It's hard to pin a date on exactly when it becomes an empire. On this timeline, this first period right over here is when we have the Roman Kingdom. Then you have the Roman Republic. And then you have the Roman Empire. And so you could debate when it actually becomes an empire. Even when it was an early kingdom, it was conquering neighboring people on the Italian Peninsula. And at that time period, it might have felt like an empire, because those people might have felt different.