A Roman dominating function of a graph G is a labeling f : V (G) → {0, 1, 2} such that every vertex with label 0 has a neighbor with label 2. The Roman domination number γR(G) of G is the minimum of ∑ v∈V (G) f(v) over such functions. Let G be a connected n-vertex graph. We prove that γR(G) ≤ 4n/5, and we characterize the graphs achieving equality. We obtain sharp upper and lower bounds for γR(...