From a cluster of huts among seven hills beside the Tiber, Rome grew across a thousand years into a city that governed much of the known world. This is the long, quiet account of how it rose through kings and consuls and emperors, how its roads and aqueducts and laws spread outward, and how, in time, the great machinery of empire slowed, fractured, and settled into memory. What remains today are the stones, the arches, and the enduring shape of an idea.
