Michael Kulikowski

‘Aculture, we all know, is made by its cities,’ Derek Walcott said in his Nobel lecture. Greeks and Romans would have agreed. Although 90 per cent of the ancient population, perhaps more, lived on and worked the land, the thought-world of Mediterranean antiquity was based on the city. It was where all the life that mattered – public life, that is to say, the life of the...

Consider​ the many things that would not exist without Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars: Asterix and Obelix; The Wicker Man; Gauloises cigarettes; the little Airfix Romans and Britons that many of us grew up with. Even today, Caesar’s legionaries and their colourful Gallic foes are bread and butter for companies that sell expensive toy soldiers to middle-aged schoolboys. One...

Three​ centuries after the death of the emperor Nero, his name had become a byword for the very worst kind of ruler. For Ausonius of Bordeaux, in his didactic poem the Caesares, Nero was a savage and baleful matricide (saevus, dirus and matricida). By this time, the bad Nero was the only version anyone knew, his reputation distilled from the works of Tacitus and Suetonius, one of them a...

Had​ you been a sixth-century Christian, living in lands that had been or still were part of the Roman Empire, you would probably have met a demon. Every tree, hill and stream, every hovel and hamlet, harboured some threat to mortal souls. Demons coiled round the legs of dying sinners and snatched them up in their gaping jaws. They landed in wine cups and tricked people into drinking them....