Roman law recognized that people harmed each other in ways that were not crimes but that required legal remedy, and it organized those harms into a category called delict — from delinquere, to fail or offend — that is the ancestor of what common law systems call tort. The Roman law of delict was not a unified system imposed from above but a collection of specific wrongs that had accumulated through centuries of legal development, each with its own history, elements, and remedies, organized into a coherent framework by the juristic tradition that had the intellectual ambition to see the categories whole. What the jurists built was not only practically useful to Romans seeking legal remedies but was the foundation of civil liability doctrine in legal systems that still operate today.

Rome and China never met. The two largest empires of the ancient world existed simultaneously — the Han dynasty and the Roman principate overlapped for roughly two centuries — and the goods they produced circulated between them across thousands of kilometers of overland and maritime routes. But no Roman diplomat reached Chang’an, and no Han envoy arrived in Rome, and what each knew of the other was filtered through so many intermediaries that the images were almost entirely mythological. Rome called China Serica, the land of silk. China called Rome Daqin, the Great Qin, imagining it as a mirror-image empire on the far western edge of the world. The distance between them was too great and the intermediary interests too profitable for direct contact to develop.

Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in ways that go beyond simple error-counting. Some of what cinema gets wrong is deliberate simplification for narrative clarity. Some is period convention — the sandal epics of the 1950s reflected Cold War anxieties as much as ancient history. Some is genuine incomprehension of a world sufficiently distant that even educated filmmakers cannot feel its difference. And occasionally, something unexpected gets it exactly right in ways that the filmmakers may not have consciously intended.

The unconquered sun — Sol Invictus — was the dominant religious force in the Roman Empire during the decades immediately before Christianity became the state religion, and the competition between them was closer than the outcome suggests. Aurelian, who reunified the empire after the chaos of the third century and who is one of the more underrated figures in Roman imperial history, established Sol Invictus as the supreme deity of the Roman state in 274 AD, built a spectacular temple in Rome, and created a new priesthood — the pontifices Solis — to administer its cult. For roughly forty years, the sun god was in a position of official supremacy that Christianity would not achieve until the reign of Theodosius nearly a century later.

In the autumn of 9 AD, three Roman legions — the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth — were destroyed in the forests of Germania over the course of three days. The commander, Publius Quinctilius Varus, fell on his own sword. Approximately twenty thousand soldiers died. The eagle standards of all three legions were captured — the most significant military humiliation in Roman history, measured by what it did to the Roman strategic imagination. Augustus, reportedly, wandered through his palace for months afterward crying out for Varus to give him back his legions. Whether or not he actually said this, the story captures the psychological weight of what had happened.

Frontinus, the Roman senator appointed curator aquarum — superintendent of waters — in 97 AD, opened his report on Rome’s water supply with a sentence that has been quoted many times since: compare, if you will, the idle pyramids, or the useless though famous works of the Greeks, with these many indispensable structures. The arrogance is characteristic, and the comparison is not entirely fair. But the underlying point is not wrong. Rome’s aqueduct system was among the most impressive engineering achievements of the ancient world, and it was, unlike the pyramids, entirely functional — designed to do something specific, doing it at scale, and doing it for centuries.

The arch is not a Roman invention. The Babylonians built arches. The Egyptians built arches. The Etruscans used the arch centuries before Rome became a significant power. What Rome did with the arch was different in kind from what any previous civilization had achieved: it deployed the arch at a scale and consistency that transformed the built environment of three continents, in forms — the vault, the barrel vault, the groin vault, the dome — that enabled the massive public spaces that define Roman architecture, and it left behind enough surviving examples that the arch became synonymous with Rome in the European architectural imagination.

In 186 BC, the Roman Senate issued the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus — the decree concerning the Bacchic rites — one of the most extensive surviving Roman legal documents and the record of what the Roman state did when it decided that a religious movement had gotten out of hand. The decree restricted the Bacchic associations throughout Italy, required their leaders to present themselves for investigation, set numerical limits on how many people could participate in the rites, and prohibited Bacchic priests from holding funds or conducting initiations without specific Senate authorization. Thousands of people were prosecuted; the sources describe executions in numbers that suggest a systematic repression rather than individual criminal cases. The Bacchanalia, as the Roman sources describe it, was the first large-scale persecution of a religious movement in Roman history.

The kingdoms that replaced Roman administration in the western provinces were not anti-Roman. This is the most important correction to the standard narrative of Rome’s fall, and it matters because the standard narrative — civilized Rome overwhelmed by barbarous outsiders — is both factually wrong and interpretively misleading. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, the Burgundian kingdom in the Rhône valley, the Frankish kingdom in Gaul — these were not negations of Rome. They were, in varying degrees, continuations of Rome under different management, sustained by Roman administrative forms, legitimated by Roman imperial titles, and often governed by rulers who had spent significant portions of their careers in Roman service and who regarded Roman civilization as the culture they had inherited rather than the culture they had defeated.

The Circus Maximus was the largest sports venue the ancient world ever built, capable of holding somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 spectators — the ancient sources give figures that seem implausibly large but are not entirely implausible given the site’s archaeology. For comparison, the Colosseum held perhaps 50,000 to 80,000. The Circus was Rome’s dominant entertainment venue, chariot racing was Rome’s dominant spectator sport, and the passion Romans invested in the circus factions — the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites — was of an intensity that modern sports tribalism only partially approximates. In Constantinople, a dispute between circus factions contributed to a riot that killed tens of thousands of people and nearly ended Justinian’s reign. This is the world that chariot racing inhabited.