The Roman Empire at its territorial height under Emperor Trajan, around AD 117, encompassed a vast network of provinces stretching from Britain and the Iberian Peninsula to the eastern Mediterranean, …
Roman engineering is often remembered through its surviving successes: the Pantheon, Colosseum, aqueducts, roads, bridges, and monumental harbors. Yet Roman engineering was also defined by projects that proved too ambitious, …
In July 64 CE, Rome suffered one of the most destructive urban fires in its history. The blaze consumed large sections of the imperial capital, displaced thousands of residents, destroyed …
The Roman Empire was not inherently opposed to religious diversity. Across its vast territory, Romans encountered and incorporated an extraordinary range of gods, rituals, priesthoods, and foreign cults. Egyptian Isis …
The Diocletianic Persecution, also known as the Great Persecution, was the Roman Empire’s final major attempt to suppress Christianity through imperial law. Beginning in 303 CE and continuing in parts …
The Mainz Gladius, sometimes called the Sword of Tiberius, is an early imperial Roman sword discovered in the Rhine River near Mainz, Germany. Today, the weapon is preserved in the …
Roman warfare is often remembered for disciplined infantry, fortified camps and the standardized equipment of the legionary. Yet behind the famous shield wall was another branch of Roman military power …
Few Roman military institutions have left a legacy as controversial as the Praetorian Guard. Created as the emperor’s elite household force, the Guard eventually became a political institution capable of …
Roman military supremacy rested on more than disciplined legionaries, engineering, and battlefield tactics. The empire also depended on something less visible but equally important: information. Roman commanders operated without satellites, …
Few military formations in ancient history were as closely associated with political power as the Praetorian Guard. Created from the tradition of commanders’ personal bodyguards and transformed by Augustus into …
The equites were far more than Roman cavalrymen. Over the course of nearly a millennium, the term evolved from describing men who served on horseback into identifying one of the …
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC–AD 65) was one of the most influential intellectuals of Imperial Rome: a Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, essayist, and political adviser who rose …
The Pyramid of Cestius is one of the most striking monuments surviving from ancient Rome. Standing beside the Porta San Paolo and the Protestant Cemetery, its sharply angled marble-covered faces …
In ancient Rome, slavery was a legally entrenched institution, but Roman law also developed formal mechanisms through which an enslaved person could become free. The most important of these was …
