Curated category
1st-century BC Romans
- Lucius Varius RufusLucius Varius Rufus stood at the center of Roman literary life during one of history's most celebrated creative moments.
- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (son of Pompey)Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus died on the 12th of April 45 BC, cornered and killed by a man named Lucius Caesennius Lento, weeks after watching his army shatter at…
- TiberiusTiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was born on the 16th of November 42 BC, and by the time he died on the 16th of March AD 37, he had ruled the Roman Empire for…
- HoraceQuintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet the English-speaking world calls Horace, once described himself as a man who fled the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC without…
- VirgilVirgil stood on a pillar of bright tin-plated iron. That is how Geoffrey Chaucer placed him in The House of Fame, written between 1374 and 1385, granting the…
- CatullusGaius Valerius Catullus wrote two lines that translators have spent two thousand years trying to equal: "I hate and I love. You ask how this is possible.
- LivyLivy, the Roman historian born in 59 BC in the prosperous northern Italian city of Patavium, devoted the greater part of his adult life to a single…
- Gaius Cassius LonginusGaius Cassius Longinus spent his life fighting against what he saw as tyranny, only to be remembered for the act that made him infamous: driving a blade into…
- GalbaGalba put on a linen corset on the morning of the 15th of January AD 69, knowing it would offer little protection against so many swords.
- Gaius Julius HyginusGaius Julius Hyginus is a name that appears twice in the history of Latin letters: once as a living man who walked the halls of Roman power, and once as a…
- Dionysius of HalicarnassusDionysius of Halicarnassus arrived in Rome sometime after the civil wars ended, carrying a scholar's ambition and a Greek's outsider eye.
- GermanicusGermanicus Julius Caesar died on the 10th of October AD 19 in Antioch, at the age of thirty-three. He left behind a Roman world in mourning so genuine that…
- Nero Claudius DrususNero Claudius Drusus entered the world between mid-March and mid-April 38 BC, three months after his mother Livia married Augustus on the 17th of January.
- Cato the YoungerCato the Younger stabbed himself in the abdomen in April 46 BC rather than accept a pardon from Julius Caesar. The details of that final night in the city of…
- SallustSallust, the Roman historian and politician born around 86 BC, left behind something almost paradoxical: the man who made moral decline the central obsession…
- Quintus Caecilius Metellus NumidicusQuintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus was born around 155 BC into one of Rome's most powerful families, yet the moment that defines him is not a battlefield…
- VitruviusVitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer who lived roughly from around 80-70 BC to sometime after 15 BC, left behind exactly one book.
- CatilineCatiline - or Lucius Sergius Catilina, as Rome knew him - died in the winter of 62 BC with his face turned toward the enemy and his body found far in advance…