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The head is over life-size, twelve inches on its own, and it broke away long ago from what was probably a seated statue of the emperor. The Met dates it to somewhere between 14 and 37 CE, which is the reign of Tiberius. Augustus was already dead when the sculptor started work. He …
An Augustan denarius held about 3.8 grams of silver. An antoninianus of Claudius II, struck about 290 years later and tariffed at two denarii, held …
Outside the Vienna Secession building stands one of the more theatrical bronze monuments in Europe: the Marc Anton Gruppe, cast in 1899 by the …
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, …
Cleopatra VII Philopator was the most politically capable ruler the Ptolemaic dynasty produced, and she failed anyway. This is not a contradiction. …
The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that …
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 …
At Millesgården, the sculptor Carl Milles’s studio and museum on the island of Lidingö outside Stockholm, a copy of the Capitoline Wolf stands in the …
The Roman Empire never solved its succession problem. This was not an oversight or a failure of political imagination — it was a structural …
Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left …
