THE TRUTH ABOUT: Septimius severus - The Untold Story

Our pay is called a ‘salary’, but were Roman soldiers really paid in salt?

Every second Wednesday, like clockwork, my salary arrives in my bank account. By Thursday, most of it is gone.

The Conversation · Sep 3

2000-year-old Roman road and roundhouse discovered in Scottish park

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a 2000-year-old Roman road along with a roundhouse whose residents may have survived a genocide in a park in…

The National (Scotland) · Aug 18, 2025

Gladiator II: a historian on the real north African kingdom of Numidia – and the men who ruled it

Gladiator II opens with a Roman fleet brutally laying siege to a city in the north African kingdom of Numidia. On the big screen we see ships set ablaze by pots of burning oil and defenders impaled by man-sized iron bolts. The so-called barbarian inhabitants are eventually enslaved and carted…

The Conversation · Dec 16, 2024

Challenging the whiteness of classics – remembering the Black Romans

As with every humanities discipline, classics has responded to Black Lives Matter with justifiable introspection. As the study of the ancient world, and particularly that of the Mediterranean cultures, classics has a significant colonial legacy: British, French and Italian colonialists saw themselves as inheriting or continuing a “civilising mission” which…

The Conversation · Feb 3, 2022