Have you ever stopped to wonder why practically every government on earth follows the same basic form?

Time waits for no one, as the Rolling Stones once said, and UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping is currently in the process of proving the now-geriatric rockers right.

No empire, from Sargon’s Akkadian Empire to the Soviet Union, lasts forever. There’s always an expiration date.

It’s really happening.

Political structures and institutions—the bedrock of the systems that underpin our world and society—aren’t a given. They can and do evolve and strengthen, or, alternatively, crumble into nothingness. That’s one of many reasons the fall of the Roman Empire is a valuable example for us to bear in mind: All things are…

In championship-level combat sports, as with generations of inbred European royalty, there’s never really an interregnum. The end of one reign is simultaneously the beginning of another. The moment the new champion’s hand is raised and the belt fitted around his waist, we’re officially living in a new era.

Every once in a while, a fight comes along that offers the promise not just of sheer bloody violence, but of it being delivered with the utmost technical skill.

In the year 350 AD, to paraphrase the historian Robin Fleming, Britain was as Roman a place as anywhere in the Empire. It had a dense network of roads and ports, luxurious villas with mosaic floors and private bathhouses, a profusion of small, prosperous towns that served as markets for regional trade, and a massive…

Joanna Jędrzejczyk fucking rules.

Decades before Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 AD and the Western Roman Empire officially went out of business, the provinces of northern Gaul (roughly the area between Paris and the lower Rhine in what’s now the Netherlands and northwest Germany) had long since slipped from the grasp of the authorities. The…

There’s nothing wrong with Saturday night’s UFC heavyweight championship fight.

As the central institutions of the Roman Empire in the west crumbled and the provinces splintered off and went their own way over the course of the fifth century, new kingdoms popped up to take their place. Today, we tend to identify these new political units with specific barbarian groups: the Visigoths in southwest…

When last we met the Goths, they had just sacked the city of Rome in 410 CE, the act for which this barbarian people is both famous and infamous. They were, after all, the first group in 800 years to pillage the Eternal City, and that kind of action is going to leave a mark in the history books. The history of this…

One way of telling the story of the fall of the Roman Empire is to examine the lives and personalities at the very top of the political spectrum, the emperors, generals, court officials, and kings at the center of power who made the life-and-death decisions that reverberated throughout the Roman world. In this…

It took just 80 years for the Roman Empire to fall apart as a political unit.

The retirement of Georges St-Pierre, the longtime UFC welterweight champion and something like a consensus pick for the greatest fighter of all time, was as close as the sport of MMA gets to a happy ending.

Rome was more than just an empire, an agglomeration of provinces ruled by the emperor and administered through a central bureaucracy and a collection of appointed governors and officials. The Roman world, beyond the political structures that sustained the empire, went much deeper than that: It was an interconnected…

The sophistication and scale of the Roman economy was a marvel that powered all of its other achievements, from monumental buildings on three continents to its famed and feared professional army. Although it was an agrarian economy focused around agricultural production, it was surprisingly complex, with whole regions…

We remember the Roman Empire for a great many things. Gladiators are always popular, and the army runs a close second, but the most striking thing about Rome is the monumental landscape of buildings it left behind. The Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, ornate palaces and villas, aqueducts that reach to the sky: These are…

If there’s one piece of the Roman Empire that has managed to weave its way into popular culture, it’s the army. Every decade or so, we get a new movie featuring the heroics of a Russell Crowe (Gladiator), Clive Owen (King Arthur), or Michael Fassbender (Centurion, which is an awesome action flick), and images of…