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.

There is a moment, approaching the Pont du Gard from the riverbank below, when the structure stops looking ancient and starts looking inevitable. Three tiers of limestone arches rising 49 meters above the Gardon river in southern France, built without mortar, without iron clamps, without any binding agent beyond the weight of precisely cut stone on stone. It was constructed around 50 CE to carry water 50 kilometers from springs near Uzès to the Roman colony of Nemausus — modern Nîmes. It has been standing for nearly two thousand years. It looks like it intends to stand for two thousand more.

Rome’s reputation for hydraulic sophistication rests almost entirely on what came in. The aqueducts are celebrated, documented, still standing in fragments across three continents. What went out receives less attention — which is itself a Roman attitude, one the city encoded in both its architecture and its social hierarchy. The removal of waste was essential, constant, and largely invisible, performed by people the Latin sources named only when something went wrong.

The Starz series Spartacus arrived in 2010 with a visual style so aggressively stylized — slow-motion combat, digitally saturated color, blood that moves through the air with the deliberate beauty of a special effect — that critics spent their first reviews debating whether it was art or exploitation before most of them had noticed what was actually happening in the story. What was happening was more interesting than the style wars suggested: a show about Roman slavery that took the institution seriously, a gladiatorial drama that understood what the arena was and what it cost, and a protagonist whose journey from Thracian warrior to rebel general was built on genuine dramatic logic rather than franchise mechanics.

The Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which premiered in 2010 and ran for three seasons plus a prequel miniseries, was not trying to be HBO’s Rome. It was trying to be 300 with a continuing narrative, and within those self-defined limits it largely succeeded. The historical record of the Third Servile War provided the scaffolding; everything else was constructed from the materials of a production that prioritized stylized violence, explicit sexuality, and operatic emotion over archaeological fidelity. The question is whether that constitutes a failure, and the answer depends on what you expected the show to be.

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.

Gaius Octavius was eighteen years old when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and nobody thought he mattered. He was Caesar’s great-nephew, slight and sickly, without military reputation or political standing. He had one asset: Caesar’s will named him adopted son and primary heir. He used that asset with a patience and calculation that none of his older, more experienced rivals understood until it was too late.

The name by which history knows him — Augustus, the revered one — was a title conferred by the Senate in 27 BC, seventeen years after Caesar’s death and four years after he had defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, eliminating the last serious rival to his control of the Roman world. Between the teenager nobody feared and the man the Senate was now calling Augustus lay fourteen years of civil war, shifting alliances, calculated betrayals, and the systematic elimination of everyone who stood between Octavian and sole power. He was very good at it.