Roman provinces in the context of "Hadrian"

Roman Italy is the period of ancient Italian history going from the founding and rise of Rome to the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire; the Latin name of the Italian peninsula in this period was Italia (continued to be used in the Italian language). According to Roman mythology, Italy was the ancestral home of Aeneas, being the homeland of the Trojans progenitor, Dardanus; Aeneas, instructed by Jupiter, moved to Italy after the fall of Troy, and his descendants, Romulus and Remus, were the founders of Rome. Aside from the legendary accounts, Rome was an Italic city-state that changed its form of government from Kingdom (ruled, between 753 BC and 509 BC, by seven kings) to Republic, and then grew within the context of a peninsula dominated by the Gauls, Ligures, Veneti, Camunni and Histri in the North; the Etruscans, Latins, Falisci, Picentes, Umbri and Sabines in the Centre; and the Iapygian tribes (such as the Messapians), the Oscan tribes (such as the Samnites) and Greek colonies in the South.

The consolidation of Italy into a single entity occurred during the Roman expansion in the peninsula, when Rome formed a permanent association with most of other the local tribes and cities; and Italy's inhabitants included Roman citizens, communities with Latin Rights, and socii. The strength of the Italian confederacy was a crucial factor in the rise of Rome, starting with the Punic and Macedonian wars between the 3rd and 2nd century BC. As Roman provinces were being established throughout the Mediterranean, Italy maintained a special status with political, religious and financial privileges. In Italy, Roman magistrates exercised the imperium domi (police power), as an alternative to the imperium militiae (military power) exercised in the provinces.

The consuls were the two highest elected public officials of the Roman Republic (c. 509 BC to 27 BC). Romans considered the consulship the second-highest level of the cursus honorum—an ascending sequence of public offices to which politicians aspired—after that of the censor, which was reserved for former consuls. Each year, the centuriate assembly elected two consuls to serve jointly for a one-year term. The consuls alternated each month holding fasces (taking turns leading) when both were in Rome. A consul's imperium (military power) extended over Rome and all its provinces.

Having two consuls created a check on the power of any one individual, in accordance with the republican belief that the powers of the former kings of Rome should be spread out into multiple offices. To that end, each consul could veto the actions of the other consul.

The barbarian kingdoms were states founded by various non-Roman, primarily Germanic, peoples in Western Europe and North Africa following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. The barbarian kingdoms were the principal governments in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages. The time of the barbarian kingdoms is considered to have come to an end with Charlemagne's coronation as emperor in 800, though a handful of small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms persisted until being unified by Alfred the Great in 886.

The formation of the barbarian kingdoms was a complicated, gradual, and largely unintentional process. Their origin can be traced to the Roman state failing to handle barbarian migrants on the imperial borders, which led to both invasions and invitations into imperial territory from the 3rd century onwards. Despite an increasing influx of barbarians, the Romans simultaneously denied them the ability to properly integrate into the imperial framework. Barbarian rulers were at first local warlords and client kings without firm connections to any territory. Their influence only increased as Roman emperors and usurpers began to use them as pawns in civil wars. The barbarian realms only transitioned into proper territorial kingdoms after the collapse of effective Western Roman central authority.

The concept of Germany as a distinct region in Central Europe can be traced to Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania, thus distinguishing it from Gaul. The victory of the Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9) prevented annexation by the Roman Empire, although the Roman provinces of Germania Superior and Germania Inferior were established along the Rhine. Following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Franks conquered the other West Germanic tribes. When the Frankish Empire was divided among Charles the Great's heirs in 843, the eastern part became East Francia, and later Kingdom of Germany. In 962, Otto I became the first Holy Roman Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval German state.

During the High Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League, dominated by German port cities, established itself along the Baltic and North Seas. The development of a crusading element within German Christendom led to the Northern Crusades and the establishment of the State of the Teutonic Order along the Southern Baltic coast in what would later become Prussia. In the Investiture Controversy, the German Emperors resisted Catholic Church authority. In the Late Middle Ages, the regional dukes, princes, and bishops gained power at the expense of the emperors. Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation within the Catholic Church after 1517, as the northern and eastern states became Protestant, while most of the southern and western states remained Catholic. The Thirty Years' War, a civil war from 1618 to 1648 brought tremendous destruction to the Holy Roman Empire. The estates of the empire attained great autonomy in the Peace of Westphalia, the most important being Austria, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony. With the Napoleonic Wars, feudalism fell away and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806. Napoleon established the Confederation of the Rhine as a German puppet state, but after the French defeat, the German Confederation was established under Austrian presidency. The German revolutions of 1848–1849 failed but the Industrial Revolution modernized the German economy, leading to rapid urban growth and the emergence of the socialist movement. Prussia, with its capital Berlin, grew in power. German universities became world-class centers for science and humanities, while music and art flourished. The unification of Germany was achieved under the leadership of the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with the formation of the German Empire in 1871. The new Reichstag, an elected parliament, had only a limited role in the imperial government. Germany joined the other powers in colonial expansion in Africa and the Pacific.

Gallo-Roman culture was a consequence of the Romanization of Gauls under the rule of the Roman Empire in Roman Gaul. It was characterized by the Gaulish adoption or adaptation of Roman culture, language, morals and way of life in a uniquely Gaulish context. The well-studied meld of cultures in Gaul gives historians a model against which to compare and contrast parallel developments of Romanization in other less-studied Roman provinces.

Interpretatio romana offered Roman names for Gaulish deities such as the smith-god Gobannus; however, of the Celtic deities, only the horse-patroness Epona penetrated Romanized cultures beyond the confines of Gaul.

Oricum (Ancient Greek: Ὤρικον, Ὤρικος or Ὠρικός; Latin: Oricum or Oricus; Albanian: Oriku or Orikum) was a harbor on the Illyrian coast that developed in an Ancient Greek polis at the south end of the Bay of Vlorë on the southern Adriatic coast. It was located at the foot of the Akrokeraunian Mountains, the natural border between ancient Epirus and Illyria. Oricum later became an important Roman city between the provinces of Epirus Vetus and Epirus Nova in Macedonia. It is now an archaeological park of Albania, near modern Orikum, Vlorë County. Oricum holds such a strategic geographical position that the area has been in continuous usage as a naval base from antiquity to the present-days.

It appears that the site of Oricum was uninhabited before the 6th century BC. In the early period contacts between the Greeks and the local Illyrians were evidently absent in the hinterland of the site. Early Greek sources describe Orikos as a harbor (Greek: λιμήν, limen). Findings from the proto-urban period in Orikos provide evidence of extensive contacts primarily with the Greek world. Like other ports of southern Illyria, the site of Orikos was a place of exchange of products and a meeting point between the outside world and the Illyrians located in the hinterland. In the Classical period Orikos was likely part of the peraia of Korkyra.

Several theories, in great extent mutually exclusive, address the issue of the origin of the Romanians. The Romanian language descends from the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in the Roman provinces north of the "Jireček Line" (a proposed notional line separating the predominantly Latin-speaking territories from the Greek-speaking lands in Southeastern Europe) in Late Antiquity. The theory of Daco-Roman continuity argues that the Romanians are mainly descended from the Daco-Romans, a people developing through the cohabitation of the native Dacians and the Roman colonists in the province of Dacia Traiana (primarily in present-day Romania) north of the river Danube. The competing immigrationist theory states that the Romanians' ethnogenesis commenced in the provinces south of the river with Romanized local populations (known as Vlachs in the Middle Ages) spreading through mountain refuges, both south to Greece and north through the Carpathian Mountains. Other theories state that the Romanized local populations were present over a wide area on both sides of the Danube and the river itself did not constitute an obstacle to permanent exchanges in both directions; according to the "admigration" theory, migrations from the Balkan Peninsula to the lands north of the Danube contributed to the survival of the Romance-speaking population in these territories.

Political motivations—the Transylvanian Romanians' efforts to achieve their emancipation, Austro-Hungarian and Romanian expansionism, and Hungarian irredentism—influenced the development of the theories, and "national passions" still color the debates. In 2013, authors of The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages came to the conclusion that the "historical, archaeological and linguistic data available do not seem adequate to give a definitive answer" in the debate. Their view was accepted by scholars contributing to The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, published in 2016, which reiterates that "the location and extent of the territory where "Daco-Romance" originated" is uncertain.

The Roman pharaohs, rarely referred to as ancient Egypt's Thirty-fourth Dynasty, were the Roman emperors in their capacity as rulers of Egypt, especially in Egyptology. After Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Republic in 30 BC by Octavian, the people and especially the priesthood of the country continued to recognize the Roman emperors as pharaohs, according them traditional pharaonic titularies and depicting them with traditional pharaonic garb, engaging in traditional pharaonic activities, in artwork and at temples throughout Egypt.

Though the Egyptians themselves considered the Romans to be their pharaohs and the legitimate successors of the ancient pharaohs, the emperors themselves never adopted any pharaonic titles or traditions outside of Egypt, as these would have been hard to justify in the Roman world at large. Most emperors probably gave the status accorded to them by the Egyptians little care and rarely visited the province more than once in their lifetime. Their role as god-kings was only ever officially acknowledged by the Egyptians themselves. This was a sharp contrast to the preceding dynasty of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom, who had spent the majority of their lives in Egypt. Pharaohs before Egypt's incorporation into the Achaemenid Empire in the Late Period had also all ruled the country from within Egypt. Egypt was, however, governed differently from other Roman provinces, with emperors hand-picking governors for the region and often treating it more like a personal possession than a province. Though not all emperors were recognized as pharaohs, Egyptian religion demanded the presence of a pharaoh to act as the intermediate between humanity and the gods. The emperors filling this role proved to be the most simple solution, and was similar to how the Persians had been regarded as pharaohs centuries prior (constituting the Twenty-seventh and Thirty-first dynasties).