Ten things
people get wrong
about Rome.

The Western imperial office ended in 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and chose not to appoint a successor. The Eastern empire continued — calling itself the Roman empire, ruled by emperors who claimed the unbroken succession from Augustus — until the 29th of May 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. The conventional teaching that "the Roman empire fell in 476" is a Western misreading that has often, historically, been deployed to dismiss the very real continuation of the empire in the East. The proper date for the end of the Roman state, in the institutional sense, is 1453.

The inhabitants of the Eastern empire called themselves Romaioi — Romans — without interruption from late antiquity to the Ottoman conquest, and continued to do so for centuries afterwards. They considered their state the Roman empire and their emperor the Roman emperor. The label "Byzantine" was coined by the German humanist Hieronymus Wolf in 1557, more than a century after the empire's fall, and was popularised by Enlightenment historians who wished to distinguish the medieval Greek-speaking Roman state from their preferred classical Latin Rome. The label has stuck, but the Eastern empire's own self-identification was Roman, in continuous good faith.

The fiddle was not invented until the eleventh century. Nero played the lyre. The story that he sang or played music during the Great Fire of 64 was first recorded by Suetonius and Cassius Dio, both of whom were hostile to Nero and both of whom wrote more than fifty years after his death. The contemporary historian Tacitus reports the story as a rumour, not a fact, and notes that Nero was at Antium when the fire began, returning to organise relief and shelter for the displaced. The image of the fiddling emperor is a Suetonian elaboration that has stuck.

Gladiators were expensive to train (multi-year apprenticeships) and expensive to feed (their training schools used specialised meat-and-grain diets). The principal gladiatorial schools, including the imperial Ludus Magnus in Rome, rented their fighters out to the games' producers. Killing a hired gladiator outright was bad for business and the producer would owe compensation. The surviving epigraphic evidence — gladiator tombstones, which routinely record numbers of fights — suggests that perhaps one in five matches ended in a death. Most matches ended in submission, with the loser spared. The famous downward-thumb gesture meaning "kill him" is a nineteenth-century artistic invention (Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting); the actual gesture is disputed but probably involved a pointed thumb to indicate mercy.

Roman imperial persecutions of Christianity were sporadic and varied in intensity. Some Christians were executed in arenas by being attacked by wild animals (the technical Roman term is damnatio ad bestias), notably during the Neronian persecution of 64 and the Diocletianic persecution of 303-311. The specific identification of the Colosseum as the site of Christian martyrdoms became established only in the sixteenth century, partly through papal initiative; archaeological evidence connecting individual Christian martyrs to the Colosseum is essentially absent. Most documented Christian martyrdoms took place in provincial arenas or by other methods (beheading was the standard for Roman citizens; crucifixion for slaves and non-citizens). The Colosseum holds a martyr's cross today; its presence is symbolic.

The Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors were Italian Latin-speakers. From Trajan onward, many emperors were of provincial origin and bilingual in Latin and Greek (or Latin and a local language). The eastern empire became progressively Greek-speaking; the official language of administration shifted from Latin to Greek under the emperor Heraclius (610-641), and after that point the emperors spoke Greek as their everyday language and used Latin only in select ceremonial contexts. By the late period, the eastern Roman emperor would have needed an interpreter to speak with a visiting bishop of Rome. The empire's official language continuity is therefore one of the institutional fictions that mattered most.

Concrete-like materials — pozzolanic mixtures of lime, ash, and water — were used in some form by several ancient cultures including the Minoans, the Egyptians, and the Greeks. The Romans, however, were the first to use concrete at industrial scale and to develop a marine concrete (pozzolanic concrete that sets underwater) that allowed harbour construction in conditions previously impossible. Modern materials-science investigation of Roman concrete (notably by Marie Jackson at the University of Utah, working on samples from the Portus harbour, 2017 onwards) has shown that the material continues to chemically self-heal after two thousand years through ongoing reactions with seawater. The properties have not been matched by any modern equivalent.

The principle of road engineering Roman surveyors followed was to keep the road as straight as the terrain allowed. On flat country this produced famously linear routes (the Watling Street in England, the Via Appia south of Rome). In mountains the Romans built switchbacks, hairpins, and contour-following routes as carefully as any subsequent road engineers — the road over the Great Saint Bernard Pass, the road from Ostia to Naples, the road over Mount Olympus in Macedonia. The myth that "Roman roads always go in a straight line" is true for the famous flatland sections and false for everything else.

Roman soldiers were paid in cash, not salt. The folk etymology connecting salarium ("salary") to sal ("salt") is ancient — Pliny the Elder seems to suggest it — but the linguistic and economic evidence does not support it. The probable origin is that salarium meant a regular periodic payment, perhaps once used specifically for the allowance given to soldiers serving at the salt road (the Via Salaria, the road from Rome to the salt-producing Adriatic), but applied generally to military pay; the salt-pay claim is a folk-etymological elaboration. Roman legionary pay was about 225 denarii a year under Augustus, raised to about 300 under Domitian, and paid in cash. Salt was a relatively cheap commodity, not a luxury.

The phrase is medieval (it appears in the twelfth-century French theologian Alain de Lille). The roads of the western empire's interior were laid out in a substantially radial pattern centred on Rome, with the milestones along major routes recording the distance to the Golden Milestone in the Forum. (The Milliarium Aureum still partly survives in the Roman Forum.) The roads of the eastern empire, however, were laid out around eastern centres — Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople — and the radial pattern of the western road system was largely a feature of the western provinces. The mosaic map of Madaba (Jordan), a sixth-century pavement showing the road system of the Levant, has Jerusalem at its centre, not Rome. The phrase is true for someone in fourth-century Lyon. It is false for someone in fourth-century Damascus.