In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes explicit what Gérôme’s paintings kept implicit. A man in contemporary nineteenth-century dress — smock, trousers, the clothes of a working artist — stands beside a Roman gladiator. The gladiator is armored, helmeted, standing over a fallen opponent whose arm is raised in the gesture of submission. The contemporary figure reaches toward the gladiator with a sculptor’s tool. This is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s self-portrait with his own creation: the artist inside the ancient world he spent his career constructing, the boundary between the nineteenth century and the Roman arena dissolved by the act of making.

In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor buildings rising from the waterline, ships under sail and oar working the channel, a colossal Neptune with trident presiding over the scene, an eagle spreading its wings above the central composition, figures on the quayside conducting the business of a working port. The label identifies the subject as the ancient harbor of Rome — Ostia Antica — depicted on a burial monument perhaps fifteen hundred years after the port it celebrates ceased to function. Someone in Renaissance Italy thought the harbor of ancient Rome was worth putting on a coffin. The choice tells you something about how the ancient port’s reputation persisted long after the silt had closed it.

In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, mounted on a low plinth against a red wall, sits the most significant surviving object from ancient naval warfare: the Atlit Ram, a bronze naval ram recovered by divers off the Israeli coast in 1980, dated to approximately 103–102 BCE, and identified on the basis of its construction and the coins found within it as probably belonging to the fleet of Ptolemy IX Soter II of Egypt. It is roughly 2.3 meters long and weighs over 465 kilograms. It is the only complete ancient naval ram in existence, and looking at it — the three horizontal blades converging at the forward point, the decorated upper surface with its trident and eagle motifs, the massive bronze casting that absorbed decades of seawater and still holds its shape — makes abstract discussions of ancient naval warfare immediately concrete. This is the weapon. Everything else is description.

In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a reproduction of a Roman maritime mosaic hangs above a scale model of a Roman grain ship. The mosaic — a copy of the type found decorating the floors of maritime collegia and wealthy houses at Ostia and other Roman port cities — shows the sea as Romans imagined it: dense with fish and marine creatures, alive with the visual abundance that the Mediterranean provided, a merchant vessel moving through a world of tuna, dolphins, an octopus, a whale. The sea in Roman mosaic art is not threatening; it is productive, teeming, the source of food and commerce and the medium through which the empire connected its parts. Below the mosaic, the grain ship model shows the vessel that made this connection real: broad-hulled, square-sailed, designed not for speed but for capacity, the workhorse of the most important supply chain in the ancient world.

In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two enormous plaster columns rise through the full height of the room, split at the midpoint because no single gallery space in Victorian London was tall enough to accommodate the complete original. Red walls, a cast-iron skylight, medieval tomb effigies on the floor below, the Column of Marcus Aurelius visible behind — it is one of the stranger and more magnificent rooms in any museum in the world, and the centerpiece is a reproduction. The V&A made these casts of Trajan’s Column in the 1860s at the request of Pope Pius IX and Queen Victoria, who both wanted to study the reliefs without traveling to Rome. The decision proved more consequential than either of them anticipated. The original column, standing since 113 AD in Trajan’s Forum in Rome, has weathered continuously for nineteen centuries. The Victorian plaster casts now preserve detail that the stone in Rome has since lost. The reproduction is, in some respects, more legible than the original.

Outside the Vienna Secession building stands one of the more theatrical bronze monuments in Europe: the Marc Anton Gruppe, cast in 1899 by the Austrian sculptor Arthur Strasser. It shows Mark Antony in full Roman dress, seated in a chariot pulled not by horses but by four lions — two fully grown, two younger, all rendered with remarkable musculature and a controlled ferocity that has not softened in 125 years of Viennese weather. The patina has gone deep green. The lions look ready to move. Antony sits above them with the bearing of a man accustomed to commanding things that could kill him.

On August 9, 378 AD, the Eastern Roman emperor Valens led his army against a Gothic force near Adrianople in Thrace — modern Edirne in northwestern Turkey — and was killed along with roughly two-thirds of his army. The Battle of Adrianople was not the largest Roman defeat in history; Cannae killed more Romans in a single afternoon. It was not the most strategically complex engagement the Romans ever fought; the tactics were relatively straightforward. What made it consequential was not the battle itself but what came before it and what followed from it, the chain of decisions and consequences that makes Adrianople one of the pivots of late Roman history.

Alexandria was not a Roman city. It was a Greek city under Roman administration, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and designed from its inception as a world capital — a city that would connect the Mediterranean world to Egypt and, through Egypt, to the trade routes of the East. By the time Rome absorbed it as part of Egypt following Cleopatra’s death in 30 BC, Alexandria was already three centuries old, the second-largest city in the Mediterranean after Rome itself, and possessed of institutions — the Library, the Museum, the great lighthouse — that Rome had nothing to rival. The Romans did not conquer Alexandria so much as inherit it, and the inheritance was complicated.

Antioch on the Orontes — modern Antakya in southern Turkey near the Syrian border — was the third city of the Roman Empire and the capital of its eastern operations. After Rome and Alexandria, no city in the Mediterranean world was larger or more strategically important. It was the administrative center for the Syrian provinces, the supply base for Rome’s eastern wars, the commercial hub connecting the Mediterranean trade network to the silk and spice routes of Asia, and an early center of Christian organization so significant that the word Christian — Christianoi — was first used there. The city that matters to understanding Rome’s eastern empire is Antioch, and it is among the most underrepresented in the popular historical imagination.

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo began publishing Asterix in the French magazine Pilote in 1959, and the series has been introducing children to Roman geography, imperial bureaucracy, and the gap between official rhetoric and actual practice ever since. Over thirty-nine albums, several animated films, and four live-action feature films, Asterix has reached an audience that no academic history of Rome has approached, and it has done so by taking the Roman Empire seriously enough to understand what is actually funny about it.