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which ancient roman do you think would make shitty powerpoints about teamwork with dated memes and way too many transition effects that they’d force the others to watch

cicero i fear is an obvious choice BUT i think his powerpoints would be. tasteful. a little bit. so instead i turn to

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she arma on my virum til i cano

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oh come on. when cassandra's screaming about how the house of atreus smells like slaughter and she can see children holding their own entrails on the roof of the stage building-- right behind the theater of dionysus is the altar of dionysus. where they have been killing animals and roasting their entrails for the dionysia. the smell of blood probably really was coming from the direction of the stage building.

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Among the latest discoveries in Pompeii:

A house with a private bathhouse , complete with hot, warm and cold rooms, and a plunge pool.

In a room were found the skeletons of a woman of about 40 years and a man of about 20 as well a pair of gold and natural pearl earrings.

The wonderful Pompeian red on the walls

Frescoes, various valuable objects, and gold coins.

Pompeii Parco Archeologico

@ancientcharm

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Blue glass rhyton, Roman, 1st half of the 1st century AD

from The Louvre

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A Post About Caesar That Definitely Has Nothing At All To Do With America in 2025

Before it was the Roman Empire, for nearly 500 years after it overthrew its last tyrannical king, Rome was a quasi-democratic* republic with a constitution of a 3-branch system of government with complex checks and balances. It was a point of national pride in the Roman identity that they had broken free of monarchy, so much so that rex (king) was practically a bad word. The highest office (consul) even had only a 1yr term, was shared by two elected people who could veto each other, and required you to wait 10 years before running for re-election. The system was broken in many ways and had a big corruption problem, but its whole constitution was wrapped up in preventing a return to the rule of kings. Sound familiar?

Julius Caesar fucked that all up and that's why those senators "did the thing we're all thinking" — they were trying to prevent a populist autocrat from destroying the democratic* republic to make himself king. Their plan failed and it's important to understand why.

Caesar had made political alliances to amass power for himself, pushed the limits of what he could get away with during his first term as consul, then worked his way up to illegally defying Senate orders and marched on the capital in early January with his loyal adoring army when the power and legal immunity he had from his office were threatened by potential prosecution against him if he couldn't get a second term, justifying this with the concern that his opponents would suppress the voters' rights by denying the election results if he won.

Once he did get his second consulship, he quickly started getting his enemies out of the way, putting his family and lackeys in office, having the state shower him with honors and allow him special privileges, consolidating unfettered control over the checks and balances, and blurring the lines between the separations of power until he could blatantly ignore the Senate without consequence and have the final say in every decision in every branch of government.

By waiving the prohibitions and allowing himself to return to office again and again immediately, he laid the groundwork for himself to stay in power indefinitely. He tested the waters by acting more and more like egomaniacal royalty — putting his face on money, sitting on a throne in kingly purple robes, renaming his own birth month after himself — and finally, in January of 44 BCE, having someone call him Rex in front of a crowd. When that got a lot of pushback, he instead made himself dictator for life in February and even performatively refused a crown in public to try to put people at ease.

Caesar was assassinated a month later, but it was too late. The damage to the constitution and balance of powers was done, and Rome couldn't go back to what it was.

The power vacuum and political divisions led to years of civil war, which ended with Caesar's legal heir Octavian in charge. Octavian claimed he would restore the democratic* republic and made a whole show of giving power back to the Senate, but it was largely an act to make it look like things were getting back to normal. In reality, thanks to Caesar's changes while consul and dictator, his successor could now claim the majority of the governing power behind the scenes, massive control over the Senate, and a newly permitted indefinite term in office.

By the time Octavian was officially imperator for life, he had recruited, killed off, or exiled his political enemies and didn't even need to call himself a king — he had made Caesar's name an equivalent title. He went from being Octavian to being Caesar Augustus, and every emperor of Rome after him was also a Caesar. The original assassinated Caesar was made into a literal god and worshipped by people throughout the empire, and variations on his name like 'Kaiser' and 'Tsar' remained titles for rulers in his legacy for millennia.

Augustus finished what Caesar started: transforming the constitution of a flawed but proudly king-free democratic* republic into a new monarchy.

Three extra notes: (1) Unlike a certain modern someone glaringly unnamed here, Caesar and Augustus were, to their credit, incredibly capable and hardworking politicians and tacticians who kept an impressive number of his populist promises and drew on their massive wealth to fund things that actually benefited the public... even though they did use all this to make themselves autocrats at the expense of their country's constitutional integrity and thousands of lives. (2) Most non-politicians at the time probably wouldn't have recognised Augustus' reign as the end of the Republic or as the start of a monarchy; it was supposed to be a return to normalcy after years of chaotic political instability, the revival of the country's prosperous golden age to heal a violently divided country, and Augustus kept this appearance up very intentionally. (3) Caesar's assassination made him a martyr without undoing the damage he caused to the constitution, enabling the next person to make those changes permanent and to slip into the throne he had built for himself.

TLDR: He has been carving a permanent seat for himself into the very structure of our government and strengthening it with every outrageous thing he gets away with. Even if he's "stopped" now, someone else will try to finish what he started and sit in that throne.

This won't end when he dies.

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Are you telling me democracy existed before the Roman Empire?? I have spent decades thinking America invented it?? How many times has it been made and unmade?

There is more history here than I can possibly summarise or do justice. different versions of democracy(ish) systems of governance have popped up all across history, but most point to ancient Greece (Athens specifically) as the "birthplace of democracy". France should also get a special mention in the history of modern democracy. If you want to look at the different forms democracy has taken and what happened with it over the past ~2600 years, the Wikipedia article for the history of democracy is a good place to start and it goes chronologically.

America established a democracy rather than appoint its own king after the Revolutionary War -- arguably it invented its own version of democracy, but that's kind of true of every democratic country. The Roman Republic was also born from a revolution against a cruel king, and the founding fathers leaned extra hard into that. "The Republic of America"'s democracy is heavily inspired by the democratic systems of ancient Greece and Rome and the much more recent developments in France (federal republic + liberal democracy, things like the separation of powers, the Constitution, the need for the Senate). it's pretty much why the architecture in all the iconic governmental buildings is so Roman-styled, so many place names (esp on the east coast) are Greek and Roman, and there's Latin all over place.

Different founding fathers pushed for different blends of Greek and Roman democracy and worked to turn each others' legacies into echoes of ancient heroes of democracy (like Washington giving up the presidency and quietly going back to rustic retirement = Cincinnatus) to use as American exempla (legendary Roman historical figures who exemplified their national moral values and were household names).

A different form of quasi-democracy continued to exist after Rome became an empire. There was still the Senate and there were still votes on some things, but one person now held ultimate power: someone who was not elected, who held that office for life, and who could pass whatever laws through what used to be real checks and balances. With each successor, the new Empire resembled its democratic peak less and less.

The parallels between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the American Republic are intentional.

The parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and what's happening right now in the American Republic are terrifying. More and more and more people have been pointing it out recently.

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The Yanqui civillization, or the Empire of Us-america, or Nato Standard according to some sources, was a vast lost culture mostly known for their circular, rubber calendars marked superstisiouly as ”good years” and the still surviving ritual known as the ”Iowa Caucus” (untranslatable)

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Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

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pillow princeps

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studying roman history is a fucking nightmare

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no! secondary sources will kill patient. she needs primary sources to live

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I see a lot of confusion about the number of conspirators - sixty, eighty, and other overblown numbers. Let me clarify: we had around twenty actual conspirators. The rest is made up by the crowd of twinks that follows me everywhere.

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it's tullying absolute cicero

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yeah, both are true. they've been stolen from licensed authority figures by licensed authority figures 3ish times depending how you look at it.

he did find them while excavating (plundering, really, as I said) Hisarlık in the 1870s and smuggled them back to Germany. when the authorities realised he had stolen them, they banned him from excavating in Turkey, sued him to get the artifacts back (unfortunately didn't do much good), and imprisoned the officers who were supposed to be supervising his dig. a few years later Schliemann traded a few pieces back in exchange for being allowed to resume digging there, but the rest of the artifacts remained in Berlin from 1881 to 1945, by which time Schliemann was long dead (1890).

BUT in 1945 when the Red Army captured Berlin, they were stolen again when another German archaeologist, Wilhelm Unverzagt, presented them to the Soviet cultural authority for post-war safekeeping and the Russians disappeared them into Moscow and denied any knowledge until 1994, when the Pushkin Museum was just kind of like "yeah. we've had them. you're not getting them back."

Spanish archaeologist Manuel Esteve wearing a Corinthian helmet that he found - 1938, near Jerez, Spain.

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if you missed e-pistulae last time: cicero is back 🫵 he is being exiled NOW 🫵 you will hear from him soon 🫵

e-pistulae is like dracula daily but for the letters of marcus tullius cicero. i am translating them from latin myself. this time it is the letters from the period of his exile. he's having possibly the worst time ever, and you Will be hearing about it. quit your job subscribe to my emo substack!!!

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it's ovid's birthday today (20 march) btw. please celebrate by lying or being a pervert