Matthew’s virtual tour: Colosseum
In the next Step, you’ll have the opportunity to explore the Colosseum for yourself, but first join me on a guided tour around this impressive structure, where I explain more …
Course: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City
Part XIII – ‘To the death’
Originally the gladiatorial combats were held in temporary wooden buildings, before emperors built permanent structures such as the Colosseum as part of their commitment to providing their population with ‘bread …
Matthew’s virtual tour: Baths
Join me on a tour of some of the bathhouses of ancient Rome. Does the sheer scale of these baths surprise you? What differences do you see between the earlier …
Roman Baths: Urban Life in Ancient Rome
Bathing was a central experience of urban life in ancient Rome; the building of bathhouses all over the Roman world, from the forts on Hadrian’s wall to the cities …
Part XII – ‘What could be worse than Nero, but what could be better than Nero’s baths’
The Romans loved to bathe. They built numerous public and private bathhouses, large and small, across the ancient city and throughout the empire. Join me on my next guided tour …
Part X – ‘Thrills, spills, speed, and more than a hint of danger’
Welcome back! Last week you heard that emperors had to ensure a steady flow of grain into the city or risk falling ‘foul of the mob’. This week our attention …
Roman food supply
The population of Rome has been estimated at around a million people. Feeding a city of that size, in an era before mechanised transport or refrigeration, was an enormous undertaking. …
Encountering the evidence: Funerary inscriptions
In this, the fifth of our ‘Encountering the Evidence videos’, I meet with Professor Peter Kruschwitz in the Ure Museum at the University of Reading to discuss inscriptions in Ancient …