The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that earned it its museum nickname, the Grüner Caesar, the Green Caesar. It was acquired in Paris in 1787, carved sometime between 1 and 30 AD, and it is posthumous: made after Caesar’s death, showing him in a toga as a statesman rather than as a general or dictator, classically idealized in the manner of early imperial portraiture. The eye inlays are modern restorations. The shadow it casts on the red wall behind it is an accident of museum lighting that happens to be accurate — Caesar and his shadow, the man and the myth that outlasted him by two thousand years and counting.

The Medea Sarcophagus in Berlin’s Altes Museum is 227 centimeters long and 65 centimeters high, carved from white marble in Rome around 140–150 AD, found near the Porta San Lorenzo on the city’s eastern edge. It is one of the finest examples of Roman mythological sarcophagus relief in any collection, and it depicts, in four continuous scenes reading left to right, the story of a woman who poisoned her rival, murdered her own children, and escaped in a dragon-drawn chariot to avoid the consequences. This is what a wealthy Roman family chose to carve on the box that would hold someone’s bones. The choice is not self-evidently logical. Making sense of it requires understanding something about how Rome thought about death that is not immediately obvious from the surface of the stone.

It hangs from a chain in a museum case in Hannover, small and bronze and entirely matter-of-fact about what it is. A winged phallus with bird legs, the feet fitted with tiny rings that once held bells. The wings spread to either side. The whole object was designed to move — to hang in a doorway or above a cradle, to swing in a draft, to catch the light and ring softly when the air shifted. This is a fascinum, the primary Roman protective object against the evil eye, and it was as ordinary a household item in imperial Rome as a smoke detector is today: unremarkable in its presence, urgently necessary in its function, noticed only when it was absent.

At Millesgården, the sculptor Carl Milles’s studio and museum on the island of Lidingö outside Stockholm, a copy of the Capitoline Wolf stands in the open air, green with patina, the two infants nursing beneath the she-wolf’s belly on a red granite plinth. Ivy climbs the wall behind it. A stone face — a garden ornament — watches from the wall above. The composition is so familiar as to have become almost invisible through repetition: the wolf alert, ears pricked, facing left with a wariness that has not relaxed in two thousand years of bronze casting; the twins below, pudgy and insistent, entirely unconcerned with the predator feeding them. The image is Rome’s founding symbol, its most exported icon, the picture that appeared on Roman coins in the second century BC and on Italian government documents in the twenty-first century AD. It has been in continuous circulation as a symbol of Roman identity for over two millennia, which is not an achievement many images can claim.

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.

A museum case in Berlin’s Altes Museum holds a collection of Roman domestic bronzes from Rome and Pompeii, first through fourth century AD, under a label that states its subject with admirable directness: Luxury in the Roman house. The contents repay attention. Two griffins — mythological hybrids of eagle and lion, rendered with precise musculature — served as the decorative supports of a folding table, their bodies forming the legs, their wings providing the lateral bracing. A satyr and nymph group, extravagantly detailed, formed the foot of a large bronze vessel. Small bronze ducks and swans — the fulcra — decorated the scroll-ends of couches and dining beds, the curved terminals that distinguished a proper Roman reclining couch from mere functional furniture. Two portrait busts on red marble pedestals completed the ensemble. None of this was structural. All of it was mandatory, in the sense that a wealthy Roman household without this level of decorative investment was announcing, inadvertently, that its owner could not afford it.

In the Greek and Roman antiquities hall of the Louvre, in a room of vaulted ceilings and warm museum light, four marble figures stand back-to-back around a central pillar and refuse to let you walk past without stopping. The group is known as the Four Captives — a Roman work, probably inspired by Hellenistic precedents, likely once decorating a monumental structure whose specific identity is lost. What survives is the message, and the message is not subtle.

Denis Foyatier carved this Spartacus in 1830 and put him in the Louvre’s Cour Puget, where he has stood ever since in a room of arched windows and pale stone, looking out over the other sculptures with an expression that is not quite triumph and not quite grief. The arms are crossed over his chest. The body is athletic, coiled without being in motion. A broken chain dangles from his wrist — the moment of liberation captured in marble, though Foyatier was careful not to make the moment simple. The face is the point: this is not a victor. This is a man who has just broken free and is now confronting what that means, which turns out to be a harder problem than the breaking.

The bronze is Roman, from the Albani Collection, and it sits now in the Louvre’s antiquities hall on a plinth of dark marble, moving through nothing. The lion has one paw resting on a sphere — the globe, the world, the totality of things worth possessing — and the posture is neither aggressive nor relaxed. It is the posture of ownership. The sphere is already subdued. The question of whether anything else needs subduing remains open. This is not a lion that has just won. This is a lion that expects to win.