Curated playlist
Culture of ancient Rome
- Marriage in ancient RomeMarriage in ancient Rome was called conubium, and it shaped nearly every dimension of Roman life, from the inheritance of property to the survival of the state itself. At its core, the institution served as a tool for building alliances…
- Roman calendarThe Roman calendar did not begin with Julius Caesar. It began, according to Roman legend, with Romulus - the city's mythical founder - and it had already been reformed, patched, and argued over for centuries before Caesar ever touched it.…
- Culture of ancient RomeThe culture of ancient Rome stretched across nearly 1,200 years of history and at its peak reached from what is now Lowland Scotland and Morocco all the way to the Euphrates. At the center of it all sat a single city so vast and so densely…
- Munera (ancient Rome)Munera, the Latin word meaning "duty" and "obligation," sat at the very center of Roman public life for centuries. To be wealthy in Rome was to owe something to the people around you. Games, feasts, fountains, roads: all of it could flow…
- Romanization (cultural)Romanization transformed the ancient world not through brute erasure, but through a quieter pressure. The subject here is cultural Romanization: the process by which populations absorbed into the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire…
- Parallel LivesParallel Lives began with a declaration that surprised many readers: "For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives." Plutarch, a Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest, made that distinction deliberately. He was…
- Ludus (ancient Rome)Ludus was a single Latin word that carried three entirely different lives in ancient Rome: a school for children, a training ground for gladiators, and a board game played for pleasure. That one word could span the classroom, the arena,…
- Ancient Roman architectureAncient Roman architecture began its distinctive journey in 509 BC with the founding of the Roman Republic, yet the buildings that would define it for centuries took shape gradually, over generations of borrowed ideas and hard-won…
- GladiatorA gladiator was an armed combatant who fought for the entertainment of Roman crowds. They faced other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals in violent confrontations. Some entered the arena willingly, gambling their lives and…
- Roman gardensRoman gardens reached their peak between 150 BC and 350 AD, shaping how people across Europe and beyond thought about green space, beauty, and the boundary between indoors and outdoors. The Gardens of Lucullus, known in Latin as the Horti…