Elektratig

You are the sole and absolute ruler of the known world.  Your eldest son has come of age, married, and fathered a son.  To celebrate th...

Lactantius was the first to tell the story of Constantine's dream that caused him to have his soldiers to place the Chi-Rho symb...

Well here's one I hadn't heard before.  In his biography of the emperor Constantine the Great , Ramsay MacMullen tells us that ...

The Roman emperor Constantius II , son of Constantine the Great , died of illness in October or November 361 AD.  After relating the ci...

When you read any book on military history, you quickly learn that salients are BAD.  What on earth, then, was the Roman emperor Traj...

It never ceases to amaze me how even the most sophisticated Romans, such hardheaded realists in so many respects, were at the same time...

Imagine a military commander setting out to launch an invasion of a territory the size of a country. He has no maps, and feels the ne...

I was never a big fan of Cicero in school.  But over the years I've mellowed toward the old pedant.  After all, at least he wasn...

When this Roman emperor was unexpectedly elevated to the throne, he whispered to himself a line from Homer: "Purple death and power...

It's not every day that you run across one of the leading modern historians of the Roman Empire calling the man generally regarded ...

A poster at Civil War Talk pointed out this videotaped conference entitled Could the Civil War Have Been Avoided? , and I thought I...

On the other hand, Prof. MacMullen points out that visitors to temple precincts in the Roman empire were apt to encounter less pleasin...

I have read a number of one-volume histories of World War II, and I had sworn them off, but this video interview of the author sorely tem...

Last May I ventured down to Longview, Texas for a wedding.  After some excellent barbecue at Carter's Bar-B-Que, I drove over to th...

Haven't done a quiz in a long while.  Here's one that will outrage you. What famous enlightenment figure is guilty of the f...

Virtually nothing is known of Celsus , a late second century Greek philosopher, other than the fact that in the 170s AD he wrote a major...

 In his delightful book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them , Robert Louis Wilken does a wonderful job teasing out all sorts of inform...

The best guess seems to be that, immediately before the emperors Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, about ...

  It's been a while since I've posted a picture of whats-his-name.

Did you know that Jacob Broom of Delaware is the only signer of the Constitution of whom there is no extant picture of ? I didn't,...