The Cloaca Maxima — the Great Drain — is among the oldest continuously functioning pieces of Roman infrastructure. Built initially in the sixth century BC to drain the marshy valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills that would become the Roman Forum, it has been carrying water to the Tiber for over 2,600 years. Tourists floating on the Tiber can still see its outlet — a rounded arch of tufa stone nearly four meters high, set into the river embankment near the Forum Boarium — and the drain itself, though substantially rebuilt and extended over centuries, remains active as part of Rome’s modern sewer and stormwater system. It is one of the oldest pieces of civil engineering in continuous use anywhere in the world.

The Colosseum was not called the Colosseum when it was built. Its official name was the Flavian Amphitheater — the Amphitheatrum Flavium — after the dynasty that commissioned and completed it. The name we use derives from a colossal bronze statue of Nero that stood nearby, a work of imperial self-aggrandizement that survived its subject by centuries. The building itself is formally anonymous, which is fitting for a structure whose purpose was to direct attention outward, toward the spectacle it contained, rather than inward toward the men who paid for it.

Isis arrived in Rome over official objections. The Roman Senate banned her worship multiple times in the first century BC — in 58, 53, 50, and 48 BC, with varying degrees of enforcement — ordering her altars demolished and her images removed from the city. The bans failed because the cult’s appeal was stronger than the official resistance, and by the first century AD the goddess who had been repeatedly expelled was being worshipped in temples funded by emperors. Caligula built her a major temple in the Campus Martius. Vespasian and Titus celebrated their triumph over Judaea in her temple precinct. Commodus appeared in her processions in priestly dress. Whatever the Senate of the Republic had thought about Egyptian divinities, the Empire had reached different conclusions.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated versions constitute a case study in how the same historical event can be made to mean entirely different things depending on the visual choices made around it. The event is fixed: Caesar was killed in the Theater of Pompey by a group of senators. The meaning of the event — was it tyrannicide or murder, liberation or catastrophe — has been contested ever since, and the paintings rehearse that contest in visual terms.

Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics and political dramas that constitute most of Hollywood’s Roman output. It is a frontier film, a journey narrative, set in Roman Britain and the territory beyond Hadrian’s Wall, and it is interested in questions that the arena films are not: what does it mean to serve an empire at its geographical and civilizational limits, and what does Rome look like from outside?

Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic commercial failure that it effectively ended the sword-and-sandal epic as a Hollywood genre for a generation. It also happens to be a substantially better film than its reputation suggests, more historically serious than most of its contemporaries, and in certain respects a more honest engagement with the period it depicts than the celebrated Gladiator that covered similar ground thirty-six years later.

In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

The bronze is perhaps eight centimeters tall and has been in Hannover’s Museum August Kestner for longer than most living people can account for. It shows a Thracian gladiator — the Thraex type, one of the most popular and most recognizable in the Roman arena — in full equipment: the curved sica sword, the small rectangular shield, the elaborate crested helmet with its full-face visor, the greaves protecting both legs. The label reads simply Gladiator, sog. Thraex, Roman Imperial period, first century AD. It sits on a glass shelf among other Roman bronzes, modest in scale, extraordinary in specificity. Whoever made this knew exactly what a Thraex carried and wore. They made this figure because there was a market for it. That market is itself part of the story.

Rome was not original in its theology, and it did not pretend to be. The Romans were systematic borrowers of divine power, operating on the practical assumption that a god who worked was worth incorporating regardless of origin. The result was a pantheon that was Greek at its core, overlaid with indigenous Italian tradition, supplemented by imports from Egypt, Persia, and Syria, and eventually contested and replaced by a monotheism that originated in Judea. Roman religion was an accumulation, not a creation.

Rome fed a significant portion of its population for free, and had been doing so, in various forms, for over five centuries by the time the Western Empire collapsed. The grain dole — the frumentatio in its Republican form, the annona in its more developed imperial incarnation — was not a welfare program in the modern sense, though it served some of the same social functions. It was a political institution, a mechanism for managing the relationship between the imperial government and the volatile urban population of the capital, and it was expensive enough, logistically complex enough, and politically significant enough to have shaped the development of Roman administration, agriculture, and provincial policy for centuries.