Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus ruled Rome for three years and ten months, from March 37 CE to January 41 CE. He was 24 when he took power and 28 when officers of his own Praetorian Guard cut him down in a corridor on the Palatine during the games. Rome has been arguing about what …
In 1864 the Boston painter George Loring Brown finished a landscape he called View of the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum. It’s now in the …
The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns a Roman mosaic glass bowl made sometime between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE. It’s about 17 …
The silver coin in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection is small, about 19 millimetres across, and it carries the face of a man who had …
Every time you say “money” you’re saying the name of a Roman goddess. Juno Moneta had a temple on the Capitoline Hill, the Romans made their coins …
Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, has a late 18th-century watercolour of a Roman altar dedicated to Apollo. It’s carved all over with …
The piece is small, about nine and a half inches high, and it is obviously a fragment. A man’s head and shoulders, carved in marble in the late first …
Forty human and animal figures, cut in high relief across seven feet of marble, with Dionysos riding a panther at the centre and the four Seasons …
Vesuvius buried the villa at Boscoreale in 79 CE, about a kilometre north of Pompeii on the mountain’s lower slopes. By then the room was already old. …
The head is over life-size, twelve inches on its own, and it broke away long ago from what was probably a seated statue of the emperor. The Met dates …
