Roman

The 2000 film directed by Ridley Scott, Gladiator, almost single-handedly resurrected the epic historical drama film genre, one which had been highly popular in the 1950s and 1960s but which had declined after that.  As one would expect, the story is about a gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius, who ends up fighting in the Colosseum in the […]

In the late 1780s, after the United States had formally concluded peace with Britain and secured its independence, the lawmakers who formed the Second Continental Congress and issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776 faced new problems. The United States was now free of foreign oppression but needed a constitution and ancillary laws. The constitution

On 1 November 82 BC, a battle took place virtually within the city of Rome itself.  It was a climactic end to a civil war that began the previous between the supporters of the Roman general, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and an alliance of Marians. The Marians were supporters of the recently deceased military commander, Gaius

A visitor today to the ruins of the town of Pompeii, which was buried under volcanic ash and rock following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, will be confronted by many frescoes, mosaics, and wall paintings showing people and mythological figures playing musical instruments. These scenes in places such as the Villa of

The toys that children play with can tell a person a lot about the society involved.  In Victorian Britain, the doll house became one of the most ubiquitous forms of play as the manufacture of detailed objects such as these was made possible on a large scale by the Industrial Revolution and the advent of

When Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th of March in 44 BC, his adoptive heir and eventual political successor, Octavian, was just eighteen.  Within weeks the young man was striving to gather military force to his cause as other allies of Caesar’s, such as Marc Anthony, scrambled for positions of power in the vacuum

One of the significant advantages any historian of ancient Rome has is a wealth of written material that has survived from 2,000 years ago to help explain to us what the remains of the Roman Empire mean. For instance, we know how the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum ended up buried under volcanic ash because

The Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which followed it controlled most of the Mediterranean world for over half a millennium.  That’s twice the length of the time that the United States has existed. At its height in the second century AD, Rome’s power extended from southern Scotland in the north-south to the Sahara Desert