The Western Roman Empire fell quickly. The Eastern Empire endured for a thousand years — yet it too faced relentless migrations. Lombards in Italy. Slavs and Avars in the Balkans. Seljuk Turks in ...

In Ancient Greece and Rome, pets brought companionship, loyalty, status, and love—from Odysseus’ Argos to Augustus’ raven.

In the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire came dangerously close to total collapse. Civil wars, economic breakdown, foreign invasions, and a devastating plague tore the empire apart. At one point, Rome ...

Archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of ancient Roman marching camps in Saxony-Anhalt — a first for one of Eastern ...

The anthropologist embarks on a journey by train visiting key sites of the Roman empire. Alice begins her Roman tour at Pompeii, where she explores ingenious Roman engineering, racy artworks, the role ...

The Roman Empire transformed into Byzantium in the 7th century. Mural of the walls of Constantinople at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Photo credit: Argos’Dad Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 The ...

In the grand cities of ancient Rome, aqueducts delivered life-giving water to fountains, baths, and homes. The concrete Romans invented allowed them to build these vast networks. But those systems ...

In a novel discovery, archaeologists in South Moravia, Czechia, have unearthed a 1,800-year-old bronze fragment of a Roman wrist purse - a utilitarian and tactical piece of military gear that offers a ...

The expansion of one of the Mediterranean’s strongest powers wasn’t only driven by conquest, but also infrastructure. By borrowing techniques from the Greeks and the Etruscans, Romans engineered ...

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed ...

The most dramatic of the mosaic’s three panels, with a naked Achilles attacking Hector. Credit: University of Leichester In the summer of 2020, during Britain’s COVID lockdown, Jim Irvine noticed ...

A version of this essay first appeared in The Swell, Salon's culture newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this, for more culture that's made to last. Two years ago, a viral trend tore ...