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On Christmas Day, 800 AD, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of the Frankish king Charles in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the assembled congregation acclaimed him Emperor of the Romans. Whether Charlemagne was surprised by this — his biographer Einhard claims he said he …
Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different …
Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William …
Latin is not a dead language. The claim that it died with Rome is one of the more misleading things said about either Latin or Rome, and correcting it …
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 …
More than half the world’s population lives under legal systems derived substantially from Roman law. This is not a figure of speech or a vague …
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 arch is not a Roman invention. The Babylonians built arches. The Egyptians built arches. The Etruscans used the arch centuries before Rome became …
The kingdoms that replaced Roman administration in the western provinces were not anti-Roman. This is the most important correction to the standard …
The tradition of serious English historical fiction about Rome begins, in its modern form, with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii in …
