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...
Persian, Greek and Hellenistic Luxuries May 22, 2023
This British Museum exhibition is about ancient luxury, but its content shows a commendable frugality. Almost all of what is on show in Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, in the three white-draped rooms of the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, can ...
A Great Romantic May 17, 2023
As Garibaldi menaced the Eternal City with his revolutionary army, foreigners in Rome put out their national flags in a bid for immunity, which gave the city a festive appearance incongruous with the anxious popular mood. A large banner over the Sant...
How Multiculturalism Toppled Rome May 17, 2023
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman emperor Gaius assembled a massive invasion force and marched it across Europe to the English Channel. The elite of the greatest army in the world, along with a massive array of siege engines, drew up in battle format...
Central Europe Has Shaped Our Culture For Centuries May 03, 2023
It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits ov...
Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture April 25, 2023
On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing rem...
Netflix’s Black Cleopatra is Ahistorical April 19, 2023
"Iremember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black." So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix "docuseries" looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of Afric...
Guide to a Foreign Past April 18, 2023
As far as clichés about the study of history go, ‘The past is a foreign country’ is not too bad. We tend, though, to omit the second and more interesting half of the original version. The complete first sentence of L P Harley’s novel about love, clas...
Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture April 07, 2023
On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing rem...
What Happened to Goths? April 05, 2023
The original Goths came out of Germany and descended on Rome in August 410, sacking the eternal city. Their late 20th century namesakes emerged from Leeds, Crawley, Northampton and other bleak provincial towns, bringing their look of black clothes an...
On Roman Landscapes March 24, 2023
When Aeneas arrives at Carthage in Book I of the Aeneid, the first thing to give our dutiful hero hope is a painting—a series of paintings, in fact, decorating the walls of a new temple to Juno and depicting the events of the Trojan War. Gratified t...
The Stigma of Stigmata: Tattoos in the Ancient World March 24, 2023
If someone mentions ancient Greek vases, the first thing that probably comes to mind is lithe, muscular figures, their proportions ideal and their skin devoid of each and every blemish. That image, however, is inaccurate. Many Greek works of art, jus...
Winning Like a Roman December 22, 2022
What is the grand strategy of the United States? Historian James Lacey believes it can be identified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Preamble. Universal equality, domestic Tranquility, unalienable rights, and the Blessings o...
The Archaeological Discovery of the Century? December 19, 2022
Over the summer, in the foothills of the tiny Tuscan hilltop town of San Casciano dei Bagni, a group of archaeologists gathered by the ruins of an ancient thermal bath and began to dig. For months they slogged through blazing heat, until, suddenly, a...
Living Descendants of Mark Antony October 27, 2022
Mark Antony was a close relative of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) and a brave general who played an integral part during the Roman Empire’s transition from a republic to a monarchy. Mark Antony is also notorious for his many love affairs and wives, the m...
The Latter Caesars October 14, 2022
Among its multiple definitions for “byzantine,” Merriam-Webster lists “of, relating to, or characterized by a devious and usually surreptitious manner of operation.” Anyone familiar with the monarchy of Byzantium should find the definition understan...
Five Best Books on Ancient Rome October 13, 2022
The Roman TriumphBy Mary Beard (2007)1. The greatest glory for a general in ancient Rome was a triumph, a street party celebrating his greatest victories or, as Mary Beard puts it, his “biggest massacres, depending on whose side you were on.” Ms. Bea...
