Get Ready for Rome

After two episodes on the Forum Boarium, we move up to the Palatine Hill. At the same time, we move from Rome's distant prehistory and Aeneas to its founding by his descendant Romulus, the son of Mars. Later still, Caesar and his adopted son Augustus presented Aeneas and Romulus as precursors of the Caesars.

There is scant evidence regarding the prehistory of Rome, but the Romans supplied this defect by handing down and codifying engaging myths. Today we visit the Forum Boarium, where Rome's distant ancestors met and began to form the people from whom the Romans would descend, or so at least Livy and Virgil tell us.

If the Sistine Chapel reflected the moral vision of Christian Rome, is there any such coherent view in Modern Rome of how we humans should understand our purpose and live our lives?

We return today to the "secular" or non-religious character of modern Rome in order to see more clearly how much the Rome of the People has changed from the Rome of the Popes.

The four Pendentives of Michelangelo's Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel represent four different dramatic stories from the Old Testament. What are these stories, and what do they teach?

Michelangelo used painted architecture and numerous nudes to divide the Sistine Chapel ceiling into separate panels and give it a complex design. Today we summarize the elaborate arrangement he came up with.

We return for a second introduction to the Sistine Chapel and outline some of the main challenges Michelangelo had to overcome in painting the ceiling.

We today make a first visit to the Sistine Chapel and look generally at the three different waves of Renaissance frescoes that decorated it. Two of these are by Michelangelo.

American troops liberated Rome from German occupation just 2 days before D-Day. What made it possible, and why did the liberation occur when it did?

We today consider Gibbon's explanation of how the Christians of Constantine's century advanced their faith by taking active measures against paganism. As he makes his case, Gibbon also extends his unflattering portrait of the followers of the new faith, perhaps to weaken their successors in his own day.

After noting the contradictory ways Constantine is remembered in Roman art and architecture, we turn to the main policies of this first Christian Emperor.

I today announce that I've begun taking a break that I hope will also help me get ready for a new season of podcasts, and I summarize the topics and issues that lie ahead.