Rome

On 21 April 753 BC, according to tradition, Romulus founded Rome. The date is a fiction a Roman scholar calculated seven centuries later. The city it commemorates outlived every peer it ever had, and most of its successors.

Rome had soldiers in Spain a century before Julius Caesar bothered with France, even though France was right next door. The reason has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with Hannibal.

On 17 March 45 BC, Caesar won the last battle of his civil war at Munda. He later said he had often fought for victory, but at Munda he fought for his life. He had a year left.

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.

On 4 February 2 BC, the Roman Senate hailed Augustus as Pater Patriae — Father of the Fatherland. He had been ruling Rome for thirty years. He wept.