How Ronald Syme showed how power worked in ancient Rome through texts, inscriptions, and coins.

A Reading From Homer A friend sent me Lawrence Alma-Tadema's (1836-1912) The Triumph of Titus: AD 71, The Flavians (1885). At first glance it looks like exactly what you’d expect from him: immaculate surfaces, the crisp pleasure of antique detail, and a Roman world that feels less “ancient history” than “walk straight into it.” Then you look again. Because what Alma-Tadema gives us here is not merely a well-researched slice of antiquity. It’s a visual theology of Roman power

INTRODUCTION The man remembered as Vespasian has long been presented as a hard-driven outsider of modest background – a provincial who clawed his way upward through military competence and talent for survival, eventually restoring order to an empire torn apart by revolts in Judea and civil war. Yet the surviving evidence points in a very different direction. As Guy Edward Farquhar Chilver, Professor of Classical Studies, long ago observed, Vespasian’s revolt and rise to power