Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
Rome’s mines were among the most productive and the most deadly operations in the ancient world. The silver mines of Spain, the gold mines of Dacia, the iron mines of Noricum, the lead mines of Britain, the copper mines of Cyprus — across the empire’s territories, Roman …
Rome was not the first state to use coinage, but it was the first to use it at the scale of an empire. The denarius — the standard silver coin of the …
Roman punishment was not uniform. It was calibrated to social status in ways so explicit and systematic that the law itself divided humanity into …
It hangs from a chain in a museum case in Hannover, small and bronze and entirely matter-of-fact about what it is. A winged phallus with bird legs, …
The Roman tavern — the caupona or taberna — was the social space of the working poor and the urban transient, serving wine, hot food, and a place to …
The Roman theater had Greek ancestors and Roman ambitions, which meant it was grander, more permanent, and more politically charged than the tradition …
Roman law recognized that people harmed each other in ways that were not crimes but that required legal remedy, and it organized those harms into a …
The bronze is Roman, from the Albani Collection, and it sits now in the Louvre’s antiquities hall on a plinth of dark marble, moving through nothing. …
Rome and China never met. The two largest empires of the ancient world existed simultaneously — the Han dynasty and the Roman principate overlapped …
Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in …
