But more than individual identity was at stake here. There were communal and social aspects too, as trades and crafts provided a context for joint activities among their workers, for promotion of the interests they held in common and for a shared sense of identity. All across the empire, local trade associations (collegia) flourished, with members

The animal sacrifices were to be performed to the traditional gods, but they were performed on behalf of or for the protection of the living emperor and his family; the emperor, in other words, was still under the protection of the Olympian gods rather than being their equal.

The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.

Augustus was trying to invent from scratch a system of dynastic succession, against the background of a fluid set of Roman rules about the inheritance of status and property. Crucially there was no presumption in Roman law that the firstborn son would be the sole or principal heir. The standard modern system of primogeniture is a fail-safe mechanis

There were also historical figures before Pompey whose prominence had come into conflict with the traditional power structure of the state. Marius and Sulla are obvious examples. But more than a hundred years before them, despite, or because of, his series of tremendous victories, Scipio Africanus had spent the end of his life in virtual exile, aft

In the second century CE, the ‘villa’ (as it is now euphemistically known) that Hadrian built at Tivoli, a few miles from Rome, was bigger than the town of Pompeii itself. And there he re-created for himself a miniature Roman Empire, with replicas of the greatest imperial monuments and treasures – from Egyptian waterways to the famous temple of Aph

Cicero’s grisly death presaged a yet bigger revolution in the first century BCE, which began with a form of popular political power, even if not a ‘democracy’ exactly, and ended with an autocrat established on the throne and the Roman Empire under one-man rule.

‘The first death under the new emperor,’ he starts, implying that there were many more to follow, was that of Marcus Junius Silanus Torquatus, the governor of Asia. He was a man of no ambition whatsoever, so shamelessly apathetic, Tacitus explains, that Gaius had aptly nicknamed him the Golden Sheep. But his death was inevitable, and the reason obv

There was some even-handedness, then, in these few, largely biological, aspects of misfortune. Yet for the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-nots: between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between very comfortable and extravagantly luxuri