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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 about six hundredths of a gram. The face value stayed put. Almost everything else went. Nobody sat down and decided to wreck the …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, mounted on a low plinth against a red wall, sits the most significant surviving object from ancient naval …
In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two enormous plaster columns rise through the full height of the room, split at the …
On August 9, 378 AD, the Eastern Roman emperor Valens led his army against a Gothic force near Adrianople in Thrace — modern Edirne in northwestern …
On August 2, 216 BC, on a flat plain near the Aufidus River in southern Italy, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca destroyed a Roman army of …
The Roman legion was designed for open battle, but Rome won its empire through sieges as much as through field engagements. The ability to take …
The Roman legion was not a fixed thing. It evolved over seven centuries from the early Republic’s tribal levies to the late Empire’s frontier garrison …
On a June morning in 217 BC, the Roman consul Gaius Flaminius led his army of approximately 25,000 men along the northern shore of Lake Trasimene in …
Mithras had no mythology that anyone has found. The god who attracted devotees across the Roman Empire for three centuries, whose cult spread …
The popular image of Roman battlefield tactics consists largely of the testudo — the tortoise formation with interlocked shields — and the general …
