Explore the history of Ancient Rome — from the founding of the Republic to the fall of the Empire. Politics, warfare, culture, and legacy.
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled the Roman Empire for fourteen years, from 54 to 68 AD, and the historical record that survives was almost entirely written by men who despised him. Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio — the three primary ancient sources for his reign — …
In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania, the edge of the civilized world as Rome understood it — for …
Palmyra occupied a position in the Syrian desert that geography had made irreplaceable and that commerce had made extraordinarily wealthy. An oasis …
No legal institution is more characteristically Roman than patria potestas — the power of the father — and none illustrates more starkly the gap …
On August 9, 48 BC — the same calendar date, by a coincidence historians have noted, as the Battle of Adrianople 426 years later — Julius Caesar’s …
Giovanni Battista Piranesi arrived in Rome in 1740 at the age of twenty and spent the rest of his life there, producing approximately one thousand …
Pliny the Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and they are the only eyewitness account of …
Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose …
On the morning of August 24, 79 AD — though some scholars now argue for a date in October based on pomegranate seeds and autumn clothing found in the …
Robert Graves published I, Claudius in 1934, followed immediately by its sequel Claudius the God, and the two novels together constitute the most …