Psssst! Have you heard about Elagabalus? They say he invented the world’s first whoopee cushion. No, really! I’m pretty sure I heard Mary Beard say that.
They also say he was as gay as America’s Next Drag … Read the article
Romantic-era novelist Alexandre Dumas may well have created the world’s first fiction factory in Paris in the mid-1800s, a factory populated by ghosts. How many of Dumas’ hundreds of millions of readers realize that the plots and … Read the article
Down through the centuries, millions of men served with the army of imperial Rome; half a million during the reign of Augustus alone. The history of the legions is the collective story of those individuals, not just … Read the article
My previous novel Roma followed the fortunes of a single family through the first thousand years of the city’s existence, from its beginnings as an Iron Age trading post to its domination of the Mediterranean world and … Read the article