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The two forces met at Actium in north-west Greece in AD 31, where Octavian won a decisive naval battle. The following year both Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, and Antony took their own lives and Egypt, like Greece before it, became a Roman province.

    The Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 476/1453)
    The Roman Empire, as opposed to the Roman Republic, was founded in 27 BC when the Roman Senate bequeathed to Octavian the name Augustus, meaning the exalted or holy one. As a matter of course, Octavian also became Princeps Senatus or leading man of the state. This later became the official title of the Roman emperors and gave us the word ‘prince’. One of his many titles, Imperator, initially awarded only to victorious generals, became associated with the ruler and was henceforth linked to leaders of empires (emperor, empereur, etc.).
    Emperor Augustus Caesar ruled with absolute power. Any concerns about this held by diehard Republicans were offset by the political and social stability that Augustus managed to introduce after decades of civil war. In fact, with the exception of a few minor interruptions and wars, and helped by the fact that Rome’s largest potential enemy, Parthia in the east, was also beset by political turmoil, the Roman Empire was to know two centuries of relative peace, referred to as the ‘Pax Romana’. Trade was brisk. In addition to imports of wheat from Africa, wine from Gaul, and oil from Iberia, spices and textiles were imported from Arabia, India and China via Asian caravans along the Silk Road.

    A huge territory with up to 50 million people, the empire was difficult to administer and expensive to run, requiring regular new sources of tax to fund its running costs. Augustus was fortunate that the state treasury received an influx of wealth and tax revenue from the newly occupied territory of Egypt, which became the new breadbasket of the Roman Empire. A major economic revival resulting from a period of peace and increased trade also boosted tax revenues. In fact, there was enough money in the Roman coffers to allow Augustus to embark on a major public building programme and boast ‘I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.’ 22  
    The tax base may have increased but it still needed to be collected. One of the ways of ensuring tax revenue was to perform a census that would confirm how many people lived in the empire and which of these could pay tax. According to the Christian New Testament, it was to register for such a census that Joseph and his wife Mary came to Bethlehem, a town in Judea in present-day Israel, where Mary gave birth to their son, Jesus.
                                            
    Jesus: The Birth of Christianity
    Jesus was born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC. Very little is known about the man until he began his ministry some 30 years after his birth. At this time Jesus began spreading a message of love and peace in a period during which Judea was under the domination of a Roman occupying army. He challenged and angered the established Pharisee leaders, who successfully called for the Roman occupiers to crucify him for blasphemy. According to the Bible, he angered them specifically by his claims that he could forgive sins, which they believed only God could do. 23
    Jesus gained a group of Jewish followers, partly through his teachings but also because many of them believed he was the Messiah – the great leader whose return was foretold in the Torah and who would liberate his people and usher in a time of peace. His crucifixion in circa AD 28-29 was a catastrophe for his devotees. Shortly after his death, however, a large number of them claimed he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them. His resurrection became the basis of Christian belief from then on.
    At the time of his crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were nothing more than members of a small Jewish sect, occasionally persecuted by the Romans. By AD 380,