Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
Every five years, Rome counted itself. The census — from censere, to assess or value — was among the Republic’s foundational institutions, and its function was simultaneously administrative, fiscal, military, and moral. The censors who conducted it were among the most prestigious …
A museum case in Berlin’s Altes Museum holds a collection of Roman domestic bronzes from Rome and Pompeii, first through fourth century AD, under a …
The Roman Empire did not end at a wall. The walls — Hadrian’s in Britain, the German and Raetian limes, the Fossatum Africae in North Africa — were …
The Roman Senate was not what it is usually imagined to be. It was not a legislature in the modern sense — it could not pass laws on its own …
The tradition of serious English historical fiction about Rome begins, in its modern form, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in …
On August 24, 410 AD, the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and spent three days sacking the city. It was the first time a …
The Saturnalia began on December 17 and lasted, in its imperial development, for seven days. It was the most popular festival in the Roman calendar, …
The Roman Empire never solved its succession problem. This was not an oversight or a failure of political imagination — it was a structural …
The tribunate of the plebs was constitutionally the strangest office Rome created: a position with enormous negative power and almost no positive …
The Roman triumph — the procession through the city in which a victorious general displayed his captives and the spoils of conquest before depositing …
