James Romm

The Marbles & the Muses

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

The Continent Puzzle

Frozen

For centuries explorers risked their lives seeking passage through the Arctic. A recent exhibition and book juxtapose the region’s mythologized past with its uncertain future.

Authoritarianism’s Emblem

From ancient Rome to Mussolini’s Fascists, the fasces—a bundle of rods surrounding an axe—have carried a wide range of meanings.

Pure Color

At the Met, replicas of classical sculptures in their original bright colors aim to shift the public’s sterile notions of antiquity.

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

A Journey into Homer’s World

The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did.

The Magnificence of the Medicis

To the Florentine dynasts, art patronage was power expressed in pigment, but as a new show at the Met highlights, it left a legacy of incalculable value.

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

What Did India Learn from the Greeks?

The Winking Satire of ‘Agrippina’

Agrippina, the Handel opera now premiering on the Metropolitan Opera’s stage, may have been written as a satire on the politics of its own time, but in the hands of producer Sir David McVicar, and set in the present day, it offers a timely paradigm of hypocrisy, corruption, and sexual manipulation in the halls of power.  

Harold Bloom, 1930–2019

We were Bloom’s only company that morning in June, apart from his caregivers; his wife, Jeanne, was out shopping, and he seemed lonely at his table, a king without a court. Perhaps his stream of well-wishers had dried up, frightened by his extreme frailty.

The Happy Tragedian

Euripides, with Notes

Greek tragedy survives today as words on a page, but ancient performances were distinguished as much for music and dance as for speeches and dialogue. But the tragic poets were composers as well as playwrights.

Loving Assassins

A Stoic in Nero’s Court

An Unknown Master

The master referred to as the Berlin Painter, who lived in Athens in the early fifth century BC, was an artist whose name and nationality remain unknown, but whose distinctive and confident illustration in the red-figure style stands out as clearly as any signature.

The Great Rescue in Timbuktu

Great Aspirations of the Iron Age

“Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, presents a vast panorama of the Iron Age and an exploration of the commerce and connections between its major civilizations.

When the Greeks Ruled Egypt

How did the Greeks, outnumbered by their subjects ten to one, maintain rule in ancient Egypt?