Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
The coin is silver, struck at Rome, and weighs under four grams. On the front there is no emperor at all. The bust is a woman’s, draped, with the legend PLAVTILLAE AVGVSTAE running around her. Turn it over and two figures stand clasping right hands, Caracalla and his wife …
In 20 BC Augustus set up a gilded marker in the Forum, the Milliarium Aureum (the Golden Milestone), to show where every road in the empire began. Two …
An Augustan denarius held about 3.8 grams of silver. An antoninianus of Claudius II, struck about 290 years later and tariffed at two denarii, held …
Almost nothing in this view of Saint-Émilion is Roman. The bell tower stands over a church that medieval monks hollowed out of the limestone, the …
Museum displays of Roman building material tend to be badly labelled and quickly walked past. A broken lump of wall behind glass with a card reading …
A carved marble box sits in the middle of the antiquities hall at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, roped off, lit from above, with a bust on a …
A blacksmith, a stable boy, a soldier, a slave. These are the sort of people who almost never survive in the historical record — no monuments, no …
The Roman public latrine is one of the few structures from antiquity that still makes modern visitors physically uncomfortable. A long stone bench, …
There is a moment, approaching the Pont du Gard from the riverbank below, when the structure stops looking ancient and starts looking inevitable. …
The stone arch does not announce itself. It simply continues — span after span across flat agricultural land, indifferent to the centuries …
