Michael Kulikowski

In the late summer​ of 32 BC, Rome declared war on Ptolemaic Egypt and its powerful queen, Cleopatra. In front of the Temple of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war, a member of an archaic priestly order called the fetiales cast a wooden spear into a small square of land that had been ritually designated as Egyptian soil. With the gods and Roman citizenry as witnesses, all appropriate legal...

The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded. As with most things...

When​ Gabriele D’Annunzio’s personal secretary likened his employer to Heliogabalus, that short-lived emperor was still a byword for florid decadence. He died at eighteen, but the Syrian boy’s appetites were monstrous from the start. He favoured every kind of sex that Romans deplored, cunnilingus most of all. He had himself shaved all over, like a eunuch, and chose his...

All the shops​ on my university campus have gone cashless. The vendors at our farmers’ market use little card readers that plug into their phones. We use cash very little these days and coins even less. By recent historical standards this is an aberration. Since the 1850s and 1860s, when banknotes were standardised in Britain and the United States respectively, most people, most of the...

Ancient​ Latin literature has reached us along an improbably narrow path. Two millennia of rats, fire and floods were as nothing compared with three historical bottlenecks. Only one of these was technological and, perhaps surprisingly, it was not the invention of the printing press but of the codex. The rapid replacement of papyrus rolls by the bound codices we know as books, complete by...