id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-3563		History of the Roman Empire - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	17063	1479	64	Ancient Rome became a territorial empire while still a republic, but was then ruled by Roman emperors beginning with Augustus (r. In the view of the Greek historian Dio Cassius, a contemporary observer, the accession of the emperor Commodus in AD 180 marked the descent "from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron"[9]—a famous comment which has led some historians, notably Edward Gibbon, to take Commodus' reign as the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire. Despite this gesture of universality, the Severan dynasty was tumultuous—an emperor's reign was ended routinely by his murder or execution—and following its collapse, the Roman Empire was engulfed by the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of invasions, civil strife, economic disorder, and epidemic disease.[10] In defining historical epochs, this crisis is typically viewed as marking the start of the Late Roman Empire,[11] and also the transition from Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-3563.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-3563.txt