The Roman Empire was ruled by an Emperor. BUT, we also saw the first glimpses of a representative republic, in which we vote on candidates to represent us in government. This is what the US has today. You may hear people infer that we are a democracy, or a democratic republic. But this is not true because in a democracy, it is majority wins; much like ancient greece. In our society we are a republic, which comes from democracy. The romans beleived it to be fair so they adopted this form of government from the Greeks (obviously changed a couple things) and they copied many other things from the greeks.
