HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T10:57:29.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/feed/atom Kev Lochun <![CDATA[Pompeii wasn’t destroyed when you think it was]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pompeii-wasnt-destroyed-when-you-think-it-was-video/ 2026-10-23T10:57:29.000Z 2026-10-23T09:54:32.000Z How do pomegranates help to unlock a 2,000-year-old mystery? Here's how they illuminate whether we've got one of the most basic facts about the destruction of Pompeii wrong.
For centuries, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii has most regularly been dated to 24 August AD 79. But a growing collection of archaeological clues – from mysterious graffiti and Roman coins to woollen clothing, grapes and even pomegranates – suggests the disaster may actually have struck months later.
So when did Vesuvius really erupt? *HistoryExtra'*s Kev Lochun, with expertise from Dr Jess Venner, investigates the evidence behind one of ancient Rome’s most enduring mysteries – and asks whether a 2,000-year-old assumption needs to be rewritten.
You can watch Kev's full podcast series, four episodes on the mysteries of Pompeii with Dr Jess Venner.
View Green Video on the source website]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[An African king in the Roman empire]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/an-african-king-in-roman-empire-podcast/ 2026-10-20T11:44:23.000Z 2026-10-20T11:44:23.000Z He was barely a toddler when he was paraded as a captive in a Roman triumph in 46 BC, but young North African prince Juba went on to marry a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and rule an African kingdom. Andrew Kenrick, author of Rex Juba: 15 Glimpses of an African King, unravels his amazing life, in conversation with David Musgrove.
]]> Rob Attar <![CDATA[Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/monsters-rome-emperors-reputation-tom-holland/ 2026-10-19T17:48:37.000Z 2026-10-19T17:30:02.000Z Rob Attar: Could you please begin by introducing Suetonius and his best-known work, The Lives of the Caesars?
Tom Holland: Suetonius is probably the most famous of all the ancient biographers. He was secretary to the emperor Hadrian, so was right at the heart of imperial power. He’d also worked as an archivist and librarian in the imperial palace, and therefore had access to all kinds of historical documents.
He drew on these to write [in around AD 121] the biographies of the rulers who had come to be known as the 12 Caesars: the 11 emperors from Augustus to Domitian and, before them all, Julius Caesar – the adoptive father of Augustus. The Lives has had a massive influence on how people understand the Roman empire.
Of all ancient classical texts, this is probably also the most influential on modern culture. It inspired Robert Graves, who would later translate the Lives for Penguin Classics, to write I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), which were then adapted into the celebrated 1976 BBC drama series [starring Derek Jacobi].
And that series inspired all kinds of US dramas, ranging from Dynasty in the 1980s, to The Sopranos in the 1990s and 2000s, and Game of Thrones in the 2010s. You could say that Suetonius is the godfather of the murderous dynastic drama.
As a historian yourself, do you consider that Suetonius was doing something similar to what you do today?
It’s important to say that Suetonius wasn’t actually a historian – he was a biographer. He was not aiming to do what Tacitus, his great contemporary, was doing – creating a record of the whole sweep of Roman history.
But of course, because the emperors are so important to our understanding of how the Roman world operated, his work does offer a sense of the Roman empire in the first century BC and the first century AD. That was a period of convulsive change: the Republic collapsed, Augustus established an autocracy, and then there was a process of evolution over the first century AD.
After Augustus died in AD 14, Rome was ruled by his family – the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero – after which that family went extinct. There was then a murderous bout of civil war in AD 69, notorious as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ – Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian – whose lives were among the 12 related by Suetonius. Vespasian, who established his own dynasty, was succeeded by his eldest son, Titus, who was then followed by his younger brother, Domitian. The lives of those three emperors are covered by Suetonius as well.
What approach did Suetonius take to writing these biographies?
His range seems to have been very extensive. From surviving fragments of his other works, we get a sense that he was interested in what today we might call social anthropology: customs, habits, the things that people do. Aside from his biographies of the Caesars, he wrote a collection of the lives of the great courtesans – and sex is also an obvious theme that runs throughout The Lives of the Caesars.
But he also wrote about children’s games, and about the insults that people give one another. He wrote about clothing, and about all kinds of aspects of social life – and these in turn informed his portraits of the emperors. He wrote about what they did as children, their appearance, their sexual habits. For Suetonius, this provided windows onto their characters and the way that their reigns were shaped. It enabled him to situate the emperors more clearly in the social, political and cultural context of the world that they ruled.
Why and how did you go about translating The Lives of the Caesars?
I was asked to do it because it was felt that the translation done by Robert Graves many decades ago was a bit old fashioned. There are certain problems, I think, with his work.
One strange choice he made was that, instead of using Roman military terms such as centurion or tribune, he gave characters titles such as ‘sergeant major’ or ‘colonel’ or whatever. That’s perhaps unsurprising, because Graves fought in the First World War, but it gives his text a slightly postwar, 1930s flavour. I’m sure that in maybe 60 or 70 years, my translation will seem very 2020s, but I hope that I’ve been truer to the Latin text than Graves was.
One other stylistic quirk of Suetonius’s I noticed was that, when writing about an individual emperor, he almost never mentioned them by name – it’s always “he” did this, “he” did that. Suetonius might introduce, say, Augustus by name at the beginning of that Life, but, from that point on, it is assumed that any third person verb will be referring to Augustus.
And the effect is very powerful. By not drawing attention to the emperor’s name, it becomes kind of omnipresent: this emperor is so significant that you don’t even need to name him – everything is revolving around him. I hope that, even in English, the reader will find this stylistic effect striking.
Did you have to make any difficult decisions when translating the text?
Purely in terms of how to render Latin – and, indeed, Greek, because there’s quite a lot of Greek in the Lives, too – the huge problem is always puns. Meaningfully translating Suetonius’s linguistic puns is always a challenge. One of them revolves around oral sex, and that touches on another, slightly more moral problem: there are passages within Suetonius that are shocking. And these passages have always been shocking.
There’s a tradition that, in the 15th century, Gilles de Rais – a Frenchman fighting the English during the Hundred Years’ War – was seduced into becoming a child killer by reading Suetonius. The Marquis de Sade reputedly owned a copy of the Lives. Then, in the Victorian period, school copies featured large chunks that were just replaced with asterisks.
Even though today, in the 21st century, we might pride ourselves on being more permissive and less easily shocked, the fact remains that there are repellent passages. The question of what to do with them was a moral consideration, but in the end I decided that I wanted to give as accurate and complete a rendering of Suetonius’s language as I could.
On that point, the Lives features some truly remarkable stories about some of the emperors’ debauched behaviour. How seriously can we take these?
I would like to focus on two of those emperors, because in some ways their reputations for debauchery reflect very different Roman cultural traditions. The first of these was Tiberius. Near the end of his life, when he was about 70, he retired to the island of Capri.
Suetonius gives us completely shocking details of what Tiberius is supposed to have got up to there: child sex, brothels, all kinds of things. Tiberius was then succeeded by Caligula – perhaps the most notorious of all of the Caesars. Rather than retiring to a private island, Caligula staged his sexual depravities on the most public of stages, according to Suetonius.
The temptation is to take these accounts absolutely at face value: to assume that Tiberius was a hideous pervert, and that Caligula was such a sexual terrorist that he was in fact insane. But I think there are different layers in how you can respond to these stories. One of these is to recognise that the Roman understanding of what was shocking and scandalous about sexual behaviour is not the same as ours.
Let’s think about Tiberius. He was the emperor – and an emperor should not retire. The only conceivable reason, in a Roman’s opinion, for doing that was because the person doing it was an absolute pervert.
So you can see why Tiberius’s retirement was framed by people hostile to him as reflecting his desire to do disgusting things that he couldn’t do while he was in Rome leading a public life. The fact that Tiberius was a very old man, and that statesmen who had attained a certain age were entitled to a dignified retirement, was ignored – because Tiberius was emperor, and shouldn’t have done it.
As for Caligula, he was taking to the public stage and rubbing the noses of his enemies in the Senate in the fact of their impotence. Both Augustus and Tiberius had shown the Senate respect, but Caligula had a different strategy. He wanted to demonstrate that he was the master, and that the senators were a bunch of lickspittles, nobodies. I think that the sexual abuse to which he submitted senators – and, notably, their wives – was a way of making that point.
That was very brutal and shocking, and why Caligula became such a notorious figure, but there was perhaps an element of strategic thinking that Suetonius didn’t acknowledge. Caligula clearly wasn’t a liberal – he wasn’t Justin Trudeau – but there was probably method behind the seeming madness.
This is part of the fascination of studying the lives of these emperors. There’s the shock appeal of the stories, and there’s the fascination of working out exactly how and why Roman attitudes to sexuality were different from ours. And then there’s the possible political context that was unspoken and unacknowledged by Suetonius, but which might nevertheless explain what is going on.
Was something similar happening with Nero, who was another really notorious figure of this time? Did he get an unfairly bad press from Suetonius?
No, because Nero brought it on himself. And, as with Caligula, I think it was a deliberate political strategy. There were really two traditions in Roman politics that the emperors inherited from the age of the Republic. There was the traditionalist approach, showing respect for the traditions of the state and traditional elites.
And then there were populares – leaders who looked over the heads of the traditional elites to appeal to the masses of the people. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius were all essentially traditionalist in their approach, whereas Caligula and Nero were both populares. They scorned the Senate and wanted to make themselves the darlings of the people.
Because they were emperors, they had opportunities to do that in ways that, in the Republic, not even the most flamboyant nobleman would have had. And I think that’s what Nero was doing. He was clearly the most tremendous showman in a way that was calculated to be shocking to his senators. Emperors were not meant to tread the boards on stage. They were not meant to play musical instruments. They were not meant to compete in the Olympics.
But Nero did all that – and he did it sufficiently well that people quite admired it. It’s as though a US president were to star in an Oscar-winning film, headline Glastonbury, or win a race in Formula 1.
And even with the most shocking crime of his reign, the murder of his own mother, Nero very pointedly didn’t try to disguise it. Instead, he drew attention to it – and I think that’s because murdering your mother was the kind of thing that a hero would do in a Greek tragedy. Nero was casting himself as literally being ‘Augustus’, someone midway between heaven and earth. He was essentially presenting himself to the Roman people, and the world beyond, as a figure from myth – as a throwback to the ancient days of someone like the notorious matricide Orestes.
This policy undoubtedly caused collateral damage, and explains why Nero’s reputation was so bad in the wake of his death. And Suetonius was clearly drawing on those traditions. After all, Suetonius was working for an imperial system founded on the ruins of Nero’s reputation and career, so there was nothing for him in trying to redeem Nero’s reputation. Again, I think – as with Caligula and Tiberius – Suetonius’s portrait of Nero gives the historian enough clues to enable them to work out what Nero was doing, what he was up to. But you’ve got to read between the lines.
In your introduction, you suggest that these rulers are both familiar and strange to us at the same time. Could you elaborate on that point?
I think they’re familiar to us because Suetonius’s biographies give us details about these individual emperors to a degree that we simply do not have for comparable imperial figures from Near Eastern and Mediterranean ancient history. Think of the pharaohs, or the kings of Assyria or Babylon or Persia: these were autocrats ruling empires and civilisations that were just as sophisticated as the Roman empire. Compared with the portraits we have of Augustus or Nero, however, they seem anonymous.
The whole point of royal iconography in Egypt or Persia was to anonymise the pharaoh or the great king. Thanks to Suetonius, though, we know how the emperors had sex, how they went to the toilet, what they looked like, the hairstyles they wore, their bodily blemishes, and so on. We know the most intimate details about them – and that makes them seem vivid and alive and familiar to us in a way that is fairly unique in ancient history. It explains, I think, why imperial Rome tends to fascinate the general public in a way that other civilisations don’t.
At the same time, I hope you will get a sense from what I’ve been saying that ancient Rome was a very alien civilisation. The codes of behaviour that governed not just the emperors but also Romans generally were very remote from ours.
And it’s that strange blend of the familiar and the weird that I think explains why Rome is so fascinating. There’s a kind of science-fiction quality to it. If you think of science fiction as being a mixture of what is familiar to us with worlds that are utterly alien, then that is what ancient Rome gives us.
Of all of the weird and wonderful stories within this book, are there any that particularly stood out for you?
One of the things that becomes very evident when you read the biographies in their entirety is that, even as Suetonius was clearly getting stuck into archives, he was also situating the stories in a dimension in which the supernatural was very vivid.
One of the most dramatic and celebrated moments in Suetonius’s Lives is Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon [the river that marked the boundary of the area controlled directly by Rome]. Caesar sent his legions ahead of him, then travelled in secret through the night from Ravenna up to the frontier. He stood on the bank. He hesitated. And then, Suetonius tells us, a great ghostly figure snatched a trumpet and blew it. This served as the signal to Caesar that he should cross the river.
The dice were thrown. The Rubicon was crossed. History changed – and the fact that there is this weird supernatural element, and it’s introduced exactly as though Suetonius is describing something completely everyday, is often written out of the story. For instance, I did not include that in my earlier account of the crossing of the Rubicon, but looking back at it now, perhaps I should have done.
Throughout all of these stories, there is a sense that what was happening was being governed by fate – that the gods were always watching down, and that it was possible for mortals who could read these signs correctly to intuit what was going to happen. This is a really important part of the universe that Suetonius has bequeathed us.
If, through some miracle of technology, you could interview one of the 12 Caesars on your podcast The Rest Is History, who would you choose?
Julius Caesar – simply because his combination of an extraordinary life and piercing, ruthless intelligence would make him incomparably the most interesting guest to interview. I think, though, for my own selfish purposes – for wanting to understand how the Roman world ticked and how the course of Roman history was changed – I would choose Augustus. He was probably the most remarkable political operator, not just in Rome but in the whole of western history – maybe even world history.
- Read more | Who are the most underrated Roman emperors?
Tom Holland is a historian, author and broadcaster who co-hosts The Rest Is History podcast with Dominic Sandbrook. His translation of The Lives of the Caesars was published by Penguin Classics in 2025.
This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[In 197 BC, the Romans faced their greatest enemy. You won't believe what they did next]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-197-bc-the-romans-faced-their-greatest-enemy-you-wont-believe-what-they-did-next/ 2026-10-19T14:20:11.000Z 2026-10-19T14:20:11.000Z In the spring of 197 BC, a vast war host rumbled west through the mountains of Asia Minor – the region now known as Anatolia, Turkey. Among its ranks were men assembled from across the known world. Clattering columns of Macedonian pikemen marched alongside auxiliaries from Syria, Palestine, Iran and central Asia, while glittering horsemen in heavy armour rode forward in the shadow of Indian war elephants.
This colossal, multi-ethnic army was united by its charismatic leader, Antiochus III, king of the Seleucid empire and one of the ancient Mediterranean’s most ambitious rulers. The Seleucids, a Macedonian dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals, already held sway over an enormous realm stretching from the east of what’s now Turkey to the edge of India. The aim of Antiochus’s expedition, according to the Roman historian Livy, was to “drag all of the cities of Asia Minor into the structure of [his] empire”, then push across the Hellespont (Dardanelles) into Europe itself.
These territories, which today comprise western Turkey and eastern Greece, encompassed fertile valleys, vibrant commercial hubs and vital axes of communication between Europe and Asia – a tempting prize for a great conqueror. For the Seleucids, it also had symbolic importance. The founder of the dynasty, Seleucus I Nicator, had conquered much of Asia Minor after Alexander’s death but, over recent decades, the empire had been losing ground to other regional powers. Antiochus’s march west was not simply an imperialist grab for valuable territory but an attempt to reclaim lost Seleucid territory and establish himself as the successor to Alexander the Great.
- Read more | Alexander the Great's empire crumbled into chaos after his death. How did it fall apart so quickly?
Opposing forces
As Antiochus bore down on the Aegean from the east, however, another power was pushing from the west: the Roman Republic. After decades of costly wars – most consequentially with Carthage under the military leadership of Hannibal, who’d invaded Italy via the Alps with his war elephants – by the end of the third century BC, Rome had emerged as the dominant force in the western Mediterranean. In 200 BC, less than a year after its victory in the Second Punic War, Rome’s battle-hardened legions had crossed the Adriatic and clashed with the armies of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s former homeland.
Within three years, Macedon had been defeated and its king, Philip V – once a charismatic, expansionist ruler in the mould of Antiochus III – was reduced to a compliant Roman puppet. The Greek city-states ringing the Aegean basin had mostly been Macedonian client states, and were now liberated from foreign rule and granted independence under Roman protection. As Rome set about enforcing its new order in the region, the stage was set for a titanic clash between the Republic and the approaching Seleucid juggernaut.
Yet the seemingly inevitable military confrontation didn’t transpire – not immediately. For the time being, the conflict was fought not by soldiers and ships but through treaties, embassies and public proclamations aiming to win the allegiance of local powers and sketch out competing territorial claims. This struggle – famously described in the 1950s by historian Ernst Badian as a “cold war” – is not only a fascinating story of ancient superpower rivalry but a revealing case study of the more subtle dimensions of Roman imperialism.
Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean is often portrayed simply as a triumph of an unstoppable war machine. But the legions were often preceded by diplomats and administrators who cultivated alliances, gathered information and disseminated propaganda. It was these methods – which might be termed ‘soft power’ – that Rome used first to challenge Antiochus’s advance and cement its influence in the Aegean.
Imperial expansions
At the turn of the second century BC, the Seleucid empire was the largest power in the eastern Mediterranean. Antiochus III himself had done much to augment the empire’s size and prestige during his 25-year reign. Self-styled as Antiochus the Great, he had spent years dashing across the known world dispatching rivals and seizing new lands. In 200 BC, he struck the Ptolemaic Kingdom, then in the midst of a major uprising, and claimed a sizable chunk of territory encompassing much of the Levant. So, as the Seleucid army marched west in 197 BC, he had good reason to feel confident of another spectacular victory.
At first, Antiochus’s forces advanced virtually unopposed, steamrolling the city-states and petty dynasts of the Anatolian interior as his navy swept across the southern coast and captured vital ports. That summer’s campaign concluded with a final, glorious victory when Antiochus captured the ancient and strategically vital city of Ephesus in south-west Asia Minor. As the army wintered in the city and its hinterland, Antiochus and his generals made plans to strike north in the new year and complete their expedition.
Most coastal settlements in Asia Minor waited anxiously for the Seleucid hammer-blow to fall, and were prepared to surrender without a fight. A few brave cities, however, took the bold decision to resist Seleucid domination – most notably the great commercial centres of Smyrna (now İzmir) and Lampsacus on the Dardanelles. Knowing that they had little prospect of survival on their own, they turned to the other great power of the region for support, dispatching embassies to secure Roman guarantees for their independence.
- Read more | It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – so why was it destroyed three times?
Unfortunately for the Smyrnaean and Lampsacene ambassadors, diplomacy in the Mediterranean in the early second century BC was usually improvised and ad hoc, and it was difficult to discern exactly whom they should petition for Roman support. The circuitous journey of the Lampsacene ambassador, Hegesias, has been preserved in a public inscription erected by the citizens of the city to thank him for his efforts. First, Hegesias sailed to mainland Greece and spoke to Rome’s naval commander in the region, who responded with encouraging but vague assurances of support.
He then ventured to Massilia (modern Marseille) – a prosperous Greek colony that was one of Rome’s closest and most loyal allies – where he successfully petitioned the city assembly to help him contact the Senate. Then, with a group of Massiliote advisors in tow, Hegesias travelled to Rome and received an audience with the Senate, which promised to make provisions for Lampsacus in any agreement it reached with Antiochus. On the way home, he made one final stop in Corinth, where he met with the principal Roman official in Greece, Flamininus, and beseeched him to protect Lampsacus’s welfare.
In 196 BC, partly as a result of these panicked embassies, the Roman Senate decided to make a bold declaration. As Antiochus was pressing north and moving to complete his conquest of Asia Minor, the Senate proclaimed that “all of the Greeks in Asia Minor and Europe should be free and self-governing”. The official purpose of this decree was to formally dismantle Macedonian control over the Aegean, and to establish a new status quo in which the autonomy of the Greek city-states was guaranteed by Rome. In reality, however, it was clearly intended as a challenge to Antiochus III, whose expedition aimed to bring these cities under Seleucid control. This is made clear by the text of the decree, which explicitly mentions several cities that had already been taken by Antiochus the previous year.
A roar of cheers
Rome reaffirmed this declaration later that year at the Isthmian games, an important Panhellenic festival held near the city of Corinth. The Greek historian Polybius described how, with “the most distinguished men from almost the whole world” in attendance, Flamininus announced that Rome would withdraw its armies from Greece, leaving the cities “without garrisons and subject to no tribute”. At this, the crowd erupted in ecstasy, letting out “such a mighty roar of cheers… that those who listen to the story now could hardly imagine it” and almost killing Flamininus as they showered him with crowns and ceremonial diadems. For the Greeks, the Roman proclamation felt like the end of a nightmare that had begun when Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II of Macedon, had subjugated them almost 150 years ago.
For the Romans, the declaration – and the theatrical way it was presented to the Greeks by Flamininus – was a masterstroke that established them as the protectors of Greece and cast Antiochus as an oppressive tyrant who threatened to extinguish the cities’ newfound freedom. It had also immediately created a network of grateful allies in Greece whose infrastructure, manpower and support were more strategically useful (and cheaper) than a permanent Roman garrison.
European ambitions
Yet even as Rome’s propaganda war began to bear fruit, Antiochus was pressing on with his campaign, seeking to create facts on the ground that would be difficult for Rome to challenge through diplomatic manoeuvring. Striking north from Ephesus, he crossed the Dardanelles and marched into Europe. His first act was to restore the Thracian city of Lysimachia, which had recently been destroyed by Rome’s allies during the war against Macedon, and establish it as his primary base in the region. Rebuilding Lysimachia was a clear declaration to Rome that Antiochus intended to remain in Europe and would not meekly accept the diktats of the Roman Senate.
Rome then sent an embassy to Lysimachia to treat directly with Antiochus in a semi-public diplomatic exchange. The Roman case was simple: Antiochus should withdraw from the cities he had taken – which had been open to conquest only because Rome had defeated Philip V – and stop threatening Roman security by pushing into Europe.
According to Polybius, Antiochus contended that the territory had been rightful Seleucid soil since Seleucus I conquered it decades earlier. As such, Antiochus was not “taking them [the Greek cities] by exploiting Philip’s difficulties, but retaking them in accordance with his rights”. Antiochus also refused to engage the Romans in a performative contest over who was the true ‘liberator’ of Greece. Though in theory he did not object to autonomy for the cities of Asia Minor, he argued that it was his gift to bestow, not the Romans’. As such, he deftly recast ‘freedom’ not as an absolute right granted by the Romans but a privilege that only he could afford to the cities under his control.
- Read more | Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence
Antiochus’s intransigence left Rome in a diplomatic and strategic bind. To declare war would be both a naked act of aggression and an unwelcome new drain on the Republic’s resources. On the other hand, if Rome did not declare war, it would have little choice but to honour its promise and withdraw its forces from the Aegean, leaving it open to further Seleucid attacks.
In the short term, Rome resolved this dilemma by declaring war on Sparta. The city’s new king, Nabis, had been aggressively reasserting Sparta’s position in southern Greece, and Rome’s allies in the region had been asking Flamininus to intervene for some time. The war provided a convenient pretext for Rome to keep its army in the region for another season of campaigning without breaking the commitments it had made at the Isthmian games. However, it did not resolve the deeper strategic problems posed by Antiochus.
Hannibal bites back
In 195 BC, an explosive new factor disrupted the delicate diplomatic balance. Exiled from his native Carthage, Rome’s most feared enemy, Hannibal, had made the long journey across the Mediterranean to the court of Antiochus III, where he offered his services. Though Antiochus received Hannibal with little more than respectful courtesy and gave him no major land commands, the news provoked horror among the Roman people, who feared that Hannibal was poised to harry Italy again with a Seleucid army at his back. Over the following two years, the Romans made military plans to defend Sicily and Italy from a potential invasion (though in hindsight such a scenario was highly unlikely).
While some feared that the return of Hannibal would coerce Rome into maintaining its garrison in Greece, the Senate decided to fulfil its promise and withdraw the legions. That said, Rome continued to make its presence felt in the Aegean by establishing itself as a local mediator and guarantor of civic autonomy.
These interventions did not respect the boundaries of Antiochus’s empire. For instance, a 194/193 BC inscription from the city of Teos on the Ionian coast, then firmly under Antiochus’s control, notes that the Romans officially granted the city exemption from tribute during this period. The Romans euphemistically described these activities as “making friendships”, but Antiochus understood them as a grave threat: they compromised the monopoly on generosity that underpinned Seleucid royal ideology.
That winter, Antiochus sent envoys to Rome in a last-ditch attempt to reach an accord. The discussions followed the same pattern as before, with the Romans (led by Flamininus) insisting that Antiochus evacuate Europe and confine himself to Asia, and Antiochus claiming that Thrace was historic Seleucid territory that he could not abandon. Flamininus, ever the showman, then took the discussion public, delivering a speech affirming that Rome would use force to keep Antiochus out of Europe if he refused their demands.
By this stage, it was becoming clear that only outright war could break the deadlock. On the way back to Antiochus’s court, the nonplussed Seleucid ambassadors paid a visit to the Aetolian League, an alliance of Greek cities that had been Rome’s allies in the war against Philip V but which had been disappointed by the terms of the subsequent peace settlement. Encouraged by the prospect of Seleucid support, the Aetolians put out diplomatic feelers to neighbours in an effort to build an anti-Roman coalition of Greek states. When this proved mostly unsuccessful, the Aetolians began attacking surrounding cities, bringing them into direct conflict with the nearby Achaean League, loyal allies of Rome.
The Aetolians lost on most fronts but were able to seize Demetrias, a strategically vital fortress-city in Thessaly, and invited Antiochus to occupy it as his new base in Europe. Recognising that war was now inevitable, Antiochus decided that he could not waste the opportunity, and dispatched his army to Demetrias. For Rome, this further incursion into Europe was impossible to ignore, and legions began swarming back across the Adriatic to meet Antiochus. The ‘cold war’ was over, and the real struggle for the Aegean had begun.
Rome and its coalition of allies outnumbered even Antiochus’s enormous war host, an imbalance that only worsened when Philip V of Macedon entered the war against him. Hoping to negate this disadvantage, in 191 BC Antiochus chose to meet the Romans at Thermopylae, the narrow, highly defensible pass where Leonidas I of Sparta had made his heroic stand against the Persian empire almost 300 years earlier. After resisting several waves of Roman attacks, the Seleucid force was ambushed by a flanking manoeuvre through the surrounding heights. Antiochus’s army disintegrated and he was forced to scurry across the Aegean back to Asia Minor and regather his forces. The Roman legions pursued and ultimately defeated him in a decisive battle near the city of Magnesia.
Antiochus was compelled to sign a humiliating peace agreement, the Treaty of Apamea, which stripped his empire of its territories west of the Taurus Mountains and parcelled them out to Roman allies. Even more ruinously, the treaty forced the empire to pay a crippling annual indemnity to Rome amounting to perhaps 10 per cent of the Seleucids’ revenues. The resulting financial crisis drove the Seleucids to squeeze new revenues from their beleaguered subjects, prompting waves of rebellions and political instability.
Antiochus himself was killed by an angry mob while looting the temples of Elam in south-west Iran – an astonishingly grubby end. A few decades later, Seleucid attempts to extract money from the city of Jerusalem and its rich temple prompted the uprising known as the Maccabean Revolt – the context for the story of Hanukkah, still commemorated by Jews today.
As the Seleucid empire entered into a death spiral and disintegrated over the following decades, Rome continued to push east. The Republic used the same diplomatic toolkit it had deployed against Antiochus as it spread its influence: guaranteeing the autonomy of its allies, establishing itself as the arbiter of local disputes, and threatening potential rivals with overwhelming punishment. It was by these methods, as much as through military force, that Rome finally established itself as sole master of the Mediterranean world.
Michael Economou is a historian and author
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Was the story of Jesus inspired by Emperor Augustus? The clever trick early Christians used to convert ancient Rome]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/was-the-story-of-jesus-based-on-emperor-augustus/ 2026-10-16T15:01:03.000Z 2026-10-16T15:00:46.000Z It’s an ancient story. A child is set to become a king. But when those in power learn of his coming, they attempt to orchestrate his death. The child escapes, his future greatness apparently beyond the reach of those who would rather see him dead.
This is a narrative arc that, of course, harkens to Herod’s attempt to kill the infant Jesus. But it’s also the origin story of Rome’s first – and arguably greatest – emperor: Augustus.
For classicist Tim Whitmarsh, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, this resemblance is resonant enough that it could be deemed intentional. If the early Christians could present Jesus as a figure comparable to Augustus, would that help them to explain why the religious figurehead was worth replacing the old Roman gods with? It’s an argument that relates specifically to how Jesus was described and understood, rather than comparing the two men’s life biographies.
“Augustus and Jesus are clearly very different figures in terms of their backgrounds and in terms of the message that they're projecting,” he says. “But I think the way in which Jesus was, if you like, ‘packaged’ in the first century was designed to gel with elements of Roman propaganda around the figure of Augustus himself.
A new order rooted in the past
Augustus was born in Rome in 63 BC, roughly six decades before Jesus. Originally named Gaius Octavius, he rose to power during the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. In 27 BC, he received the title Augustus, marking the conventional beginning of his reign as Rome’s first emperor. He ruled until AD 14.
In the context of the traditions and norms of the Roman Republic, this was a move that required some PR. Romans associated kingship with tyranny, and their Republic had traditionally distributed authority among magistrates and the Senate. Augustus concentrated power in his own hands while presenting himself as the restorer of established institutions.
“Augustus creates this paradoxical relationship with the past, whereby the Roman Republic is both fulfilled in the figure of Augustus, who's returning to the Republic, but also in a sense radically changed by it,” Whitmarsh explains.
“So you've got this sense of simultaneously re-rooting the Roman Empire in tradition but also transforming it.”
The Christian claim about Jesus had a comparable structure. His followers understood him through Jewish scripture and expectations, while proclaiming that his life, death and resurrection had brought something new: an expansion on the past, while still seeking to derive validation from it. Both the Roman Empire and the new Christian religion rooted themselves in one transformative individual who sought legitimacy, in some regard, from an older, respected past.
- Read more | “The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
Birth stories with striking parallels
This narrative work begins with the birth stories. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written in the first century AD, describe Jesus’s beginnings through divine announcements and a prophetic fulfilment of his future significance.
“There are surprisingly similar stories told about Augustus,” says Whitmarsh.
In his Life of Augustus, the Roman biographer Suetonius reports on a portent that announced that a king would be born for the Roman people. The alarmed Senate decreed that no male child born that year should be allowed to live. However, senators with pregnant wives prevented the decree from being formally registered: each hoped that the predicted ruler might be his own son.
- Read more | A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
Now think back to the stories of the Bible. In Matthew’s account, Herod, Rome’s client king in Judaea, learns that a child has been born who is described as king of the Jews. He orders the killing of boys aged two and under in Bethlehem and its surroundings. Jesus survives because Joseph, warned in a dream, takes him and Mary to Egypt.
“[Augustus’s birth story] is so eerily close to the story in Matthew of the Massacre of the Innocents that it seems to me unlikely that the Massacre of the Innocents was not, in a sense, reflecting on that.”
The imperial language of “good news”
Another link between the two figures’ narratives is an inscription linking Augustus’s birthday to the beginning of the year.
In 9 BC, the Roman governor of Asia, Paullus Fabius Maximus, proposed a calendar reform adopted by the province’s Greek cities. Asia here means the Roman province in western modern-day Turkey.
Under the arrangement, the year would begin on 23 September, Augustus’s birthday. Copies of the relevant texts survive from several places, most famously Priene. They show how provincial institutions incorporated loyalty to the Roman emperor into the organisation of everyday life as a symbol and method of devotion.
The accompanying praise presented Augustus as a saviour who had ended war and brought order. His birthday marked the beginning of benefits for the world, expressed through the Greek word euangelia: “good news”.
“This euangelia is taken up by Christians to mark the Gospel.”
Mark begins his account by announcing the “good news” of Jesus Christ. Paul’s earlier letters also use this language.
Jewish culture also plays an interconnected role here. In Jewish scripture, Isaiah describes the announcement of good news concerning God’s deliverance of his people. Greek versions of those scriptures gave early Christians a vocabulary through which to express their hopes.
Early Christians seem to have been drawing from the Jewish roots of their religion, while also referencing the history of Roman imperial rule. These dual origins shouldn’t be surprising – Christianity explicitly emerged from Jewish life within a Roman imperial world.
So for Whitmarsh, the evidence suggests that the early Christians were consciously adapting Jesus’s story to align with familiar archetypes of authority, even if the details of their claims differed profoundly from those made for Augustus.
- Read more | From secret cults to Christianity, how did ancient Roman religion change so dramatically?
“We're not being told that Jesus is Augustus,” he says, “but they're using the same language and the same tropes, if you like, to establish Jesus as a radically new figure who also roots us in the past.”
Tim Whitmarsh was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Ancient Rome's founding fathers: the extraordinary stories of the city's first kings]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/ancient-romes-founding-fathers-the-extraordinary-stories-of-the-citys-first-kings/ 2026-10-09T13:18:38.000Z 2026-10-09T13:15:37.000Z According to the ancient Roman tradition, the city of Rome began with a king who was raised by a wolf after being abandoned by the gods. This line of monarchs would end with a ruler remembered chiefly for his arrogance and abuse of power.
Between Romulus – the first mythical king – and Tarquinius Superbus – the last – stood five other kings, each associated with a particular contribution to Roman life. Together, their reigns explained how a settlement beside the River Tiber acquired the institutions of a state that would grow to become the mighty Roman Republic.
But were these men historical figures, or characters created to account for developments whose origins had been forgotten?
Ancient historian Christopher Smith, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that binary is too restrictive.
“Is it a myth? Is it a legend? Or is it some sort of reflection of reality which isn't correct, but is telling us some quite important truths?”
The problem of the missing centuries
The traditional chronology places Rome’s foundation in 753 BC, in central Italy, long before its armies controlled the Mediterranean.
“In the Roman account, the first king is in the middle of the 8th century BC – that's Romulus – and the last king is expelled from Rome in 509 BC,” Smith explains.
But there is a huge distance between those supposed events and the historians who described them.
“The first Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, does not write until 200 BC. And I've just been talking about the period from 750 to 500 BC. So, there's a gap.”
Writing around the end of the third century BC, Pictor looked back roughly three centuries to the monarchy’s traditional end, and more than five to its beginning. And to further complicate the picture, his history survives only in fragments and references by later authors.
Smith contrasts this with Greek historians who could investigate events within living memory. Thucydides, for example, participated in the fifth-century BC war between Athens and Sparta that became the subject of his work.
- Read more | 2,200 years ago Rome got caught in the Thucydides Trap. The result transformed the ancient world
Roman accounts of the kings had no comparable proximity. The fullest surviving narratives, including Livy’s history, were written later still. Nevertheless, the royal sequence has a recognisable structure.
The first three Roman kings?
“Romulus is number one,” Smith says. “He has a miraculous birth, gets rid of his twin, takes over, and he founds a lot of the military and political apparatus of Rome.”
In the familiar legend, Romulus and Remus are abandoned twins who survive through the intervention of a she-wolf, who they suckle from. Their eventual dispute leaves Remus dead and Romulus the founder of the new city. The story associates Rome’s beginnings with both political creation and violence. But a functioning community requires more than a founder and an army.
“So the next king, Numa Pompilius, comes in and he teaches the Romans about religion,” Smith explains. “So you've got statecraft with Romulus. You've then got religion with Numa Pompilius.”
Religion here meant public responsibilities as well as personal belief: priesthoods, ceremonies and the correct relationship between the community and its gods.
- Read more | Ancient Roman culture would be baffling to modern eyes – and their toilet habits prove it
The third king, Tullus Hostilius, shifts attention back towards conflict.
“Tullus Hostilius is predominantly associated with military activity and the conquest of territory.”
Read in sequence, these reigns give separate – but, crucially, intertwined – identities to processes that any growing city might experience: establishing authority, organising worship and extending control over its neighbours. Whether those processes actually belonged to three identifiable rulers – or whether those rulers are symbolic personifications of those processes – is another question.
Outsiders and a changing city
The fourth king, Ancus Marcius, combines qualities assigned to his predecessors.
“He's quite pious, he looks after military affairs. He's quite sane and stable,” Smith says.
Then the narrative introduces an outsider: Tarquinius Priscus, also called Tarquin the Elder.
“He comes from Etruria, north of the Tiber River. He's a new person to arrive, and he is a builder. There's an awful lot of building work that happens under his reign.”
- Read more | What have the Etruscans ever done for us?
Etruria lay principally in what is now Tuscany, Umbria and northern Lazio. Its cities belonged to a prosperous society with extensive Mediterranean connections, skilled craftspeople and monumental religious buildings. Rome developed alongside this influential neighbour.
Tarquin’s foreign origin therefore raises useful historical questions. Could the story reflect the movement of powerful families between cities, or Rome’s absorption of outside skills and leadership? Either way, Tarquin’s role in this mythology presents the city’s development as something involving newcomers, rather than an entirely self-contained achievement.
Roman Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy
Member exclusive | In this four-week course, discover everything you need to know about Roman Britain, guided by Rob Collins, professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University. Explore the course now
Reform followed by tyranny
Servius Tullius, the sixth king “seems another kind of intruder into the story,” Smith explains. “He's not related to anybody, but he turns out to be one of the most inventive kings.”
The tradition credits him with reorganising the population and its civic obligations.
“So he resets the constitution. Allegedly, he does a whole load of founding [of institutions]. He reorganises the city.” The constitution, here, refers to arrangements governing political participation and public duties, rather than a single written document. Reforms attributed to Servius connected wealth, military service and citizens’ place within the state.
- Read more | 10 key Roman dates you need to know
The final king provides the narrative’s reversal. Tarquinius Superbus removes Servius and takes power, before being expelled himself.
“Clue's in the name: ‘Superbus’, meaning proud,” Smith observes.
His overthrow explains the emergence of the republic: government through public offices rather than kingship. The sequence thus accounts for both the creation of royal authority and the justification for ending it. But how much of this story is actually true?
What the buildings can tell us
Archaeology offers an independent way to examine the setting of these stories.
On Rome’s Capitoline Hill, substantial foundations survive from the sixth-century BC Temple of Jupiter, a sanctuary also dedicated to Juno and Minerva. Roman tradition associated its construction with the Tarquins. A project of this size required resources, labour and coordination. It supports the picture of an early Rome capable of major collective building.
But it doesn’t independently verify who commissioned it. That is where Smith locates the “middle ground” between fact and mythology.
Even if these traditions didn’t stem from individual kings, we can still infer some things about the societies that produced them. Their stories may combine inherited memories, explanations of existing institutions and later judgements about good and bad government.
“What’s exciting about the Roman king narrative,” Smith concludes, “is that it distils an awful lot that's going on in an archaic society into a narrative form.” And that narrative form is “a really important way in which the Romans told a story: their origin, their expansion, and how power worked”.
Christopher Smith was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[These are the 12 most underrated Roman sites in the world – how many have you visited?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-the-12-most-underrated-roman-sites-in-the-world-how-many-have-you-visited/ 2026-10-04T18:31:03.000Z 2026-10-04T18:30:25.000Z The Mediterranean world is full of Roman structures, but it can often feel like the best sites are so overrun by tourists that it is impossible to appreciate their beauty and historical importance. So here we’ve rounded up 12 Roman sites that contain spectacular remains but few, if any, tourists.
1. Volubilis, Morocco
Located 2.5 hours east of Rabat near the spot where Roman control of eastern Mauretania (modern North Morocco) ended and the Atlas Mountains began, Volubilis contains some of the most extensive Roman ruins in North Africa. Originally founded in the third century BC, Volubilis came under Roman control in the first century AD and remained a part of the empire through at least the third century AD.
Despite its remote location, native Berbers, Punic speakers of Phoenician background, Italian and Gallic soldiers, Greeks, and Christians all lived in this cosmopolitan city. So too did a substantial Jewish community that left behind the southwestern-most Hebrew inscriptions in the Roman world.
Visitors to the site can walk along the Decumanus (the town’s main east-west street), visit the six excavated temples, tour the three public baths, wander into mansions and villas decorated with brilliant floor mosaics, and experience what life was like in a multi-cultural urban environment at the empire’s edge that once housed 20,000 people.
The site is highlighted by a large triumphal arch dedicated to the emperor Caracalla in AD 217 and the decorated façade of a palace sometimes associated with the emperor Gordian III.
2. Italica, Spain
Game of Thrones fans have flooded the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Split that were featured in the show, but far fewer make the trip to Italica, the location of the Roman arena used for Westeros’s Dragon Pit.
Situated about 20 minutes outside of Sevilla, Italica was originally a veterans’ colony settled by Roman soldiers around 206 BC. Later, it was the birthplace of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. In the 120s and 130s AD, Hadrian rebuilt the city in spectacular style by constructing temples (including one honouring his predecessor and adoptive father Trajan), large public works, and an amphitheatre with enough seating for 25,000 people.
Visitors to the site can tour the extensive remains of Roman villas, complete with ornate floor mosaics, and then walk over to the amphitheatre. The structure itself is made mostly of masonry, with passageways, rows of seats, and a second level that visitors can explore.
3. Vienne, France
A little more than 20 minutes by train from Lyon lies the Roman city of Vienna (modern Vienne). Vienne was originally the political centre of a local Gallic tribe called the Allobroges, before being made into a Roman colony in the first century BC. The city now contains an almost entirely intact temple dedicated to the first Roman emperor Augustus and his wife Livia.
The temple remained in use until modern times, due first to its conversion into a church in the later Roman period and then its transformation into the local centre of the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution.
A short walk away from the temple is a beautiful park featuring a terraced Roman portico that joins the remains of the partially excavated Roman Forum and the walls of a late Roman administrative building. Next to the park is the Roman theatre, a structure dug out from the hillside in antiquity that is so well preserved that it still hosts concerts and performances.
Vienne’s local museum also holds a bronze statue of a local notable named Pacatianus, one of the very few surviving Roman bronzes that depicted someone who was neither a member of the imperial family nor a god. Its survival is due to the fact that it was shattered into more than 220 small pieces and buried in antiquity. These fragments were unearthed in the 19th century and reassembled in 1957.
4. Senlis, France
The charming French city of Senlis, located less than an hour outside of Paris, is so full of cobblestoned streets and medieval houses that it has been used as a set for more than 25 French films. But Senlis (which was known as Augustomagus in antiquity) also boasts two of the more remarkable Roman monuments in north-western Europe.
The first of these, a privately owned Roman amphitheatre that once seated as many as 10,000 spectators, was fully excavated in the 19th century, and has been caringly preserved by the Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Senlis.
Unlike many Roman amphitheatres in the Mediterranean, the Senlis arena also doubled as a theatrical performance space, an architectural peculiarity seen mostly in Roman Gaul. In the summer, its upper levels are filled with wildflowers and sustain a colony of bees that produce honey sold in the town under the Miel des Arènes de Senlis brand.
A little more than a 10-minute walk from the amphitheatre is the third-century AD city wall. The wall, which was made of white stone inlaid with beautiful red-brick rings and accents, was built both to protect the city from barbarian attacks and to advertise the prosperity that Roman control promised. Most of the original span still survives along with 16 of the original 30 Roman guard towers. Two of these towers were later incorporated into a castle built in the 12th century by the French king Louis VII that visitors can also tour.
5. Ostia Antica, Italy
Unless you arrive very early in the day, you will never really have the site of Ostia Antica fully to yourself, but the ancient city of Ostia (which may have once housed 100,000 people) is so large that it can often feel as if you do.
While not as celebrated as Pompeii or Herculaneum, Ostia contains ruins that are nearly as expansive and impressive as the Campanian cities buried by Mount Vesuvius. Ostia was once the main port of the city of Rome but gradually declined in the third and fourth centuries following the development of a new, more modern port under the emperor Trajan.
WATCH | Before the volcano: life in ancient Pompeii
View Green Video on the source website
It is possible to spend an entire day leisurely wandering the ruins of Ostia’s abandoned temples, private houses, restaurants, apartment buildings and commercial structures, and noticing the decorations in taverns, the mosaics on the floor of a bath, or the personal toilet tucked underneath the stairs of a private home.
Few sites offer you a better, less crowded way to see the spaces in which ordinary urban Romans lived their lives – and no other such site is only a 30-minute local train ride away from the capital.
6. Parco Regionale dell’Appia Antica, Rome, Italy
The Appian Way was built in the 310s BC by the Roman senator Appius Claudius Caecus (Appius Claudius the Blind) and is the most famous ancient Roman road.
The road begins in the centre of the ancient city, just east of the spot where the Palatine Hill and imperial palace join the Circus Maximus. For its first 2 kilometres, the Appian Way runs within the ancient city walls, taking you past the Baths of Caracalla, the family tomb of the Scipiones, and the Arch of Drusus.
The road then passes through Rome’s third-century AD Aurelian Walls at the Porta San Sebastiano, a 30-metre-tall gate with two towers that forms part of the Museo delle Mura (the Museum of the Walls). The museum allows visitors to walk the passageways within the walls that ancient soldiers used and to enjoy a panoramic view of the Appian Way and Roman countryside from atop the towers of the gate.
Traveling another 2.5 kilometres down the Appian Way brings you to the catacombs of St Callixtus, a richly decorated underground burial spot housing the remains of nine early popes.
Across the street from the catacombs is a complex of brick buildings constructed by the emperor Maxentius in the early 310s AD. It includes a palace, a mausoleum built for his son and family members, and a full-size Roman circus that once seated as many as 10,000 people. Most of the grandstands remain intact and extend in a horseshoe around the racecourse’s 520-metre length. In the summer, the racetrack is filled with blooming wildflowers.
Motorised vehicles are largely banned for the 8 kilometres of the Appian Way beyond the Circus. This transforms the road back into something approaching its ancient form and allows you to walk on ancient Roman paving stones through beautiful countryside surrounded by ancient sculptures, inscriptions, temples, villas and monumental family tombs. In the autumn and winter, your only company may be the goats who help keep the road’s shoulder from being overgrown with weeds.
- Read more | “Roman roads turn up so often” | Catherine Fletcher on what the Romans did for European transport networks
7. Felix Romuliana, Serbia
Located just over 200km from both the Serbian capital of Belgrade and the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, this fortified imperial palace was built by the emperor Galerius (ruled AD 305–311) and named after his mother, Romula.
An architectural contemporary of the famous palace that the emperor Diocletian built in the Croatian city of Split at roughly the same time, Galerius’s 10-acre compound is surrounded by walls and 20 stunning fortification towers built with alternating layers of red and black bricks.
After entering the gates, visitors find the remains of two temples, two palatial residential structures and a long corridor decorated with expertly created mosaics depicting gods and mythological scenes.
Just beyond the walls are two mounds that contain the tombs of Galerius and Romula, both of whom were deified following their deaths. Although the northern palace building has yet to be excavated, archaeologists working on the south part of the site have yielded an extraordinary array of statues, coins and inscriptions.
8. Aphrodisias, Turkey
Many travellers seek out the Roman ruins along Turkey’s Aegean coast at sites like Ephesus, but few venture the additional 150 kilometres inland to the equally extensive and better-preserved remains of Aphrodisias, the ancient capital of the Roman province of Caria.
The Aphrodisias archaeological site includes a four-sided monumental gateway, multiple temples and many private homes as well as a theatre, marketplace, bath complex and the chamber in which the town council met.
The site also contains one of the most complete stadiums in the Roman world, a mammoth running track extending for nearly 300 metres and surrounded on all sides by up to 30 rows of seats. Its capacity was (and still is) around 30,000 people.
Many of these remains are in such good condition that visitors can view the finely carved sculptures and inscriptions decorating the ancient city’s columns, archways and exterior walls. The local museum holds even more impressive statues and friezes in its public collection.
9. Qal’at Sem’an and the Dead Cities of Northern Syria
Between AD 300 and 700, the highlands separating the modern Turkish city of Antakya (ancient Antioch) and the Syrian city of Aleppo contained scores of prosperous villages that grew rich from their olive groves and vineyards.
Climate change and political upheaval led to the collapse and abandonment of these towns (which have come to be called the Dead Cities of Northern Syria) in the early Middle Ages, but the later Roman stonemasons who lived in the region were so skilled that many of the structures they built still survive almost entirely intact aside from their roofs and wooden support beams.
People travelling through these hills can see the remains of townhouses, inns and hundreds of abandoned Christian churches, but the area’s most important monument is the later fifth-century cathedral built to honour Saint Simeon Stylites.
Simeon was a Syrian monk who spent more than 30 years perched atop a large stone pillar he had erected on a mountain outside of Antioch. Soon after Simeon died in AD 459, the Roman emperor Zeno hired four teams of masons to build what was then the world’s largest church.
It was made up of four basilicas, each built in slightly different styles, that were arranged so that they formed the four arms of a cross. They are connected by an octagonal, domed space that enclosed Simeon’s pillar.
The remains of Simeon’s pillar and the central part of the church sustained major damage in airstrikes during the recent Syrian civil war, but the side basilicas and significant portions of the complex of monasteries and pilgrims’ hostels located below the church still remain.
10. Beit She'an, Israel
First settled around 5000 BC, modern Beit She’an is one of the oldest settlements in the Jordan River Valley. In the Roman period, it was known as Scythopolis and served as the capital of the late Roman province Palaestina Secunda from the later fourth through the seventh centuries.
Once home to a population of 40,000 Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, the site includes a spectacular array of Roman remains. Separate from the main archaeological park is a Roman amphitheatre that still has visible traces of the plaster forest scenes that once decorated the walls enclosing its arena floor.
The excavated city centre contains a theatre, a bath complex, sacred buildings and colonnaded streets lined with the brilliant mosaic floors that once decorated its shops and public buildings. The site is immense and 120 metres below sea level so visitors should take precautions against the heat if visiting in the summer.
11. Hegra, Saudi Arabia
Originally developed by Nabataeans whose ingenious ability to channel and store scarce rainwater enabled them to build large cities in the middle of the desert, Hegra came under Roman control following the empire’s absorption of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106.
By that time, Hegra already contained more than 130 ornate tombs carved from the red desert sandstone.
Hegra’s structures are reminiscent of the much better-known rock-hewn structures in the old Nabatean capital of Petra, but many of the tombs in Hegra are larger and better preserved than those in Petra. In many cases, recognisable human faces, birds, and mythological creatures are still visible.
Although surviving inscriptions suggest that Hegra had a substantial population at least until it slipped from Roman control around the turn of the fourth century, there have not yet been large-scale archaeological excavations of the city’s residential districts.
But, because no Greek or Latin inscriptions have been found south of Hegra, it is likely that the city was the last major settlement before you reached the border of Roman Arabia.
12. Taposiris Magna, Egypt
Taposiris Magna (which is located about 45 kilometres west of Alexandria) was once a bustling port city that linked the Mediterranean to the Nile via the large freshwater Lake Mareotis.
Most of the city remains unexcavated, but two important monuments sit on a large bluff that separates the lake from the sea.
On the west side stands the remains of a huge temple that once honoured the Egyptian god Osiris. Initially constructed by the Ptolemaic leaders of Egypt during the Hellenistic period, the current complex dates to the late third century AD and included a barracks within the temple enclosure. A church was added later in the fourth century.
To the east of the temple is a 30-metre-tall scale model of the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, an architectural and engineering marvel that fell into the sea following an earthquake in 1303. This left Taposiris Magna’s lighthouse as the only surviving architectural representation of what was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Because some have speculated that Cleopatra and Mark Antony may have been buried at Taposiris Magna, general access to the site is limited. It is possible, however, to tour it using local guides.
Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. His latest book is The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (Basic Books, 2025)
]]> Emily Briffett <![CDATA[Roman kings: myth, memory and the making of power]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/roman-kings-myth-memory-and-the-making-of-power/ 2026-09-07T14:04:47.000Z 2026-09-04T11:49:23.000Z Before Rome's republic and the age of emperors, there were kings… or so the story goes. Beginning with Romulus, and ending with Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, these rulers loomed large in the Roman imagination – but is their narrative fact or fiction?
In this episode, Emily Briffett is joined by ancient historian Christopher Smith, as they sift myth from memory, and uncover how seven legendary figures shaped Rome’s ideas of power and identity.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Could you have survived in ancient Rome? (Probably not for very long, according to our expert)]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/could-you-have-survived-in-ancient-rome-probably-not-for-very-long-according-to-our-expert/ 2026-08-30T14:31:03.000Z 2026-08-30T14:30:59.000Z When we think of ancient Rome, perhaps we imagine strolling through well-ordered cities or lounging in a brightly-coloured house, sipping fine Italian wine – a kind of ancient dolce vita.
What we tend not to imagine is working from dawn to dusk, carefully counting every penny, juggling three jobs while trying to keep the debt collectors at bay.
These may seem like modern worries, but these problems kept ordinary Romans up at night as well. Getting by under the Roman empire was more complicated than we have assumed.
So, if you found yourself transported back to ancient Rome, here are some hacks to get by.
Be a farmer
Farming was the most common occupation – and the most prestigious. Today, farming is a minority occupation in most industrialised worlds, but not so in ancient Rome.
Estimates suggest 70-80 per cent of the population were farmers, and most of those were small farmers working modest plots.
But if you were a Roman farmer, even with a small amount of land, you were not a stereotypical peasant. Roman farmers survived by selling small surpluses of wine, hay, pork, even apples or dates, to their neighbours or to their comrades in cities.
Farming meant tracking fluctuating prices; it meant borrowing during the winter to (hopefully) pay it back in the autumn; and it meant figuring out how to squeeze every last sestertius out of every inch of land.
So while you would definitely want to be a farmer, you should set aside any dreams of living happily farm-to-table. Just like small farmers today, you would have to be a savvy operator, worrying over crop prices, juggling your debts against your sales, and weighing the risks of growing something you could sell for a high price – wine, peaches, even mustard – with something you could eat.
- Read more | Could today’s kids survive in ancient Rome? Here’s the harsh reality of life as a Roman child
Study maths
Surviving in the Roman world, even for farmers, meant doing sums. Thousands of ordinary Romans’ accounts, including tax bills, expenses and land leases, are preserved on wooden tablets, papyri, even scratched on walls.
They describe a world where all kinds of people had to do maths regularly. Unlike the Middle Ages the Roman world was awash with coins; everything had a price in money and true barter was probably pretty rare. But that meant you needed to do maths all the time.
So if your taxes were based on a percentage of your crop yields, and an estimate of the quality and quantity of your land, you had to run the maths.
If you had to decide whether it made better financial sense to rent a plot of land and farm or work for wages on someone else’s land, you had to run the maths. Keeping track of expenses, hours worked, taxes owed, loans made and taken, all these required constant maths.
Luckily for you, that maths wasn’t terribly complicated, nor did it necessarily mean you could read and write. Romans had a sophisticated finger-counting system that allowed them to do sums, even calculate interest, on their hands. They had a basic abacus that did the same.
And even if you couldn’t read Virgil, you might know your letters and your numbers and so keep some basic accounts – full of misspelled words, but precise to the quarter of a sestertius.
Do five jobs
In ancient Rome, it was almost impossible to make ends meet with wages alone. Just like in many countries today unskilled wages were not enough to live on, either for an individual and definitely not for a family. Potters, miners, shipbuilders, even farmers, often struggled to earn enough to make it to the end of the month.
So if you wanted to get by on wages, you needed to hustle. For example, a butcher might have a side gig selling hay; you might work as a potter in one season and a farmer in another; women would spin wool by the ounce and sell animal feed while lending money to their neighbours.
Families would also put their children to work to earn a few coins, such as sweeping leaves or hauling water. Pooling all these sources of income allowed Roman families to buy enough to eat, pay down their debts and sometimes set some money aside.
- Read more | Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again
Spend to play
Romans loved things. Anyone who has been to an archaeological museum holding Roman-era discoveries will no doubt have been amazed by the number of things even ordinary Romans owned. Things like perfume and earrings, children’s toys, and shoes and clothes in every conceivable cut and colour.
But like us, Romans didn’t just love things, they lived in a world where you had to have the right things in order to fit in, to participate in society. For us, being able to function in society requires several sets of clothes and shoes, a bag to carry your things, pictures on your walls, a mobile phone.
Romans, even poor and working Romans, also needed to have a surprising range of things in order to fit into their world – multiple tunics, several pairs of shoes, some basic jewellery, a range of plates and glasses, metal tools and glass lamps.
Even farmers bought a whole range of goods, while city dwellers, in order to fit into their complicated, bustling society, needed even more. In other words, Romans need to spend to play: consumer goods were not a luxury, but a necessity.
The result was an expensive world, where the cost of living didn’t just include enough bread to eat and a roof over your head, but a whole range of other things that meant the difference between having friends and a job or being a social outcast.
So, if you arrived in the Roman world, be prepared to shop. And to watch your meagre earnings get eaten up by a world of things.
Be prepared to sell anything
But don’t despair if you’ve spent all your income on shoes and perfume. All that stuff you own didn’t so much as use up your money as change its form. And when times get particularly tough, you could sell or pawn your stuff for cash.
The used clothing and goods market was huge in the Roman world and everything had a price. Pawnbrokers’ accounts reveal women, who were the custodians of a household’s things, pawning everything from their jewellery to kitchen pots for a bit of cash, often at month’s end or during the hungry months before the harvest.
And if you ran out of things to sell, you could always sell your body – or those of your family members. If you’d just given birth, you could rent out your body as a wet nurse. If you had younger brothers or sisters, you might lease them out to work for others, both pocketing their wages and saving on feeding them. One particularly harsh set of accounts find a father leasing out his six-year-old daughter to work in a mill for many years, just to pay the interest on a loan.
While some surviving letters from the army camps describe a family of army suppliers who bought and resold small amounts of fish, vegetables, and perhaps their female family members, to the army garrisons. Selling out your daughters as prostitutes was one particularly brutal solution in a world where wages were low and everything had a price.
Have a high tolerance for pain
Finally, if you were an ordinary Roman doing manual labour you had better be prepared to do a lot of it. Skeletons from Roman-period cemeteries show signs of unremitting, body-breaking work, far more than people who lived in other societies.
These remains have signs of osteoarthritis, inflammation around the joints, herniated discs, and lots and lots of broken bones. Growing surplus crops to sell on the market and working multiple other jobs on the side took a huge toll on the body.
Working in the now-huge craft industries, such as dyeing clothes, making bricks and shaping metal, were particularly punishing on the bones as well as your muscles thanks to the repeated actions of washing, pounding and hammering.
Now, your life wouldn’t have been very long if you lived in ancient Rome, with an average life expectancy of around 25-30 years old, even less for women who had to do the most dangerous job of all – childbirth.
But even as a 20-year-old, your hard-working body would start to resemble the body of a 60-or 70-year-old today with arthritis in your hands, swollen joints in your knees, and an ever-aching back.
So if you think that life in ancient Rome was easy, think again. Most people, probably a good 90 per cent, had hard, complicated and above all short lives. They juggled, hustled and worked their bodies to the bone. Surviving in their brutal, complex world meant hard choices – about what to buy, when to sell, and how to deploy all your resources, even your children.
Kim Bowes is professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton University Press, 2026)
]]> Mike Soutar <![CDATA[Zenobia: The queen who challenged the Roman empire]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/zenobia-the-queen-who-challenged-the-roman-empire/ 2026-08-25T10:19:10.000Z 2026-08-24T10:18:55.000Z She may not be well known to us today, but Zenobia – who was queen of what’s now Syria in the third century BC – definitely deserves to be. That’s because she took on the might of the Roman empire and, for a short time at least, emerged victorious.
So how did she succeed where so many others failed? Was she a skilled leader, or merely an opportunist taking advantage of her opponent’s weakened circumstances?
In this episode, historian and author Shushma Malik talks to Mike Soutar about the remarkable story of this forgotten female leader – and whether her eventual downfall can offer any lessons about the dangers of aiming too high.
Watch below or listen to the full interview, ad-free:
View Green Video on the source website
For more on the life and legacy of Zenobia, don’t miss our curated collection of articles, podcasts and videos
]]>