The Life of Rome’s Most Notorious Emperor
When the name Nero is heard, a few things are conjured up in our imagination. Nero the persecutor of Christians; Nero the brutal tyrant who embodied the…
When the name Nero is heard, a few things are conjured up in our imagination. Nero the persecutor of Christians; Nero the brutal tyrant who embodied the…
Thomas Hardy’s mother died in 1904 at the age of ninety. One of the poems Hardy wrote, musing on her memory, is called “The Roman Road.” In…
In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, the philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius makes a wonderful appearance. In this poetic portrayal of the truths of history, Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard…
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In…
What made the Roman Empire an empire like no other was that it alone was the city that became an empire. Its distinctively republican civic form became…