Essays on the politics, architecture, and ordinary life of the Roman world — written for readers who want the sources, not the summary.
Eleven aqueducts, four hundred kilometres of channel, and a grade so gentle that engineers still argue about how it was surveyed. We walk the Aqua Claudia from spring to castellum and explain why the Romans buried most of what they built.
Tiberius Gracchus and the land reform that ended, badly, in the Forum itself.
Bread, wine, a haircut, a night at the baths — a working Roman's weekly budget.
Pozzolana, seawater, and the harbour moles that are still standing two thousand years on.
The triplex acies formation, and what it actually solved on an open battlefield.
Pontifices, intercalation, and the politics of adding a whole extra month.
How a proconsul ran Hispania from a desk three weeks' sail from Rome.
Five turns the story took, in brief.
Rome replaces monarchy with two annually elected consuls — a compromise that will hold, in spirit, for four centuries.
Rome builds its first navy to fight the first war, and burns Carthage to the ground to end the third.
Caesar brings his army over the Rubicon, and the Republic's unwritten rules stop applying.
The Senate offers him titles; he accepts the ones that sound Republican and keeps the power that isn't.
Romulus Augustulus is quietly pensioned off. No one in Ravenna calls it the end of an era at the time.
"He found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble."