including headings Augustus Caesar, The Julio-Claudian emperors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, ...
including headings Holy Roman Emperor, Emperors and popes, Papal decline and recovery, Gregory VII and investiture, Rome and the struggle for power, ...
It is typical of Octavian's political skill that under this arrangement the much-cherished republic of Rome appears still to be intact. Yet with hindsight historians have judged 27 BC to be the founding year of the empir...
The acceptance of Odoacer as king of Italy in 476 causes this year to be seen as the end of the Roman empire. And in a real sense it is. Kings and popes, neither of them part of Roman imperial tradition, will henceforth...
Mosaic spreads through the Hellenistic world, and is brought by Greek craftsmen to Italy - as revealed in the amazing examples from Pompeii (for example, the dramatic image of Alexander and Darius in battle). <...
Spain is a rich prize for any empire-builder. It has mines of gold, silver and copper, and a plentiful supply of Celts, tough warriors and useful recruits for an army. The Iberian peninsula is therefore hotly contested,...
Hero, a mathematician in Alexandria in about AD 75, enjoys inventing mechanical gadgets, which he describes in his work Pneumatica. Whether he has the technology to make them we do not know, but his scientific pri...
In the 4th century Alexandria plays a prominent role in an entirely new context, that of Christian dogma. The preeminence of the city in the eastern Mediterranean makes it an important early centre of Christianity long b...
A great crowd gathers in a stadium in Alexandria. All eyes are on two tiers of thrones. On the upper level sit Antony and his wife Cleopatra, robed as the Egyptian goddess Isis. On four lower thrones are their own three...
During the Roman empire Alexandria retains its commercial importance, for it is the port through which the grain of Egypt passes on its way to the granaries of Italy. With the decline of Greek influence, the city loses s...
One of the surviving books of Hero of Alexandria, entitled On the Dioptra, describes a sophisticated technique which he has developed for the surveying of land. Plotting the relative position of features in a land...
Alexandria suffers a double blow in the 7th century. First it falls victim to the final struggle between the Persian and Byzantine empires, being captured by the Persians in 616. Then, after a siege lasting more than a y...
In Palestine one rich local family increasingly enjoys Roman favour - that of Herod. The family are practising Jews, though not descended from one of the tribes of Israel, and they seem able to deliver the stability whic...
The Roman rulers are not the first to link Syria administratively with Palestine. In the late 6th century Darius makes Syria and Palestine, together with Cyprus, the fifth satrapy of his empire. During the Seleucid dynas...
In the Roman empire large households were run by an official known as major domus ('mayor of the house'), from whom we derive our major-domo. The Frankish kings adapt this system, calling their chief administrativ...
