James Romm

The compound word​ kolossourgia, ‘monumental composition’, is found only once in extant ancient Greek, in a ringing sentence composed by Strabo of Amaseia. He uses it to convey the scope and technique of his Geographica, an atlas in written form describing all the lands known to the Greeks and Romans of his day. In a passage introducing the work, Strabo invokes the analogy of...

Alexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. He permitted only a single court-approved sculptor, Lysippus, to do his portrait and took a team of propagandists and influencers on his invasion of Asia. On a medallion dating to late in his reign or just after, he appears in the guise of Zeus, holding a fiery thunderbolt – the first time a European...

No​ ancient Greek site, except perhaps Delphi, is now so richly imbued with the spirit of Hellenism as Olympia in the Peloponnese. Its ruins and museum suggest lofty Greek values: the drive (among males, anyway) to excel, simply for the honour of being the best; the aspiration towards the wise use of power (again, by males only), as seen in the site’s idealised portraits of Zeus; and...

‘No part of Greek history should come home to us like the third century bc,’ William Tarn wrote in 1913. ‘It is the only period that we can in the least compare with our own.’ And yet the third century – standing midway between the classical age and the coming of Rome, undocumented by any intact surviving source – gets little attention even from...

The​ great fire that started in Rome on 19 July 64 CE not only destroyed much of the city but also helped to bring down the Julio-Claudian dynasty that had ruled the empire for nearly a century. Nero, who occupied the position of princeps (‘first citizen’) by virtue of being the great-great-grandson of Augustus, had destroyed all the other male members of the line by the time of...