A ripe peach arrived at a Roman stall with a clock already running. Pliny the Elder gave it no more than about two days after picking. It could not wait through a long warehouse delay, improve during storage or be held until a seller liked the price. Once the branch released it, the fruit had … Read more
A worker at Puteoli could begin with a bench that hardly promised brilliance: pale sand, flower of natron, coarse copper filings and water. The blue appeared only later, after those materials had been ground, mixed, rolled into balls, dried, enclosed in pottery and fired. In Vitruvius’s account, color was not gathered ready-made. It was constructed … Read more
Two enormous wooden theatres stood close together in Rome, but their audiences initially faced away from one another. Morning plays ran at the same time, the opposite orientation keeping one cast from drowning out the words of the other. Then the buildings moved. Each semicircular theatre balanced on a pivot. The structures revolved until their … Read more
Protogenes approached the painting called the Ialysus as if endurance could be designed. Pliny the Elder says he laid down four coats of paint, leaving three beneath the surface so that age or injury could remove one and reveal another. The painter also disciplined his own appetite, living on soaked lupins while he worked because … Read more
Mark Antony was having no luck with a fishing line, and Cleopatra was there to see it. Irritated by failure in front of her, he ordered fishermen to swim below the boat and fasten fish already caught to his hook. Two or three convenient successes came out of the water. Cleopatra recognized the trick, admired … Read more
Pliny the Younger had counted the snails before his guest failed to appear. Septicius Clarus had accepted an invitation to dinner, but the couch reserved for him stayed empty. Pliny answered with a letter that reads like a bill written by a host who is too amused to send a real invoice and too irritated … Read more
Vitruvius begins his well-safety instruction with the moment a worker should not descend. Air can rise through fissures into a deep excavation, he writes, and the resulting exhalation can stop a digger’s breath. Anyone who fails to escape quickly may die below. His precaution is small enough to fit in one hand. Before sending a … Read more
The most quoted words on Vindolanda Tablet 346 are the easiest ones to smile at: socks, sandals and underpants. They survive in an ink letter from the Roman frontier, broken across ten pieces of thin wood. The familiar objects seem to pull an ancient parcel straight into the present. Yet the tablet is valuable precisely … Read more
Pliny the Younger knew how his story sounded. He told Caninius that it was true, though very much like a fable, and suitable for a poet. He had heard it at dinner from a man he considered trustworthy. Those assurances do not turn the letter into a modern field report. They tell us that credibility … Read more
An Athenian audience knew what the urn was supposed to mean. In Sophocles’ Electra, the heroine receives what she believes are the ashes of her dead brother Orestes. Her lament belongs to the plot: the vessel is a prop, the death a deception, and the grief a test the actor must make convincing. Aulus Gellius … Read more
