Roman daily life: Did you mean...?

The Roman army fought many conflicts throughout its long history, though perhaps none so indelible as the Pyrrhic War from 280 to 275 BCE. This war between Rome and a league of Greek colonies in southern Italy led by the city of Tarentum...

Antisthenes (c. 445-365 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who founded the Cynic School of Athens. He was a follower of Socrates and appears in Plato's Phaedo as one of those present at Socrates' death. He is one of the primary interlocutors in...

Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. For this reason, European colonial settlers in Africa and the Americas used slaves on their plantations, almost all...

The Holy Roman Empire officially lasted from 962 to 1806. It was one of Europe’s largest medieval and early modern states, but its power base was unstable and continually shifting. The Holy Roman Empire was not a unitary state, but a confederation...

Roman constitution was an accumulation of laws, legal decisions, and ancient customs. While today 'constitution' usually refers to a single act of legislation, this was not the case in ancient Rome. Instead, Roman government relied on the...

Citizenship is and always has been a valued possession of any individual. When one studies the majority of ancient empires one finds that the concept of citizenship, in any form, was non-existent. The people in these societies did not and...

A Roman boy's rite of passage, a ceremony or ritual marking a transitional period in life from childhood to adulthood, was the assuming of the toga virilis, the adult toga. The ceremony usually took place sometime between the boy's 14th and...

Ancient Roman culture affected vast numbers of people across the known world of its time, beginning with the rise of the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) and throughout the duration of the Roman Empire (27 BCE - c. 476 CE in the West and 1453...

Roman Gaul is an umbrella term for several Roman provinces in western Europe: Cisalpine Gaul or Gallia Cisalpina, comprised a territory situated in the northernmost part of the Italian peninsula ranging from the Apennines in the west northward...

The Roman army consisted of three separate divisions: the famed legions, the cavalry, and lastly, the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries (auxilia) were comprised of infantry cohorts, mounted infantry, and cavalry units or wings (alae). Although...