Perhaps the singlehandedly most famous remain of imperial glory in the western world; the colosseum.

It’s more than being “big and awesome”. It represents something incredibly complex about the Roman imperial psyche.

It’s tempting to imagine the ancient Romans as some version of ourselves. They launched disastrous military expeditions to those parts of the world where we too have failed. Iraq was as much a graveyard for the Romans as it has been for us.

Back in Italy too, Roman life had a familiar side. Urban living in a capital city with a million inhabitants, the biggest conurbation in the west before the 19th century, raised all the usual questions: from traffic congestion (one law tried to keep heavy vehicles out of the city during the day, with the knock-on effect of appalling noise at night) to rudimentary planning problems (exactly how high were high-rise blocks allowed to be, and in what materials to make them safe from fire?).

But it is not so simple. To study ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope – a careful balancing act, which demands a very particular sort of imagination. If you look down on one side, everything does look reassuringly familiar, or can be made to seem so.

Cicero’s disappointment in the first century BC with his son Marcus, who, at university in Athens, preferred clubbing and drinking to attending lectures on philosophy, is one that many of us can relate to.

On the other side of the tightrope, however, is completely alien territory. Some of that strangeness is well recognised. The institution of slavery disrupted any clear idea of what it was to be a human being (neither Greeks nor Romans ever worked out whether slaves were things or people). The filth of the place was, in our terms, shocking. There was hardly any reliable system of refuse collection in ancient Rome, or in any ancient city, and there were revealing stories about stray dogs walking into posh dinner parties clutching in their mouths human body parts they had picked up in the street.

We idolize romans, why is that so you think?
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