Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different from the academic tradition’s engagement — less archaeologically earnest, more ironic, more interested in the tension between the ruin and its meanings than in the reconstruction of what the ruin was before it ruined. Contemporary artists approaching Rome approach a subject already saturated with prior appropriations: the neoclassical, the Victorian, the fascist, the cinematic. To paint or photograph or install Rome now is to navigate a layered history of representations that is itself part of the subject.

Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.

Ephesus was the most important city in the Roman province of Asia — which meant it was one of the most important cities in the world. At its imperial peak in the second century AD, its population may have reached 200,000 to 500,000 people, making it one of the three or four largest urban centers in the Roman Empire after Rome itself and Alexandria. It sat at the western terminus of the major trade routes from the Anatolian interior and the eastern Mediterranean, on a harbor that connected it to the Aegean sea lanes, and it possessed in the Temple of Artemis one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. What the site preserves today — the most extensively excavated and partially reconstructed ancient city in the world — is an archaeological window into Roman urban life of a quality available nowhere else.

Frederic Leighton, Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death in 1896, was the dominant figure in British academic painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his engagement with classical antiquity — primarily Greek and Roman — was the defining subject of his career. Unlike Alma-Tadema, whose classical paintings were organized around the reconstruction of material culture, or Poynter, whose Romans served moral arguments, Leighton’s classicism was organized around a single overriding concern: beauty as an end in itself, the human figure in relation to drapery and landscape, the moment of formal perfection that painting could capture and sustain.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator arrived in 2000 and revived the sword-and-sandal epic as a commercially viable genre after a forty-year hiatus. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It made Russell Crowe a star. It sent tourism to Rome’s Colosseum surging. It also contained enough historical inaccuracy to sustain a small academic industry of correction, none of which has diminished its cultural influence by a measurable degree.

What Scott got right is worth acknowledging first, because the film’s defenders are not entirely wrong. The production design is serious in a way that the 1950s epics it superficially resembles were not. The texture of a Roman legionary camp — the tents, the equipment, the organizational density — reads as the work of people who had looked at the archaeological record. The Colosseum sequences capture something real about the theatrical staging of Roman spectacle: the trap doors, the dramatic entrances, the relationship between the crowd and the performance. The physical scale of the arena, the way it processes tens of thousands of people, the machinery beneath the floor — all of this is handled with a seriousness that rewards attention. And the relationship between Maximus and his soldiers in the opening battle sequence reflects genuine research into how Roman generals cultivated personal loyalty among their troops.

Hadrian spent more time away from Rome than any emperor before or after him. In twenty-one years of rule, from 117 to 138 AD, he made two extended tours of the empire’s provinces, personally inspecting frontiers, reviewing troops, visiting cities, correcting administrative abuses, and leaving behind a physical record of his passage in the form of temples, baths, aqueducts, and the walls and frontier fortifications whose most famous example still bears his name. He was the most traveled of emperors, the most architecturally prolific, and the most systematically interested in the practical realities of governance at the provincial level. He was also the most controversial figure of the Antonine dynasty, for reasons that have as much to do with his personality as with his policies.

HBO’s Rome ran for two seasons from 2005 to 2007, cost approximately one hundred million dollars to produce, was cancelled before completing its intended narrative arc, and remains the most historically serious attempt to dramatize the late Roman Republic for a mass audience that has yet been made. Its cancellation, attributed to production costs after a fire destroyed the primary sets, was a genuine cultural loss. The show was not perfect. It was better than anything else in its field by a margin that makes comparison almost unfair.

Roman naming conventions are among the more counterintuitive aspects of the culture for modern readers, and the confusion they generate is not merely academic. Understanding Roman names is understanding something important about Roman identity, social structure, and the relationship between the individual and the family — a relationship that was organized very differently from the modern Western model.

The classical Roman name for a male citizen of the Republic consisted of three parts: the praenomen, the nomen, and the cognomen. The praenomen was the personal name — the equivalent of a first name — but it was used almost exclusively within the family. Romans did not address each other by praenomen in public contexts. There were very few praenomina in use — approximately eighteen were common, and many families used only two or three across generations — which meant that they were not functionally distinctive at any scale beyond the household. The praenomen was abbreviated in writing: Gaius became C., Marcus became M., Lucius became L. (confusingly, since Gaius was abbreviated C rather than G, a legacy of archaic Latin spelling).

The Roman legion was designed for open battle, but Rome won its empire through sieges as much as through field engagements. The ability to take fortified positions — to reduce cities that refused submission, to breach walls that geography or construction made seemingly impregnable — was as central to Roman military power as the legion’s battlefield performance. Siegecraft required different skills, different equipment, and different timescales than open combat, and Rome developed all three to a level of systematic competence that its opponents rarely matched.

The Roman Republic is frequently invoked and rarely understood. Politicians cite it as a model of balanced governance. Historians treat it as the prelude to empire. Both framings miss what made it functional for four centuries and what made it impossible to sustain once Rome outgrew the conditions it was designed for.

The Republic was not a democracy. It was an oligarchy with democratic elements, calibrated to preserve the power of a landed aristocracy while providing enough popular participation to maintain legitimacy. The Senate was not elected. It was a body of former magistrates, predominantly from noble families, that served for life. Real legislative power resided in the popular assemblies, but those assemblies were structured to weight the votes of wealthy citizens more heavily than poor ones. The system produced decisions that reflected the preferences of the propertied class while maintaining the form of popular consent.