In the online game SPQR, you are a sleuth seeking out the plans of "The Calamitus," the barbarian spy who will not rest until he has struck at the Achilles Heel of the ancient city. In Chapter One your mission is to acquire Calamitus' journal. Finding the journal is not easy and will involve a combination of exploration through a three-dimensional, computer-generated simulation of the Forum Romanum. You will be aided in your quest if you can find the journals of the four main characters: Lucius the private ey, Verania the Vestal Virgin, Sibyl the oracle, and Gordian the city engineer. If you prevail and acquire the journal of Calamitus, you will be privy to the diabolical thoughts of this would-be destroyer of the civilization, and hopefully gain insight into his plans to destroy Rome.

SPQR takes place in the Roman Forum at dawn on a day in AD 205, where the first scroll is to be found in front of the Arch of Septimius Severus. Dedicated by the Senate only two years earlier, on the decennalia of the emperor?s accession in AD 193 and in celebration of his victory in Parthia ten years before, it was the first major architectural addition to the Forum in eighty years. Placed diagonally opposite the Arch of Augustus, which also had been erected to celebrate a triumph over the Parthians, it symbolically linked Severus, who had come to power after a bloody civil war, with Rome's first emperor. So debilitating was this struggle, as Roman legion fought Roman legion, that Gibbon considered Severus to be the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.? - Lucius Aelius Stilo