in may, ancient rome left 7 dated events: the roman emperor who traded absolute power for a vegetable garden · the dark roman ritual to repel ghosts at midnight · the day the roman empire admitted rome no longer mattered. here is what happened, day by day.
diocletian pulled the empire out of the abyss of the crisis of the third century, installed a regime of absolute power and designed the tetrarchy. and then, on 1 may 305, he did what no emperor had done: voluntarily abdicate and retire to grow cabbages.
read the full entry →at the lemuria, the roman patriarch rose barefoot at midnight, filled his mouth with black beans and spat them over his shoulder to drive away the hostile spirits of his dead. the domestic terror of the civilisation that ruled the mediterranean.
read the full entry →on 11 may 330, constantine inaugurated constantinople and shifted the empire's centre of gravity to the bosphorus. a military and economic decision that guaranteed a further thousand years of life to the state in the east and sealed rome's decline.
read the full entry →every 15 may, the vestal virgins threw thirty rush effigies bound like prisoners into the tiber. a rite that ancient historiography itself read as the civilised echo of old human sacrifices.
read the full entry →in 325, constantine summoned hundreds of bishops to nicaea, summoned them to his palace and demanded a single dogma. for the emperor, theology was secondary; what was at stake was the public order of an empire.
read the full entry →constantine the great postponed his baptism until his final agony so as to die absolved of the purges he himself had ordered against his son and his wife. the conversion of the empire, read as a last play of power.
read the full entry →on 29 may 1453, after 53 days of siege and under the fire of mehmed ii's artillery, constantinople fell. the last emperor, constantine xi, stripped off the purple and died fighting like a common soldier. rome did not surrender on parchment: it went out in combat.
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