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 — 61 complete works or authors from Antiquity:

• Aeneas Tacticus: Siege Defense (Greek, English)
• Aetna (Latin, English)
• Ampelius: Liber Memorialis (Latin)
• Apicius: De Re Coquinaria (English)
• Appian: Roman History (English)
• Aristotle/ps‑Aristotle: various works (Greek, English)
• Asclepiodotus: Tactics (English)
• Augustus: Res Gestae / Monumentum Ancyranum (Latin, Greek, English)
• Aulus Gellius: Noctes Atticae (Latin)
• Caesar: Gallic War, Civil Wars, African War, Alexandrian War, Spanish War (English, some Latin)
• Calpurnius Siculus (Latin, English)
• Cassius Dio: Roman History (English)
• Cato on Farming (Latin, English)
• Celsus on Medicine (Latin, English)
• Censorinus: de Die natali (Latin, French)
• Cicero: various works (English, some Latin)
• Claudian (Latin, English)
• Colluthus (Greek, English)
• Dio Chrysostom (English, most of the Greek)
• Einsiedeln Eclogues (Latin, English)
• Excerpta Valesiana (Latin, English)
• Florus' Epitome (Latin, English)
• Florus' Poems (Latin, English)
• Frontinus on the Water Supply of Rome and the Strategemata (Latin, English)
• Grattius: Cynegeticon (Greek, English)
• Herodotus: The Histories (Greek, English)
• Historia Augusta (Latin, English)
• Isidore of Seville: Etymologies (Latin)
• Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis (Latin)
• Laus Pisonis (Latin, English)
• Macrobius: Saturnalia (Latin)
• Manetho (English, some Greek)
• Nemesianus (Latin, English)
• Onasander: Strategikos (Greek, English)
• Origo gentis Langobardorum (Latin, critical edition)
• Cynegetica and Halieutica (Greek, English)
• Paulinus Pellaeus: Eucharisticon (Latin, English)
• Pliny the Elder: Natural History (Latin)
• Plutarch: Parallel Lives (English)
• Polybius: Roman Histories (English)
• Procopius: Buildings (Greek, English) and Secret History (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)
• Strabo (English)
• Suetonius: The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
  and The Lives of Famous Men (Latin, English)

  [Grammarians, Poets, Rhetoricians, others]

• Tacitus: Histories and Annals (Latin, English)
• Theophrastus: Odors and Weather Signs (Greek, English)
• Varro on Farming (Latin, English)
• Velleius Paterculus: History of Rome (Latin, English)
• Vitruvius on Architecture (Latin, English)

A bare index to all books onsite — these and many others, though only those reasonably complete — is available here.

In progress:

• Ammian (Latin, English)
• Aulus Gellius (English)
• Columella (Latin, English)
• Diodorus Siculus (English, some Greek)
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus (English)
• John Lydus: de Mensibus (English, some Greek)
• Plutarch: Moralia (English, some Greek)

A Latin Inscriptions Site on three levels:

• for the expert: a bare listing with 200 inscriptions transcribed
• 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.

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.

[ 2/17/21: 1192 webpages —
395 woodcuts, 38 photos, 6 plans ]

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.

[ 3/16/18: 25 pages, 22 woodcuts ]

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 85% 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).

[ 1/22/18: 473 pages, 83 photos, 3 engravings ]

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.

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

Ancient historian Tenney Frank did not neglect the general and college reader. In A History of Rome (1923) he gives us a sober account focusing on the economic and social analysis of ancient Rome, which he would eventually explore in greater depth to make the best contributions of his career. His book has the added twist of seeking out what he felt would be most relevant to his fellow Americans.

[ 598 pages of print in 35 webpages,
with 12 maps — and a good bibliography ]

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)

[ 907 pages of print in 35 webpages (plus indexes):
2 photos, 7 maps & plans ]

Thomas Hodgkin's Italy and Her Invaders is onsite in full. The eight volumes of the work (and one more from the first edition) take us thru the changes by which classical Italy, the core of the Roman Empire and the center of government and law for the Western world, became medieval Italy: essentially from Constantine to Charlemagne, a saga of many peoples — the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantine restoration, the Lombards, the Franks — and many languages, many leading figures, many ancient sources. In its thoroughness, the longest work transcribed so far on my site, and considering that I rekeyed every bit of it by hand, I'm very, very grateful to Hodgkin for being such a pleasant, readable writer. At no point did I ever find him dull; something of a record in all my transcriptions.

[ 5,158 pages of print in 204 webpages ]

John Buchan's Augustus, a life of the Roman emperor, was met with immediate wide critical acclaim and continues to be well regarded today, for its solid attempt to get to the heart of what Augustus and his recasting of the Roman Republic was about.

[ 337 pages of print in 16 webpages:
3 photos, 1 map, 1 genealogical chart ]

A growing section on Roman Britain 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.

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.

[ 775 pages of print in 16 webpages:
123 lithographs or photos and 3 maps ]

The Romans on the Riviera and the Rhone, by William Henry Hall (1898): An Englishman of leisure traces on the soil of Provence the events of her Carthaginian and Roman history.

[ 185 pages of print in 20 webpages:
15 lithographs or photos and 5 maps ]

Alberta Mildred Franklin's doctoral thesis, The Lupercalia (1921), is a valiant effort at getting to the bottom of one of the strangest of Roman religious festivals; a serried investigation taking the reader thru Greek and Roman cults of the wolf, the goat, and the dog, the foundation legends of Rome, and several unsuspected by‑ways, it says absolutely nothing about Valentine's Day. . . .

[ 102 pages of print in 13 webpages ]

Cities in the Sand (1957) is a commented photographic record of Lepcis Magna, Sabratha, and more generally Roman Tripolitania. Some of the photos are of added value since there have been changes to the ancient sites, not all for the better.

[ 56 pages of print in 6 webpages:
98 photographs and 2 maps ]

Influencia de la Civilización Romana en Cataluña comprobada por la orografía (1888): an interesting philological monograph on the toponymy of Catalan mountains. The author seems to have been the first to notice that many terms for various types of mountains, in Catalunya and elsewhere in Occitania, derive rather unexpectedly from the Latin names for parts of the Roman amphitheatre and circus. [In Spanish]

[ 1/17/12: 71 pages of print in 15 webpages ]

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 few of these are not related to ancient Rome, by the way, but to Egypt, the Near East, or India.)

[ 5/9/23: 159 articles ]

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.

[ 23 drawings, 4 plans ]