Tag
The Roman legion was an infantry force, and the Romans knew it. This was not a limitation they were ignorant of — it was a structural fact of their military system that they compensated for through a combination of allied cavalry, auxiliary units recruited from peoples with …
Rome had no formal intelligence service in the modern sense — no organization with a defined charter, a permanent headquarters, and an institutional …
Roman medicine was Greek medicine operating in Latin. The systematic approach to understanding the body that the Romans inherited and developed had …
The Roman legion’s effectiveness rested on discipline, and Roman military discipline rested on the credible threat of punishment that was severe …
Denis Foyatier carved this Spartacus in 1830 and put him in the Louvre’s Cour Puget, where he has stood ever since in a room of arched windows and …
In the autumn of 9 AD, three Roman legions — the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth — were destroyed in the forests of Germania over the course …
Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, occupies a different register from the gladiatorial epics …
The Praetorian Guard killed four emperors, elevated at least five more to power, and constituted the single most politically destabilizing institution …
The Roman Empire did not end at a wall. The walls — Hadrian’s in Britain, the German and Raetian limes, the Fossatum Africae in North Africa — were …
The Roman Empire never solved its succession problem. This was not an oversight or a failure of political imagination — it was a structural …
