LacusCurtius:
Into the Roman World

[ 214 pages (not counting translations), 340 photos ]

The core of this site, in my own mind at least, is the Roman Gazetteer, a commented photo album of Roman towns and monuments.
Rome • Assisi • Augusta Zilil • Cesi • Città di Castello • Fossato di Vico • Gubbio • Massa Martana • Mevania • Milan • Narni • Ostia • Perugia • Pitigliano • Rimini • Rusellae • Saintes • Spello • Spoleto • Todi • Trevi • Triponzo • 'Urvinum Hortense' • Vetulonia • Volubilis
Topical Indexes: amphitheatres • gates • hydraulic engineering (aqueducts and baths) • roads • theatres • tombs

Stray page (for now): Opus Sectile

Greek and Latin Texts — 37 complete works or authors from Antiquity:

• Ampelius: Liber Memorialis (Latin)
• Appian: Roman History (English)
• Augustus: Res Gestae / Monumentum Ancyranum (Latin, Greek, English)
• Cassius Dio: Roman History (English)
• Cato on Farming (Latin, English)
• Celsus on Medicine (Latin, English)
• Censorinus: de Die natali (Latin, French)
• Claudian (Latin, English)
• Dio Chrysostom (English, some Greek)
• The Excerpta Valesiana (Latin, English)
• Frontinus on the Water Supply of Rome (Latin, English) and the Strategemata (Latin, English)
• Gellius: Noctes Atticae (Latin)
• Grattius: Cynegeticon (Latin, English)
• Historia Augusta (Latin, English)
• Isidore of Seville: Etymologies (Latin)
• Macrobius: Saturnalia (Latin)
• Nemesianus: Cynegetica (Latin, English)
• Paulinus Pellaeus: Eucharisticon (Latin, English)
• Pliny the Elder: Natural History (Latin)
• Plutarch: Parallel Lives (English)
• Polybius: Roman Histories (English)
• Procopius: Secret History and Buildings (English)
• Ptolemy: Tetrabiblos (English)
• Quintilian: On the Education of an Orator (English)
• Quintus Curtius: The Histories of Alexander the Great (Latin)
• Rhetorica ad Herennium (English)
• Rutilius Namatianus (Latin, English)
• Sallust: Catiline and Jugurthine War (Latin, English)
• Suetonius: The Lives of the Twelve Caesars • On Grammarians • On Rhetoricians (Latin, English)
• Varro on Farming (Latin, English)
• Velleius Paterculus: History of Rome (Latin, English)
• Vitruvius on Architecture (Latin, English)

• Ammian (Latin, English)
• Columella (Latin, English)
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus (English)
• Gellius (English)
• Strabo (English)

• Cicero: various works (Latin, English)
• Plutarch: Moralia (English, some Greek)

[ 12/5/07: 1015 pages, 392 woodcuts, 38 photos, 5 plans ]

William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, an encyclopedic work containing a lot of good basic information (and references to primary sources), was published in 1875: it is thus an educational resource in the public domain.

I've been putting a large selection of articles from it online, often as background material for other webpages. It is illustrated with its own woodcuts and some additional photographs of my own.

Chariots and carriages, the theatre, circus and amphitheatre, roads, bridges, aqueducts, obelisks, timepieces, organs, hair curlers; marriage & children, slaves, dance, salt mines, and an awful lot more; among which special sections on law, religion, warfare, daily life, and clothing.

Far more detailed, more recent, and, by and large, better than Smith's Dictionary is Daremberg & Saglio's Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines. If on this page it doesn't look like it, that's because the entire 10‑volume work is already online elsewhere in the original French: on my site the articles are in English — but I've translated just a very few of them. I'll be adding to them once in a while; they'll still remain a tiny selection.

[ 11/26/06: 402 pages, 83 photos, 3 engravings ]

Samuel Ball Platner's great work, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (as revised by Thomas Ashby in 1929), is another even more solid resource in the public domain. A scholarly encyclopedia with hundreds upon hundreds of articles on the remains of antiquity within the city of Rome, it is an excellent reference work for hills, streets, roads and monuments of all kinds, providing ancient sources and modern bibliographies. Something like 80% of it is online here; I'll eventually do all of it.

The dictionary includes 4 small maps of Rome (s.vv. Pomerium, Septimontium, Servian Wall, Servian Regions).

[ 107 drawings, 16 photos, 12 maps & plans ]

Pagan and Christian Rome: a splendid account, by Rodolfo Lanciani, the rightly famous 19c archaeologist and topographer, of how Rome made the transition from the capital of Antiquity to the great city of our own time. It's a case study on Late Antiquity, an excellent popular topography of Rome, a mine of information on the Catacombs and the tombs of apostles, emperors and popes, and a fascinating read. This Web edition is enhanced with additional photos of my own, useful links, etc.

[ 907pp in the print edition, presented in 35 webpages plus indexes;
2 photos, 7 maps & plans ]

J. B. Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire: "Generally acknowledged to be Professor Bury's masterpiece, this panoramic and painstakingly accurate reconstruction of the Western and Byzantine Roman Empire covers the period from 395 A.D., the death of Theodosius I, to 565 A.D., the death of Justinian. Quoting contemporary documents in full or in great extent, the author describes and analyzes the forces and cross-currents which controlled Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, the Persian and Teutonic regions; the rise of Byzantine power, territorial expansion, conflict of church and state, legislative and diplomatic changes; and scores of similar topics." (From the Dover edition jacket blurb)

I'm also slowly putting good careful editions of ancient and early mediaeval topographical texts onsite. For now, just three: Ptolemy's Geography, the Regionaries (Notitia, Curiosum, and Appendices) and the Ordo Benedicti.

A growing section on Roman Britain now includes four books: Thomas Codrington's Roman Roads in Britain, long the standard authority in its field; two by John Ward — Romano-British Buildings and Earthworks and The Roman Era in Britain, a general survey with many excellent illustrations (especially of jewelry, combs, keys, and similar objects); and a regional resource, George Witts's Archaeological Handbook of Gloucestershire.

[ 16 webpages: 775 print pages;
123 lithogravures or photos and 3 maps ]

Not quite as scholarly as most of the other items listed on this page, The Rulers of the South — Sicily • Calabria • Malta, an excellent readable overview of the history of Southern Italy from prehistory down to the sixteenth century, is still carefully based on the sources; roughly two-thirds of it falls under Antiquity broadly defined.

[ 5/27/08: 91 articles ]

Scholarly journals are a treasure-trove of interesting and very varied stuff; not all of it by any means is that difficult to grasp. The Antiquary's Shoebox is my collection of public-domain articles from them; like most shoeboxes, it accumulates scraps over time, as I discover items that catch my fancy.

A Latin Inscriptions Site on three levels:

• for the expert: a bare listing with transcriptions of 200 inscriptions
• for the student: a selection of 28 photographed inscriptions, sorted by level of difficulty, solutions presented separately
• for the surfer: a topical and a geographical index to various webpages.

A Roman Atlas, a collection of 19c maps covering most of the Roman world, some of them indexed with ancient and modern placenames, longitude and latitude (both modern and ancient according to Ptolemy), bibliographical refs, web links, etc.
[ 29 maps ]

A catalogue of Roman Umbria: eventually, I hope to create similar catalogues of other parts of the Roman Empire.

[ 23 drawings, 4 plans ]

The Tomb of Mausolus, by W. R. Lethaby: not Roman at all, but who's quibbling? An in-depth look at one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus: and an attempt at reconstructing it.