Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
Jacques-Louis David painted the Oath of the Horatii in 1784, five years before the French Revolution, and the painting arrived in Paris as a political event rather than simply an aesthetic one. Three Roman brothers swear to their father to fight to the death for Rome against the …
The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that …
On a June morning in 217 BC, the Roman consul Gaius Flaminius led his army of approximately 25,000 men along the northern shore of Lake Trasimene in …
Latin is not a dead language. The claim that it died with Rome is one of the more misleading things said about either Latin or Rome, and correcting it …
Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes …
The Romans did not found London because they needed a city there. They founded it because they needed a crossing point on the Thames, and the crossing …
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations for himself. This is not an inference — it is evident from the text, which is addressed in the second person to …
On October 28, 312 AD, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge north of Rome, ending the civil war between them and establishing …
Mithras had no mythology that anyone has found. The god who attracted devotees across the Roman Empire for three centuries, whose cult spread …
The Medea Sarcophagus in Berlin’s Altes Museum is 227 centimeters long and 65 centimeters high, carved from white marble in Rome around 140–150 AD, …
