Slavery was not a marginal institution in ancient Rome. It was deeply embedded in Roman agriculture, households, commerce, mining, manufacturing, public administration, and entertainment. Enslaved people were legally treated as …
Flamma, whose name means “the Flame,” is one of the most intriguing gladiators known from the Roman world. Unlike many famous gladiators whose careers are reconstructed from literary accounts, Flamma …
In the final decades of the first century AD, few figures in Rome could command the attention of a crowd like Scorpus. Born around AD 68 and dead by about …
For all its roads, bridges, ports, and engineering achievements, the Roman Empire was a surprisingly slow world to travel through. Movement depended heavily on a person’s wealth, social status, the …
The Roman Empire is often imagined as a Mediterranean-centered civilization bounded by the Atlantic Ocean in the west, the Rhine and Danube in the north, the Sahara in the south, …
Marcus Junius Brutus is remembered primarily as the Roman senator who joined the conspiracy that assassinated Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC. Yet reducing Brutus to …
Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus was one of the most consequential commanders of the Roman Republic. He defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE, ended the Second Punic War, destroyed Carthage’s …
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace, was one of the defining literary figures of Augustan Rome. Born in 65 BC and dying in 8 BC, he lived through the …
Imperial Rome is remembered for its temples, aqueducts, roads, and monuments. Most Romans lived in a very different environment. At its height, Rome may have contained hundreds of thousands of …
Silbannacus is one of the most obscure figures associated with the Roman Empire. No surviving ancient historian mentions him. No inscription records his name, and no statue preserves his image. …
Few monuments demonstrate the scale, engineering ability, and political ambition of Imperial Rome as dramatically as the Baths of Caracalla. Known in antiquity as the Thermae Antoninianae, the complex was …
The Roman army was far more than a fighting force. It was one of the principal instruments through which Rome imposed order, projected imperial authority, built infrastructure, collected revenue, and …
Poena cullei, or the “penalty of the sack,” was one of the most severe punishments in Roman law. It was associated primarily with parricidium, especially the murder of a parent …
The Roman army of the late Republic produced commanders whose names became inseparable from its greatest campaigns, but its battlefield success depended just as heavily on men whose careers rarely …
