I have been studying and writing about Roman emperors for more than 30 years. I never imagined I would live in a time and place where the judicial system might give more extensive legal immunity to an American president than any Roman emperor ever enjoyed. Until last Thursday.

Contemporary imagination often assumes that Roman emperors enjoyed absolute authority to do what they wanted with their empire’s resources, wealth, and military power. They did not. Rather, Roman emperors were magistrates who held office for life, managing the Roman state on behalf of its citizens. This position gave emperors vast powers to initiate wars, choose administrators, appoint generals, order criminal investigations, and take the property and lives of convicted criminals. But, like their fellow citizens, Roman emperors were subject to Roman law.

Emperors themselves said so. In 429 C.E., the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III explained that “a reigning sovereign must be subject to the laws because our authority is dependent upon that of the law and it is the greatest attribute of imperial power for the sovereign to be subject to the laws.” It is only by accepting that laws apply to every Roman, the emperors continued, that we are able to “forbid others to do what we do not suffer ourselves to do.” In other words, an emperor claiming an exemption from Roman law had no right to expect his fellow citizens to obey those same laws.

A few decades later, Priscus of Panium, a Roman official and rhetorician who served as an ambassador to the court of Attila the Hun, explained to an acquaintance he calls Graikos why Roman legal procedures must apply equally to everyone. Graikos had once lived in Roman territory but had chosen to live among the Huns. He told Priscus he preferred the Hunnic empire, where, unlike in Rome, Attila limited corruption, did not assess high taxes, and presided over a people who did not trouble one another. True, the brutal barbarian king could do what he wanted to anyone. But Graikos still believed this was better than Rome, where “lawsuits are much protracted, much money is spent on them,” and everyone is distracted from doing what they want by concerns of when or even whether a legal penalty will be enforced.

Priscus corrected Graikos sharply. “Those who founded the Roman state,” he said, “ordained wise and good men to be guardians of the laws so that things should not be done haphazardly.” In Rome, “the laws apply to all, even the emperor obeys them,” and “the time taken in cases results from a concern for justice lest a judge err in his decisions.” Under Attila, by contrast, “one must give thanks to Fortune for freedom.” In a society without laws, Priscus asserted, your life and property are protected only by fate and the whims of Attila. Realizing his mistake, Graikos “wept and said that the laws were fair and the Roman state was good.”

It is, then, astonishing to read the April 25 transcript of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Donald J. Trump v. United States. The day began with Donald Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, boldly asserting, “Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it.”

As the proceedings continued, the exchanges became increasingly shocking. At one point, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what would happen if the president “orders the military” to assassinate a political rival. In response, Sauer claimed that such an order “could well be an official act” and thus render the president immune from prosecution. Then, near the hearing’s conclusion, Justice Samuel Alito took on an incredulous tone as he asked the government’s lawyer, “If [the president] makes a mistake, he makes a mistake; he’s subject to the criminal laws just like everyone else?”

Any serious Roman jurist would know how to answer Alito’s question. They would respond as the 10th century bishop Nicholas of Constantinople did to the emperor Leo VI when he tried to get married illegally: “It is evil, a most evil doctrine to say that, because one is an emperor he is permitted to do wrong in a way that no one would permit his subjects to do.” Romans knew that even the limited liberty permitted by their autocracy depended on every citizen, regardless of their station, being equally subject to the protections and restrictions of a common legal system. To assert otherwise would be to leave the Roman world of law and enter the unpredictable, anarchic kingdoms led by people like Attila the Hun.

Alito is, without a doubt, a finer legal scholar than I am. But he is not a finer legal scholar than Tribonian or Papinian or many of the thousands of other jurists who taught and wrote about a tradition of Roman legal scholarship that stretched across nearly 2,000 years. These wise men refused to grant the powers to an emperor that Alito and Sauer seem to want to grant to an elected president. Maybe our Supreme Court could learn something from reading their work.

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Those who criticize President Biden as “too old” or “slow” or “confused” might learn something from the very similar treatment of the Roman emperor Claudius.

Claudius, who ruled from 41 to 54 CE, was the most effective and successful member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, apart from Augustus. He was also the only emperor mocked as weak-willed and feeble. Claudius grew up a sickly, unattractive child with a limp and a speech impediment. His own family teased and derided him, in his early years and beyond. Like other Romans, they saw his physical imperfections as weakness, and cause for disdain. They kept him out of the public eye, encouraged him to study history, and did not allow him to hold any civic  or military office.

Caligula, Claudius’ nephew, attained the imperial throne at age 24. In order to stress his Julio-Claudian family ties, Caligula appointed Claudius to an honorific post as co-consul in 37 CE.  Yet Caligula followed the family’s view of Claudius as weak, and did everything he could to ridicule his aging uncle. Caligula made Claudius the butt of jokes at dinner. He even required him to pay 8 million sesterces to serve as a priest in the imperial cult, forcing him to sell off property to pay the exorbitant fee.refused to appoint his uncle to any public office of note.

Claudius survived Caligula’s acts of degradation by feigning indifference. When Caligula pushed Claudius into a river, robes and all, out of anger that the older man took part in a senatorial delegation in Germany, Claudius played dumb to avoid provoking further retaliation. Nor did Claudius complain when Caligula humiliated him by making him the last consul consulted on all opinions in the senate. Again, he pretended not to notice the slight.

Claudius had no part in the brutal assassination of Caligula, a mere four years into the young emperor’s reign, at the hands of a praetorian guard infuriated by his cruelty and erratic behavior. In the midst of this palace coup, Claudius, the last of the Julio-Claudian family, feared for his life. He ran and hid in a bedroom in the palace. When a praetorian guard found him and proclaimed him emperor, Claudius quickly promised 15,000 sesterces to each man to win his loyalty.

Thus Claudius lived to take up the throne, at age 50. His policies provided the Romans with much-needed military and administrative reforms. He famously expanded citizenship to provincials, and sought out talented outsiders who could serve Roman institutions. In Lyon in Gaul, modern France, for example, Claudius advanced provincial elites to become members in the senate in Rome. Locals in Lyon appreciated Claudius’ actions on their behalf, and immortalized a speech he offered in their defense by casting it in a bronze which survives to this day. Claudius’ efforts to open the senate to new members set a pattern for greater inclusion that would invigorate the body for centuries to come.

Claudius is celebrated today for his infrastructure reform and building projects; he funded a new port for the city of Rome in Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber River. He planted new cities and colonies, such as the settlement that is now known as Cologne, Germany. Claudius also supported the successful expansion of Roman rule into Britain, and personally went to Gaul to claim victory there.

Roman coin depicting Emperor Claudius (left). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Despite his many successes, he faced heavy criticism. Roman elites fumed because Claudius expanded the imperial bureaucracy to include freedmen—former slaves who had earned freedom, but not equality, in Roman society. The decision, like Claudius’ support of provincial citizens, demonstrated a canny awareness of the value of incorporating new and talented men into the state. But entrenched elites, who worried about enabling powerful decision-makers from outside the upper class who owed loyalty only to the emperor, ridiculed the new functionaries as lacking in culture, and as being motivated only by economic gain. The biographer Suetonius, for instance, disparaged Claudius for giving out magistracies and punishments in accord with freedmen’s recommendations. Like other Roman elites, he complained that the emperor was too easily swayed by his servants, and did not have the strength of character to make up his own mind.

Looking back on these accusations today, what stands out is the personal mockery that accompanied them—from contemporaries and from later Roman historians—because Claudius did not live up to expectations for physically fit, manly, headstrong emperors. The Romans defined virtue in terms of masculine ideals; the term “virtue” means literally the quality of being a man, requiring physical strength and vigor. Critics usually blamed Roman emperors for military disasters or avarice. They targeted Claudius instead for physical and mental weakness.

Biden’s predicament is similar. Like Claudius, the president can boast many achievements—recovery from the pandemic, building a global coalition in support of Ukraine, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and pushing through historic legislation to rebuild infrastructure and respond to climate change. Yet, like Claudius, he is mocked for lacking the swagger and virility of a younger man.

Members of Biden’s own party openly acknowledge his age, 81, as their primary concern. They worry he will not be up to the physical demands of the presidency, and that he may not finish his term. Ironically, Biden’s likely Republican challenger, Donald Trump, is 77—also elderly. He, too, may not finish out his years in office. Yet Trump’s aggressive bluster and virulent anger, along with his wide girth, make him appear more virile. Voters equate an angry demeanor with a more manly, youthful leader, and do not weigh the advantages of experience and wisdom in a president.

Claudius reminds us that it’s foolish to dismiss a leader’s political skills and wise actions based on superficial observations of physicality and virility. It has taken centuries for historians to reevaluate Claudius’ rule, and to appreciate his administration’s forward-looking policies. Hopefully American voters will be quicker to realize that human virtues and moral strength do not require the appearance of youth.

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The recent failures, and subsequent government rescues, of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, prompt us to consider an ancient question: How do banks prevent the actions of very rich people from endangering the integrity of a widely used banking system?

Like today, the rapid and unexpected movement of large amounts of capital nearly caused the Roman banking system to collapse in the 1st century. Roman banks survived then because the imperial government injected large amounts of money to stabilize the credit market. And, again like today, that action was both necessary and quite unpopular.

Rome’s crisis began in 33 CE, when anonymous informers accused members of the Roman Senate of enriching themselves by loaning excessive amounts of money, in violation of a law that mandated senators hold a certain portion of their fortunes in Italian real estate. An official investigation, according to the historian Tacitus, determined that “not a single [senator] escaped guilt.” The Senate was given 18 months to get its membership back into compliance with the law. Those who failed to do so risked having their property confiscated.

This presented a significant challenge for most senators. Although they were among the wealthiest Romans, the bulk of their assets consisted of loans that they had made directly to others as well as bonds made up of loans originally issued by others. Such an investment portfolio was not atypical among wealthy Romans of the 1st century, seeing as most large transactions in Rome involved the transfer of bonds from the bank account of a buyer to that of the seller.

But the sudden enforcement of a law requiring senators to own property compelled all 600 senators to radically change what their collection of assets looked like. Soon they were calling in the loans they had made, selling the bonds they owned, and withdrawing the money they had deposited in banks. All of this money then flowed out of the banks and into the Italian property market.

Chaos resulted. Tacitus explains that the sudden demand for high-end Italian estates caused land prices to spike. Meanwhile, there were suddenly too many loans available to sell—collapsing the market and prices of such loans. As a result, Tacitus reports, the more bonds “a man owned, the more disastrous it was for him to sell.”

The senators didn’t have any choice. The law required them to continue liquidating their depreciating assets so that they could purchase real estate at inflated prices. “The result,” Tacitus writes, “was a dearth of money” to loan because the investors “had withdrawn their capital from circulation in order to buy land.”

The Roman banking system had reached a crisis point, threatening the economic life of the empire.

In 33 CE, the Roman banking system was already 200 years old. It was sophisticated and capable when it came to controlling the flow of money. Like modern financial institutions, bankers took in deposits, paid interest to the depositor, and turned profits by loaning money to borrowers at a higher interest rate than they paid depositors. But Roman bankers did far more than this. If someone needed to pay a bill at some point in the future, bankers could receive the funds, and then issue payment in cash on the depositor’s behalf when it was time to disburse it. They would cash checks issued to a creditor by someone who had money deposited with them, either by giving the person currency in exchange for the check or by crediting the sum to their account. Bankers managed property sales, both as agents for the sellers and as figures who provided credit for the buyers.

And, just as the Federal Reserve today depends on banks in the United States to circulate new dollar bills into the economy, the Roman state depended upon bankers to collect worn-out coins, turn them over to the treasury, and replace them with newly minted ones.

All of these actions made bankers money. Every time a banker made a transaction on behalf of a client, he debited a fee from the account balance that the client had deposited. Bankers also were permitted to invest the wealth deposited with them in ventures they believed would make a profit. When they did this, they paid the client for borrowing against their deposits. These usage fees could be quite large. Justinian’s Digest mentions a banker who paid a sum roughly equivalent to $800,000 today to a client because of the “many transactions” he had undertaken using money from the man’s accounts.

Despite all of these innovations, Romans in 33 CE still had not figured out how to secure the wealth of bankers and depositors if the debts upon which credit instruments were based went bad. This was not because they lacked experience responding to financial crises. In the early ’80s BCE, for example, the massacre of thousands of businessmen in Asia Minor by King Mithridates of Pontus made the loans they had taken out impossible to collect. Suddenly those loans, the bonds based on those loans, and all of the deposits backed by these bonds became worthless. In response to the destruction of so much wealth, the Roman government responded by minting large numbers of silver coins, an action that limited but did not reverse the economic damage.

Romans tried a different strategy in 49 BC when armies led by Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and captured the city of Rome. When nervous senators called in loans and tried to convert large amounts of high-value bonds into currency that they could carry with them if they needed to flee Italy, Caesar introduced emergency measures that he believed would calm the financial markets. They included mandating a mediation process before any lender could compel repayment, placing a limit on the amount of gold and silver any individual could possess, and instituting capital controls to prevent the wealthy from liquidating their financial assets and fleeing Rome with the cash.

None of these strategies would have, by themselves, solved the problem Rome faced in 33 CE. For the economy to stay solvent, Romans needed to believe in the integrity of their banking system, trust that the funds they had placed in it remained secure, and know that funds were available to borrow if they needed to do so. Only the emperor Tiberius had the capacity to intervene in a fashion that addressed all these concerns.

Tiberius’ answer was to aggressively recapitalize the banks. Tacitus, our most detailed source for this crisis, explains that the emperor infused the equivalent of more than $2 billion of his own money “into the banks and permitted them to make many loans without interest for three years” using these funds. He augmented this short-term injection of capital with a long-term program of monetary stimulus. Roman mints produced 800% more silver coins and 300% more gold coins in the years immediately following this crisis, and many of these coins entered the economy through banks in Rome.

Tiberius also eliminated the condition that caused the crisis in the first place by quietly suspending any further enforcement of the mandate that senators hold a certain portion of their wealth in real estate. “In this way,” Tacitus wrote, “credit was restored and, gradually, private lenders were found.”

The senate honored Tiberius for his successful economic rescue, and later authors praised his “generosity,” but not all Romans approved of his actions. Tacitus, for one, saw Tiberius’ bailout as creating a moral hazard. What began as a rigorous effort to reform illegal financial behavior by senators, Tacitus argued, “ended in negligence, as generally happens.” Tacitus wrote that “the public good was placed below private profit” after “the curse of usury became ingrained in Rome.”

Tacitus’s concerns—about the moral hazards of using public resources to reinforce a financial system undermined by the illegal behavior of the wealthy—remain relevant today. Bank bailouts are essential to the functioning of a sophisticated economy, but they will always be unpopular when they appear to reward the rich rather than protect the interests of the public. In ancient Rome and modern America, these bailouts should be paired with vigorous, sustained reform efforts to correct the misbehavior of the wealthy.

Unfortunately, as Tacitus reminds us, they seldom are.

The post How Would Emperor Tiberius Have Handled Silicon Valley Bank? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On January 7, cameras recorded a beaming Kevin McCarthy as he ascended the rostrum of the House of Representatives and raised the speaker’s gavel. If one knew nothing about the previous few days, they might imagine this image captured the ceremonial coronation of a speaker who, like every other speaker for 100 years, had known the job was theirs for months.

A slightly wider angle shot of the House rostrum shows a more complicated scene. Mr. McCarthy is the only one smiling. The seven clerks gathered around the dais all sit expressionless, looking exhausted. This is because McCarthy took the gavel at 12:30 a.m. on the fourth day of voting. In the words of Florida’s Rep. Matt Gaetz, McCarthy “sold shares of himself” as he campaigned and traded so much of the speaker’s authority for votes that Gaetz “ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.” McCarthy’s concessions are apparently so significant that he refuses to divulge them to his aides or the public.

What happens when someone gains a prestigious political position but loses the respect and authority that its holders usually command? To answer that question, we can look to Marcus Didius Julianus, the Roman senator who became emperor by winning his crown at auction.

Julianus was born in 133 C.E. to a wealthy Milanese family. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Roman senate. He also won a major victory against Germanic invaders as a legionary commander, served as a Roman consul, and governed multiple provinces. This distinguished career put Julianus among the most accomplished senators of his generation. But Julianus really wanted to be Roman emperor.

He got the chance on March 28, 193, when the reigning emperor Pertinax was killed in the palace by rebellious praetorian guards. The praetorian commander knew about the rebellion in advance and arranged for Flavius Sulpicianus, his choice for the next emperor, to be in the praetorian barracks when Pertinax died. The plan was that Sulpicianus would secure the guards’ support and then use the soldiers to compel the senate to recognize him as emperor.

Julianus, however, heard about the murder of Pertinax before Sulpicianus and the soldiers agreed on terms. He “raced to the camp” and “promised to give the praetorians everything they wanted” if only they would award him the title of emperor.

The senator Cassius Dio called this “a most disgraceful affair” in which “both the City and its empire were auctioned off as if in some market.” The soldiers shuttled back and forth between Sulpicianus and Julianus, informing each of them what the other had most recently bid. When it seemed that Sulpicianus’ offer to pay each soldier 20,000 sesterces apiece (an amount equivalent to 33 pounds of silver) might win the day, Julianus raised his bid to 25,000 “both shouting it in a loud voice and indicating the amount with his fingers.”

The soldiers, “captivated by this excessive bid…received Julianus inside and declared him emperor.” The senate approved the choice without any real enthusiasm, largely because Julianus had surrounded its meeting place with praetorians.

After the senatorial vote, Julianus walked across the Forum to the imperial palace. He might have been grinning in a McCarthy-esque fashion as he climbed the ramp up to the Palatine Hill and walked into the residence. When Julianus entered the dining room, he saw the spartan dinner that had been prepared for Pertinax and “made great fun of it, sending people out to every place where something expensive could be found at that time of night” so he could feast in style. He then summoned a famous actor “to play dice” with him as they celebrated his accession.

The party did not last long. A sullen mob rioted in the Forum the following morning as Julianus tried to enter the senate house. Within a week, crowds in the Circus Maximus began chanting for him to be replaced, senators started mocking him in private, and the praetorians became antsy when they realized that he did not have the money he promised to pay them.

Julianus responded to this discontent in the only way he knew. He “paid court to the senate and all men of influence by making promises, bestowing favors, and laughing and joking with everyone.” Cassius Dio wrote that “he left nothing undone to court our favor,” but everything he did “made us suspicious because he was indulging in servile flattery.”

Julianus was so obviously weak that three commanders stationed all around the empire rebelled almost immediately after hearing about how he had taken power. By early May, the forces of Septimius Severus, the rebellious governor of Pannonia Superior, reached the outskirts of Rome. “Dumb and witless” Julianus, the historian Herodian wrote, “did not know how to handle the situation” without making yet another offer that further reduced his already much-diminished power. He sent “a letter to Severus” in which he offered “to make him [Julianus’s] colleague as emperor” in exchange for peace. The senate and praetorians supported this proposal until they realized that Julianus “was terror stricken and in despair.” At that point, the praetorians and “all the senators immediately abandoned him for Severus”—despite all Julianus had promised them.

The senators then condemned Julianus to death and the praetorians sent soldiers to execute him. When the executioners arrived in the palace, Cassius Dio wrote, the bewildered Julianus asked them: “But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?”

He was right to be confused. He died not because he was evil, but because he had nothing more with which to buy support. “Servile flattery,” as Cassius Dio described it, had failed him. The emperor had burned through all his political and financial capital in only 66 days.

Will Kevin McCarthy last that long?

The speaker’s time on the dais, however long it lasts, likely will be filled with the same string of smiling concessions, exorbitant promises, and compromises that consumed Julianus’ short residence in the imperial palace. And when the new speaker runs out of things to give his allies, one wonders if he will understand any better than Julianus why those to whom he promised so much could turn on him so suddenly.

The post Can Kevin McCarthy Outlast an Ancient Roman Emperor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than 230 amphitheaters, among the largest and most memorable monuments left to us by the Romans, survive in cities from northern England to the banks of the Jordan River.  The Romans built amphitheaters for more than 500 years in a range of sizes—from a capacity of a few thousand to 50,000 in the Colosseum—using a variety of techniques. The amphitheater at Pompeii was built in the first century BCE by workers who excavated hillsides, placed terraced seating on the packed soil, and erected retaining walls to hold the rows of seats in place. The amphitheater in Bordeaux was built nearly 300 years later as a freestanding oval fashioned out of brick, concrete, and cut stone.

In every one of these diverse structures, the proximity of one’s seat to the arena floor corresponded to one’s social standing in the community. That method of letting status determine seating is having a rebirth today, and is more than just a symbol of an increasingly unequal society.

Back in Rome, inside the Colosseum for example, the emperor and empress had a box with its own entrance at the equivalent of the 50-yard line, across from the box where the most important priests and magistrates sat. Members of the Roman Senate sat in a section called the podium that abutted the boxes and enclosed the rest of the arena floor. Roman knights, the next most prestigious social group, took their places in the seats above the senators. Ordinary Roman citizens filled out a large middle section of seating that was subdivided into blocks reserved for soldiers, married men, and other distinct groups. Non-citizens sat in the upper deck. At the very top of the Colosseum stood shaded wooden bleachers used by women.

The spectators were intentionally segregated from higher- and lower-ranking people. Each person got a token indicating which of the 80 entryways they were to use. Senators walked through specific arcades to get to their seats, and they may even have accessed different toilets and drinking fountains. Other, smaller amphitheaters in the provinces forced the people sitting in the upper and lower sections to each use specially identified gates so that they could only take a stairway that led to the appropriate seating area.

Despite these rigid divisions, the Roman amphitheater was also a place that spoke to the promise of social mobility. Imperial Rome was by no means as dynamic a society as postwar America, but it was a place where a man sitting in the senatorial seats on the podium had earned his status through the offices he held or the service he rendered to the state and its leader. The amphitheater view could seduce Romans to believe that, if they excelled in a stratified society, they or their descendants could one day sit closer to the arena floor.

This wasn’t a hollow promise. Gaius Julius Rufus paid for the construction of a large amphitheater in the city of Lyons in the first century AD. Rufus was the grandson of a man who received Roman citizenship from Julius Caesar and the great-grandson of Epotsoviridius, a Celt with a mellifluous and decidedly non-Roman name. In three generations, Gaius Julius Rufus’s family moved from not being able to attend games at all to sitting in the best seats of an amphitheater that bore his name.

In the United States, the earliest sports arenas didn’t follow this stratified Roman practice. In 1914, Yale University opened the Yale Bowl, the nation’s first fully enclosed football stadium and, at that time, the world’s largest sports venue.  All spectators entered (and still enter) the Yale Bowl through a series of gates at ground level, which lead to tunnels that direct people to the middle of the seating area. Those with field level seats on the 50-yard line and those at the top of the upper deck enter together and share a similar experience. For over a century, every seat in the vast stadium has been a bleacher seat with an unobstructed view of the field. In 1912, Yale’s President Arthur Twining Hadley claimed he was “glad that Yale, in spite of its classical traditions, prefers the good old word ‘bowl’… to the ‘coliseum’ of the Romans.”

American sports stadiums embraced this democratic ethos for much of the rest of the 20th century. The Rose Bowl, built in 1923, also used exterior gates that emptied into the middle of a vast seating area. New York’s Shea Stadium, San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, and the other multipurpose concrete donuts built in the 1960s and early 1970s had multiple tiers of seats, but fans in different sections entered through the same gates, moved freely through the concourses, and bought the same terrible food. If, like me, you went to Mets games in the early 1980s, you also regularly moved from cheap seats in the upper deck to box seats near the field as the home team fell farther behind.

Our stadiums are no longer built this way. Someone with a luxury suite ticket to an L.A. Clippers game now uses a separate entrance from a fan with a general admission ticket. They then take an elevator to an entirely different part of the arena with its own concessions, restrooms, and concourses. No matter the score, it is unthinkable for a Clippers fan to move from the upper deck to a suite.

The situation is even more extreme at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, site of the most recent Super Bowl. Like the Yale Bowl, SoFi is a 70,000-seat oval, but SoFi rigidly segregates its fans in the fashion of a Roman amphitheater. SoFi has 12 entry points. Eight are for general admission. The other four points are reserved for different grades of VIPs, who also enjoy their own reserved entrance gates and premium parking options.

Over a single generation, we have moved from sporting venues that encouraged interaction of all social and economic classes to Roman-style spaces that create rigid boundaries between spectators.

But Romans built stadiums in the same way they had constructed their society. Everyone in an amphitheater understood why they sat where they did. Their seat placement corresponded to their position in an explicitly and intensely stratified social hierarchy, with generally accepted rules determining people’s status.

In America, however, we now segregate groups of people watching the same event in the same building without determining whether that separation is consistent with the values around which we organize our public life.

Our failure to consider this question matters for two reasons. First, citizens in Oakland, Tampa, Washington, D.C., and Anaheim—where the socially stratified Honda Center sits across the parking lot from the mingling crowds of Angel Stadium—are now considering whether to spend public money on new stadiums. It is hard to imagine how taxpayers can justify paying for a structure that makes our society less cohesive and less democratic unless they also understand what offsetting social good such buildings advance.

Second, growing economic inequality may soon challenge Americans’ tolerance for the special access and privileges wealthy people receive when they attend a sporting event in a public building. If Americans can come to some sort of agreement about how we want to watch sports, we may again find a way to embrace the common principles that bind the people of a diverse country together.

Just like Romans did.

The post Why Are Our Sports Stadiums Becoming More Like Roman Amphitheaters? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A failed economic assault on ancient Rome offers a window into the possibilities and perils of this strategy.

This ancient case study begins in the late summer of 89 BC, when Mithridates VI of Pontus—the ruler of a medium-sized kingdom along the southern Black Sea coast (present-day northeastern Turkey)—declared war on Rome. The trigger had been a Roman ally’s recent raid on Pontus.

At the time, the Roman state extended from the Atlantic Ocean to modern Turkey, but its power was rooted in Italy. Mithridates lacked the military capacity to invade Italy or directly attack the city of Rome. Instead, the king decided to damage the Roman heartland indirectly by attacking buffer states that separated his realm from the Roman provinces along the Aegean coast, before breaking through into Roman territory outside Italy. Through these attacks, he sought to turn allied states against Rome, and disrupt the Roman economy.

Mithridates’ strategy unfolded across 88 BC. As his armies swept through Roman Asia Minor, they captured Roman officials, seized cities, and confiscated the local treasuries that supported the Roman regime. Then, once he had secured these lands, Mithridates sent out a letter that was received as an order to kill Roman businessmen, tax collectors, and government contractors whose fortunes depended on the Roman government’s activities in the region.

“With that one letter,” the rhetorician Valerius Maximus would later write, “he killed 80,000 Roman citizens, businessmen who were spread throughout the cities in Asia.” Other sources count as many as 150,000 Roman men, women, and children living in the cities and towns of Asia Minor who were rounded up and killed by people acting on Mithridates’ orders.

Forces loyal to Mithridates also attacked the Athenian island of Delos, the most important commercial port linking Italy with the Greek world. The geographer Strabo wrote that traders engaged in the import-export business “favored Delos,” but “it was frequented by Romans more than any other people.” The geographer Pausanias recorded Mithridates’ forces “put[ting] to death the foreigners residing” on the island before “plundering much of the property belonging to the traders.”

These attacks suggest that Mithridates targeted Roman business and commercial interests in order to chill the financial relationships that linked Rome to its provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean. All these murders of Romans abroad instilled fear—and also represented a direct assault on the economy of the Roman homeland.

First century Rome possessed an extremely sophisticated financial sector in which credit flowed easily, and wealthy people based much of their fortunes on their holdings of nomina, creditor notes that functioned like modern bonds. Romans could hold, sell, or exchange nomina with one another or cash them out, facilitated by bankers working in the Roman Forum.

This Roman financial system depended upon bankers correctly estimating the credit risk of individual debtors so that they could accurately price the loans they held or sold. This process worked well under normal conditions. But Mithridates murdered so many tax collectors, contractors, and traders based in Asia Minor and Delos that the nomina tied to business activities there lost all of their value at once. The sophistication of the Roman financial sector compounded the damage because these suddenly worthless nomina had been sold to investors, used as collateral to buy houses, and served to capitalize Roman banks. Massive amounts of wealth disappeared from Roman banks, investors, and property owners overnight.

The Roman economy crashed. In a speech delivered in 66 BC, Cicero recalled how “very many people lost large fortunes in Asia … there was a collapse in credit at Rome, because repayments were interrupted. Indeed, it is not possible for so many people in one state to lose their property and fortunes without the result that many others are dragged into the same calamity with them.” The historian Philip Kay has compared the financial crisis Mithridates caused to the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S.

But unlike the 2008 U.S. financial crisis, Rome’s public finances collapsed alongside its private wealth thanks to Mithridates’ economic warfare. Tax revenue collected by Roman contractors in Asia paid for the distribution of subsidized grain to Roman citizens, one of the few public welfare programs the Republic provided. With Asia occupied by Mithridates and Rome’s tax collectors murdered, the Roman poor faced a sudden disruption to the funds that ensured their food supply. Such a desperate sense of panic fell upon the city that a mob murdered one of Rome’s chief judicial magistrates when he tried to mediate a dispute between lenders and debtors.

Rome struggled to respond to this economic crisis. Its leaders introduced emergency measures to restrict the amount of debt lenders could take on and to compel lenders to renegotiate loans that could not be repaid. Rome also injected capital into the economy by minting large numbers of silver coins, some of which were made from bullion borrowed by the state from the treasuries of Roman temples as an emergency measure.

None of this worked particularly well. Then, as Roman anxiety and anger rose, the great commanders Marius and Sulla pushed Rome into a civil war sparked by an argument over who would lead the army against Mithridates.

It is hard to imagine Mithridates’ economic attack inflicting greater damage on the Republic. Yet ultimately, this economic war failed to defeat Rome. And it would end up in disaster for Mithridates.

Few Romans would have known the name Mithridates before 88 BC. But once Mithridates directly affected the life of every Roman citizen, the Republic had no choice but to pour their resources into his defeat. The Republic fought on, pushing back Mithridates from Roman territory and forcing him to sign a peace treaty in 84 BC.

Rome fought two more wars with Mithridates until 63 BC, when his own son betrayed him, and the old king killed himself so he could avoid being paraded through the city of Rome in a triumphal procession.

That would have been the only way Mithridates ever reached Rome.

The post How Economic Warfare Backfired in Rome appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On December 9, 100 B.C., Romans assembled to vote for the two consuls who would serve as the Republic’s top magistrates for the coming year. The election promised to be momentous. Gaius Marius, the dominant political figure in the Roman Republic for the previous decade, was finishing his fifth consecutive consulship. Once an extraordinarily popular figure, Marius had only won his most recent consular term through widespread vote-buying and intimidation.

Marius’s behavior in office had been even worse than his campaign conduct. In alliance with two radical populists, the tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia, Marius spent much of the year before the election mobilizing angry crowds that violently backed laws that benefitted their partisans and punished their rivals—in one case even beating their opponents with clubs after polling had begun. So Rome seemed ready to move on.

Marius was not on the ballot that day, but Glaucia was. Glaucia understood that an electoral victory might again depend upon violence and intimidation, and so his supporters came to the polling place, hoping he would win but ready to fight if that would prevent his loss.

Roman magistrates did not win election by simply carrying a majority of the popular vote. Roman elections for consul were instead decided when candidates won a majority of Rome’s 193 voting centuries. The voting centuries were neither equally distributed across property classes nor were they the same size. The wealthiest Romans had the most centuries in the assembly, but their centuries had far fewer members than the ones to which poorer Romans belonged. Romans nevertheless accepted that a successful consular candidate needed to win the support of 97 centuries, regardless of their raw vote total. This was, in a way, a Roman analog to our own Electoral College.

Also, as in 21st-century America, there was a ceremonial aspect to how Romans announced voting results. Each century announced its vote separately, one at a time, until the votes of 97 agreed. And, as the votes were cast on that December day, it became clear that Glaucia would lose the consulship to a man named Memmius. Rather than accept this outcome, he and his supporters rioted. They disrupted the vote counting, attacked Memmius, and beat him to death. The assembled voters fled in terror before the election could conclude.

The Roman historian Appian wrote that “neither laws nor any sense of shame” remained among Romans after the bloodshed began. Supporters of Glaucia battled in the streets with their rivals, before retreating, along with Glaucia and Saturninus themselves, to the Capitoline Hill, the ceremonial center of Rome’s Republic and the place from which our Capitol building derives its name. The insurrectionists then seized the Capitol and barricaded themselves on it.

The Roman Senate invoked a constitutional measure called the senatus consultum ultimum, a rare emergency action that empowered magistrates of the republic to use whatever means they had at their disposal to save Rome’s representative democracy. This time, the person the Senate chose to put down Glaucia’s seizure of the Capitol was none other than Glaucia’s associate, Marius.

Marius faced a wrenching decision. Much of what he had accomplished during the past year came from his deft use of populist rhetoric and political intimidation to excite a base he shared with Glaucia. Marius had looked the other way when Glaucia and Saturninus used mob violence to push Marius’s policy goals and punish Marius’s political adversaries. The senatus consultum ultimum meant that Marius could no longer pretend not to see Glaucia’s abuses. He had to act—or face charges that he was complicit in Glaucia’s insurrection.

Appian tells us that Marius “was vexed” about whether to defend his old ally or defend his state, but he ultimately chose to defend the Republic. He “armed some of his men reluctantly,” approached the Capitol with his troops, and surrounded the hill until the water supply was cut, forcing Glaucia and his men to evacuate.

But that didn’t end the crisis—it only relocated it. Marius, hoping for peaceful trials of his allies, granted Glaucia and his men safe passage down from the hill to the curia, the building where the Roman senate often met. Once Glaucia and his supporters reached the curia, though, an angry mob appeared and set upon the insurrectionists—killing them with a barrage of tiles broken off of the chamber’s roof.

No Roman woke up that December day imagining that the election to choose one of Rome’s top magistrates would end with one candidate killed during the voting and another dying with his supporters in the Senate House. Romans worried constantly about their lawful Republic descending into anarchic violence, but none imagined that this descent would happen so quickly or with such terrible results.

Americans today face a similar moment of shock, and reckoning. On a day when our Congress was supposed to perform the ceremonial task of accepting the electoral votes for our next president, this democratic exercise was halted by violence. Like Glaucia’s mob in 100 B.C., the Washington insurrectionists were incited by the candidate who was about to officially lose the election. With his encouragement, they marched to the Capitol carrying weapons and bombs, stormed through its gates, and interrupted the vote tallying. They were met with gunfire. At least one was killed.

Donald Trump could not even muster the integrity that Marius showed. Instead, Trump expressed love for his supporters, and offered only the most lukewarm criticism of their actions.

It is hard to overstate the damage that a day like this can cause to a republic. The violent disruption of the consular vote in 100 B.C. initiated two decades of political dysfunction that led to the first civil war in Rome’s recorded history. That fighting ultimately deprived hundreds of thousands of Romans of their lives or property.

That’s why Americans must not dismiss, or move quickly past, the events of January 6, 2021. Our leaders and regular citizens must respond far more forcefully to an assault that targeted not just the seat of government, but the democratic rights and protections we enjoy. We need to condemn more clearly the insurrectionists’ actions, to identify and punish all the perpetrators, and to remove the instigators from our public life. If we cannot do that, sedition, insurrection, and political violence threaten to become the most potent political tools in the America of the 2020s—just as they did in the Rome of the 90s B.C.

The post When a Violent Mob Stormed Rome’s Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cicero set De Re publica in the year 129 BC, a dramatic moment when Romans, for the first time in centuries, had begun to confront the consequences of political violence. In 133 BC, a mob had killed the tribune Tiberius Gracchus after he used a combination of threats and extra constitutional measures to push through a series of land reforms. Four years later, the damage from Tiberius’s recklessness had become clear, but Rome still had a chance to mitigate it. So Cicero chose this moment to stage a dialogue in which the age’s most prominent politicians, jurists, and thinkers debated the nature of an ideal constitution and questioned what would become of their Republic after “the death of Tiberius Gracchus had divided one people into two factions.”

Cicero emphasized that Tiberius’s tactics of intimidation and his willingness to disregard law set Rome on a very dangerous course. “If this habit of lawlessness begins to spread,” he explained, it “changes our rule from one of justice to one of force.” This made Cicero “anxious for our descendants and for the permanence of our Republic.”

Cicero’s fear grew in part out of what he believed the Republic to be: community property of Romans, who were bound together not by race or ethnicity but by a shared sense of justice and fidelity to law. Law, Cicero wrote, provided the foundations for just interaction between citizens. It established the channels through which political decisions passed. And, because Rome was a representative democracy in which citizens elected leaders and voted on the legislation they proposed, Cicero argued that the Roman Republic could last forever if it remained governed by law and administered vigorously by its citizens.

A state governed by violence had much dimmer prospects. At best, such a state might sometimes “seem as if it was at peace” because “men feared each other … but no one was confident enough in his own strength” to challenge his adversaries. A sort of stable anarchy emerged, and a balance of fear was the only thing that held back citizen violence. Such a polity was no longer governed by laws. It could not be considered a republic.

Cicero’s Rome “may retain the name Republic, but we have long since lost the actual thing,” he wrote in De Re publica. By 54 BC, the Republic “was like a beautiful painting whose colors were beginning to fade.” Romans have “neglected to refresh it by renewing the original colors” and “have not even taken care to preserve its shape.” In other words, complacency was undermining the Republic.

During the three years it took Cicero to finish his De Re publica, Rome degenerated into something that looked a lot like the republic of violence the work described. “Murders happened every day,” the historian Cassius Dio later observed, “and [Romans] could not even hold elections” as regular street fighting between factions paralyzed political life. The most notorious of these, a battle on the Appian Way between gangs loyal to the politician Milo and his rival Clodius, led to Clodius’s death in January of 52. Clodius’s supporters then carried his body into the Roman senate house, heaped the chamber’s benches into a pyre, and incinerated both the corpse and the structure.

Cicero hated Clodius so much that, in the midst of writing De Re publica, he agreed to serve as an advocate for Milo at his trial. Constant threats and heckling from Clodius’s supporters interrupted Cicero’s planned remarks. He later published what he wished he would have said, a speech in which Cicero asserted that violence had to be used against Clodius because he was a “man whom we were unable to restrain by any laws.” In the heat of the moment, even Cicero defended vigilante justice.

Order returned to Rome in 52, only after the Senate called upon the powerful general Pompey the Great to secure the city. They granted him an “army and levy of troops,” a force that made Pompey more frightening than any of the petty leaders of Rome’s political gangs. It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence that Rome had descended from a Republic of laws and become a city stabilized by fear.

But, as Cicero understood, all it takes to destroy the balance of fear is a figure who is willing to try.

And, in Rome, Julius Caesar was that figure.

Caesar had spent much of the 50s conquering Gaul with a powerful and loyal army. But his command was due to expire at the end of the year 50. Caesar and his allies in the capital tried to negotiate an agreement that would protect him from politically motivated prosecution if he dismissed his troops, but the leaders of the Republic lacked the will to come to an agreement with him.

More importantly, the Republic’s leaders also lacked the capacity to reassure Caesar that any agreement he made would be observed. “Compelled by its terror at the presence of Pompey’s army and the threats from his friends,” the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army or be declared an enemy of Rome.

When the Senate followed through on this threat in January of 49, Caesar went before his troops and told them that political activities permitted by law were “now branded as a crime and suppressed by violence.” The soldiers responded that “they were ready to defend their commander” and his allies “from all injuries.” This declaration—that violence, not law, governed Rome—began the series of civil wars that ended the Republic.

The United States now approaches the tipping point between a republic governed by law and the polity of violence, governed by mutual fear, that Cicero described over two millennia ago. Political violence courses through our streets as groups of demonstrators fight each other. The president and his political allies express public support for a young man who shot two protestors. It might be tempting to applaud Americans we agree with when they attack those with whom we do not, as Cicero did. But the distance from Cicero’s defense of Milo’s vigilantism to Caesar’s appeal to his troops is quite short. Neither vigilante justice nor armed insurrection can exist in a Republic whose citizens share a common purpose and respect for laws.

Cicero himself said so in one of the very last things he ever wrote before soldiers loyal to Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus killed him, hanging his hand and head on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. “Nothing,” Cicero proclaimed, “is more destructive to civilizations, nothing is so contrary to law and justice … than governing through violence in a Republic.”

The post What Would Cicero See in American Governance Today? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These were all challenges of the ancient world—times and places far removed from the 21st-century United States. But on a cool summer evening before a packed audience at the outdoor amphitheater of the Getty Villa, three scholars found some surprising parallels between that distant era and our own, as they pondered the question, “What Can the Ancient World Teach Us About Globalization?”

Leading off the Wednesday night Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event, moderator Margot Roosevelt, an economy reporter for the Orange County Register, cut straight to the chase, asking the panel of experts what is the single most significant thing we can learn from past civilizations about globalization.

Roger Bagnall, a classics scholar at New York University, replied that, because ancient governments were not democratic, “they had a whole lot less trouble with globalization than we do.”

Grant Parker, a classical philologist at Stanford University, cautioned that, because history tends to be written by the victors, we need to reconstruct more stories of people in ancient times who were unrepresented and oppressed, if we are to make full sense of remote eras.

The hour-long event touched on several issues that were as complex and thorny in the globalized ancient world as they are today: identity and assimilation; the role of language in shaping consciousness and asserting power; and the tug-of-war between emerging global powers, eager to put their mark on the map, and decadent older powers seeking to find (often darker-skinned) scapegoats for their troubles.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a scholar of globalization, development, and cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, emphasized the importance throughout history of cycles of trade expansion. In the ancient world, empires at the height of their power saw expanding commerce as beneficial, while empires in retreat tended to pull back from trade, he said. That phenomenon can still be seen today: “As America retreats, China advances,” he said.

Back when all roads led to Rome, Carthage, or Constantinople, trade helped speed not only the flow of grain, olive oil, and wine to new markets, but the flow of thought as well.

“Often, ideas went on the same boat as commodities,” Parker said, citing the example of the cult worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

But, Roosevelt asked, did circulating ideas across borders sometimes produce a backlash? Bagnall replied that the Romans initially pushed back against some of the new ideologies and new gods. But, in other cases, they gradually ingested and assimilated these upstart deities and newfound ways of doing things, he said.

Mastering the lingua franca of the day was another way to profit from globalization in the ancient world. Parker said that having command of Latin could give a subject of the Romans entry into the empire. Bagnall countered that, while a large part of the Roman Empire actually spoke Greek, the Romans tended to take a dim view of Syrians partly because “they were funny and they talked differently and they ate different things.” Juvenal, the Roman satirical poet, was perhaps the most famous complainer about Syrian migrants.

For Pieterse, one of the essences of globalization is connectivity, which requires both hardware (tradeable goods, transportation) as well as the “software” of ideas. Once upon a time, he observed, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius walked the earth as near contemporaries, spreading philosophies that helped humans to establish “wider identities beyond the tribal and local.”

(You can read more about it in Pieterse’s most recent book, titled Multipolar Globalization: Emerging Economies and Development, which at one point he plucked from his satchel and displayed, to the amusement of the audience and his fellow panelists. “This is a commercial break,” Bagnall deadpanned.)

Long before there was any talk of Brexit, trade deficits, lost domestic jobs, or currency manipulation, some ancients believed that globalization mostly benefited elites.

Yet, Bagnall said, although it’s true that Roman elites benefited considerably from globalization, so did many poor people who migrated to places where they found better work.

“But we don’t hear about them because they didn’t write books,” Bagnall said.

Roosevelt asked whether climate change affected antiquity by prompting mass migrations, as it has begun to do in our time. Is there evidence that climate change might even have sparked wars? Bagnall says it’s difficult to pinpoint whether climate change could have caused a clash between, say, the Greeks and the Persians. But the records do indicate that droughts, which at times prevented the Nile from having its rejuvenating seasonal floods, caused harm to the Roman Empire.

During the question-and-answer period, several audience members probed the panel about additional parallels between ancient times and ours. One man asked what pagans would have to say about the way they were treated by the early Christians.

“Nothing very favorable,” Bagnall answered, “but the Christians could reply that they learned their lessons from the Roman government.”

Even now, Pieterse said, the ancient world still speaks to us through its monuments and its works of art.

“The ancient world is teaching us all the time because the ancient world is part of us,” he said.

The post Your Complaints About Globalization Are Old News appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I first visited Rome in September 1990. I had just handed in my doctoral thesis–the examination would not be for months–and I was due to start my first teaching job in October. Into this limbo I managed to squeeze a week visiting the City whose history and archaeology I had circled for a decade, as I studied and traveled in the provinces of her vast empire. Coming to the capital at last was mind-blowing.

Today, revisiting the Roman forum or the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla or the Tiber Port, I am often conscious of the ghost of my former self, circa 1990, gaping wide-eyed at vast monuments that today’s Romans take completely for granted as they go about their daily business. Even today I sometimes catch sight of a café and remember exactly which table I was sitting at, with which book open in front of me, all those years ago.

During my first week in the City, I was visiting the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine when I ran into a friend from Cambridge. He was taking a party of stunned-looking students around the ruins of the emperors’ palaces, and they were collapsed in the shade, huddled on some bright porphyry columns that had been brought from Egypt’s eastern desert two millennia before. When he suggested I come for supper that evening at the School, I was glad to accept.

The British School at Rome lies on the northern fringe of the vast Borghese Gardens and at the edge of the rather smart district of Parioli. In front is the piazzale Winston Churchill which–in a rather typically Roman juxtaposition–is an extension of the via Gramsci, named for a Communist intellectual imprisoned by Mussolini. You might recognize the school’s spectacular neoclassical façade, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens for the Rome Exhibition of 1911, as the fictional “Galleria D’Arte di Roma”–one of George Clooney’s and Brad Pitt’s targets in Ocean’s Twelve. But when you penetrate the glistening travertine entrance hall, you find yourself in a shady courtyard. Pines surround a goldfish pond with a mossy fountain at its center. The wings that enclose the courtyard, or cortile, house a library, rooms for resident scholars, and, at the back, the studios of the artists the School brings to Rome on stipends to find inspiration–and to stop academic residents from taking themselves too seriously.

That evening we were to eat outside on long tables. As I walked out into the cortile I was immediately hailed by a rubicund figure in a silk dressing gown, holding a gin and tonic in one hand and a tall pottery flagon in the other. It was a Keeper–a senior curator–from the British Museum, leading excavations at the site of the Mola di Monte Gelato, a first or second century A.D. agricultural estate north of Rome where archaeologists from the British School have been working off and on since just after World War II. He and his team were celebrating this completely unique find, a wine vessel made in the lifetime of Nero, inscribed a drinking song in Greek. It offers a rare glimpse of the leisured life of Roman landowners, swapping literary tags and sipping Faliscan wine. The flagon would be the star item reported in the next year’s Papers of the British School; it has been much discussed since. But for me it always evokes my first evening at the British School, and scholarly conversation among the lemon trees.

I have been back to the British School at Rome many times since. One year we rented a flat on the other side of the Villa Borghese for six months. I walked in to use the library each day, leaving my children to see the zoo or to play football in the park or to watch Italian cartoons at the tiny Cinema di Piccoli. But I had as much fun as they did. The School has such fantastic library resources that it attracts eminent Italian scholars as well as the residents, who are mostly British, Canadian, and Australian. But much more importantly, the School is an engine of serendipity.

I stayed there again this spring to begin another book project. I read rare journals, visited sites and museums, and did all I had planned. But–as I knew I would–I also found myself making new connections. The School is always busy. A U.S.-based colleague writing a book on Constantine flew in to spend 24 hours tracking the first Christian emperor around the City. There were graduate students and post-docs investigating long vanished Italian languages and the gardens of imperial Rome. I spent evenings talking with a historian of 19th-century Catholicism, a paleo-environmentalist documenting the slow erosion of Italy’s forests, and an architectural historian who has spent two years reconstructing the work of the renaissance humanist Pirro Ligorio. How their research will connect to mine is not always immediately obvious. But months, or even years later, I will find that my understanding has been subtly extended, and that unexpectedly I know something of value.

A bell rings for tea in the cortile. Most of us take a few moments to surface from whatever we are reading. But then we gather, outside in the sun or in the long cool refectory, to ask questions and be questioned in turn.

I can’t wait to go back.

Buy the book: Skylight, Powell’s, Amazon.

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story and Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder and editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

*Photo courtesy of jackharrybill.

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