The Alternation of Rome

Triumphal arch, Roma Nova (Author photo)

Rome fascinates us, bewitches us even in the high tech 21st century.

It stretched for over 1229 years, it reached the heights (occasionally depths) of military achievement, produced the social, cultural and legal framework for the entire Western world, gave us its engineering genius and left us a richness in architecture, power politics, literature and […]

Rome and the wolf

The shocking news that the icon of Rome’s foundation, a life-size bronze statue of a she-wolf with two human infants suckling her, is about 1,700 years younger than its city hit the headlines this summer.

Scholars had long established that the bronze figures of Romulus and Remus feeding from their adopted wolf mother were added […]

The Domain of Soissons - a Roman remnant

The Roman Empire didn’t ‘fall’ in a cataclysmic event as the movies and TV would have you believe – it localised and eventually dissolved like chain mail fragmenting into separate links, giving way to rump states, local city states and petty kingdoms. New, dynamic and often warring nations emerged – Goths, Franks, Alamans and Burgundians.

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