Michael Kulikowski

The street violence​ endemic to the city of Rome had been growing steadily worse for years and because of it, early in 52 BC, the great orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was facing a nasty challenge in a career that had been full of them: how to defend a murderer who openly admitted to the killing and, worse, how to do it when the victim was Cicero’s worst enemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher. A...

In August​ 378 AD, the Roman army suffered a catastrophic defeat at Adrianople, near modern Edirne on what is now the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Tens of thousands of soldiers were slaughtered when the Gothic cavalry fell on the Roman flank. The high command of the eastern empire was almost completely wiped out and the Emperor Valens died on the battlefield, his body never recovered. Amid the...

In the late summer​ of 32 BC, Rome declared war on Ptolemaic Egypt and its powerful queen, Cleopatra. In front of the Temple of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war, a member of an archaic priestly order called the fetiales cast a wooden spear into a small square of land that had been ritually designated as Egyptian soil. With the gods and Roman citizenry as witnesses, all appropriate legal...

The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded. As with most things...

When​ Gabriele D’Annunzio’s personal secretary likened his employer to Heliogabalus, that short-lived emperor was still a byword for florid decadence. He died at eighteen, but the Syrian boy’s appetites were monstrous from the start. He favoured every kind of sex that Romans deplored, cunnilingus most of all. He had himself shaved all over, like a eunuch, and chose his...