s the walls built by Aurelian were more a symbol of the danger of barbarian attack than a restoration of Rome’s grandeur.

By the time Diocletian reformed the imperial government in the late 3rd century, ushering in the period of relative prosperity symbolized in his great baths, Rome was no longer the administrative capital of the empire. The founding of Constantinople (now Istanbul) merely confirmed Rome’s loss of political primacy. Constantine I, however, did much to restore the buildings and monuments of imperial Rome. In addition, his patronage of Rome’s small Christian community laid the foundations of the Christian and papal Rome of the medieval and modern periods. Rome in the 4th century remained nonetheless a distinctly conservative and pagan city dominated by proud senatorial families. When the Visigothic army of Alaric first threatened the city in 408, the Senate and the prefect proposed pagan sacrifices to ward off the enemy.

In 410 Alaric seized Rome and allowed his troops to pillage the city for three days; much booty was taken, and many Romans fled. By the mid-5th century the population had dropped to fewer than 250,000. It is unlikely, however, that the monuments of Rome suffered extensive damage. Its churches, for the most part, were spared. Even the longer, 14-day sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 did less damage than the Romans did themselves. In the 4th and 5th centuries the emperors repeatedly legislated against those who were stripping buildings and monuments for their materials, especially the marble.