Ancient Rome is very used to being looked at. We see versions of it everywhere: in films and TV series, in school syllabi, and in contemporary politics.

Melbourne Museum’s exhibition Rome: Empire, Power, People holds the promise of a fresh look, with the majority of artefacts, borrowed from the Museo Nazionale Romano (Rome) and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Florence), not seen previously in Australia.

At first, it feels like business as usual: even though the materials are fresh to our shores, the exhibition mostly sets them up in familiar thematic groupings for this subject: ambition, life, luxury, the divine and eternity. The way these are displayed feels familiar, too.

But the exhibition’s design offers unexpected insights: room to room, the presentation offers a de-facto history of how we have looked at ancient Rome over the years. This design invites us to consider how societies in different eras have framed this complicated culture, and how we frame it now.

A tour through the history of looking at ancient Rome

We start with the Romans’ own vision of their even more ancient selves: an altar with Romulus and Remus, two characters from the city’s mythological........

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