Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
The arch is not a Roman invention. The Babylonians built arches. The Egyptians built arches. The Etruscans used the arch centuries before Rome became a significant power. What Rome did with the arch was different in kind from what any previous civilization had achieved: it …
In 186 BC, the Roman Senate issued the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus — the decree concerning the Bacchic rites — one of the most extensive …
The kingdoms that replaced Roman administration in the western provinces were not anti-Roman. This is the most important correction to the standard …
The Circus Maximus was the largest sports venue the ancient world ever built, capable of holding somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 spectators — …
The Cloaca Maxima — the Great Drain — is among the oldest continuously functioning pieces of Roman infrastructure. Built initially in the sixth …
The Colosseum was not called the Colosseum when it was built. Its official name was the Flavian Amphitheater — the Amphitheatrum Flavium — after the …
Isis arrived in Rome over official objections. The Roman Senate banned her worship multiple times in the first century BC — in 58, 53, 50, and 48 BC, …
The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated …
Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics …
Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic …