https://ancientrome.org/tags/cities/ Recent content in Cities on Ancient Rome Hugo en-us Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/aquincum-museum-reconstructs-16-roman-faces-from-skulls-found-on-budapests-danube-frontier/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/aquincum-museum-reconstructs-16-roman-faces-from-skulls-found-on-budapests-danube-frontier/ <p>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 &ldquo;Once we were like you,&rdquo; it runs until October 31 and puts visitors eye-to-eye with the ordinary inhabitants of a Roman city that stood on the empire&rsquo;s northern edge nearly two thousand years ago.</p> https://ancientrome.org/ostia-the-port-that-fed-rome/ Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/ostia-the-port-that-fed-rome/ <p>In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor buildings rising from the waterline, ships under sail and oar working the channel, a colossal Neptune with trident presiding over the scene, an eagle spreading its wings above the central composition, figures on the quayside conducting the business of a working port. The label identifies the subject as the ancient harbor of Rome — Ostia Antica — depicted on a burial monument perhaps fifteen hundred years after the port it celebrates ceased to function. Someone in Renaissance Italy thought the harbor of ancient Rome was worth putting on a coffin. The choice tells you something about how the ancient port&rsquo;s reputation persisted long after the silt had closed it.</p> https://ancientrome.org/alexandria-romes-second-city/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/alexandria-romes-second-city/ <p>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 inception as a world capital — a city that would connect the Mediterranean world to Egypt and, through Egypt, to the trade routes of the East. By the time Rome absorbed it as part of Egypt following Cleopatra&rsquo;s death in 30 BC, Alexandria was already three centuries old, the second-largest city in the Mediterranean after Rome itself, and possessed of institutions — the Library, the Museum, the great lighthouse — that Rome had nothing to rival. The Romans did not conquer Alexandria so much as inherit it, and the inheritance was complicated.</p> https://ancientrome.org/antioch-rome-in-the-east/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/antioch-rome-in-the-east/ <p>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 eastern operations. After Rome and Alexandria, no city in the Mediterranean world was larger or more strategically important. It was the administrative center for the Syrian provinces, the supply base for Rome&rsquo;s eastern wars, the commercial hub connecting the Mediterranean trade network to the silk and spice routes of Asia, and an early center of Christian organization so significant that the word Christian — Christianoi — was first used there. The city that matters to understanding Rome&rsquo;s eastern empire is Antioch, and it is among the most underrepresented in the popular historical imagination.</p> https://ancientrome.org/caesarea-maritima-a-roman-city-built-from-nothing/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/caesarea-maritima-a-roman-city-built-from-nothing/ <p>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 period of approximately twelve years ending around 10 BC, and it became the capital of the Roman province of Judaea and one of the most important cities on the eastern Mediterranean coast. The feat of urban creation involved harbor engineering that modern marine archaeologists have called the most ambitious building project in the ancient world: an artificial harbor of roughly 100,000 square meters created by sinking enormous concrete blocks into water sixty meters deep, using hydraulic concrete — the pozzolanic technology that gave Roman harbor structures their extraordinary durability — in its most ambitious application anywhere in the empire. The harbor blocks, two thousand years later, still lie beneath the Mediterranean, structurally recognizable and studied by diving archaeologists who find in them evidence of Roman engineering at its most technically extraordinary.</p> https://ancientrome.org/carthage-the-city-rome-had-to-destroy/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/carthage-the-city-rome-had-to-destroy/ <p>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, regardless of the speech&rsquo;s actual subject, in the years before the Third Punic War. It is probably apocryphal, or at least exaggerated, but it captures something true about the Roman relationship with Carthage: a fear and hostility so intense that it could only be resolved by elimination, and a political culture prepared to act on that resolution against a city that had been, by the 140s BC, effectively defanged by the terms of its previous defeat.</p> https://ancientrome.org/ephesus-where-rome-met-the-east/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/ephesus-where-rome-met-the-east/ <p>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.</p> https://ancientrome.org/londinium-rome-at-the-edge-of-the-world/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/londinium-rome-at-the-edge-of-the-world/ <p>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 point became a city because trade and administration followed the military logic that had chosen the site. The settlement that grew up at the first substantial tidal ford on the Thames — approximately where London Bridge stands today — was called Londinium, and within a century of its founding it had become the administrative capital of the Roman province of Britannia and one of the most important commercial cities in the northwestern empire. Britain was at the edge of the known world; Londinium was a world city transplanted to the edge.</p> https://ancientrome.org/palmyra-the-desert-queen-who-defied-rome/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/palmyra-the-desert-queen-who-defied-rome/ <p>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.</p> https://ancientrome.org/piranesis-rome-ruins-as-sublime/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/piranesis-rome-ruins-as-sublime/ <p>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&rsquo;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.</p> https://ancientrome.org/pompeii-what-the-ash-preserved/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/pompeii-what-the-ash-preserved/ <p>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.</p> https://ancientrome.org/the-insulae-how-rome-housed-its-millions/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/the-insulae-how-rome-housed-its-millions/ <p>The city of Rome at its height had a population of somewhere between half a million and a million people — the estimates vary and the ancient census figures are difficult to interpret — compressed into an urban area that had no master plan, no grid, and no effective building code until the fires that made such codes politically possible. The vast majority of these people lived not in the marble houses of imperial imagination but in multi-story apartment buildings called insulae — islands — so called because they filled city blocks the way islands fill water, surrounded on all sides by streets. The insula was Rome&rsquo;s residential reality, and it was often dangerous, frequently squalid, and occasionally catastrophically flammable.</p>