Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled the Roman Empire for fourteen years, from 54 to 68 AD, and the historical record that survives was almost entirely written by men who despised him. Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio — the three primary ancient sources for his reign — were senators or wrote from senatorial perspectives, and Nero’s relationship with the Senate was sufficiently hostile that objectivity from that quarter was never likely. The result is an emperor whose actual governance has to be extracted from beneath layers of accumulated literary contempt, much of which is genuine but some of which is retrospective distortion by a class that had specific and personal grievances.

In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania, the edge of the civilized world as Rome understood it — for reasons he described cryptically as a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a didactic work on the art of seduction published nearly a decade earlier, which Augustus had apparently decided was a contribution to the moral looseness he had spent his reign trying to suppress. The mistake is unknown and has generated scholarly speculation for two thousand years. Ovid spent the remaining ten years of his life on the Black Sea shore writing poems of exile — the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto — that constitute the most sustained literary response to political persecution in antiquity, and he died without recovering the imperial favor he spent those years petitioning for.

Palmyra occupied a position in the Syrian desert that geography had made irreplaceable and that commerce had made extraordinarily wealthy. An oasis city sitting at the crossing of the major caravan routes between the Mediterranean coast and Mesopotamia — between the Roman west and the Parthian and Sassanid east — it controlled the tolls and services that long-distance trade required and accumulated wealth that its extraordinary ruins still convey despite two millennia of decay and, most recently, deliberate destruction by forces who understood, in their way, the symbolic weight of what they were attacking.

No legal institution is more characteristically Roman than patria potestas — the power of the father — and none illustrates more starkly the gap between Roman law as a formal system and Roman life as it was actually lived. In strict legal theory, the Roman paterfamilias held power of life and death over every person in his household: his children, his children’s children, and any descendants who had not been legally emancipated from his authority. He could expose newborn children he did not wish to raise. He could sell his children into slavery. He could execute them for serious misconduct. The legal texts that state these powers are explicit and unambiguous. The social reality was that these powers were almost never exercised in the forms the law contemplated, and the history of Roman family law is substantially a history of the gap between the formal authority the law recognized and the actual conduct it produced.

On August 9, 48 BC — the same calendar date, by a coincidence historians have noted, as the Battle of Adrianople 426 years later — Julius Caesar’s army defeated Pompey’s at Pharsalus in Thessaly, ending the civil war between them in a single afternoon and ending the Roman Republic as a functioning political institution in any meaningful sense. The Republic would survive in form for another seventeen years, until Augustus completed its constitutional conversion. But Pharsalus was where it ended in fact, because Pharsalus eliminated the only man with the political authority, military reputation, and institutional support to contest Caesar’s supremacy on terms the existing system could legitimate.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi arrived in Rome in 1740 at the age of twenty and spent the rest of his life there, producing approximately one thousand etchings of the ancient and modern city that changed how Europeans understood ruins and, through ruins, understood time. His Vedute di Roma — the Views of Rome — documented the ancient monuments with a precision that made them available to architects, scholars, and artists across Europe who could not travel to see the originals. His Carceri d’Invenzione — the Imaginary Prisons — invented spaces of impossible scale and mechanical complexity that influenced the visual imagination of the Gothic tradition, science fiction, and everything in between. His archaeological publications — the Antichità Romane — were serious scholarly contributions to the understanding of Roman building techniques. He was simultaneously a documentarian, a fantasist, and a polemicist, and the three modes were not always separable.

Pliny the Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and they are the only eyewitness account of one of the most significant natural disasters in recorded history. Pliny was seventeen years old when the eruption occurred. He watched from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples, as the cloud rose from the mountain. His uncle, Pliny the Elder — the naturalist and admiral who commanded the fleet at Misenum — sailed toward the eruption and died in it. The younger Pliny stayed behind, survived, and thirty years later wrote the letters that documented what he had seen with a clarity and precision that would have done credit to a trained scientist.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose love is thwarted by a corrupt Roman senator, and the eruption of Vesuvius happens to provide the third act. The volcano is plot device rather than subject. This is a reasonable choice for a commercial action film built on a historical catastrophe; it is not the choice that a serious engagement with Pompeii’s destruction would have made.

On the morning of August 24, 79 AD — though some scholars now argue for a date in October based on pomegranate seeds and autumn clothing found in the excavations — Mount Vesuvius began its eruption. By the following morning, the city of Pompeii was buried under four to six meters of volcanic ash and pumice. Approximately eleven thousand people lived there. Somewhere between two and three thousand did not escape. The volcano that killed them preserved them, and what it preserved has told us more about ordinary Roman life than any literary source.

Robert Graves published I, Claudius in 1934, followed immediately by its sequel Claudius the God, and the two novels together constitute the most successful fictional treatment of Roman history in any language. They have never been out of print. They were the basis for the BBC television series that remains the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. They are cited by historians as substantially accurate in their broad outlines while being recognized as works of fiction that invented freely within the framework the sources provided. They are also, simply, very good novels — constructed with the discipline of a scholar and the freedom of a storyteller.