Juno the Roman god Who was Juno? Juno was Jupiter's wife and sister for the Romans, the way Hera was Zeus's wife for the Greeks. Because the Romans and the Greeks were both descended from Central Asian Indo-Europeans, Hera and [...]
Hadrian's Pantheon from the outside. Built in the early 100s AD In some ways Roman religion is a lot like Greek religion, but in other ways it is very different. Like [...]
Imperial cult: The Roman general Pompey Worshipping rulers as gods The Roman general Pompey conquered West Asia around 50 BC. He was embarrassed to find that people there were worshipping him as a god. Who [...]
Castor and Pollux - the Dioscuri - on a votive plaque from Tarentum in southern Italy Who are Castor and Pollux? Castor and Pollux were originally Greek gods, but when the [...]
Bust of Plotinus (Ostia, ca. 250 AD) Around the time of Jesus, philosophers (and regular people) in West Asia and the Roman Empire started to think a lot about what happened to you after you died. [...]
A medieval manuscript copy of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) What's Lucretius's backstory? Lucretius was born about 99 BC, in the later Roman Republic. Nobody knows anything about [...]
A Roman man making a speech (Florence, about 50 BC) Thanks to VROMA for the image Romans meet Greek philosophy Roman men didn't begin studying philosophy until about 200 BC. At that time, [...]
Cicero's philosophy: a bust of Cicero (Capitoline Museum, Rome) Who was Cicero? In the last years of the Roman Republic, great men like Julius Caesar and Pompey fought over which of [...]
A Roman shepherd, probably a slave (Istanbul, 500s AD) Many Roman people were owned by other people, or by the Roman government, as slaves. Because the Romans didn't really have hourly wage [...]
Roman education outside of school: A Roman teacher home-schooling, about 200 AD Poor kids had to work Roman schools were for rich boys; most Roman kids did not go to [...]
