Jacques-Louis David completed The Oath of the Horatii in Rome in 1784 and exhibited it at the Paris Salon the following year. It stopped the room then. It still stops rooms now — visible here on the deep terracotta wall of the Louvre’s Denon Wing, large enough to command the gallery from any angle, the three brothers extending their sword arms toward their father in a gesture that has not lost its charge in two and a half centuries.

In the Altes Museum in Berlin there is a circular painted panel, tempera on wood, roughly 30 centimeters in diameter, made in Egypt around 200 AD. It shows a Roman imperial family in full regalia: a bearded emperor in the upper right wearing the jeweled diadem of the Severan dynasty; his wife beside him on the upper left, dark-eyed and elaborately coiffed; a young man below them in the center wearing his own smaller diadem. A fourth face occupies the lower left — or rather, a fourth face should occupy it. What is there instead is bare wood, scratched down to nothing by something sharp, the ghost of a face removed with deliberate force at some point after the panel was painted. The family portrait has three people in it. It was made to have four.

The bust in the Altes Museum in Berlin is one of the more technically striking Roman portrait pieces in any German collection. The head is Carrara marble — white, fine-grained, the standard material for imperial portraiture — but the drapery is carved from a deeply veined breccia, red and brown and amber in layered striations that catch the light differently at every angle. The polychrome combination, fashionable in later reworkings of ancient busts, gives the portrait an unusual visual richness: the cool classical face above the warm geological drama of the clothing. The label identifies her plainly. Kaiserin Faustina die Jüngere. Empress Faustina the Younger. Wife of Marcus Aurelius. Marble, 141–175 AD.

The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that earned it its museum nickname, the Grüner Caesar, the Green Caesar. It was acquired in Paris in 1787, carved sometime between 1 and 30 AD, and it is posthumous: made after Caesar’s death, showing him in a toga as a statesman rather than as a general or dictator, classically idealized in the manner of early imperial portraiture. The eye inlays are modern restorations. The shadow it casts on the red wall behind it is an accident of museum lighting that happens to be accurate — Caesar and his shadow, the man and the myth that outlasted him by two thousand years and counting.

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 open air, green with patina, the two infants nursing beneath the she-wolf’s belly on a red granite plinth. Ivy climbs the wall behind it. A stone face — a garden ornament — watches from the wall above. The composition is so familiar as to have become almost invisible through repetition: the wolf alert, ears pricked, facing left with a wariness that has not relaxed in two thousand years of bronze casting; the twins below, pudgy and insistent, entirely unconcerned with the predator feeding them. The image is Rome’s founding symbol, its most exported icon, the picture that appeared on Roman coins in the second century BC and on Italian government documents in the twenty-first century AD. It has been in continuous circulation as a symbol of Roman identity for over two millennia, which is not an achievement many images can claim.

In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

In the Greek and Roman antiquities hall of the Louvre, in a room of vaulted ceilings and warm museum light, four marble figures stand back-to-back around a central pillar and refuse to let you walk past without stopping. The group is known as the Four Captives — a Roman work, probably inspired by Hellenistic precedents, likely once decorating a monumental structure whose specific identity is lost. What survives is the message, and the message is not subtle.

The Starz series Spartacus arrived in 2010 with a visual style so aggressively stylized — slow-motion combat, digitally saturated color, blood that moves through the air with the deliberate beauty of a special effect — that critics spent their first reviews debating whether it was art or exploitation before most of them had noticed what was actually happening in the story. What was happening was more interesting than the style wars suggested: a show about Roman slavery that took the institution seriously, a gladiatorial drama that understood what the arena was and what it cost, and a protagonist whose journey from Thracian warrior to rebel general was built on genuine dramatic logic rather than franchise mechanics.

The Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which premiered in 2010 and ran for three seasons plus a prequel miniseries, was not trying to be HBO’s Rome. It was trying to be 300 with a continuing narrative, and within those self-defined limits it largely succeeded. The historical record of the Third Servile War provided the scaffolding; everything else was constructed from the materials of a production that prioritized stylized violence, explicit sexuality, and operatic emotion over archaeological fidelity. The question is whether that constitutes a failure, and the answer depends on what you expected the show to be.

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’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.

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo began publishing Asterix in the French magazine Pilote in 1959, and the series has been introducing children to Roman geography, imperial bureaucracy, and the gap between official rhetoric and actual practice ever since. Over thirty-nine albums, several animated films, and four live-action feature films, Asterix has reached an audience that no academic history of Rome has approached, and it has done so by taking the Roman Empire seriously enough to understand what is actually funny about it.

Gaius Octavius was eighteen years old when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and nobody thought he mattered. He was Caesar’s great-nephew, slight and sickly, without military reputation or political standing. He had one asset: Caesar’s will named him adopted son and primary heir. He used that asset with a patience and calculation that none of his older, more experienced rivals understood until it was too late.

The name by which history knows him — Augustus, the revered one — was a title conferred by the Senate in 27 BC, seventeen years after Caesar’s death and four years after he had defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, eliminating the last serious rival to his control of the Roman world. Between the teenager nobody feared and the man the Senate was now calling Augustus lay fourteen years of civil war, shifting alliances, calculated betrayals, and the systematic elimination of everyone who stood between Octavian and sole power. He was very good at it.

Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards in 1959, a record it shared with Titanic and The Lord of the Return of the King for decades, and it is the film against which all subsequent Roman epics have been measured — usually unfavorably. William Wyler’s production was the most expensive film ever made at the time of its release, employed tens of thousands of extras, built the largest film set in history for the chariot race sequence, and ran for three hours and thirty-two minutes. It was also, by the standards of its genre, serious in ways that the epics of the preceding decade were not.

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’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.

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 would not have entered the church had he known what was to happen — is debated; the staging suggests coordination, and Charlemagne was not a man who was often genuinely surprised by political events. What is not debated is what the coronation meant: four centuries after the conventional date of Rome’s fall, the most powerful ruler in western Europe was being crowned not as King of the Franks or King of the Germans but as Emperor of the Romans, in Rome, at the greatest shrine of Roman Christianity, by the successor of St. Peter. Rome had not died. It had changed form.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was the greatest orator Rome produced, possibly the greatest the ancient world produced, and he was killed for it. His head and his right hand — the hand that had written the Philippics, the series of speeches attacking Mark Antony — were displayed on the Rostra in the Roman Forum by Antony’s orders in 43 BC. Antony’s wife Fulvia reportedly pushed hairpins through the tongue that had destroyed so many reputations with such elegance. The story may be exaggerated. The impulse it describes was not.

Nearly a thousand letters written by Cicero survive, along with approximately ninety letters addressed to him from other correspondents. They span the period from 68 BC to his death in 43 BC and constitute the most intimate documentary record of any figure from the ancient world. They were not written for publication. They were written to friends, family members, political allies, and enemies, in the urgency of specific moments, and they reveal a man whose public persona — the great orator, the defender of the Republic, the statesman who executed the Catilinarians — was inhabited by someone considerably more anxious, vain, inconsistent, and human than the published speeches would suggest.

The 1963 Cleopatra directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz — or rather, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and then by Mankiewicz after Mamoulian was fired, with extensive interference from the studio and the cast throughout — cost approximately forty-four million dollars, which was enough to nearly bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, take four years to complete, survive the death of one director, the illness and near-death of its star, and the most extensively documented off-set romance in Hollywood history. The resulting film runs for four hours and seventeen minutes in its complete version. It is simultaneously one of the most expensive disasters in studio history and a more interesting film than its reputation suggests.

Cleopatra VII Philopator was the most politically capable ruler the Ptolemaic dynasty produced, and she failed anyway. This is not a contradiction. She operated in a political environment — the Roman civil wars of the late first century BC — where even the most capable maneuvering could not fully compensate for the structural weakness of a client kingdom dependent on whichever Roman faction happened to be ascendant. She made the best choices available to her at each decision point. The choices were not enough. Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, the year of her death.

Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different from the academic tradition’s engagement — less archaeologically earnest, more ironic, more interested in the tension between the ruin and its meanings than in the reconstruction of what the ruin was before it ruined. Contemporary artists approaching Rome approach a subject already saturated with prior appropriations: the neoclassical, the Victorian, the fascist, the cinematic. To paint or photograph or install Rome now is to navigate a layered history of representations that is itself part of the subject.

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 Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator arrived in 2000 and revived the sword-and-sandal epic as a commercially viable genre after a forty-year hiatus. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It made Russell Crowe a star. It sent tourism to Rome’s Colosseum surging. It also contained enough historical inaccuracy to sustain a small academic industry of correction, none of which has diminished its cultural influence by a measurable degree.

What Scott got right is worth acknowledging first, because the film’s defenders are not entirely wrong. The production design is serious in a way that the 1950s epics it superficially resembles were not. The texture of a Roman legionary camp — the tents, the equipment, the organizational density — reads as the work of people who had looked at the archaeological record. The Colosseum sequences capture something real about the theatrical staging of Roman spectacle: the trap doors, the dramatic entrances, the relationship between the crowd and the performance. The physical scale of the arena, the way it processes tens of thousands of people, the machinery beneath the floor — all of this is handled with a seriousness that rewards attention. And the relationship between Maximus and his soldiers in the opening battle sequence reflects genuine research into how Roman generals cultivated personal loyalty among their troops.

Hadrian spent more time away from Rome than any emperor before or after him. In twenty-one years of rule, from 117 to 138 AD, he made two extended tours of the empire’s provinces, personally inspecting frontiers, reviewing troops, visiting cities, correcting administrative abuses, and leaving behind a physical record of his passage in the form of temples, baths, aqueducts, and the walls and frontier fortifications whose most famous example still bears his name. He was the most traveled of emperors, the most architecturally prolific, and the most systematically interested in the practical realities of governance at the provincial level. He was also the most controversial figure of the Antonine dynasty, for reasons that have as much to do with his personality as with his policies.

HBO’s Rome ran for two seasons from 2005 to 2007, cost approximately one hundred million dollars to produce, was cancelled before completing its intended narrative arc, and remains the most historically serious attempt to dramatize the late Roman Republic for a mass audience that has yet been made. Its cancellation, attributed to production costs after a fire destroyed the primary sets, was a genuine cultural loss. The show was not perfect. It was better than anything else in its field by a margin that makes comparison almost unfair.

I, Claudius was broadcast by the BBC in 1976, produced on a budget that would not cover the catering costs of a modern prestige television production, shot almost entirely on interior sets that made no pretense of representing ancient Rome, and it is the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. The production design is limited. The performances are not. Robert Graves’s source novels provided a narrative that understood the Julio-Claudian dynasty as a political tragedy of Shakespearean scope, and the BBC production found the cast to realize it.

Jacques-Louis David painted the Oath of the Horatii in 1784, five years before the French Revolution, and the painting arrived in Paris as a political event rather than simply an aesthetic one. Three Roman brothers swear to their father to fight to the death for Rome against the rival city of Alba Longa, their arms extended toward the swords their father holds, their posture rigid with civic resolution. Behind them, the women of the family — who are connected by marriage to the enemy side — collapse in grief that the oath requires be subordinated to duty. The painting is a lecture on republican virtue delivered at the exact moment when the French intelligentsia was developing the vocabulary of republican revolution, and it was received as such.

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 requires understanding what actually happened to the language after the Western Empire’s political structures dissolved in the fifth century. Latin did not die. It evolved, as all living languages do, into forms that its classical speakers would have had difficulty understanding. The languages that evolved from it — Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, Occitan, and several others — are Latin, in the same sense that modern English is Old English: substantially transformed, but continuous. They did not replace Latin; they are Latin, moving through time.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations for himself. This is not an inference — it is evident from the text, which is addressed in the second person to himself, organized not as an argument for public consumption but as a series of private reminders, admonitions, and attempts to hold himself to standards he found difficult to maintain. The work was not intended for publication, and if it had been published by its author rather than preserved by accident, it would probably have been a different book. As it survives, it is the most intimate document of a Roman emperor’s inner life that exists, and one of the most honest accounts of what it is like to try to live according to a moral philosophy while holding enormous power over other people.

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled the Roman Empire for fourteen years, from 54 to 68 AD, and the historical record that survives was almost entirely written by men who despised him. Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio — the three primary ancient sources for his reign — were senators or wrote from senatorial perspectives, and Nero’s relationship with the Senate was sufficiently hostile that objectivity from that quarter was never likely. The result is an emperor whose actual governance has to be extracted from beneath layers of accumulated literary contempt, much of which is genuine but some of which is retrospective distortion by a class that had specific and personal grievances.

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.

Pliny the Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, and they are the only eyewitness account of one of the most significant natural disasters in recorded history. Pliny was seventeen years old when the eruption occurred. He watched from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples, as the cloud rose from the mountain. His uncle, Pliny the Elder — the naturalist and admiral who commanded the fleet at Misenum — sailed toward the eruption and died in it. The younger Pliny stayed behind, survived, and thirty years later wrote the letters that documented what he had seen with a clarity and precision that would have done credit to a trained scientist.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is not a film about the eruption of Vesuvius. It is a film about a slave-turned-gladiator and a merchant’s daughter whose love is thwarted by a corrupt Roman senator, and the eruption of Vesuvius happens to provide the third act. The volcano is plot device rather than subject. This is a reasonable choice for a commercial action film built on a historical catastrophe; it is not the choice that a serious engagement with Pompeii’s destruction would have made.

Roman citizenship was, for most of Roman history, a restricted status that conferred concrete legal advantages and carried genuine political weight. It was also, uniquely among ancient states, something Rome was willing to extend — gradually, pragmatically, and eventually universally — in a process that transformed a city-state’s civic identity into the legal framework of a multinational empire. The story of Roman citizenship is the story of how Rome absorbed the world it conquered without ceasing, at least formally, to be Rome.

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 cultural influence — it is a specific claim about the transmission of particular legal concepts, doctrines, and analytical frameworks from the Roman jurists of the classical period through Justinian’s sixth-century compilation, through the medieval universities where that compilation was taught, and through the national codifications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that carry Roman legal doctrine in modified form to the present day. The French Civil Code of 1804, the German Civil Code of 1900, the Italian Civil Code of 1942, the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian, and hundreds of other civil law codes: all of these are Roman law filtered through historical transmission and adapted to modern conditions.

Rome’s mines were among the most productive and the most deadly operations in the ancient world. The silver mines of Spain, the gold mines of Dacia, the iron mines of Noricum, the lead mines of Britain, the copper mines of Cyprus — across the empire’s territories, Roman exploitation of mineral resources operated at a scale and intensity that would not be matched in Europe until the Industrial Revolution. The quantities extracted were enormous, the methods often technically sophisticated, and the human cost on the enslaved and condemned workforce was catastrophic in ways that the ancient sources acknowledge with varying degrees of discomfort.

Roman punishment was not uniform. It was calibrated to social status in ways so explicit and systematic that the law itself divided humanity into categories that determined not merely the severity of punishment but its entire character. The honestiores — the honorable ones, comprising senators, equestrians, veterans, and local elites — faced one set of penalties for any given crime. The humiliores — the lower orders — faced another, typically harsher, more physically degrading, and more public. This was not a failure of Roman justice to live up to an egalitarian ideal. It was Roman justice operating precisely as designed.

Rome has been a film subject since the beginning of cinema, and the relationship between Hollywood’s Rome and the historical record is complicated in ways that go beyond simple error-counting. Some of what cinema gets wrong is deliberate simplification for narrative clarity. Some is period convention — the sandal epics of the 1950s reflected Cold War anxieties as much as ancient history. Some is genuine incomprehension of a world sufficiently distant that even educated filmmakers cannot feel its difference. And occasionally, something unexpected gets it exactly right in ways that the filmmakers may not have consciously intended.

There is a specific category of object that exists in every tourist market in the world: the miniature Eiffel Tower, made in China, sold in Paris, possessing the shape of the original without any of its substance. It is recognizable as the thing it represents. It is not the thing. Spartacus: House of Ashur, which premiered on Starz in December 2025, is that object. It has the visual vocabulary of the original series — the slow-motion combat, the stylized blood, the ludus architecture, the Roman costumes — and it has none of what made the original worth watching. Recognizable. Not the thing.

Steven Saylor began publishing his Roma Sub Rosa mystery series in 1991 with Roman Blood, a novel centered on one of Cicero’s actual legal cases — the defense of Sextus Roscius against a charge of parricide — and has continued through more than a dozen novels, each using a historical crime or legal proceeding as the vehicle for an exploration of late Republican Rome. The series’ detective, Gordianus the Finder, operates as an investigator for hire in a society that had no professional police force, appearing at the margins of the major political events of the period and providing a ground-level perspective on the world that the official historical record’s focus on senators and generals does not supply.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote the Lives of the Twelve Caesars — biographies of Julius Caesar through Domitian — probably in the early second century AD, and the work has been read continuously ever since, generating controversy about its reliability that has not diminished its influence by the slightest degree. Suetonius was the secretary of the emperor Hadrian before being dismissed, apparently for inappropriate familiarity with the empress, and he had access to the imperial archives during his service. Whether he actually used the archives, and how judiciously, is a question classical scholars continue to disagree about.

Tacitus is the most important historian the Roman world produced and one of the most important historians in any tradition. He is also, unmistakably, a man writing under conditions that shaped his account in ways he could not always control and occasionally did not try to. He was a senator who served the emperors he despised, a man who had survived Domitian’s reign by keeping his head down and who never entirely forgave himself for it, and who wrote history as an act of witness and accusation that the dead and the living were equally subject to. His prose style — compressed, ironic, capable of saying in a subordinate clause what lesser writers would require a paragraph — has influenced historical writing ever since and is the primary source for everything popular culture believes about Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and their courts.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated versions constitute a case study in how the same historical event can be made to mean entirely different things depending on the visual choices made around it. The event is fixed: Caesar was killed in the Theater of Pompey by a group of senators. The meaning of the event — was it tyrannicide or murder, liberation or catastrophe — has been contested ever since, and the paintings rehearse that contest in visual terms.

Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was released in 1964, ran for nearly three hours, cost twenty million dollars, and was such a catastrophic commercial failure that it effectively ended the sword-and-sandal epic as a Hollywood genre for a generation. It also happens to be a substantially better film than its reputation suggests, more historically serious than most of its contemporaries, and in certain respects a more honest engagement with the period it depicts than the celebrated Gladiator that covered similar ground thirty-six years later.

The calendar you use today is a Roman calendar. The twelve months, the seven-day week borrowed from Near Eastern sources and transmitted through Rome, the numbering of the years from a fixed point that eventually became the Christian era — all of these are features of the system that Julius Caesar reformed in 46 BC and that the Catholic Church adjusted in 1582 with modifications so minor that most countries now use what is, in its essentials, the calendar Caesar commissioned. You wake up on a Tuesday in October because a Roman dictator in the first century BC decided to align the civil year with the solar year, and his solution was good enough to last two thousand years.

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 1834 — a novel that invented the sub-genre of Roman disaster narrative, established the template of the virtuous Christian and the corrupt pagan Roman, and sold in numbers that established ancient Rome as a commercially viable fictional setting for the Victorian reading public. The novel is not much read today and deserves to be read less. Its historical importance is entirely distinct from its literary quality.

The Roman triumph — the procession through the city in which a victorious general displayed his captives and the spoils of conquest before depositing the latter in the treasury and offering thanks at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus — was the most spectacular public ritual of the Roman world, and its visual representation has served as propaganda for European rulers from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The triumph’s logic — the hero returns, the enemy is displayed, the city is made to feel the extent of its power — was available for appropriation by any ruler who needed to communicate the same things, and the painters who rendered ancient triumphs for modern patrons understood they were serving both historical documentation and political argument simultaneously.

Popular history is a machine for producing confident errors, and Rome is one of its most productive subjects. The combination of genuine drama, distant evidence, and centuries of embellishment has generated a set of myths about Rome that persist through repetition long after the historical record has corrected them. Some are harmless. Some distort the actual history in ways that matter.

The vomitorium was not a room for vomiting. It was a technical term for the exit passages of an amphitheater or theater — the tunnels through which large crowds could rapidly exit a stadium after an event. The word derives from the Latin vomere, meaning to spew out, which is an entirely accurate description of crowds disgorging from a building. The association with Roman dining excess came later and has no serious ancient support. Romans did occasionally induce vomiting for medical or digestive reasons, but the image of systematic purging between banquet courses is a fantasy.

The Senate’s formula for praising good emperors — felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, may you be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan — established Trajan as the standard of imperial virtue against which all subsequent emperors were measured. He was the first provincial emperor, born in Spain to a Roman family that had settled there generations earlier, and his elevation by Nerva in 97 AD represented the completion of the process by which the Roman Empire’s leadership became genuinely imperial rather than Italian. He was admired by his contemporaries, praised by the senatorial tradition that wrote most of the surviving ancient history, and still regarded by most historians as among the most capable emperors who ever held the position. His reign was also the high-water mark of Roman territorial expansion, after which the empire never grew larger and began, slowly and then rapidly, to contract.

Edward Gibbon spent six volumes and most of his adult life explaining why Rome fell, and he was not the first. The question has generated more scholarly production than almost any other in historical study, a volume that says less about Roman history than about the intellectual needs of subsequent civilizations that measured themselves against Rome’s shadow. Every generation finds its own answer, and every answer reveals as much about the present as about the fifth century.