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Roman state existed for nearly thirteen centuries, repeatedly exerting a profound influence on the course of history. I present the history of ancient Rome in the individual articles below, which not always refer solely to the Eternal City itself but encompass the wider world of the Roman Empire.
I encourage you to submit your own articles and to report any corrections or factual inaccuracies.
In 451, one of the bloodiest battles of antiquity took place. The Huns, Romans, and Visigoths clashed on the Catalaunian Plains. A year after this battle, the fearless Attila invaded Italy but retreated across the Danube, where he soon died, allowing Rome to breathe a sigh of relief. To whom does the Empire owe its salvation? General Aetius? Emperor Marcian? Or perhaps Pope Leo? Who truly stopped Attila?
There are images that return like a persistent frame from an old film: a row of crosses stretching along a road, a body nailed to the wood, a face frozen in pain, and a garment girded around the hips, modest, almost symbolic, as if meant to shield not so much the body as the viewer’s conscience. In the collective memory, this image has already been polished, transformed by cinematic aesthetics and religious iconography, tamed. The cross appears as a symbol of faith or an individual’s drama, not as a part of the state machine. Meanwhile, Rome, which turned this punishment into a political tool, was not interested in shielding anything.
Lex Rhodia de iactu is a set of maritime law regulations originating from the Greek island of Rhodes. It concerned so-called maritime dumping (iactus), i.e., cases where a ship’s captain (the so-called magister navis) was forced to throw part of his cargo overboard in order to save the rest of the cargo, as well as the crew and the ship itself.
When we think of aqueducts, we usually picture rows of arches stretching for kilometres, once supplying the greatest cities of the Republic and later the Roman Empire with drinking water. Indeed, the arcades — many of which survive to this day — were part of that system; however, the majority of aqueducts ran underground: tunnels carved through rock, hidden from enemy eyes and generally far cheaper and more practical to build.
When Maximus in Gladiator declares his full name, the line sounds like a statement of identity and authority. Yet at the very center of that famous speech lies a detail that is more Roman than all the armor on screen: “Decimus.” It is not a flourish invented by the scriptwriters or a random Latin word chosen for effect. It reflects a real feature of Roman naming traditions. In ancient Rome some male names were literally ordinal numbers and meant exactly what they appear to mean: Quintus the fifth, Sextus the sixth, Septimus the seventh, Octavius the eighth, Decimus the tenth. For a modern reader the conclusion seems obvious. A man called Quintus must have been the fifth son, Sextus the sixth child, Decimus perhaps the tenth descendant. It sounds tidy and logical. But Roman society rarely worked with such neat arithmetic, and the gap between what seems obvious and what can actually be proven is where the real historical curiosity begins.
Asclepius (Aesculapius in Latin) – the Roman counterpart of the Greek god of medicine – came to the Eternal City around 291 BCE. At that time, the Senate, hoping to contain a plague devastating the country, sent a Roman delegation to the Greek city of Epidaurus, home to the famous sanctuary of Asclepius. The Roman envoys were tasked with bringing back a statue of the deity, thereby securing his aid in the fight against the epidemic.
The subtractive method, in which a smaller number placed to the left of a larger one was subtracted from it, is nowadays a dominant way of writing values not covered by the seven basic Roman numeral symbols. At times, however, we can encounter values such us 9 written using the additive method. Thus, instead of the usual IX symbol, the value is marked as VIIII – Roman five symbol with four Roman one symbols added.
Rome – Roma Aeterna and caput mundi – The Eternal City and the “head of the world”. Who among us hasn’t heard of the capital of Italy? The city from which the ancient empire once grew, lives in the mass imagination and pop culture with images such as the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, Julius Caesar, or ancient ruins. Generally, all of these images can be thrown into a bag on which it is written: “magnificent, wonderful, monumental, timeless”. But would such issues as… toilets, poop, defecation fit into this bag? Not really, is it? It is not too popular a subject in terms of considerations on the magnificence of ancient Rome, which is a pity. One of the foundations of the empire, an indispensable element of its social fabric and a determinant of high development was the first such modern and advanced sewage and sanitation system in the world. In order to show you every aspect of life in the Roman Empire, I invite you on a trip through its not-so-smelly, but extremely important and interesting…side.
