Julian 
A bronze tablet large enough to dominate a wall records no battle and flatters no victorious general. Its crowded columns list farms. They give owners, neighbours, valuations and sums of money. Read one line at a time, it resembles a rural mortgage register. Read as a whole, it describes how imperial capital was supposed to … Read more
The face looks startlingly present. Dark eyes meet the viewer. A curl falls across the forehead. Gold catches at an earring or wreath. Yet the painted wooden panel was not made to hang alone on a pale museum wall. It was fitted over the wrapped head of a mummy. These works are commonly called Fayum … Read more
A woman stands before a Roman praetor and refuses to let someone else turn her dispute into acceptable male speech. She returns with another case, and then another. We do not possess her words. What survives is the irritation of the men who remembered hearing them. Her name was Gaia Afrania. The later legal tradition … Read more
A lamp burned beside a coffin while an entire city praised the woman who refused to leave it. Petronius’s Ephesian widow had followed her husband into the tomb, rejected food and held her vigil into a fifth day. Her grief had become a public marvel before a soldier guarding nearby crosses noticed the light among … Read more
By the time Pliny inspected Nicomedia’s water problem, the city had already paid for failure twice. One aqueduct had consumed 3,329,000 sesterces and stood unfinished, effectively a ruin. A second scheme had raised another two million and had also been abandoned. The combined expenditure did not leave the city with reliable water. It left another … Read more
Publius Decius Mus did not begin his last charge by lowering a spear. He first covered his head, pressed a toga-wrapped hand against his chin and stood upon a spear while a pontiff supplied the words. Only after the formula had been spoken and his colleague had been notified did the consul tighten his clothing, … Read more
A sliver of lentisc wood passed between the teeth. A narrow implement answered an itch in the ear. A gold pin lifted oiled hair clear of silk, while a boxwood comb waited for a recipient whom the poet promptly declared bald. In Martial’s gift book, Roman grooming arrives not as a single morning routine but … Read more
A leather ball struck a left hand and flew across a triangle before the receiver had settled his feet. Nearby, another ball moved at a gentler pace between a boy and an older man. A third kicked up dust as agile players reached and missed. To call all three simply “Roman ball games” would erase … Read more
A servant lifted a coarse linen bag above a cup. Inside it sat snow, an object that belonged naturally to winter but had arrived at a Roman table in another season. Meltwater passed through the cloth. The wine below became cold. Then the bag began to boast. That voice comes from Martial’s Epigrams, where objects … Read more
Ten witnesses stood around a small cake of spelt. A sacrifice was offered to Jupiter Farreus. Traditional words were spoken, although the jurist Gaius does not preserve them for us. Nothing in his compressed description sounds like a private exchange of affection. The surviving outline is spare, formal and crowded: food, god, formula and witnesses … Read more
