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How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, Guy de la Bédoyère argues that Gibbon’s magnum opus remains a landmark in the writing of history
Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beginning the history of the United States. But back in the old world, another, rather more modest event would have a profound influence on cultural history. For 1776 was also the year that the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in London. And though it may not have spawned a nation, there’s little doubt that the book’s release was a landmark moment in the writing of history. Authored by Edward Gibbon, an essayist and, at this time, Whig MP for Liskeard, this epic work eventually grew to encompass the story of the Roman empire from the accession of the emperor Trajan in AD 98 through to 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the rump of the Eastern empire fell. The last of its six volumes appeared in 1788 just before another tumultuous year in global history, 1789, when the opening salvos were fired in the French Revolution. What, in the year of its 250th anniversary, are we to make of Decline and Fall? Is it coincidental that a book written at a time of rebellion, and where so much of the narrative is about political intrigues and the loss of power, connected with 18th-century readers? And how did a history based on limited resources that few scholars would refer to today escape its time to become a classic? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-122219029webready-2206e03-e1771851490986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A life‑sized marble statue of a Roman leader stands upright against a carved stone wall. The figure wears ornate armor decorated with reliefs, including a central face and small mythological scenes. A heavy cloak drapes over the left shoulder and arm, adding a sense of movement to the otherwise rigid pose. The right arm is raised, holding a scroll that suggests authority or command. The statue’s expression is calm and formal, and the smooth, pale marble contrasts with the textured architectural backdrop" title="Trajan’s reign marked the beginning of a time when, wrote Gibbon, the Roman empire presided over the “most civilised portion of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Young and lonely To begin to answer these questions, it helps to know a little about Decline and Fall’s author. Gibbon was born in Putney in 1737 to a family of considerable means. But for all his privilege, there’s more than a suggestion of loneliness in his early life. His relationship with his mother was troubled. None of his six siblings survived to adulthood. He attended Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, but is better understood as someone who was largely self-educated as a result of his extensive reading. His decision to convert to Catholicism in 1753 brought his time at Oxford to an abrupt end, but under threat of being disinherited by his father, he swiftly returned to Protestantism. There’s a sense at this stage of Gibbon failing to find a purpose in life. Or perhaps, bearing in mind his bookish creativity, a failure to find the right project. This would not arrive until 1764 when, travelling around Europe on a Grand Tour, Gibbon reached “the great object of [my] pilgrimage”, Rome. In Decline and Fall, he would famously note, “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near 20 years of my life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1649172Gibbonwebready-365c81c-e1771851649321.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of six books standing side by side, with their spines facing the viewer. Each book is brown, red and green in colour with gold lettering" title="The six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall were published in the 12 years between the American and French revolutions. The author declared that the book itself documented “a revolution which will ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the Earth” (Image by Peter Harrington)" /> Gibbon had found his calling. By the end of the 1760s, he had begun the work that would define him. His preface suggested he knew exactly what he was doing as he explained how he intended to cover the 13 and a half centuries from AD 98 to 1453 by dividing his subject into different periods. He began by explaining: “The first of these periods may be traced from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, when the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline; and will extend to the subversion of the Western empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe. This extraordinary revolution, which subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror, was completed about the beginning of the sixth century.” From there, Gibbon planned to move on to a second period starting with Justinian (reigned 527–65), who was emperor for close to four decades, and lasting to the reign of Charlemagne, who founded the Carolingian empire in AD 800. A third period would take the story from this Frankish revival of the Western empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Read more | Meet the “grossly underappreciated” Roman emperor who became the enemy of the ancient world Blind faith Gibbon baulked at the prospect of completing the massive task he had set himself. “I dare not presume to give any assurances,” he warned his readers. Yet for all his modesty, there was a sense of purpose about his writing. From the off, he wanted to argue that the Roman empire fell due to a combination of Christianity’s corrosive influence, which eroded civic ambition and responsibilities, and barbarian invasions, which acted as the final blow to an already weakened state. He believed that Christianity redirected the focus of citizens from worldly concerns to the afterlife, diminishing their commitment to the state. He also suggested that other internal factors – like despotism, corruption and military weakness – contributed to the empire’s internal decay before the external pressures became overwhelming. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL206171webready-bdcce3f-e1771852336666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A painted portrait of an 18th‑century man wearing a red coat with gold buttons, a white cravat, and a powdered wig. He faces slightly to the side against a dark background, which highlights his pale face, formal clothing, and the refined style typical of the period" title="Edward Gibbon shown in a portrait from c1779. “He deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him,” writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Gibbon didn’t think he was writing about a remote and arcane subject. He believed that, “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind”, neatly brushing over the total dependence of the Roman empire on slavery. The empire’s decline and fall was, Gibbon said, “a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth”. Here lay his central point. The collapse of the Roman empire, however long it had taken, had a decisive effect on the world that followed. It was, therefore, a lesson for all time in how civilisations can fall to pieces and what this might mean for those who follow. Although there are countless observations that could be made about Gibbon’s use of ancient sources, and the limitations both of his technique and the evidence he had to hand, it would be difficult to quarrel with his interest in trying to understand why and how a state could fail. This shouldn’t blind us to Decline and Fall’s limitations. One of those limitations emerges during Gibbon’s discussions of the invasion of Britain in the first century AD (in which the author looked back to see how the Roman empire grew to become the dominant force of the second century). Of the British tribes, he noted that “while they fought singly, they were successively subdued”. This is an instantly identifiable line borrowed and translated from Agricola – written by the Roman historian Tacitus and named after the general who helped mastermind the conquest of northern Britain. Read more | Roman invasion of Britain: did the Britons ignore them? Unattributed borrowings like this were commonplace at the time. In one sense, they were homages, but they also served to showcase the author’s learning and easy familiarity with classical texts. Gibbon may have expected, even wanted, his readers to notice this kind of copying and pasting, but it also illustrates an uncritical approach to his source material. A few lines on, Gibbon discussed the recall of Agricola, despite “his superior merit”, from his post as governor of Britain in the AD 80s. Agricola was Tacitus’s father-in-law, and the biography Tacitus wrote was an unashamed hagiography. Gibbon simply copied Tacitus’s very evident bias and accepted the criticisms of the last Flavian emperor, Domitian (ruled 81–96). Happy days? Gibbon was prone to making sweeping judgments. Among the most famous lines in the entire book is his assertion that, “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”. This statement may be well known but that doesn’t mean it was correct. As I alluded to earlier, we now have a far more graphic understanding of the reality of Roman slavery. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2181025710webready-7b1c152-e1771851899984.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue of a man with curly hair and a beard, looking down towards the left with a serious expression on his face" title="Gibbon saw in the second-century emperor Commodus a man unable to cope with the colossal responsibilities of imperial power (Image by Getty Images)" /> Yet Gibbon could also be astute. His stance on Commodus – the much-maligned emperor assassinated in a palace coup on the last day of 192 – showed an understanding of the vulnerability of the imperial system when the emperor lacked the personal resources to cope with the enormous demands of the job. “Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable, from his infancy, of the most inhuman actions,” observed Gibbon. “Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition.” Gibbon’s descriptions of Commodus also reveal a pithiness and a joy in the use of language that helps explain Decline’s and Fall’s initial success. There are many examples of Gibbon’s meticulous turns of phrase but only room here to highlight a small number. Commodus’s downfall was precipitated by him having “discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace” since childhood. When Emperor Septimius Severus died at York on campaign in 211, Gibbon described the moment thus: “The declining health and last illness of Severus inflamed the wild ambition and black passions of [his son] Caracalla’s soul.” We might choose different words today, but Gibbon’s meaning remains obvious. He was foreshadowing what came next. Caracalla, “the common enemy of mankind”, now embarked on a tyrannical rule that lasted until his own murder in 217. The only historical figure whom Caracalla admired, Gibbon tells us, was Alexander the Great. But “in no one action of his life did Caracalla express the faintest resemblance of the Macedonian hero, except in the murder of a great number of his own and of his father’s friends”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464435571webready-2521f5e-e1771851785523.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble bust of a bearded man with thick, curly hair, shown from the chest up. His expression is intense, with furrowed brows and a slightly turned head that gives a sense of movement. The sculpted curls, textured beard, and draped garment are finely detailed, highlighting the craftsmanship of the classical style" title="Gibbon reserved some of his most stinging criticisms for the emperor Caracalla, whom he labelled “the common enemy of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Maxims of persecution Gibbon also had sharp words for Constantine I, who famously converted to Christianity and issued an edict banning the persecution of Christians in 313. What this shift meant in practice, Gibbon contended, was that Christians themselves became oppressors: “The emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the Catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity.” Like so many passages of Decline and Fall, Gibbon’s writings on the impact of Christianity on Rome were phrased beautifully. But that didn’t stop them triggering a firestorm of criticism. Leading the charge was the theologian George Travis, who outlined his grave objections to the book in a series of letters published in 1785. Travis’s condemnation centred on a specific passage in the Bible known as the Johannine Comma. This was a phrase affirming the unity of the Holy Trinity that appeared in the Epistles of John, but was absent from ancient Greek manuscripts. Travis defended the Comma as authentic scripture. Yet, in his discussion of the conversion of “barbarians” to Christianity in Decline and Fall, Gibbon labelled it a “pious fraud”. Travis wrote to Gibbon to say: “It will become one who wishes to live to posterity as a historian, to consider well how he can justify himself either in literary candor [sic] or Christian charity, for accusing men so evidently conscientious… of the complicated crime of the falsification of Scripture!” Travis went on to accuse Gibbon of “bigotry” because of his “perverse adherence to any opinion of any kind, without giving to the evidence on the contrary part, an open hearing”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1336622679webready-094aff8-e1771852165870.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A circular mosaic showing the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. At the centre, John the Baptist pours water over Jesus, who stands waist‑deep in the river. A white dove descends above them, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The scene is surrounded by brightly colored, gold‑accented figures of angels with halos arranged in a radial pattern, creating a sense of sacred ceremony and ornate Byzantine style" title="A fifth-century mosaic shows Jesus Christ being baptised in the river Jordan, which is depicted as a pagan god. Edward Gibbon noted the ease with which early Christians made the transition from the oppressed to the oppressors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Travis story is how the affair might have inspired Jane Austen. As he dashed off his pen to slate Gibbon, Travis included the phrases “partiality and prejudiced” and “certain truths which you affirm to be now universally acknowledged”. In her History of England (1791), a piece of juvenilia poking fun at school history books, the 15-year-old Austen referred to herself as a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”. In addition, Austen’s celebrated words “pride and prejudice” can be found in Decline and Fall when Gibbon refers to them as a cause of slavery. Read more | Divided they fell: how war, revolution and sectarianism led to the end of the Ottoman empire In the knives-out scholarly argument that followed the clash between Gibbon and Travis, Gibbon’s view prevailed with the support of an ancient Greek scholar called Richard Porson, who produced evidence suggesting that the Comma was a later insertion. But the episode demonstrates how, in its time, Decline and Fall was hugely controversial. Gibbon was believed by many, especially the clergy, to be attacking the very institution of the church. Resentment of Gibbon’s perceived criticism of Christianity proved enduring. The Rev HH Milman edited an 1845 edition of Decline and Fall and contributed a foreword in which he warned the reader: “We may deplore the bias of his mind; we may ourselves be on our guard against the danger of being misled, and be anxious to warn less wary readers against the same perils.” While he was gracious enough to acknowledge that Gibbon “leaves us the materials for forming a fairer judgment”, Milman insisted “that great misrepresentation which pervades his history” was a “false estimate” of the influence of Christianity. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-566460025webready-1a85702-e1771852243572.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A pencil sketch depicting a woman dressed in a white dress and cap, with her arms crossed. She has dark curly hair escaping out the front of the cap and is looking towards the left" title="A c1810 portrait of Jane Austen. Was the title of her bestselling novel inspired by Edward Gibbon’s prose? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Churchillian praise If conservative religious voices criticised Gibbon, Conservative politicians have often expressed their admiration. Winston Churchill, who was inspired by Gibbon’s self-education, said he had “devoured Gibbon”. He praised Decline and Fall and “was immediately dominated by both the story and the style”. In more recent times, Gibbon appeared at the centre of another controversy. In a 2021 interview, Boris Johnson claimed the fall of Rome was “largely the result of uncontrolled immigration”, an argument derived ultimately from Gibbon. Johnson’s warning that Europe was itself not immune to a similar fate was widely criticised for being over-simplistic, outdated and provocative. Where, then, does all this leave Edward Gibbon? If he did wish “to live to posterity as a historian”, he succeeded. Does it matter that he is now regarded as being out of date? Of course not. Decline and Fall is a valuable artefact of its own time, as is every history book. Glibly criticising works for such a failing is the last refuge of idle academics indulging the conceit that they have themselves pulled off the impossible feat of eternal and indisputable objectivity. If there was no subjectivity or bias in history there would be no history, and instead merely a series of statements of fact. Decline and Fall is also a magnificent monument to a pre-digital era when assembling a book of such epic complexity and range had all to be done by hand and in person. That Gibbon both managed this – and to do so with a memorable use of his native language – means he deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him. As so often with the creators of great works, Gibbon’s life after Decline and Fall was an anti-climax compounded by serious ill-health and loneliness. He had never married, his father obstructing the one union – with the salon host and writer Suzanne Curchord – Gibbon had wished to pursue. Gibbon died in 1794, aged only 56 and afflicted with gout and several other ailments. He is buried in Fletching, East Sussex. When he laid down his pen in 1787, Gibbon said in his final paragraph that he hoped his readers would be excited by “a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”. He acknowledged his own imperfections, and the inadequacy of the book compared to his own wishes but delivered it “to the curiosity and candour of the public”. And there it has remained ever since. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, many about the Roman world. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Nero's doomed love affair: did a failed romance trigger his descent into madness?
He’s reviled as a cruel tyrant who killed his own mother and fiddled while Rome burned. But was Nero’s descent into madness triggered by his failed romance with a former slave? Edward J Watts tells a story of murder, incest and political intrigue
It is difficult to feel empathy for the emperor Nero, a man who did such unquestionably terrible things that he has become a prototype for the monstrous Roman ruler. During his lifetime he was labelled a matricide, an arsonist and a persecutor of Christians who also killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach. After his death, these stories grew into terrifying legends about his cruel madness. By the Middle Ages, chroniclers even detailed a tale in which Nero commanded doctors to make him give birth. Fearing for their lives, the terrified doctors “made up a potion in which they put a frog and gave it to the emperor to drink”, while prescribing him a special diet that would cause his stomach to expand. When Nero vomited the animal out, he “commanded that the foetus be fed and kept in a domed chamber” as his imperial heir. Some manuscripts even featured an image of Nero on a birthing chair beside his frog-child to illustrate his “evil madness”. And yet it is not hard to imagine a different life for Nero. This is because, before Nero became a monster, he was a heartbroken boy prohibited from marrying Acte – his one true love. Family trauma The tragic history of Nero’s family made it all the more surprising that he found such a romantic partner. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Germanicus – the man whom Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius, hoped would assume imperial power following his planned retirement. When Germanicus predeceased Tiberius, however, his wife and children became potential rivals and were ultimately arrested. Agrippina’s mother starved to death in captivity, while her brother took his own life by eating the mattress in his cell. Their fates taught the princess that real financial and political security came only from a strong connection to some devoted, powerful male figure. She married thrice, each time to a rich and powerful suitor. Her first marriage, which was celebrated in AD 28 when she was just 13 years old, joined Agrippina to her 30-year-old cousin, Domitius Ahenobarbus. Nero was born to the couple in AD 37, and the child not only inherited his father’s fortune when Ahenobarbus died in AD 41, but also that of Agrippina’s second husband, Passienus Crispus, who died six years later. In AD 49, Agrippina wed her uncle, the elderly emperor Claudius. She persuaded Claudius to name Nero as his heir and to marry his natural-born daughter Octavia to Nero in AD 53. Between her husband and her son, Agrippina finally seemed to have the security she had long craved. Read more | Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations? As Claudius’s natural-born son Britannicus entered adolescence, however, the emperor began to reconsider Nero’s appointment as successor designate. But Claudius suddenly died on 13 October AD 54, poisoned by a mushroom that Agrippina may or may not have arranged for him to eat. The 16-year-old Nero was now Roman emperor. Britannicus would be dead within a year. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/7-NeronyAgripina-6f8fc45-e1766490879177.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue showing a woman crowning a man. Both are dressed in Roman clothes" title="A relief shows Agrippina crowning Nero with a laurel wreath. The 16-year-old boy became emperor following the death of his mother's third husband (and uncle), Claudius (Image by Wiki Commons)" /> Acte enters the scene Everyone in Rome, except perhaps for Nero himself, understood that Nero’s status as Claudius’s legitimate heir derived in large part from his marriage to Octavia. It was then essential for the young couple to remain together. Nero, however, found his wife physically repulsive, and began searching for more attractive and interesting sexual partners. This is how Acte entered his life. The girl, who had been bought as a slave in the Roman province of Asia, was seen by the men around Nero as someone who “could fulfil his desires without harm to anyone” since, as the historian wrote, “it was feared that he might rush into scandalous behaviour with noble ladies, if he were not permitted this indulgence”. Tacitus’s words reflect the Roman idea that enslaved people like Acte were, in a sense, disposable commodities whose bodies could be used by noble men to fulfil the urges their wives could not. When the men tired of “the debaucheries… that vice made overwhelmingly attractive”, they were supposed to dispose of the slaves who had serviced them. This is how elite men often behaved, but no one anticipated that, instead of using and dismissing the girl, Nero would fall in love with Acte. Not only had she quickly won Nero’s affections, but their intense connection would lead to her emancipation and talk of Nero’s desire to marry her. Agrippina was incensed when she learned that this sexual dalliance had evolved into a genuine romance. Tacitus says that she “raved with a woman’s fury about having… a slave girl for a daughter-in-law”, but that “the fouler her reproaches, the fiercer the passion Nero felt”. Read more | One of ancient Rome’s most notorious emperors murdered his own mother, and there's a dark reason why Finally, Agrippina snapped and yelled at her son: “It was I who made you emperor!” This entirely true but extremely unwise outburst was too much for the headstrong teenage emperor to bear. It was at that point, writes Tacitus, that Nero “threw off all respect for his mother”. Rise of the sycophants Sensing an opportunity, men like the future emperor Otho and the senator Seneca stepped forward to exploit the emperor’s hurt feelings and growing estrangement from Agrippina. Otho, a fashionable party boy from an aristocratic family, offered emotional support to Nero during wild drinking sessions, in which the emperor confessed to Otho far more than was wise. Meanwhile, Seneca offered more practical aid by enlisting an associate who was willing to pretend to be in love with Acte, so he could “serve as the ostensible giver of the presents secretly sent by the emperor to the girl”. The appreciative emperor was too naïve to realise that these men encouraged his love affair precisely because it weakened his bond with Agrippina and made him more likely to reward them in the future. Agrippina was not so foolish. “Changing her tactics,” Tacitus writes, she went to her son and “pleaded guilty to an ill-timed strictness”. She even “offered the seclusion of her chamber” for Nero and Acte to use so that their activities did not further embarrass Octavia. This shift in Agrippina’s attitude was sensible politics and good parenting, but Nero’s “most intimate friends… begged him to beware of the arts of a woman” who, they claimed, “was always daring and was now lying”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/8-gettyimages-1157131481-594x594-528e6a8-e1766491080872.jpg" width="579" height="413" alt="A painting showing a group of Roman" title="An 1881 book illustration imagines Nero participating in a bacchanal. The young emperor indulged in marathon drinking sessions, in which he told acquaintances of his desires for Acte (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Agrippina’s views softened, Nero’s sycophants became even more strident in their support of Nero’s relationship with Acte. According to the historian Suetonius, one group of senators even “perjured themselves by swearing that she [Acte] was of royal birth”, so she would quickly become a suitable imperial spouse. The senators were rewarded by Nero, even though it is not clear if anyone besides Nero expected their claim to be persuasive. Murder, intrigue and incest Not long after the predictable failure of this gambit, Nero realised that despite his love for Acte, the gulf between their social statuses was too great for them to ever wed. The affair then ended and both people moved on. Inscriptions from Italy reveal that Acte had a good, productive life, in which she used the profits from some of Nero’s gifts to become a wealthy patron of several towns. Nero’s story, of course, has a much sadder ending. As the years passed, the emperor grew ever more estranged from his mother and became enmeshed in the intrigues of sycophants like Otho, who enticed the emperor into a scandalous love affair with his wife, Poppaea. Tacitus reports that Otho embarked on the scheme “to inflame Nero's passion, in the hope of adding to his own influence by the further tie which would arise out of possession of the same woman”. The affair led Nero to divorce Octavia and force the dissolution of Otho’s marriage so that he could marry Poppaea – the wife he is later rumoured to have killed while she was pregnant with his child. This chapter in the emperor’s romantic life was, of course, much more shocking and tragic than his relationship with Acte. Meanwhile, the senator and Neronian associate Cluvius Rufus reports an even more appalling sexual incident that Nero only just escaped. He tells of how Agrippina tried seducing Nero “in her eagerness to retain her influence”. Seneca then hurried in Acte, who told Nero that the incest was “notorious” and that the soldiers would never endure the rule of an “impious sovereign”. While Rufus’s unreliability as a narrator ought to make one suspect whether Agrippina’s seduction really happened, his description of Acte as the one person who could be counted on to restrain Nero’s worst impulses rings true. She seemed capable of getting Nero to accept uncomfortable truths, because the emperor knew that she alone was genuinely concerned about his best interests. Read more | Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise Descent into madness Despite Nero’s increasingly poor decisions and unrestrained behaviour over the last decade of his life, it seems that Acte was never again summoned to the palace to check his worst impulses. She was not there when Nero arranged for Agrippina to be killed in AD 59, or when he burned Christians alive following a fire that devastated Rome in AD 64. She was not consulted before he went to Greece in AD 67 to compete in rigged Olympic competitions while popular anger boiled over at home. She seems not to have been involved as Nero bungled his response to the rebellion of the future emperor Galba, when he spent more time figuring out how to transport his water organ to the front than he did planning military strategy. Most heartbreaking of all, she was absent when Nero took his own life, virtually alone, after the senate stripped him of his imperial power in AD 68. And yet Acte clearly still loved Nero until the very end of his short life. After his death and public condemnation, Acte joined with the two nursemaids who had raised Nero as a baby to ensure that he had a proper burial. According to Suetonius, the ceremony cost “two hundred thousand sesterces”, an immense sum equal to the annual salary of more than 220 Roman soldiers. Nero was “laid out in white robes embroidered with gold” and, after his cremation, Acte and the two other women “deposited his ashes… in the family tomb of [his father’s family] the Domitii” in a “sarcophagus of porphyry, with an altar of Luna marble standing above it, and enclosed by a balustrade of Thasian stone.” We cannot know whether Acte’s affection, forthrightness and intelligence would have been enough to save Nero from infamy had the pair been permitted to marry. The emperor is fully deserving of the cruel reputation for which he is now remembered. What is certain, though, is that Nero’s descent into madness began when his relationship with Acte ended: the first woman he ever loved, and perhaps the only woman who ever loved him back. Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the book The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
Think you know everything about ancient Rome? These 25 facts will prove otherwise
Edward J Watts, author of The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, shares 25 things you need to know about one of the greatest civilisations of the ancient world – from their incredible feats of engineering to their sporting spectacles
1. The Romans lived in an independent state for more than 2,200 years According to tradition, Rome was founded in 753 BC, shortly after the beginning of the Italian Iron Age. Its inhabitants were Latin-speaking pagans who lived along the river Tiber in what is now central Italy. The empire of Trebizond, the last independent Roman kingdom descended from that state, was captured in 1461 by an Ottoman army equipped with gunpowder weapons. The people living in Trebizond also called themselves ‘Roman’, but they were Christians who lived in a city on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey and spoke a language they called Romeika (which translates as 'Roman', but which we now call Greek). 2. The Roman empire once included all, or part of, nearly 50 countries At the empire’s greatest extent in AD 117, Roman territory stretched from what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Persian Gulf beaches in Kuwait, from southern Egypt near the current Sudanese border to northern England, and from just south of Casablanca in Morocco to the Caspian Sea shores of Azerbaijan. The land area of the Roman empire was smaller than Australia, but if one included the territorial waters controlled by Rome (as is customary with modern states) the empire would rank as the fifth-largest country on earth if it existed today. 3. As much as one-third of the world’s population lived under Roman control Late during the reign of the emperor Trajan (ruled AD 98–117), it is thought that the Roman empire reached a population of 80 million, out of a total world population of around 230 million. In modern terms, Rome’s share of the world population at that moment would be nearly equivalent to a country with the combined populations of India and China. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2GettyImages-1369193411-fa1bfb0-e1764241964618.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A yellow, blue and red map showing the Roman empire" title="The Roman empire reached its maximum territorial extent in the early second century AD, during the reign of the emperor Trajan. The empire would rank as the fifth-largest country in the world if it existed today (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. Rome was the first city in the world with a million residents Rome reached a population of 1 million during the first century BC, and aside from temporary population decreases caused by plagues or natural disasters, did not fall below that level until the end of the fourth century AD. This is even more remarkable considering that poor sanitation and crowded conditions meant that the city lost as much as 3 per cent of its population each year to disease – a number far greater than the birthrate. Rome’s massive population was sustained through large-scale migration from other parts of the empire, nearly every year, for five centuries. 5. Hadrian’s Wall was NOT the longest Roman wall – and nor was it the most northern Almost everyone has heard of Hadrian’s Wall, the defensive structure that once stretched 73 miles across what is now northern England. However, an even longer fortification built under Hadrian and his successor, Antoninus Pius, extended nearly 190 miles across southern Germany. It began roughly where the Rhine turns west at Mainz, and extended to meet the Danube near Regensburg. Antoninus Pius also ordered the construction of the empire’s northernmost wall – the eponymous Antonine Wall – which stretched 39 miles across what is now Scotland, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/3GettyImages-639158628-7d65967-e1764242013260.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A modern illustration depicting Hadrian’s Wall as it may have appeared during the second century AD. The 73-mile-long fortification stretched from what is now Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria to Wallsend in Tyne and Wear (Image by Getty Images)" title="A modern illustration depicting Hadrian’s Wall as it may have appeared during the second century AD. The 73-mile-long fortification stretched from what is now Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria to Wallsend in Tyne and Wear (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. The Romans produced more than 25 million coins each year Following a reform instituted by joint emperors Diocletian and Maximian in AD 294, the Romans established a network of 15 mints across the empire – all the way from Londinium (London) to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Although production slowed around 100 years later, no state in the world would again match Rome’s numismatic productivity until the 19th century. Read more | How the Romans "reversed circumcision" and 5 other shocking medical realities from the ancient empire 7. Rome’s ‘eighth hill’ is a load of old rubbish… literally The Testaccio region of Rome is now famous for its nightlife, but it takes its name from Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill that is 35 metres tall and created from the remains of ceramic shipping containers offloaded from barges along the Tiber. Most of the pottery has been dated to the period between AD 140 and 250, though the base of the hill may be much older. Despite its unusual provenance, Monte Testaccio is sometimes described as Rome’s ‘eighth hill’, in addition to the seven other hills within the city walls: the Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal and Viminal hills. WATCH | Dr David Musgrove finds out what the Romans really got up to on the loo View Green Video on the source website 8. The Pantheon is the oldest intact, continually used building in the world Originally created in the style of a conventional Roman temple in the first century BC, the Pantheon was rebuilt under the direction of the emperor Hadrian in the AD 120s. The ground level was originally much lower than it is today, and when one approached the structure from the front, it appeared to be a normal temple because the structure’s 43-metre-wide dome was obscured by its triangular pediment (gable). Nearly two millennia later, the Pantheon’s dome remains the largest of its kind in the world – its survival no doubt linked to the decision to convert the building into a Christian church in AD 609. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1211436528-b8e4a0d-e1764242052537.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An aerial photograph of the Pantheon in Rome. It has a large dome roof with a hole in the top and is surrounded by several other red roofed buildings" title="Despite being nearly 2,000 years old, the Pantheon boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. There was once a giant city plan, carved on marble blocks, that showed every street and building in Rome Between AD 203 and 211, the emperor Septimius Severus ordered the creation of a 234-metre-square map of the city of Rome that included accurate renderings of the ground-floor architectural plans for every building in the city. Carved on marble blocks, the map was hung on a wall of the Temple of Peace, which now forms the northern exterior of the Basilica of St Cosmas and Damian. As of 2025, more than a thousand fragments of the Severan Marble Plan have been discovered since the Renaissance, representing around 10 per cent of the original map. Because many of these include the name of the building they represent, it has been extremely useful for archaeologists looking to identify newly discovered architectural remains. Today, the fragments are on display in the new Museo della Forma Urbis on Rome’s Caelian Hill. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/5GettyImages-1925908763-d918fdc-e1764242087895.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of large white stone fragments with inscriptions on them" title="More than a thousand fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae (‘The Shape of the City of Rome’) have been discovered, giving researchers a remarkable window into early third-century AD Rome (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. Rome is still surrounded by its ancient walls The Aurelian Walls that surround the city of Rome were built in the AD 270s, but they continued to be used by the city’s defenders until the late 19th century. The breaching of the walls by the army of the Kingdom of Italy in September of 1870 represented the final step in Italian unification. 11. You can find an ancient wall in McDonald’s The Servian Walls of the fourth century BC may be less famous than the Aurelian Walls, but they have much more character. Stretching around 12 miles, multiple fragments of the walls still speckle the modern city of Rome. The largest fragment can be found next to Termini Station, but the most memorable remains are now found in the McDonald’s restaurant on the train station’s lower level. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/6Termini-McDonalds5-c5a8b6d-e1764242135272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a McDonald's ordering screen and behind it there is a large, old brick wall" title="Burger, fries… and a fourth-century BC wall? Visitors to the Roma Termini station branch of McDonald’s can marvel at a feat of ancient engineering while they get their fast food fix (Image by Edward J Watts)" /> 12. Rome’s walls were formidable… but Constantinople’s were MUCH more difficult to breach Rome has been captured numerous times since the Aurelian Walls were built, but the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) – which became the Roman empire’s eastern capital in AD 330 – has fallen to invaders on just three occasions. The city remained under Roman control for nearly 900 years until its walls were breached by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, before being recaptured by the Romans in 1261. It then fell to the Ottomans in 1453, but has not been seized since. 13. The Roman empire was home to one of the most fought-over cities in the world Although only 134 miles from Constantinople, Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey) has been the site of at least 15 different battles and sieges. The last two occurred in 1913 when Bulgaria captured the city from the Ottoman empire before losing it again later that year. 14. The Colosseum was the largest (but not the only) amphitheatre Rome’s Flavian Amphitheatre, or Colosseum, was once capable of seating 50,000 people, making it almost 30 per cent larger than the empire’s next-largest arena in Capua. But the Colosseum was unique because of its remarkable size, not because amphitheatres were rare. In fact, the remains of more than 230 amphitheatres have been found in former Roman cities, stretching all the way from Britain to Israel. One such example in Cahors, France, was discovered during the construction of a car park that is now aptly named the Parking Amphithéâtre. Another, found in suburban Paris, now serves as the courtyard for a high school. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1451938726-d5b4185-e1764246957408.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A computer generated image of the Colosseum, a large circular building with several arches" title="A computer-generated image depicting the Colosseum during its ancient heyday. The amphitheatre is now a World Heritage Site and a symbol of both modern Italy and ancient Rome (Image by Getty Images)" /> 15. Arenas weren’t just for gladiator fights Thanks in part to the 2000 movie Gladiator and its recent sequel, Roman amphitheatres are now commonly associated with clashes between sandal-wearing warriors. However, gladiator battles weren’t the only events to take place in these ancient arenas. In fact, spectators were as interested in events that displayed exotic wild animals like rhinos, lions and ‘camel-leopards’ (giraffes). The largest games on record – the 100 days of spectacles marking the opening of the Colosseum in AD 81 – saw upwards of 9,000 animals killed. Read more | Sharks in the arena? Gladiator II's real history and historical accuracy explained 16. Commodus was a much better fighter than Hollywood would have us believe In comparison to Maximus (Russell Crowe), Gladiator’s main antagonist, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), is depicted as an unremarkable fighter – but this is a distortion of the truth. Following a failed assassination plot orchestrated by his sister Lucilla, the real-life Commodus sent for instructors from around the world to teach him how to shoot arrows, throw javelins, and excel in hand-to-hand combat. As his skills increased, Commodus wanted to show his subjects what he could do. In one memorable display in the Colosseum, the senator Cassius Dio witnessed the emperor “dispatching, with his own hands, five hippos and two elephants in two days. He also killed rhinos and a camel-leopard”. Another time, Commodus arranged for “a hundred lions to appear in one group” and then “killed the entire hundred with exactly one hundred javelins” so that “no one saw a single extra javelin.” While Dio did not approve of these displays, even Commodus’s worst critics could not deny his talent. WATCH | Historian Alison Futrell discusses the real history behind Gladiator II View Green Video on the source website 17. Chariot racing was HUGELY popular The Circus Maximus in Rome, the main site for chariot races, adjoined the imperial palace and had seating for at least 150,000 people. On competition days, 800 horses could race in as many as 24 different contests. The last races held in the Circus Maximus took place in AD 549, but racing continued at Constantinople’s 100,000-seater Hippodrome into the 13th century. 18. Chariot racing was the football of its day Rome originally had four charioteer teams: the Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues. The Reds and Whites were the most historic, but they were surpassed in prominence by the Greens and Blues during the first century AD. The teams had franchises that competed in major cities across the empire and even boasted organised groups of supporters (akin to modern football ultras) prone to riotous behaviour. Star drivers, who could often change teams during their careers, frequently earned enormous amounts of money. The tombstone of Gaius Appuleius Diocles, one of the greatest charioteers of the second century AD, mentions that he won 1,462 races and earned 35,863,120 sesterces in prizes across a 24-year career spent racing for the Reds, Whites and Greens. Although he is believed to have died at the age of 42 and would have kept only a portion of his winnings, his career earnings exceeded the fortunes of most Roman senators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-520726031-6041b74-e1764247102231.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A chariot race in the Circus Maximus depicted by 19th-century painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Star drivers could earn huge sums of money (Image by Getty Images)" title="A chariot race in the Circus Maximus depicted by 19th-century painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Star drivers could earn huge sums of money (Image by Getty Images)" /> 19. Rome became the first large empire to enact universal citizenship In AD 212, the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – better known by his nickname, Caracalla – issued a law making all free people in the empire Roman citizens. The new citizens had to legally change their names to honour their new benefactor, flooding the Roman bureaucracy with tens of millions of people now bearing the name ‘Aurelius’. The reason for Caracalla’s generosity? He wanted everyone in the empire to celebrate the murder of Geta, Caracalla’s brother and co-emperor who was killed in his mother’s arms. 20. Roman trade across the Indian Ocean was hugely lucrative When we think of ancient trade, the Silk Road – the sprawling network of trade routes stretching some 4,000 miles between China and the Mediterranean – often springs to mind. Yet, it wasn’t the only source of wealth for the Romans. Merchants also travelled across the Indian Ocean to Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, carrying gold coins and bringing back spices and exotic animals. At times, the demand for Roman coins in India and Sri Lanka so exceeded the supply that Indian mints struck their own coins featuring the portraits of Roman imperial figures and legends written in Latin. 21. The Romans developed a sophisticated financial system From the second century BC, Roman bankers managed investment accounts that their clients could use for depositing money and making transfers. The system was so sophisticated that emperor Trajan used subsidised government loans to fund social welfare programmes in the second century AD. 22. The Romans invented some truly terrifying military technology The Romans developed a napalm-like substance commonly known as ‘Greek fire’ which was placed in hand grenades or sprayed from hoses equipped with special nozzles – usually against enemy naval forces. When the substance ignited, it even burned on water. The technology was first deployed in AD 672 and was used for more than 500 years against the navies of the Bulgars, Rus’ and Arabs. The empire lost the ability to manufacture Greek fire just before AD 1200, although no one really knows why. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Greekfire-madridskylitzes1-760acd4-e1764242423636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of two boats with men in them. The boat on the left are blowing fire over the one of the right" title="A 12th-century AD depiction of Greek fire being used against the rebel Thomas the Slav in AD 821. The exact composition of this devastating incendiary substance has been lost" /> 23. The longest-serving Roman emperor was actually pretty unremarkable He ruled for 66 years between AD 962–1028, but Constantine VIII’s passions for fine food and horses meant that he took little interest in state affairs until the last three years of his life. He instead trusted his older brother and co-emperor – the much more famous and capable emperor Basil II – to govern the empire for most of their lives. Coincidentally, Basil’s term in office (AD 960–1025), is the second-longest in Roman history. Read more | Step inside the ancient Roman empire's gladiatorial arenas, and witness 24 hours of shocking violence 24. TWO emperors share the record for the shortest reign Father-and-son duo Gordian I and Gordian II ruled for a mere 22 days in AD 238. The Gordians, who were governing a province in north Africa without an army stationed there, foolishly rebelled against Maximinus Thrax – one of four other men who also claimed to be emperor that year. Although the Gordians received senatorial support in Rome, they were quickly dispatched by a general loyal to Maximinus. As for the second-shortest reign, the emperor Nepotian barely outlasted the two Gordians by holding Rome for 28 days in June of AD 350. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10Gordian-II-238-ADEdward-Watts--Author-1d53219-e1764242478419.jpeg" width="850" height="413" alt="Coins issued by the emperor Gordian II, who – along with his father, Gordian I – ruled for just 22 days in AD 238 (Image by Edward J Watts)" title="Coins issued by the emperor Gordian II, who – along with his father, Gordian I – ruled for just 22 days in AD 238 (Image by Edward J Watts)" /> 25. It took a VERY long time for the Romans to adopt Christianity When Constantine I famously converted to Christianity in AD 312, the territory he ruled was only around 10 per cent Christian. In fact, the Roman empire did not become a Christian-majority state until the AD 390s, and some pagan-majority communities lasted long enough that they negotiated the surrender of their cities to Muslim generals in the AD 630s. The Syrian city of Harran (now part of modern Turkey) even maintained temples dedicated to its moon god into the 11th century AD. Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
Blood, guts and spectacle: 6 shocking events from the history of ancient Roman gladiators
How did gladiators supercharge the rise of Julius Caesar? And why were they seen as sex symbols? As Gladiator II arrives in cinemas, Guy de la Bédoyère tells the story of this brutal form of mass entertainment through six of its most significant (and surprising) moments
Julius Caesar turns death into mass entertainment Of all Roman pastimes, gladiators excite the most fascination and horror to this day – not least because of the sneaking suspicion that, if revived, they would rapidly pick up a fervent following. Yet, ironically, this most Roman of entertainments wasn’t the brainchild of the Romans. That dubious honour goes to the Etruscans, an ancient Italian people that emerged near the beginning of the first millennium BC. Gladiators used to fight in bouts to the death at Etruscan funerals – in short, they served as a form of human sacrifice. The Romans derived many of their customs from the Etruscans. And so it was perhaps inevitable that, as they grew into the dominant force on the Italian peninsula, they would adopt gladiatorial combat with gusto. Decimus Junius Brutus, later a consul, was said to have been the first to lay on a gladiatorial show – in honour of his deceased father, in c264–262 BC. Yet, as was the case with so many aspects of ancient Roman history, the concept of fighting to the death as mass entertainment was profoundly shaped by one Julius Caesar. In 65 BC, Caesar used his position as aedile (junior magistrate) to initiate a programme of public shows to secure, in the words of the historian Suetonius, “the good will of the masses”. He laid on 320 gladiatorial bouts and animal fights – and did so both in his name and in association with the other aedile, Marcus Bibulus, but in a way that ensured it was widely assumed the occasions were all his work. That, of course, was precisely his intention. Curiously, the 320 gladiatorial bouts represented a reduction of Caesar’s intentions. He had organised such a large number that his political opponents in the senate were terrified by the thought of so many armed men in Rome on Caesar’s payroll. And so they passed a law putting a cap on the numbers. The fears were well-grounded. Gladiators supplied muscle for thug politicians in the late Republic. By the 50s BC, when Roman politics was becoming increasingly polarised during the age of the imperators Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, violence was routinely used to further political agendas. In 57 BC, the notorious senator Publius Clodius Pulcher rounded up a gang of gladiators to rush those assembled to vote on a measure. They attacked and killed some of the crowd. In Rome, gladiatorial events later became the preserve of the emperors. The first, Augustus (Caesar’s heir and great-nephew), set the trend with multiple gladiatorial events, involving around 10,000 combatants. It was a sign of things to come. Caesar: Death of a Dictator Member exclusive | On the Ides of March 44 BC, the most famous Roman in history was murdered. Julius Caesar's assassination transformed Rome forever, and the image of his bloody toga has haunted monarchs and tyrants ever since. Listen to all episodes now Spartacus gives his captors the fright of their lives As bizarre as it may appear today, some gladiators were drawn to the profession by the violent glamour, and actually volunteered to lay their lives on the line. The vast majority, however, were there under duress, drawn mainly from the ranks of criminals and prisoners-of-war. That’s not to say that they were thrown into the arena without a second’s preparation. Gladiators often spent long hours honing their martial expertise. Top-notch training may have made for better entertainment but, for the Roman authorities, it involved a huge element of risk. The most famous of all slave revolts was, of course, led by Spartacus, a former soldier in the Roman army who had been enslaved and sold for gladiatorial training at a school in Capua. That training, allied with their leader’s natural intelligence, made Spartacus’s army of professional gladiators a formidable fighting force. It took two years (73–71 BC) and two armies to crush the rebellion, the Third Servile War, followed by the crucifixion of the rebels along the Appian Way (the road from Rome to Brundisium, now Brindisi). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/HM9AW7-170574a-e1731580516558.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A net-bearing retiarius captures a secutor (‘pursuer’), as depicted in a third-century mosaic. Gladiators’ martial skills were used to devastating effect during Spartacus’s uprising of 73–71 BC (Photo by Lanmas/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A net-bearing retiarius captures a secutor (‘pursuer’), as depicted in a third-century mosaic. Gladiators’ martial skills were used to devastating effect during Spartacus’s uprising of 73–71 BC (Photo by Lanmas/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Part of the reason that Spartacus’s army proved such an effective fighting force was that gladiators were skilled in the use of numerous weapons, such as swords, tridents and nets. They were also taught to employ a range of defensive equipment, including helmets, shields and guards. There were many different types of gladiator who fought in the arena. One was the retiarius (from rete = ‘net’), who had no helmet and darted about the arena equipped with a net, dagger and trident. The murmillo, armed with a sword and small shield, was named after the Greek saltwater fish mormylos because of the long, high crest on his helmet. The secutor (‘pursuer’) had a plain helmet with two eyeholes and no crest, protecting him from being snagged by the net of a retiarius, and was armed with a sword and large shield. Read more | What were the lives of gladiators like in ancient Rome? Gladiator specialisation was based on physical attributes. The most heavily armed had to be strong, while the retiarii needed to be agile and swift. Ethnicity was probably also a factor, because part of the entertainment was role-playing. Gladiatorial bouts were as much about theatrics as violence. That brew of brutality and performance could earn gladiators fame – and the admiration of the opposite sex. “Celadus the Thracian, the gasp of all the girls!” shrieked one piece of graffiti from Pompeii. “Crescens is the lord of the dolly birds!” boasted another. Not only could gladiators win hearts, they could also win their freedom. Some even went on to run their own gladiatorial schools, picking slaves and prisoners for their physique, educating them in the art of combat, and renting them out for shows. As the case of Spartacus proves, it was that education that made gladiators so potentially dangerous. Take the quiz | What type of Gladiator would you be? Mob violence rages through Pompeii over a gladiatorial show In the early decades AD, Emperor Tiberius had to send in two cohorts of soldiers to place Pollentia (now Pollenzo) in northern Italy under martial law. Just for good measure, his troops imprisoned many people, including the town councillors. The reason for these extreme measures was a gladiator show – or lack of it. The people of Pollentia wanted a prominent centurion to stump up the funds to put on a show at the arena. He failed to oblige so the mob killed him and then refused to give up his body until, reported Suetonius, “Their violence had extorted money from his heirs for a gladiatorial show.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-122213209-c1a28a3-e1731580735100.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A fresco from Pompeii depicts a riot in the town’s amphitheatre. Gladiator bouts were banned for 10 years following the unrest (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images)" title="A fresco from Pompeii depicts a riot in the town’s amphitheatre. Gladiator bouts were banned for 10 years following the unrest (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images)" /> Things got even worse in Pompeii later in the first century AD. The town was home to one of the Roman world’s oldest stone amphitheatres, built around 80–70 BC. Generations of Pompeian magistrates had lined up to compete with one another as impresarios, ingratiating themselves with the population by putting on gladiatorial combat. All that came to an ugly end in AD 59. The problems started when a troublemaker called Livineius Regulus – who had been expelled from the senate – decided to put on a gladiatorial show. Supporters gathered at the arena in Pompeii and so did rival supporters from neighbouring Nuceria. They started hurling insults at each other in a way the Roman historian Tacitus described as being “typical of the petulance of country towns”. Read more | What was Pompeii like before the eruption of AD 79? Unfortunately, the supporters started throwing stones at each other, and then blades were pulled. There being more Pompeians than Nucerians, the Pompeians soon overwhelmed their enemies. “As a result,” said Tacitus, “many of the Nucerians were carried maimed and wounded to the capital, while a large number mourned the deaths of children or of parents.” Pompeii was severely punished for the outrage. Gladiatorial bouts were banned there for 10 years. As for the troublesome Livineius and his cronies, they were all sent into exile. Nero delights the public by forcing his senators to fight One of the problems with gladiatorial bouts was that there were only so many ways the Romans could be treated to the sight of human beings hacking each other to death. Boredom was inevitable. During the reign of Nero (AD 54–68), the blood and gore had descended into repetitive tedium. Weary audiences watched the brutality barely half-awake. Impresarios trotted out the same old shows. Part of the problem was trying to please fussy audiences. Petronius, Nero’s style guru, had one character in his Satyricon novel moaning about a lousy show in which only old and worn-out gladiators “who would have fallen over flat if you’d breathed on them” were sent out to battle. So bad were they that they were all flogged at the end to punish them for a lack of enthusiasm to fight. Nero’s tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, wrote a letter to a friend recounting how disappointed he’d been by a midday event: “I happened to stop off at a lunchtime show, hoping to enjoy myself with some wit and relaxation, where a man’s eyes can rest at the sight of the death of their fellow men.” Yet it was just the opposite, he lamented. “The fights that used to take place were merciful by comparison. Now any mucking about is set aside and this is just plain murder. The fighters wear no armour, and their entire bodies are exposed to blows – and none of these are wasted.” Read more | Rethinking Nero: was the Roman emperor really so bad? So how could Nero liven up the action? According to Suetonius, one solution was to force “400 senators and 600 equestrians, some of who were affluent and of excellent repute, to compete in the arena. Even those who battled with wild animals and carried out the various service duties were senators and equestrians.” That was one of the reasons many in the Roman crowd loved Nero. He had the common touch. Humiliating the aristocracy was perfect entertainment. Nero wasn’t the only emperor to employ a little creativity when it came to putting on gladiator shows. Domitian (reigned AD 81–96) introduced an extra frisson with bouts between female gladiators, known as Amazons, while in AD 107 Trajan organised 123 days of games. Eleven thousand animals died this time, and 10,000 gladiators fought one another. Excess was becoming an end in itself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-108547949-1234d24-e1731580838149.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A relief from c40 BC shows men battling animals. As the quest for spectacle grew ever more grotesque, 11,000 animals died in one season staged by the emperor Trajan in AD 107 (Photo by Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" title="A relief from c40 BC shows men battling animals. As the quest for spectacle grew ever more grotesque, 11,000 animals died in one season staged by the emperor Trajan in AD 107 (Photo by Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)" /> Around 80 years later, the Roman mob was treated to a new type of spectacle: a gladiator-emperor. Commodus, whom you might remember was the emperor in the movie Gladiator, was in love with the glamour of the arena. He acquired special chariot horses and dressed as a charioteer (as well as living with gladiators). According to the historian Cassius Dio, who witnessed Commodus’s antics, “He would enter the arena in the garb of Mercury, and casting aside all his other garments, would begin his exhibition wearing only a tunic and unshod.” Another historian of the time called Herodian said: “It was easy for him to defeat his opponents in gladiatorial bouts, just by wounding them, because they regarded him as emperor instead of a gladiator, and allowed him to win.” Britannia catches the bug for bloodsports Gladiatorial bouts may have begun life as a niche activity at Etruscan funerals, yet, over the following centuries, they were to spread to all corners of the mighty Roman empire – and that includes to the north-western outpost of Britannia. We know this because the physical remains of amphitheatres have been found in places such as London, Silchester, Cirencester, Dorchester and Caerleon. The famous Colchester vase depicts two gladiators, Memnon and Valentinus, in action. They were probably notable local gladiators in their day (the late second century). Meanwhile, the Roman villa at Rudston in Yorkshire had a mosaic featuring scenes from the arena, and gladiators are depicted on another at Bignor in Sussex. Read more | Bread and circuses: what happened in the amphitheatres of the Roman empire? For the most part, amphitheatres of Roman Britain were built by creating turf embankments and digging out the arena. At Cirencester the amphitheatre was formed by digging out and adapting a quarry on the south-west side of the town (by the early second century). Stone walls were used to create revetments, entrance passageways and the arena wall. Despite natural erosion, the earthen embankments still rise to a height of about 8 metres. At Dorchester the amphitheatre was built by adapting a Neolithic henge monument that conveniently supplied ready-made earth embankments around an arena-shaped and sized enclosure. London’s amphitheatre lay close to the fort of the governor’s garrison, and is open to the public today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-501578349-9710fdb-e1731581117800.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Colchester Vase shows a retarius raising a forefinger in submission to a secutor. An inscription reads: “Memnon Valentinus of Legion XXX” (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="The Colchester Vase shows a retarius raising a forefinger in submission to a secutor. An inscription reads: “Memnon Valentinus of Legion XXX” (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> At the VI legion’s fortress and military colony at York a man called Victor was buried with a small bone label laid on his chest. It said: “Lord Victor, may you have a lucky win!”, an exhortation normally applied either to gladiators or charioteers. The glory of the remains of the II legion Augusta’s base at Caerleon in south Wales is its amphitheatre. Today visitors can wander around the arena where gladiators fought and among the stone-revetted earthen embankments for the wooden seats that have long since rotted away. It had seats for around 5,000 or 6,000 spectators – enough for the legion – and probably doubled up as a venue for speeches to the troops and formal military displays. A doctor embarks on an eye-catching change of career Gladiators needed some looking after, despite the fact that they might end their lives mutilated and bloody on the arena floor. One man employed to offer medical care to fighters was Gaius Futius Philargyrus, a freedman doctor of Rome’s gladiators in the first century AD. (His name was appropriately descriptive. It means ‘lover of the horse-training circuit’, but was probably used here in a more general sense to refer to a training arena.) We also know that the Greek doctor Claudius Galen’s first professional appointment was as a surgeon to gladiators. Read more | Roman medicine: 6 ways people stayed healthy in ancient Rome Of course, often there was nothing a doctor could do to save gladiators from the injuries they sustained in the arena – a fact that is made grimly apparent by the contents of a cemetery at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. Here, the graves were accompanied by inscriptions and tombstones that name and depict the dead as gladiators. The skeletons featured major bone injuries, some even demonstrably from blows made by a trident. Another Roman-period cemetery – this time in Driffield Terrace in York – contains 80 or so skeletons, many of which may have been gladiators. Crucially, about 75 were adult men, which of course couldn’t possibly be representative of the population. A little taller than average and well-built, many of them bore the signs of injuries, some healed and some unhealed. It’s possible that before they were buried, some of the corpses were studied by doctors in post-mortems that could also be used for anatomical lessons. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-935427404-14c91db-e1731581036984.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Galen treats a stricken gladiator in the city of Pergamon, as depicted in an illustration from the 19th century (Photo by DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA /Getty Images)" title="Galen treats a stricken gladiator in the city of Pergamon, as depicted in an illustration from the 19th century (Photo by DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA /Getty Images)" /> The scientific writer Celsus thought gladiators provided useful evidence for anatomists. “Occasionally,” he wrote, “a gladiator in the arena, a soldier in battle, or a traveller attacked by highwaymen, is wounded so that some part of his insides is exposed.” Interestingly, we know of at least one man whose life straddled the worlds of both medicine and fighting, earning a living as an eye doctor before, following a dramatic change of career, entering the arena as a gladiator. Unfortunately, it seems that this anonymous individual wasn’t a very good doctor – and that made him the target of one of the Roman poet Martial’s jokes. “You are now a hoplomachus [a type of gladiator],” quipped Martial. “Before you were an opthalmicus [an eye doctor]. You did as a doctor what you now do as a gladiator.” In other words, the offending individual’s career had consisted of poking out people’s eyes. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian, broadcaster and author of Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome (Abacus, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Roman roads turn up so often” | Catherine Fletcher on what the Romans did for European transport networks
Matt Elton talks to Catherine Fletcher about ancient Rome’s continent-spanning road network, how it allowed the empire to flourish – and how it shaped Europe across later centuries
Matt Elton: At the start of your book, you note that Roman roads are fascinating but also mundane. How should we make sense of this apparent contradiction? Catherine Fletcher: Right from the very beginning, Roman roads did two different things. First, of course, they were designed to get people from point A to point B – and, quite importantly, to get the Roman army from A to B. In doing so, they made everyday life a lot easier for a lot of people. If you lived on a road, you’d be able to get to market more effectively, for instance, or to go to vote – if you were the kind of person who was allowed to vote in Roman society, at least. But, from the start, Roman roads also had a cultural role. They were a way of saying: “Hello, the Roman empire’s here.” All the way along every road, at mile intervals, were milestones that would tell you how far you had travelled – but also who the current emperor was. So, as well as making everyday life possible in various ways, roads also connected the Roman empire and made a cultural statement. It’s very easy for us now to be fascinated by those roads, because they’re everywhere. On the other hand, they’re just not as glamorous as monumental sites such as Pompeii, for instance, so we don’t think about them in quite the same way. You write that the staggering scale of the roads conveys Roman power on a level no individual building can match. Should we see the Roman road network as a kind of monument in itself? Yes, I think so. When you stop and consider the fact that the routes went right the way across Europe, up into Scotland, around the Mediterranean, along the top of north Africa and through to Turkey, it’s really spectacular. But, perhaps because parts of the network are hidden now, we don’t realise how remarkable it is. It only became clear to me when I actually started travelling around Europe to see the roads while I was researching this book. When did construction of the roads start? The most famous of the roads, the Via Appia, emerged around the fourth century BC. It connected Rome with Brindisi, on the Adriatic coast of the Italian peninsula, and really set a precedent for long-distance roads connecting more and more places as the power of the Roman empire started to expand. Read more | Emperors, popes and Renaissance glory: exploring Rome’s history The Via Flaminia went north from Rome to Rimini. Other routes crossed the peninsula from elsewhere on the Adriatic coast. And, as the Romans expanded outward beyond Italy, the Via Egnatia went through what’s now Albania and Greece, and the Via Augusta linked Cádiz to the Pyrenees. By the third or fourth century AD, a network of Roman roads stretched all around the Mediterranean – so we’re talking about really impressive growth. Was length the key feature that set these roads apart from any that had been laid before? Yes. Vitally, these were long-distance trunk routes that allowed for really effective connections between imperial centres. And, as time went on, that’s what allowed them to be used for a range of services. There was the postal service, for instance, which enabled specific types of official to pass messages along to one another. There was also the rise of what we might now think of motorway service stations: mansiones, which had Roman-style baths and places you could change horses; and mutationes, which were more basic changing posts where you could pick up fresh horses. So a real infrastructure developed to facilitate very fast travel along these roads. As well as length and speed of construction, there’s another characteristic often mentioned when talking about Roman roads: straightness. Were they really so very straight – and if so, why? This is something experts argue over! But the network certainly features very impressively long, straight stretches of road. Travelling along the Via Appia from Rome towards Terracina, for instance, involves driving for miles along a very, very straight stretch of road. This straightness was appealing to the Romans for a few reasons. It made everything easy to map, and it brought other obvious benefits: you can go faster in wheeled transport on a straight road than if you’re constantly having to pause to navigate bends, for instance. But it also acted as an indicator of the Romans’ power, because building those bridges, making those cuttings and digging those tunnels demonstrated their mastery over nature. It’s worth saying, of course, that it’s not entirely true that the roads always went dead straight. Sometimes you can sense the builders thinking, when faced with a stretch of difficult terrain: this isn’t going to be worth it. Some roads go around a hill or avoid a particularly steep valley, because of the extra engineering that would have been involved. What were the roads made from? They were built using whatever materials were available locally. Some were paved with local stone, as is the case with the Via Appia. Others weren’t paved at all but instead topped with a kind of gravel called glareae, which was a bit more like modern tarmac: you just threw small stones across the surface of the road, and waited for them to be beaten into it over time by the traffic. Who funded the construction of these roads? In some cases, it was prominent private individuals. The Via Appia was funded by Appius Claudius Caecus, one of Rome’s most prominent men. He effectively sponsored its construction – and, of course, it was named after him. Some roads were funded by consuls, governors and so on. But in other cases the roads were established by an invading Roman army, either for military purposes or as a way to consolidate relationships with the territory being conquered. However they were funded, once they were built their maintenance became the responsibility of the people living along the route. So that, in a sense, acted as a kind of tax imposed by the Romans on local populations. You mentioned that you explored some of the network while researching this book. Did that change how you viewed it? One of the things that struck me is that I hadn’t fully considered just how far east this road network extends. I travelled from Vienna through to Bulgaria where, beneath a metro station in the capital, Sofia, you can still walk along part of a Roman road that was on a major route linking what’s now Istanbul with Vienna. As someone who grew up during the Cold War, I always saw the Roman empire as somehow belonging to the western world. But, of course, a significant part of this network was behind the iron curtain. It was a much more eastern empire than I was taught as a child. As you say in the book, these roads were so powerful because they spanned so much of the continent, and drew together so many of its people into an empire. How key was this network in shaping how the Roman empire was run? To run an empire effectively, you have to know what’s going on at the far reaches. You need a method of communicating with its governors, and a method of control that allows you to mobilise troops quickly to reach any given area. The roads definitely provided a useful tool for Roman authorities in their hard, hawkish way of running an empire. But they also enabled a softer style of imperial governance: bringing people in, making them part of the conversation and allowing them to access the privileges of the capital city. The Colosseum, for instance, included a set of seats for merchants from Cádiz who were doing business in Rome. The roads definitely facilitated a combination of those two ways of ruling the empire. What would it have been like to travel along these roads, both when the empire was at its height and as it started to decline? Travel would have been much slower than we’re used to today. The suggestion is that you might have been able to cover as much as 30 miles a day – though that would vary hugely, of course, depending on whether you were on foot or in some sort of carriage. If you were wealthy, you might even have sat in a kind of chair carried by enslaved people. Whatever the method of transport, it was better to travel as part of a group rather than going alone, because the roads were often quite dangerous. There was a lot of concern about bandits, of being robbed, and of being ripped off by the innkeepers along the route. But even as the might of the Roman empire started to ebb, the roads were obviously still there. It takes quite a lot to completely ruin a road, and much of the network remained perfectly passable for quite some time. That wasn’t the case everywhere: there was a road that ran east to west across southern France that we think seems to have fallen out of use. And because some of the network started to become less convenient for very long journeys, people do seem to have switched to sea routes where available, particularly to bypass land routes that were too fragmented or too uncomfortable. Your book goes on to explore the afterlives of the Roman road network into the subsequent centuries. By the time we reach the crusades, you characterise the roads as being places of both opportunity and danger. Why? Many of the crusading armies opted to get to the Holy Land by sea. But travelling across water was expensive, particularly for a large army with lots of horses to move. Add in the risks posed by pirates and shipwrecks, and you can see why some – particularly those coming from central Europe – might take an overland route. There were still risks, of course. We know that the armies irritated local populations, sometimes even raiding them for supplies en route, so there’s evidence of local people attacking crusaders. And, as I mentioned earlier, bandits remained an ever-present threat. As well as acting as a conduit for political and military force, these roads had another key historical use: as pilgrimage routes. What aspects of that story are important? Pilgrimage was a phenomenon that existed from very early on in the history of Christianity, and offers another side to the story of Roman roads. Take the apostle St Paul who, after various periods of house arrest, was forced to travel to Rome to go on trial. He landed at the trading port of Puteoli [Pozzuoli, in Campania], where he was greeted by local Christians, and made his way up the Via Appia. The reason that’s interesting is because we see later travellers, and later tourists, who are drawn to the roads not because they buy into the narrative of the Roman empire’s greatness but because they identify with the figure of Paul as someone persecuted by the Romans. Read more | How to go on a medieval pilgrimage During the Renaissance era, the trend for making cultural journeys along these roads really came to the fore. Did that change how they were regarded? Whereas the roads had primarily been noted for their practical value – for pilgrims, for instance, as a way of getting to Rome – the interest in ancient cultures that developed during the Renaissance period meant that Roman roads started to be seen as interesting cultural artefacts in their own right. In the 15th century, Pope Pius II became agitated when he witnessed people digging up Roman roads to remove their stones. He asked a local ruler of lands south of Rome to stop it going on, and to make sure the roads were preserved and kept in situ. That was the start of a series of efforts by Renaissance popes and rulers to preserve and care for ancient artefacts and learn more about them. We can see a similar growth in interest among travellers then, too. Alongside this growing recognition of the roads’ cultural value, the need for military and political power obviously continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. Did the roads also continue to be important then, both as routes and as symbols? Absolutely. Napoleon was a great fan of Roman roads. And, of course, in the early 20th century Italy had a Fascist government, led by Mussolini, which had quite an ambiguous relationship with the ancient past. It wanted to be modern – a cult grew up around the motor car and the virtue of speed – but Mussolini himself drew inspiration from the ancient Romans to build a road network. A key example of a Fascist road can still be seen near the Roman Forum itself. There’s a big road linking the Colosseum at one end with the huge white typewriter monument, the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’ [aka the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument], at the other. That route was cut right through the city to enable Mussolini’s motorcade to parade through the middle of an ancient setting. He wasn’t alone in that fixation, either. Hitler famously launched a programme building autobahns. He is supposed to have said that, when he conquered Russia, he wanted to expand an imperial road network into that nation along the lines of the routes created by the ancient Romans. So would you say that this history is valuable because it reveals the nature of political power across the centuries? I think so, because Roman roads turn up so often throughout European history! When I started researching this book, I thought that I would be writing about the logistics of the journey to Rome, so I was astonished by the number of major historical events I ran into. We’ve talked about some of them, but there are many others. Charlemagne had a grand vision for a road network in the eighth and ninth centuries. Much later, the British empire explicitly drew inspiration from the Romans in the way in which it constructed roads and railways in India. Underlying all of these examples is the fact that, when European powers have gone about growing and expanding outside their borders, the model they have very often looked to is the Roman empire. That’s because we can still see physical evidence of its extent, partly in the form of its road network. As that’s the way European rulers have thought over the centuries, understanding the relationship between the Roman empire and its infrastructure is really important. We’ve discussed some examples, but did you follow any other specific roads you’d recommend as routes into this history? Where the Via Flaminia reaches a place called Furlo [in the Marche region of central Italy], there’s a road that heads through an incredibly steep valley between mountains. It’s cut into the rock and, at a certain point, the people building it were no longer able to terrace it into the side of the valley, and instead had to make a tunnel. It’s spectacular, and incredible to think of them digging halfway up a cliff, with only basic tools and no electricity. In Britain, I’d advise people to drive along the A5 near Wroxeter in Shropshire, which gives a good sense of a straight Roman road. If you continue east along the A5, to the village of Wall, you can see beautifully preserved remnants of one of the mansiones service stations. Read more | Exploring Britain’s Roman roads with historian Dan Jones Finally, which were better: Roman roads at their peak, or the roads we have today? I think that’s a very unfair comparison [laughs]! You see that kind of meme pop up online every so often – someone comparing a pothole-riddled modern road with a perfectly paved Roman one. But the difference is, of course, nobody was trying to drive a juggernaut along their roads – they would break very quickly if you did. And, as we’ve discussed, it’s not as if the Romans managed to maintain a perfect road network. Roads fall into disrepair, their upkeep requires a lot of effort, and Roman authorities faced similar maintenance and infrastructure issues as we do today. Catherine Fletcher is professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of numerous books, including The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Vintage, 2020) Her book The Roads to Rome: A History is out now
The Roman army: everything you wanted to know
Adrian Goldsworthy answers listener questions on what life was like in the armies of ancient Rome – from revolting rations and brutal discipline, to promotion prospects and the chances of settling down
What did the average Roman soldier eat and drink while on campaign? Were the legions seen as a oppressive force in the regions they conquered? And why was one Roman centurion nicknamed 'bring me another'? Speaking with Emily Briffett, ancient historian Adrian Goldsworthy answers listener questions on life in the Roman army – from training and punishment to whether legionaries really hated being sent to Britain.
Alison Futrell shares the story of the Roman rebel – from his early enslavement and brutal gladiatorial career to his extraordinary uprising
"I am Spartacus" is one of the most iconic lines in cinema history: from the 1960 film starring Kirk Douglas in the titular role, it has come to define how we see the Roman rebel. However, according to Roman historian Alison Futrell, the real man behind the legend has an equally fascinating story to tell. Speaking to Emily Briffett, Alison explains how Spartacus's life has been told through a variety of skewed lenses, explores the context surrounding his extraordinary uprising – and reveals how he has come to be seen as a revolutionary hero.
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
From the hanging gardens of Babylon to the lighthouse of Alexandria, Bettany Hughes answers listener questions on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
Did the hanging gardens of Babylon really exist? How was Egypt's Great Pyramid built? And could any one person have seen all seven ancient wonders? In our latest Everything you wanted to know episode Rachel Dinning puts listener questions on the seven wonders of the ancient world to public historian Bettany Hughes, who gives us the lowdown on these spectacular monuments and explores why humanity has had such an enduring fascination with them. Bettany Hughes is the author of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-257666&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-seven-wonders-of-the-ancient-world%2Fbettany-hughes%2F9781474610322%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%2520Seven%2520Wonders%2520of%2520the%2520Ancient%2520World%2520%28Hardback%29%26text%3DFrom%2520the%2520Great%2520Pyramid%2520at%2CWorld%2520in%2520page%252Dturning%2520prose.#:~:text=The%20Seven%20Wonders%20of%20the%20Ancient%20World%20(Hardback)&text=From%20the%20Great%20Pyramid%20at,World%20in%20page%2Dturning%20prose." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy on Waterstones
What were the lives of gladiators like in ancient Rome?
Hollywood likes to cast them as heroic freedom fighters, but what was life really like for Rome's arena-warriors? Tony Wilmott brings you the facts…
In 1993 Austrian archaeologists working at the Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey made a spectacular discovery – a cemetery marked by the tombstones of gladiators. The stones gave the names of the men and showed their equipment – helmets, shields, the palm fronds of victory. With the tombstones were the skeletal remains of the fighters themselves, many of which bore the marks of healed wounds as well as the injuries that caused their deaths. Perhaps the most spectacular find was a skull pierced with three neat, evenly spaced holes. This man had been slain with the barbed trident wielded by a type of gladiator called a retiarius, who also fought with a weighted net. The gladiator has long been an iconic symbol of ancient Rome, and a popular element in any Roman epic movie, but what do we really know about the lives and deaths of these men? How much is known about the lives of gladiators? Until the discovery of the cities of Vesuvius in the 18th century, virtually everything we knew about gladiators came from references in ancient texts, from random finds of stone sculptures and inscriptions, and the impressive structures of the amphitheatres dotted about all over the Roman empire. It is difficult now to quite comprehend the impact that the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum (both in the 18th century) had on the classically educated of Europe, who suddenly saw the reality of Roman lives in a bewildering array of objects, graffiti and paintings. Read more about the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum The reality could be spectacular, and in some cases seemed to confirm the more lurid stories in the sources. In 1764 the temple of Isis at Pompeii confirmed the practise of mysterious and esoteric eastern religions. Two years later, in rooms around the courtyard of the theatre, a number of skeletons were found together with a large quantity of gladiatorial armour, identifying the rooms as a gladiator barracks. Among the dead was a woman adorned with bracelets, rings and an emerald necklace. Ever since, this discovery has become part of the mythology not only of Pompeii, but of the arena. At the time, it seemed to confirm scandalous stories in ancient sources of wealthy and aristocratic women having sexual adventures with brawny gladiators – though we now see the 18 skeletons in this room as a group of frightened fugitives sheltering from the disaster of the volcanic eruption. Gladiators' weapons and armour: how were they armed? From the point of view of reconstructing the gladiator, the most important discovery was the bronze gladiatorial armour and weaponry. This included 15 helmets richly ornamented with mythological scenes, and six of the curious shoulder guards known as galerus. Gladiators were divided into categories – each armed and attired in a characteristic manner – and were then pitched against one another in pairings designed to show a variety of forms of combat. Each different type of equipment provided varying levels of protection to the body, deliberately giving the opponent the opportunity to aim for specific points of vulnerability. All gladiator categories wore a basic subligaculm and balteus (a loincloth and broad belt). Among the most heavily armed gladiators were the thraex (Thracian) and the hoplomachus (inspired by Greek hoplite soldiers). Both wore padded leg-guards with bronze greaves (a form of armour) strapped over them on their legs (14 of such greaves were found in Pompeii). Each carried a small shield: rectangular for the thraex, who was armed with a short, curved sword; round for the hoplomachus, who carried a spear and short sword. Both wore a padded arm-guard or manica, but only on the sword/spear arm. The shield arm was unprotected, as was the torso. The thraex and hoplomachus wore heavy bronze helmets of the type found in Pompeii. These had broad brims, high crests and face guards. Visibility was limited to what he could see through a pair of bronze grilles. As gladiatorial re-enactors have discovered, breathing in these helmets isn’t easy, as the wearer is forced to inhale the air trapped in the face guard. Factor in fear and exertion – which would inevitably shorten the breath anyway – and you’ve got the makings of a lung-busting experience. Another type of gladiator to wear a large helmet and carry a short sword was the murmillo. He was also armed with a large rectangular shield, which he used to defend his legs. He only wore armour on one leg – though the leg on the shield side was protected with padding and greave. Two other gladiators – the provocator and secutor – also fought with one vulnerable leg, and only carried a manica on the weapon arm. While they also carried a short sword and large shield, they wore lighter helmets than the thraex, hoplomachus and murmillo. The secutor’s helmet fitted close to his head. Visibility was restricted to two small eye-holes, and there was no decoration. The helmet was shaped like the head of a fish – for the simple reason that the secutor’s opponent, the retiarius, was equipped as a fisherman. Gladiators in Britain Compared with most other provinces of the Roman empire, Roman Britain has surprisingly little evidence for gladiators. The differences between Britain’s amphitheatres may help to explain this. Those sited at the legionary fortresses of Chester and Caerleon were built in the AD 70s to serve legionaries – the citizen-soldiers of Rome. Drawn from all over the empire, they would have expected to be provided with an amphitheatre – both for entertainment and to enact games on festivals associated with the imperial cult. The legionary amphitheatres were stone-built like many across the empire. However, at the British tribal capitals the Romans built earthwork amphitheatres. There is evidence to show that these were infrequently used, and it appears that the native population didn’t wholly embrace the Mediterranean concept of the Roman games. Despite this, there is evidence for the presence of gladiators. In 1738, a stone relief was found near Chester amphitheatre showing a left-handed retiarius – the only such depiction from the empire. And at Caerleon, a graffito on a stone shows the trident and galerus of a retiarius flanked by victory palms. These are the only references to gladiators from any British amphitheatre, and both are from the legionary sites. In Britain there is but a single gladiator wall painting. Of the three gladiator mosaics left to us, the best is a frieze of cupid-gladiators at the villa of Bignor in Sussex. This features a secutor, a retiarius, and the summa rudis (referee) in a comic strip of an arena event. Knife handles in bone and bronze are also found in the form of gladiators. An evocative piece is a potsherd discovered in Leicester in 1851, on which was scratched the words “VERECVNDA LVDIA : LVCIVS GLADIATOR”, or “Verecunda the actress, Lucius the gladiator”. This love token may relate to a couple in Britain but there is ambiguity. The pottery is of a type imported from Italy, and the graffito may have been made there as well. The retiarius is perhaps the most extraordinary of all the gladiator classes, and his equipment shows most clearly the carefully choreographed balance between strength and vulnerability that ensured a degree of fairness and balance in gladiatorial combat. The retiarius was almost wholly unprotected. If he was right-handed, his left arm would be protected by a padded manica, and on his left shoulder would be strapped a high shoulder-guard, the galerus. An example of a galerus was found in the Pompeii barracks, decorated with a dolphin and a trident, a crab and the anchor and rudder of a ship. The retiarius wore no helmet, but he was armed with a long-handled trident, a short knife and a lead-weighted net or rete, after which he was named. The net could be used as a flail, but it is clear that the job of the retiarius was to throw the net over his opponent, catching the fish-like secutor, and then dispatching him with the trident. On the podcast | Gladiators: everything you wanted to know Once he’d thrown the net the retiarius could use the trident as a pole arm. This is when the galerus comes into play: when using the trident two-handed, the left shoulder would be forward, and the galerus would prove an effective head-guard. One tomb relief of a retiarius from Romania shows him holding what seems to be a four-bladed knife. The identity of this weapon remained a mystery until archaeologists discovered a femur at the Ephesus cemetery. This showed a healed wound just above the knee consisting of four punctures in the pattern of a four on dice. The effectiveness of the retiarius is gruesomely revealed by the punctured skull discovered in Ephesus, but he did not always get his own way. A mosaic from Rome, now in Madrid, shows two scenes from a fight between a secutor named Astanax and the retiarius Kalendio. Kalendio threw his net over Astanax, but when he caught his trident in the folds of the net, Astanax could cut his way out and defeat Kalendio, who was then killed. The same mosaic features another figure – an unarmed man in a tunic carrying a light wand. He is the summa rudis, the referee, reminding us that this was not a free-for-all, but a fight that must be carried out within a framework of rules and rituals. These rules would clearly be understood by the audience, who would have been at least as appreciative of the fighters’ skills as excited by pure blood-lust. Gladiators as entertainment The audience would also have been fully aware who was putting on such entertainment for them. Gladiatorial shows were almost always staged by leading citizens – often to enhance their political careers by currying favour with the electorate. Thus the walls of Pompeii are daubed with painted election notices, alongside advertisements for gladiatorial spectacles. One of many examples, found near the forum, reads: “The gladiatorial troupe of Aulus Suettius Certus will fight at Pompeii on 31 May. There will be a hunt and awnings. Good fortune to all Neronian games.” There is little doubt about the popularity of the combats. Even tombs are covered with scratched graffiti showing the results of particular fights. A cartoon of two gladiators fighting in neighbouring Nola is captioned “Marcus Attius, novice, victor; Hilarius, Neronian, fought 14, 12 victories, reprieved.” This says a lot. Attius unexpectedly beat a veteran, but, like most of the combats recorded at Pompeii, the loser was spared. Being a gladiator was not an automatic sentence of violent death. The person funding the games (the editor) would commission a troupe (familia) of gladiators run by a proprietor/trainer (lanista). One such lanista, recorded in Pompeian graffiti,was Marcus Mesonius. He would acquire gladiators from the slave market. Legally, gladiators were the lowest of the low in Roman society, but a trained gladiator was a valuable commodity to a lanista, representing a considerable investment of time and money, and it would be in his interest to keep his stable well and to minimise the death rate. Commodus: the emperor who loved to fight The relationship between the emperor and the arena was complex. Emperors could get a bad reputation for showing too much enthusiasm for spectacles of death. Claudius, for example, was reputed to have keenly watched the faces of gladiators as they died, favouring the killing of the helmetless retiarii. For a member of the elite to fight in the arena was shameful – which was why Caligula, Nero and Commodus forced well-born Romans to do so. Special contempt was reserved for those emperors who chose to fight as gladiators in the arena. Caligula liked to appear as a thraex. Commodus, however, was the most notorious for his arena appearances. He fought as a secutor, and was a scaeva – a left hander. According to Cassius Dio he substituted the head of the Colossus by the Colosseum with his own, gave it a club and bronze lion to make it look like Hercules (with whom he identified himself). He inscribed his own titles upon it, ending “champion of secutores – the only left-handed gladiator to conquer 12 times one thousand men”. Interestingly, Aurelius Victor relates a story of Commodus refusing to fight a gladiator in the arena. The gladiator’s name was Scaeva. Perhaps Commodus was afraid to lose his usual natural advantage in fighting a fellow southpaw. In AD 192, intending to assume the consulship of Rome in gladiatorial guise, he was strangled by an athlete. Thus he died in shame without the opportunity to take the coup de grâce with dignity like a true gladiator. What were the survival rates for gladiators in ancient Rome? A graffito now in Naples Museum gives the results of a show put on by Mesonius. Of 18 gladiators who fought, we know of eight victors, five defeated and reprieved, and three killed. This kind of ratio may be typical given the records in graffiti and on tombstones. There were veterans; an unnamed retiarius on a tombstone in Rome boasted 14 victories, but few survived more than a dozen fights. The painstaking forensic work on the Ephesus gladiator skeletons has provided startling and intimate insights into the way these men lived and died. Of the 68 bodies found, 66 were of adult males in their 20s. A rigorous training programme was attested by the enlarged muscle attachments of arms and legs. These were strong, athletic men, whose diet was dominated by grains and pulses, exactly as reported in classical texts. Yet as well as muscle and stamina, gladiators needed a good layer of fat to protect them from cuts. The Ephesus skeletons also provided evidence for good medical treatment. Many well-healed wounds were found on the bodies, including 11 head wounds, a well-set broken arm and a professional leg amputation. On the other hand, 39 individuals exhibited single wounds sustained at or around the time of death. This suggests that these men did not die from multiple injuries but a lone wound. This provides further evidence for the enforcement of strict rules in the arena, and the delivery of a coup de grâce. At the end of a bout a defeated gladiator was required to wait for the life or death decision of the editor of the games. If the vote was for death, he was expected to accept it unflinchingly and calmly. It would be delivered as swiftly and effectively as possible. Cicero speaks of this: “What even mediocre gladiator ever groans, ever alters the expression on his face. And which of them, even when he does succumb, ever contracts his neck when ordered to receive the blow?” As we have seen, gladiators were at the bottom of the heap in Roman society. This remained the case no matter how much they were feted by the people. Above most qualities, the Romans valued ‘virtus’, which meant, first and foremost, acting in a brave and soldierly fashion. In the manner of his fighting, and above all in his quiet and courageous acceptance of death, even a gladiator, a despised slave, could display this. This article was first published in the May 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
“The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
Mary Beard tells Matt Elton what life would have been like for Rome’s emperors – from the path to the top to the almost inevitable sticky end
Your new book covers a swathe of the history of ancient Rome, from Julius Caesar to Septimius Severus and beyond, but starts by introducing a less familiar figure. Who is he, and why did you lead with him? The book kicks off with the story of a teenager from Syria who came to the Roman throne in AD 218 and who was assassinated in 222. Known as Elagabalus [officially Marcus Aurelius Antoninus], he certainly wasn’t one of Rome’s greatest hits, but he is an emperor around whom the most extravagant stories have collected. If you think Nero or Caligula were over the top, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve looked at Elagabalus! We’re told that when he invited people to dinner, he showered them with rose petals – with so many petals that his guests were smothered and died. He is said to have been the earliest known user of the whoopee cushion in western history: he would have his slaves go around and let the air out of dinner guests’ cushions so that they ended up on the floor. He’s also reputed to have married a Vestal Virgin [a priestess sworn to chastity] and made a human sacrifice. In short, Nero was a pussycat in comparison. I start the book with Elagabalus because the point about such stories isn’t whether or not they’re true. (My guess is that they’re not, but were invented after Elagabalus’s time to besmirch his memory.) My pitch is that, in a way, it doesn’t matter if they are literally true, because they’re true in another sense: they represent Roman fears about what the worst kind of emperor would be like. They’re saying that you never know where you are with a bad emperor – that emperors are never what they seem, and that some of what lies at the heart of Roman imperial power is deceit, deception and fakery. In the orbit of the emperor, you can never believe your eyes. Even nature might be corrupted. Elagabalus’s alleged tricks included only eating fish when he was inland, and having snow brought to his summer gardens. Again, these stories paint a picture of a mad, capricious emperor – but what they’re actually saying is that the problem at the root of imperial power is its subversion of nature. You can learn a lot about what people thought about emperors from these tales, even if they are true only at the level of ideology. You write that Rome was an empire before it had an emperor. Could you elaborate on that point? People sometimes think that the Roman empire was acquired and governed by a Roman emperor. It was absolutely the reverse: though it’s completely counter-intuitive, the Roman emperor inherited an empire. The previous political system, generally known as the Republic, ended with Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. It was a sort of – and I mean sort of – democracy, with very ‘sort-of’ elections: it wasn’t exactly one-man, one-vote equality. One of the things about the Republic that forever marked out Rome from almost any other early western power is that it was stunningly successful in conquest. People have always wondered why: some argue that it’s because the Romans were simply nastier than everyone else, though I think that everyone was nasty, really. But certainly the Romans were hugely successful at defeating their neighbours and expanding their territory. By the second century BC – long before Rome had an emperor – it had acquired a huge land-based empire stretching around the Mediterranean from what’s now Portugal and Spain to Greece and Turkey. Read more | Cheese, angry gods and shoddy surgeons: the unlikely deaths of Roman emperors The key point here is that it was the enormous size of this empire that destroyed Roman democracy. The Republic was based on notional equality among the elite, and on the basic rule that nobody held any political office for more than a year, and that any such office was always shared with someone else. But although that system helped the Romans acquire that vast swathe of territory, it proved unworkable as a means to govern or keep it. Long before there was an emperor, unprecedented power ended up being handed to individuals, in order to put down rebellions or clear the sea of pirates or whatever the problem was in that moment. At the same time, the notional equality of the elite was being destroyed because so much wealth was being acquired from the empire, and some people were making themselves so much bigger than others. So, from the second century BC, a series of civil wars erupted, with kind-of prequels to emperors taking power. Out of all of that, one-man rule was established. That change in system did help solve practical problems of governing the empire. Some provinces lay several months’ travel from Rome, and if you held office for only one year, you could barely get out to such distant realms and back again during that time. Ultimately, Julius Caesar cut through all of this bureaucracy to be made dictator – and, eventually, dictator for life. As a single ruler, he founded the political system we know as the empire. But it really was a case of the empire producing emperors, not emperors producing the empire. After Caesar’s assassination, someone you’ve described as “a particularly nasty young man” rose to power: Octavian. Why was he so very nasty, and how did he become Rome’s first emperor? Caesar was assassinated in the name of ‘liberty’ – ha ha – by some privileged aristocrats whom William Shakespeare glorified. A decade of civil war followed, during which Caesar’s supporters – notably Mark Antony and Octavian – defeated his killers, then turned on each other. Octavian eventually emerged victorious and became the first emperor proper, changing his name to Augustus [and reigning 27 BC to AD 14]. But he was a thug, at least in the first instance. He illegally raised his own private militia and joined forces with Mark Antony. He was then part and parcel of some extremely nasty civil violence and lawless killing. He is well known as being a violent young bloke: one story tells how he tore out the eyes of one of his enemies with his bare hands. One of the great mysteries of Roman history is how, after starting out in that way, Augustus was able to rebrand himself as a founding father and elder statesman. Some of that early violence might have been a bit exaggerated by his enemies, but some of it certainly wasn’t. There are plenty of other terrorists and radicals who, after winning the fight for power – pretty nastily, sometimes – turned themselves into revered elder statesmen, but Augustus’s must count as one of the biggest and most unexplained turnarounds. He ruled for 40 years, making him the longest-serving Roman emperor – and yet, if you’d encountered him in the 30s BC, you’d have steered well clear. Not only did Octavian rule for a long time, but he also established principles of emperorship that endured for centuries. Why were they so successful, and how did he change what rule meant? Quite how much of a ready-made plan he had, when he’d just been fighting a civil war, I don’t know. No doubt his most pressing aim was to not get a dagger in the back. Though ancient writers suggest he was working to a template that he already had in mind, I think he improvised a set of measures that lasted, and which are relatively clear. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Roman emperors One that was absolutely crucial was nationalising the army. Part of the problem that had emerged in Rome in the first century BC was that a whole series of ambitious men were raising their own private legions that were loyal to them, not to the state. That’s how Augustus had operated during the civil war, and he must have seen that was a big problem. So he jettisoned the notion of temporary armies built by leading men, and replaced it with a professional army, with limited terms of service and a retirement package at the end. That broke the link between ambitious and powerful generals and their troops, and was very successful – but also hugely expensive. It’s reckoned that paying the troops, plus retirement packages, cost around half the entire revenue of the Roman empire. But I think that’s an indication of just how important Augustus regarded making the army the force of the state, not of individual generals. He also continued the traditional Roman conquests. With the money that was left, he was phenomenally generous to the Roman people – not only in terms of cash handouts and providing shows and spectacles, but also of rebuilding the ceremonial centre of Rome, which had been rather higgledy-piggledy and not very well planned. He erected new buildings, many with decorations featuring Augustus himself. He flooded the Roman world with his image, both on coins and in marble. It’s reckoned that there were between 25,000 and 50,000 depictions of him across the world. Though immortalised in these sculptures, eventually Augustus’s rule – like all others – had to end. How did succession work? Could anyone become an emperor if they wanted it enough? You could say that Augustus was successful and lucky in everything apart from succession planning. That’s where you see the big fault-lines in the system. Part of the problem was that he and his wife, Livia, had no living children of their own. They each had children from previous marriages, but didn’t have children between them to take over the throne. What happened instead was a series of adoptions, and failed attempts to marry off Augustus’s daughter to potential heirs – none of whom lived long enough to succeed as emperor. Eventually, Augustus was left with only Livia’s son from her first marriage, Tiberius, whom he adopted and who took over the throne. It’s not hard to see why some historians imagined that Livia was angling for her son’s succession all along, and had a hand in the premature deaths of the other potential candidates – though there’s no evidence for that, only gossip. So succession was a mess from the very beginning. As to whether anyone could become emperor: in theory, yes – but what really happened was that successors were chosen via adoption, first from the wider family of the emperor and then, from the second century AD, from a wider range of the elite. So it certainly wasn’t like the way any American can dream of inhabiting the White House. Did that expanding pool lead to more diverse figures becoming emperor? And is some of that diversity obscured by the fact that statues of emperors now seem to us to be universally white? One feature of the Roman empire, right from its origins, was that Rome gradually allowed people from its empire into full citizenship and power. And, as the elite of the Roman empire became more diverse, so the diversity of the people on the throne also increased. Trajan came from Spain, for instance, while Elagabalus was from a Syrian family. I think you’re right: the fact that visitors to museums now see loads and loads of white marble statues can give us a misleading impression of the kinds of people who were Roman emperors. The exact ethnicity of Septimius Severus has been much debated, for instance, but he certainly wasn’t what we might now term ‘pale, male and stale’. And of course those statues might have looked different when they were painted to reflect a range of skin tones and facial characteristics. So yes: looking at ancient statues, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all emperors were white. You’ve mentioned Elagabalus again there. In your book, you make the point that it’s vital to see these individuals not just as characters in macabre stories but as hard-working bureaucrats. What tasks did they perform, and just how hard-working were they? Some rulers must have been more hard-working than others. A key point of my book, though, is that, despite our tendency to see Roman emperors as a series of psychopaths, it just doesn’t make sense to understand the Roman empire in these terms. The empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths, because in that case it just would not have survived. As to what emperors actually did, I think the job description would probably have been the same in AD 210 as it was in 10 BC – though some would have been better at doing it than others. As the emperor Marcus Aurelius put it in the second century AD, when he was looking back at his predecessors: Roman imperial power, and imperial power more generally, is “the same play, just a different cast”. Read more | The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history Some jobs would always have had to be done, regardless of who was emperor – and one of those was dealing with correspondence. The emperor’s postbag must have been enormous, crammed full of petitions, begging letters, and reports from leaders and governors. Some missives would have been about matters of great geopolitical import, while others would have been about lost cows. There is no doubt that somebody in the royal palace was looking at those questions and signing them off. We don’t know how many letters were actually dealt with by the emperor himself – just as we know that if we write to the prime minister now and get a reply, it wasn’t actually written by the PM. But when Romans imagined the emperor, they imagined him with his red boxes adjudicating legal cases just as much as they pictured him having sex in the swimming pool. We talked earlier about Caesar’s assassination, a fate that also befell plenty of his successors. Was there a link between meeting that fate and an emperor’s posthumous reputation? It certainly made an enormous difference. I think that modern readers of Roman history, me included, have tended to be a bit naive about this. We’ve assumed, for instance, that Domitian [ruled AD 81–96] was very nasty, and that’s why he was assassinated, to be succeeded by the elderly but steady Nerva. Well, you could spin that: you could say that because Domitian was assassinated in a palace coup – with most of the conspirators coming from inside the palace – it was in the interests of Nerva and others to spread vile stories about Domitian. Now, we don’t know which story is right, and I think it’s always a bit too simple to somehow pretend that these monsters were really nice. None of them were nice in our terms, but it’s still useful to remember that good men and bad men alike are assassinated. You end the book by writing that researching and writing it has opened your eyes to aspects of modern politics. Without naming any specific present-day politicians, in what ways do you mean that? On the one hand, writing the book made me hate autocracy more. It’s a system in which everybody is engaged in a fiction, a fake – even the emperor. He’s the one person to whom no one will ever tell the truth. So I felt more distaste for autocratic power. At the same time, I felt a bit more sympathy on an individual basis for the probably very ordinary person on the throne. How do you live in a culture in which there is no truth? But I sympathised also with all those others caught up in that culture, right down to the bottom of the pile. I suppose it’s also made me think slightly differently about modern politics in this country and elsewhere. I could do an analysis of the hypocrisy of the British political system – its preponderance of soundbites, its lies and systematic untruths – but I have sympathy for the men and women caught up in that system, too. Most of them probably didn’t go into politics to be part of a sham facade of untruthfulness, but instead to try to make things better. And in a sense, we’re all implicated in their problems, because we don’t ever let them off the hook – we don’t ever let them make a mistake. We’re there on social media – me included – trying to out them and to cancel them. I felt a little more sympathy for them as people, while decrying some of the deplorable structural aspects of British or American politics – indeed, probably any big political system in the modern world. The one thing you can say, however – and this has got to make us pleased – is that we’ve got the ballot boxes and general elections, and we can vote the buggers out, whoever they may be. If we choose not to, that’s our problem. No one could vote out an emperor, though, and of course one of the reasons why that world looks so bloody from our perspective is that there was only one way of solving a problem in the ancient world – which was death. So we’re in a better position, and we should perhaps use our democratic rights more enthusiastically. You can listen to Mary Beard talk to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast here. This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine