Rome
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The Romance of Belonging Nowhere December 12, 2024
“You’re romanticizing,” André Aciman’s brother unfailingly points out to his dreamy, bookish, struggling sibling over the course of the author’s new memoir, Roman Year. The context of the remark is, by turns, both intimate and heartbreaking as the tw...
What Did Roman Emperors Do All Day? December 12, 2024
Mary Beard’s excellent new book, Emperor of Rome, begins with a timeline of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus that gives each emperor’s years of reign, a quick fact or two, and often, his manner of death. But these three pages ar...
Rome Travelogue December 10, 2024
I’m in Rome for one week, for two Cluny Institute events. The first, which Luke organized, is a private discussion of Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th century utopian text New Atlantis; the second, the next night, is a literary reading at a bilingual booksto...
Peace Through Strength April 22, 2024
We know a vast deal about the history of Rome and yet there remains so much we do not know. Mary Beard reports in her new book, Emperor of Rome, that the teenage emperor Elagabulus—who ruled from A.D. 218 to 222, his reign ending with his assassinati...
We Are All Tom Ripley April 08, 2024
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley pickpockets the plot of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and turns it into a detective thriller set in the early years of the Cold War. Oblivious shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf taps the e...
Plutarch's Gift January 26, 2024
When Emperor Julian’s private secretary, the Greek sophist and rhetorician Himerius, was trying to get his son Rufinus admitted into the Areopagus in the fourth century AD, he pulled a nepo baby move that had nothing to do with the Roman emperor but ...
Are We Focused on the Wrong Rome? January 08, 2024
In April 2021, The Atlantic ran a long article by Cullen Murphy entitled “The Fall of Rome All Over Again?” Its subject was the purported similarities between the position of the United States today and the Roman Empire when it toppled. A year later,...
The Secret Life of Druids August 25, 2023
Gaius Verius Sedatus was a respectable citizen of the community of Chartres in the early 2nd century CE. He was a member of his local town council (a sort of mini-senate), where he and his colleagues presided over its laws and management, under the a...
The Great Libraries of Rome August 09, 2023
It’s around 200 CE, in Ephesus, an Aegean city of Greek roots, now a major hub of the Roman Empire. Meandering down marble-paved Curetes Street, a dweller is lost in the bustle of the town, procuring produce and wares in shops tucked beneath the colo...
