When Napoleon Became King of Italy

The adoption by the provincial gentry of literati ideals (and bureaucratic ambitions) was a vital stage in China’s transition from a semi-feudal society, where power was wielded by great landholders, into an agrarian empire. What made that possible was an imperial system that relied much less on the coercive power of the imperial centre (a clumsy a

Whatever the causes of the Social War, the effects of the legislation of 90 and 89 BCE that extended full citizenship to most of the peninsula were dramatic. Italy was now the closest thing to a nation state that the classical world ever knew, and the principle we glimpsed centuries earlier that ‘Romans’ could have dual citizenship and two civic id

It was not for nothing that both Lord Palmerston and John F. Kennedy proudly broadcast the Latin phrase Civis Romanus sum (‘I am a Roman citizen’) as a slogan for their times. In short, Rome for the first time began to look ‘Roman’ as we understand it, and as they understood it.