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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 …
On August 9, 48 BC — the same calendar date, by a coincidence historians have noted, as the Battle of Adrianople 426 years later — Julius Caesar’s …
Ninety percent of the people in the Roman Empire worked the land. This is the number that most discussions of Rome skip past in their attention to the …
Rome held elections. This fact is worth stating plainly because it tends to get lost between two competing misrepresentations: the idealization of …
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 …
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 …
In 186 BC, the Roman Senate issued the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus — the decree concerning the Bacchic rites — one of the most extensive …
Every five years, Rome counted itself. The census — from censere, to assess or value — was among the Republic’s foundational institutions, and its …
The Roman Senate was not what it is usually imagined to be. It was not a legislature in the modern sense — it could not pass laws on its own …
The tribunate of the plebs was constitutionally the strangest office Rome created: a position with enormous negative power and almost no positive …
