A Nickname Thousands of Years Old
Rome, the capital of Italy, carries one of the most evocative nicknames of any city in the world: the "Eternal City." The name is not modern marketing. It reaches back more than two thousand years, to the days of the ancient Roman Empire, and it reflects a deep belief that the Romans held about their own city — that it was destined to last forever.
The Poet Who Coined It
The phrase can be traced to Roman poetry. A Roman poet named Tibullus, writing in the first century BCE, described Rome in Latin as the "Urbs Aeterna" — the Eternal City. The idea clearly struck a chord, because other famous Roman poets after him picked up the same theme, writing of Rome as a city that would never fall. Over time the label stuck so firmly that, even today, dictionaries and historians still treat "the Eternal City" as simply another name for Rome.
Eternal in Idea, Not in Stone
It is worth understanding what the Romans actually meant. They were not claiming that Rome's buildings and walls would physically stand untouched forever. What they believed was that the idea of Rome — its laws, its customs, its way of life and its influence — would never truly die. And in a sense they were right. Even after the empire collapsed, Rome reinvented itself again and again: as the center of a great religion, as a city of art, and finally as the modern capital of Italy. The city kept enduring through enormous change, which is exactly what its ancient nickname always promised.
Source
This article was written using information from Wikipedia.