The Senate’s formula for praising good emperors — felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, may you be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan — established Trajan as the standard of imperial virtue against which all subsequent emperors were measured. He was the first provincial emperor, born in Spain to a Roman family that had settled there generations earlier, and his elevation by Nerva in 97 AD represented the completion of the process by which the Roman Empire’s leadership became genuinely imperial rather than Italian. He was admired by his contemporaries, praised by the senatorial tradition that wrote most of the surviving ancient history, and still regarded by most historians as among the most capable emperors who ever held the position. His reign was also the high-water mark of Roman territorial expansion, after which the empire never grew larger and began, slowly and then rapidly, to contract.

Roman food is one of the most misrepresented topics in popular history. The standard image — wealthy Romans reclining at banquets, eating dormice and vomiting between courses to make room for more — is accurate for a narrow slice of Roman society at a specific moment in imperial history and almost entirely wrong for everyone else. Most Romans ate simply, cheaply, and without couches.

The staple of the Roman diet was grain. Bread and porridge — puls, a thick wheat or spelt mash — were the foundation of what the majority of the population ate every day. Grain was so central to Roman social stability that the state organized its supply directly: the annona, the grain dole, eventually provided free or subsidized grain to several hundred thousand residents of the city of Rome. This was not charity in the modern sense. It was political infrastructure. A city that could not feed its population was a city that would riot, and Rome had learned this lesson repeatedly.

Roman clothing was a system of social communication before it was a system of warmth or modesty. What a Roman wore told every observer who saw them something specific about their legal status, their social rank, their occupation, their marital status, and the occasion they were attending. The reading of clothing was automatic and precise in a society that had neither name tags nor business cards and that organized its social interactions around the rapid assessment of social position. Dress was not merely decorative; it was informational, and the information it carried was regulated by law and custom with a specificity that modern dress codes do not approach.

Roman property law was the most sophisticated system for organizing the ownership and transfer of things that the ancient world produced, and it is the foundation on which most modern property law in continental Europe and its legal descendants directly rests. The Roman jurists who developed it between the second century BC and the third century AD were not theorizing for its own sake; they were solving practical problems generated by the increasing complexity of a commercial economy that operated across thousands of kilometers and involved millions of transactions. The solutions they developed were elegant enough that Justinian’s sixth-century compilation transmitted them to medieval Europe, from which they were adopted by the civil law systems that govern most of the world outside the common law sphere today.

Edward Gibbon spent six volumes and most of his adult life explaining why Rome fell, and he was not the first. The question has generated more scholarly production than almost any other in historical study, a volume that says less about Roman history than about the intellectual needs of subsequent civilizations that measured themselves against Rome’s shadow. Every generation finds its own answer, and every answer reveals as much about the present as about the fifth century.

The Battle of Zama in 202 BC ended the Second Punic War and established Roman dominance over the western Mediterranean for the next three centuries. It was the only battle Hannibal ever lost in a pitched field engagement, and it was lost to the one Roman general who had studied his methods carefully enough to use them against him. Scipio Africanus was thirty-four years old when he defeated Hannibal at Zama. He had spent his career learning from Carthage’s mistakes and Rome’s. The education was complete.