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 reputation for hydraulic sophistication rests almost entirely on what came in. The aqueducts are celebrated, documented, still standing in fragments across three continents. What went out receives less attention — which is itself a Roman attitude, one the city encoded in …
Jacques-Louis David completed The Oath of the Horatii in Rome in 1784 and exhibited it at the Paris Salon the following year. It stopped the room …
The Starz series Spartacus arrived in 2010 with a visual style so aggressively stylized — slow-motion combat, digitally saturated color, blood that …
The Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which premiered in 2010 and ran for three seasons plus a prequel miniseries, was not trying to be HBO’s …
In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, mounted on a low plinth against a red wall, sits the most significant surviving object from ancient naval …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a reproduction of a Roman maritime mosaic hangs above a scale model of a Roman grain ship. The mosaic — a …
In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two enormous plaster columns rise through the full height of the room, split at the …
Outside the Vienna Secession building stands one of the more theatrical bronze monuments in Europe: the Marc Anton Gruppe, cast in 1899 by the …
