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A blacksmith, a stable boy, a soldier, a slave. These are the sort of people who almost never survive in the historical record — no monuments, no inscriptions, no chroniclers. A new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest gives them their faces back. Titled “Once we were …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor …
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 …
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 …
Caesarea Maritima was built by Herod the Great on a site with no natural harbor, no fresh water source, and no existing urban infrastructure, over a …
Carthage must be destroyed. The phrase — Carthago delenda est — was reportedly repeated by Cato the Elder at the end of every Senate speech he gave, …
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 …
The Romans did not found London because they needed a city there. They founded it because they needed a crossing point on the Thames, and the crossing …
Palmyra occupied a position in the Syrian desert that geography had made irreplaceable and that commerce had made extraordinarily wealthy. An oasis …
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 …
