Rome did not conquer its empire and then build roads to administer it. The roads and the conquest advanced together, each enabling the other in a feedback loop that eventually produced the most extensive road network the ancient world had ever seen. At its peak, the Roman road system covered somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 kilometers, of which roughly 80,000 kilometers were stone-paved primary roads capable of moving legions, supplies, and official communications at speeds that would not be matched in Europe until the nineteenth century.

The Roman bath was not primarily about hygiene. That framing, which modern people find intuitive, misses what made the baths central to Roman urban life for centuries. The bath was a social institution — a place where Romans of different classes shared the same water, the same space, and the same several hours of the afternoon in an arrangement that had no precise equivalent before or since. It was the forum, the gym, the library, the barbershop, and the social club compressed into a single building and made available, often for free or for a nominal fee, to virtually everyone in the city.

The calendar you use today is a Roman calendar. The twelve months, the seven-day week borrowed from Near Eastern sources and transmitted through Rome, the numbering of the years from a fixed point that eventually became the Christian era — all of these are features of the system that Julius Caesar reformed in 46 BC and that the Catholic Church adjusted in 1582 with modifications so minor that most countries now use what is, in its essentials, the calendar Caesar commissioned. You wake up on a Tuesday in October because a Roman dictator in the first century BC decided to align the civil year with the solar year, and his solution was good enough to last two thousand years.

Every five years, Rome counted itself. The census — from censere, to assess or value — was among the Republic’s foundational institutions, and its function was simultaneously administrative, fiscal, military, and moral. The censors who conducted it were among the most prestigious officials in Roman public life, elected for an eighteen-month term and charged with counting the citizen population, assessing property for taxation, maintaining the rolls of the Senate and equestrian order, overseeing public contracts, and conducting the ritual purification — the lustrum — that closed the proceedings and symbolically cleansed the community assembled before the gods. That a single process managed population counting, tax assessment, social classification, public contracting, and civic religion simultaneously tells you something about how the Romans understood the relationship between governance and community that modern bureaucratic specialization has dissolved.

The Roman Empire did not end at a wall. The walls — Hadrian’s in Britain, the German and Raetian limes, the Fossatum Africae in North Africa — were not barriers in the way that a modern border fence is a barrier. They were administrative lines, surveillance infrastructure, and military positioning systems that defined the edge of Roman tax collection and legal authority rather than the edge of Roman cultural or economic influence. The distinction matters because the popular image of Rome crouching behind its walls against pressing barbarians misrepresents the actual relationship between Rome and the peoples beyond its frontiers — a relationship that was commercial, diplomatic, and culturally interpenetrative as well as occasionally violent.

The Roman Senate was not what it is usually imagined to be. It was not a legislature in the modern sense — it could not pass laws on its own authority. It was not a democratic body — its members were not elected by the people. It was not a check on executive power in any reliable or structural way. What it was, for most of Roman history, was the most powerful advisory body in the ancient world: a self-perpetuating oligarchy of former magistrates whose collective authority rested on tradition, social weight, and the practical reality that the men who ran Rome had all, at some point, sat in it.

The tradition of serious English historical fiction about Rome begins, in its modern form, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 — a novel that invented the sub-genre of Roman disaster narrative, established the template of the virtuous Christian and the corrupt pagan Roman, and sold in numbers that established ancient Rome as a commercially viable fictional setting for the Victorian reading public. The novel is not much read today and deserves to be read less. Its historical importance is entirely distinct from its literary quality.

On August 24, 410 AD, the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and spent three days sacking the city. It was the first time a foreign enemy had taken Rome in eight hundred years — since the Gauls in 390 BC — and the psychological shock of the event reverberated across the Mediterranean world in ways that exceeded its military or economic significance. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, described the impact in terms usually reserved for cosmic events. Augustine, prompted by pagan Romans who blamed Christianity for the calamity, spent the next thirteen years writing the City of God in partial response to the question of what the sack meant. What it meant, in fact, was both more and less than the commentary of the time suggested.

The Saturnalia began on December 17 and lasted, in its imperial development, for seven days. It was the most popular festival in the Roman calendar, the one that Roman writers mention most frequently as a cherished institution, and the one whose customs have attracted the most scholarly attention for their relationship to the Christmas traditions that eventually overlapped with and largely replaced them. For the duration of the Saturnalia, Roman social life was deliberately inverted: slaves were served dinner by their masters, social distinctions were relaxed, gambling was legally permitted, gift-giving was universal, and the general atmosphere of licensed excess provided a temporary release from the hierarchical rigidity that organized Roman life during the other fifty weeks of the year.

The Roman Empire never solved its succession problem. This was not an oversight or a failure of political imagination — it was a structural consequence of the way the principate was constructed. Augustus had built a system that was functionally monarchical but constitutionally republican, which meant it could not have formal hereditary succession without admitting it was a monarchy. The result was a fiction maintained for centuries: that each emperor received his powers from the Senate and people of Rome, and that the previous emperor’s designation of a successor was a recommendation rather than a binding determination. Everyone knew this was a fiction. The fiction was maintained because the alternative — acknowledging that Rome was a hereditary monarchy — was politically untenable for an aristocratic culture that had executed men for aspiring to kingship.