Rome Divided in Two

The Roman Empire didn’t last forever. Today, if you go to Italy, you will see ruins of old Roman buildings. You will see the remains of old Roman roads. But you won’t see any ancient Romans.

What happened to the Roman Empire? The Roman Empire got too big. Its borders were too long for one army to protect. The soldiers of Rome couldn’t possibly keep all invaders out of Rome’s territory. And more and more invaders started to wander into the Roman Empire.

Ruling Rome was a little bit like having the biggest candy bar in a group of very hungry people. Everyone wanted to take it away. The emperors of Rome had to fight constantly against invaders. These invaders wanted Roman land and Roman wealth. They wanted to use the Roman roads and live in the Roman villages. But they didn’t want to obey the Roman emperor or pay taxes to the Roman government. So they attacked Rome’s borders with armies, hoping to take Rome’s countries away. The Roman emperors had a difficult time keeping invaders out. There was so much Roman land that they couldn’t protect all of it at once.

If ruling Rome was like having the biggest candy bar in a group of hungry people, ruling the entire empire was like having a candy bar as big as a car. How could you keep the whole candy bar safe? While you were protecting one side of it, a hungry person could sneak up and take a bite out of the other side. And if you ran around to protect the other side, you would leave the first side without anyone to guard it.

How could you protect such a big candy bar? Do you have any ideas? Here’s one idea: You could break the candy bar in half and give the other half to someone you trusted to guard for you. That’s exactly what happened to the Roman Empire. A wise emperor named Diocletian realized that no one ruler could keep all of Rome safe.

“This empire is too big for one man!” he exclaimed.

So Diocletian asked another Roman leader to be his partner. This partner, Maximian, ruled the western part of the Roman Empire. Diocletian ruled the eastern half.

Now Rome had two emperors! Diocletian and Maximian worked hard to protect Rome. Each one had an army, and they recruited more and more soldiers to make their armies bigger. For a while, the Romans held off invaders. The Roman Empire seemed to be doing well. Eventually, Rome became the capital of the western half of the empire. And Constantinople, the city named after Constantine, became the capital of the eastern half of the empire.

But something strange began to happen to Rome. The Western Roman Empire grew poorer and poorer, while the Eastern Roman Empire became richer and richer. The people of the West even had trouble finding enough food for themselves. They had to buy food from the East. And Rome, which had once been the greatest city in the world, was looking rundown. But Constantinople was a shining beautiful city full of marble buildings with gold trim.

The Western Roman Empire had other problems, too. Invaders from the north kept attacking its borders, and the Western army was too weak to keep these invaders away. The people of the Western Roman Empire called the invaders barbarians, because they could not understand their language. And they were frightened of the barbarians, who seemed able to conquer anything in their path.

The armies of the Western Roman Empire tried to fight the barbarians off, but they just kept on coming. They invaded Britain. They invaded Gaul. They invaded Spain. And soon, they invaded Italy itself.

Note to Parent: Boadicea’s revolt against Rome was in AD/CE 61–63; it is presented slightly out of chronological order in order to introduce the idea that Rome was weakening. Diocletian came to the throne in AD/CE 284 and divided the empire in 286. He ruled jointly with Maximian from 286–305.