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roman history

The Grim Reapers of the Roman Arena

Alexander Meddings

Few voices from antiquity capture the sinister spectacle of the Roman amphitheatre quite like Tertullian. A North African Christian writing at the turn of the third century CE, Tertullian was a lawyer by training and a rhetorician by instinct, and when inveighing against pagan Rome’s moral decay,...

Julius Caesar’s Mysterious Childhood

Alexander Meddings

Given the famous deeds associated with Julius Caesar — his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE, his assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, and even his salacious sex life — it might surprise you to learn that we know next to nothing about his childhood.  What little we do know comes mainly...