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This was the context for Rome's conflict with Christianity, which Romans variously regarded as a form of atheism and novel superstitio, while Christians considered Roman religion to be paganism. Ultimately, Roman polytheism was brought to an end with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. [citation needed]
The Roman Empire began when Augustus became the first emperor of Rome in 31 BC and ended in the west when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer in AD 476. The Roman Empire, at its height (c. AD 100), was the most extensive political and social structure in Western civilization.
Edward Gibbon wrote the first historiographical view of how the Roman Empire was Christianized in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776. Gibbon attributed it to Constantine whom he saw as driven by "boundless ambition" and a desire for personal glory to impose Christianity on the rest of the empire ...
Map of the Roman Empire with the distribution of Christian congregations of the first three centuries AD. The growth of Early Christianity from its obscure origin c. AD 40, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches.
One characteristic of cultural Romanization was the creation of many hundreds of Roman coloniae in the territory of the Roman Republic and the subsequent Roman Empire. Until Trajan , colonies were created by using retired veteran soldiers, mainly from the Italian peninsula, who promoted Roman customs and laws, with the use of Latin .
Many slaves were created as the result of Rome's conquest of Greece, but Greek culture was considered in some respects superior to that of Rome: hence Horace's famous remark Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captured Greece took her savage conqueror captive"). The Roman playwright Terence is thought to have been brought to Rome as a slave ...
In the year before the First Council of Constantinople in 381, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Theodosius I, emperor of the East, Gratian, emperor of the West, and Gratian's junior co-ruler Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, [1] which recognized the catholic orthodoxy [a] of Nicene Christians as the Roman Empire's state religion.
On February 27, 380, the Roman Empire officially adopted Trinitarian Nicene Christianity as its state religion. [8] Prior to this date, Constantius II (337-361) and Valens (364-378) had personally favored Arian or Semi-Arianism forms of Christianity, but Valens' successor Theodosius I supported the Trinitarian doctrine as expounded in the Nicene Creed.