There’s a funny exchange in the classic comedy, ”Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in which members of an insurgent group, the People’s Front of Judea, are grousing about their Roman rulers. ”What did the ...

The bread-and-circuses approach to public policy has never been more ambitiously or outrageously memorialized than by the eternal centerpiece of the Eternal City—the subject of “Colosseum,” the ...