April 19, 2013

Today I continued researching Wars of the Roman Empire for the Patron Discovery Page I’ve been working on. The Roman Empire is marked by dictators and an autocratic government, in contrast to the more democratic Republican era of Ancient Rome. The 500-year-old Roman Republic was destabilized by civil war, and the appointment of Julius Caesar as dictator solidified Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire in 44 BC. The Roman Empire declined over the next four centuries until Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was defeated in 476 by Germanic tribes -- the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. The library has a vast amount of resources on everything from the reign of Julius Caesar to the uniforms and weaponry of the Roman Legions. The most challenging part of creating PDPs has always been choosing from the abundance of resources and summarizing the topic (400 years in the case of the Roman Empire) into a paragraph or two.