european history starts technically speaking with Greek civilization, from 2400BC onwards. But because the Greeks learned so much from the neighbouring Egyptian and Persian civilizations.
Greeks build foundations of
western civilization (including limited democracy, the foundation of western philosophy and the arts). They beat back the Persians from Europe, eventually Alexander conquers the entire middle east, and southwest asia all the way to India, plus Egypt. This cause all great middle-eastern, north-african and european cultures to mix into the hellenic culture. After Alexander, division and decline.
Cue Rome, which borrowed its culture from the peoples it conquered. Conquerors they became by being extremely efficient engineers and statesmen, developing a system of coopting those they
conquered that set the bar for
empires everywhere. The rule of law, huge leaps in engineering and empirical science are some of their biggest legacies. Keeping together the
Empire was difficult, since they didn't just have to deal with economical fluctuations that would from time to time cause revolts, but also they had great variation in the quality of their leaders (emperors), and were under constant attack from "barbarians" at the edge of the empire (some of those "barbarians" were really competing empires, with technology and culture comparable to that of the romans). By the third century the empire was fraying and the
emperors tried to use religion to unify it. First they used the sun god cult, then christianity. Nevertheless the roman empire decayed, and split in a western and eastern part.
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