Sublime

Archaeology, tyranny – and rape

The other sides of civil war

Birth, death and grief

The boundaries of empire

The other side of the story

But the underlying pattern is clear. Caracalla in 212 CE completed a process that in Roman myth Romulus had started a thousand years earlier – that is, according to the conventional date, in 753 BCE. Rome’s founding father had been able to establish his new city only by offering citizenship to all comers, by turning foreigners into Romans.

Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric.

Swallows and serpents

PROLOGUE · THE HISTORY OF ROME