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The Romans took over from the Greeks as the dominant Mediterranean power after Alexander of Macedon died in 323 BCE, and then turned into an empire when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, which is a nice way to say that he staged a military coup and installed himself as dictator. It ran along merrily for 800 years until around 500 AD, when it was finally overrun by a series of people with awesome names like Visigoths and Attila the Hun.

Rome was actually founded even earlier than that, though, in the 700s BCE, by Aeneas, who was a Trojan - from the Trojan War, so we’re working (as usual) off Homer. Like Odysseus, Aeneas had a long and incompetent journey from Troy.


I made this myself! Click for bigger

He wasn’t going home, though, he was trying to find a prophesied new one. Because Odysseus showed up in a horse and burned his old one. (That famous Trojan Horse story is mostly told in the Aeneid, only briefly referred to in the Odyssey.)

That founding story, which is made up, is what's told in the greatest Roman epic, Virgil's Aeneid, written around 20 BCE. It’s pretty good. The story of the Carthaginian queen Dido is a high point: she falls in love with him; they sleep together and then he’s like never mind, I gotta go found Rome, prompting her to commit suicide by stabbing while burning, and beginning a feud with Carthage that will come to fruition when Hannibal barely fails to defeat Rome around 200 BCE, and then Rome completely destroys Carthage and you can’t even find ruins anymore, really, which is a bummer.


Dido killing herself - by Cayot, 1711, this is in the Louvre

TS Eliot calls The Aeneid "our classic, the classic of all Europe." It's a minor work for our generation - we're way more familiar with Homer - but it's been consistently read since it was written, unlike Homer (who lost favor for a while in the Middle Ages). It's an imperialist work, basically, written to canonize Rome as a great civilization and specifically exploring what it means to be a superpower. Virgil wasn't comfortable with it himself; he never finished it, and (according to the myth) asked that it be burned after his death, which lesson Kafka might have paid attention to: if you want something burned right, you'd best do it yourself.

Translations
I read the Fagles translation, which was as usual excellent. In case you don't know, Fagles is the Pevear & Volokhonsky of antiquity: he's done well-regarded translations of just about every work written BCE, which means you can just go with him if you don't have any better ideas but you should maybe watch out that you don't end up absorbing the entire canon through him, which would be weird. Mandelbaum also has a translation; I haven't read it but his work is dependable. Your other options are the conservative Fitzgerald or the very liberal Lombardo. Here's that (starting about halfway down) talks at length about different translations and comes out for Fagles.