The tribunate of the plebs was constitutionally the strangest office Rome created: a position with enormous negative power and almost no positive authority, held by men who were personally inviolable and therefore theoretically untouchable, which the Senate solved, when necessary, by murdering them. The office existed because the plebeian class had successfully used the threat of mass withdrawal from Roman civic life to extract political concessions from the patrician establishment. It functioned for centuries as a genuine check on senatorial power. It became, in the hands of the Gracchi, the mechanism by which the Roman Republic began to destroy itself.

The Roman triumph — the procession through the city in which a victorious general displayed his captives and the spoils of conquest before depositing the latter in the treasury and offering thanks at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus — was the most spectacular public ritual of the Roman world, and its visual representation has served as propaganda for European rulers from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The triumph’s logic — the hero returns, the enemy is displayed, the city is made to feel the extent of its power — was available for appropriation by any ruler who needed to communicate the same things, and the painters who rendered ancient triumphs for modern patrons understood they were serving both historical documentation and political argument simultaneously.

Roman law did not begin with the Twelve Tables. There was law before them — customary, oral, held in the memory of the patrician families who administered it and interpreted it as they saw fit. That was precisely the problem. In 450 BC, a commission of ten men — the decemviri — was appointed to write the law down. The resulting text, inscribed on twelve bronze tablets and displayed in the Roman Forum, was the founding document of the Western legal tradition. The tablets themselves are lost. Their importance is not.

The Vestal Virgins were the most socially privileged women in Rome and, simultaneously, subject to a punishment for a specific transgression — unchastity — that no other Roman citizen faced: burial alive. The combination of exceptional status and exceptional vulnerability was not a paradox in the Roman religious framework but a logical consequence of what the Vestals were understood to represent. Their virginity was not a personal moral choice; it was a civic necessity. The sacred fire they tended in the Temple of Vesta was, in Roman religious understanding, the eternal flame of Rome itself, and its maintenance by women who were themselves unbreached vessels was what kept Rome’s divine favor intact. When a Vestal was unchaste, it was not a private transgression but a public catastrophe that had to be addressed with proportionate ritual severity.

Popular history is a machine for producing confident errors, and Rome is one of its most productive subjects. The combination of genuine drama, distant evidence, and centuries of embellishment has generated a set of myths about Rome that persist through repetition long after the historical record has corrected them. Some are harmless. Some distort the actual history in ways that matter.

The vomitorium was not a room for vomiting. It was a technical term for the exit passages of an amphitheater or theater — the tunnels through which large crowds could rapidly exit a stadium after an event. The word derives from the Latin vomere, meaning to spew out, which is an entirely accurate description of crowds disgorging from a building. The association with Roman dining excess came later and has no serious ancient support. Romans did occasionally induce vomiting for medical or digestive reasons, but the image of systematic purging between banquet courses is a fantasy.

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.

Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed rather than published incomplete. Augustus overruled the request. Two of Virgil’s literary executors, Varius and Tucca, published what existed. The unfinished poem became the foundational text of Western literature, the work that every subsequent European writer of ambition had to read and respond to, the poem against which Dante measured himself when he chose Virgil as his guide through Hell. The work Virgil thought too imperfect to survive has survived everything.

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.