Ancient Rome: The Myths That Refuse to Die

Rome is one of those subjects everyone half-knows, largely from films. The half that is wrong tends to be the memorable half — which makes it perfect quiz material, because the wrong answer is usually the one that feels right.

Julius Caesar was never emperor

This is the big one. Caesar held enormous power and had himself named dictator, but Rome at that point was still, officially, a republic — and killing him in 44 BC was an attempt to keep it that way. The first actual Roman emperor was his adopted heir, Octavian, who took the name Augustus.

So the man whose name became a word for "emperor" — Kaiser, Tsar, both derived from Caesar — never held the title himself. If a quiz asks who the first Roman emperor was, the answer is Augustus, and the trap is Caesar.

The vomitorium

It was not a room where Romans went to be sick so they could eat more. A vomitorium was the passage that let crowds pour in and out of an amphitheatre — the word is about the building "spewing out" spectators, not about the spectators themselves. The banquet-vomiting image is a Victorian invention that stuck because it is memorably disgusting.

The concrete that beat ours

Roman concrete has survived two thousand years, including harbours that have sat in seawater the whole time — while modern concrete often crumbles in decades. The Romans mixed in volcanic ash, and recent research suggests the mixture could effectively self-heal small cracks over time. The Pantheon's dome, poured nearly 1,900 years ago, is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

The Colosseum, correctly

Its real name is the Flavian Amphitheatre. It held something like fifty thousand spectators, could be covered by a huge retractable awning, and the "Colosseum" nickname came later, probably from a colossal statue that once stood nearby.

The gladiators are also oversold. They were expensive to train and house, closer to modern sports stars than to disposable victims, and most fights did not end in death — killing your investment every afternoon is bad economics. The dramatic thumbs-up-or-down verdict is real in spirit but its exact gesture is genuinely uncertain, so be wary of any quiz that states it too confidently.

Rome did not fall in 476

That date is when the last emperor in the west was deposed. But the empire had split in two, and the eastern half — centred on Constantinople, which we call the Byzantine Empire — carried on for nearly another thousand years, until 1453. For most of the Middle Ages, "the Roman Empire" was still very much a going concern; it was just in the east and speaking Greek.

Things the Romans left in your day

• The months July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Augustus.
• Latin is the parent of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian — the Romance languages.
• Roman numerals still mark book chapters, film sequels and clock faces.
• "All roads lead to Rome" was nearly literal: milestones across the empire measured distance from a single point in the city.
• "Bread and circuses" — panem et circenses — was a Roman writer's jab at keeping the public content with food and entertainment. It has aged uncomfortably well.

Almost every famous fact about Rome has a truer, slightly more interesting version sitting just behind it. That gap is exactly where the good quiz questions live.