roman imperialism

Above Portrait of Alexander on the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun at Pompeii. The youthful, clean cut features, the brushed back wavy hair, the large eyes, fleshy lips, and bridgeless nose were characteristic of all later portraits of the Macedonian king, who became a role model for later Hellenistic and Roman rulers.

Military History
124

Alexander the Great

Graham Goodlad surveys the remarkable career of ancient history’s most successful warlord.

Far left Julius Caesar ‘the greatest Roman of them all’ personifies the murderous violence that characterised the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC, when it was expanding faster than ever before, to achieve dominance over the Mediterranean basin and much of continental Europe. Yet, in the perspective of history’s longue durée, the Roman Empire was but an interlude unstable and unsustainable, for it defied the logic of Europe’s distinctive geography.

Current Archaeology
231

The Land between the Oceans: The Making of Modern Europe (Part Three)

Geography made a unitary empire embracing the Mediterranean and temperate Europe inherently unstable; but the wreckage of the Roman Empire contained the building blocks of modern Europe. In the third and final part of our series based on Cunliffe’s new book, Europe between the Oceans, we chart the changes from Caesar to Charlemagne.