Beneath one block of Herculaneum, archaeologists entered a tunnel eighty-six metres long and began bagging what the city had tried to flush away. The work eventually produced about 750 sacks of ancient sewage. Mixed through it were food remains, pottery, coins, beads, a lamp and a gold ring set with a gemstone. The deposit had … Read more
A Roman speaker could prepare for court by walking through a house without moving his feet. He began at the doorway, crossed the atrium, passed a column, paused at a couch and continued toward a staircase. At each familiar place he set a vivid mental image for one part of the speech. When the moment … Read more
Rome’s countryside did not enter the city at random. On a recurring market day, farmers and rural buyers could plan to bring produce, settle business, hear news and return home with goods that were difficult to obtain locally. The cycle was called the nundinae, a “ninth day” by Roman inclusive counting but an eight-day interval … Read more
Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces did not ask Rome to remember a borrowed heroic ancestor. He put bread production on his tomb. Near the Porta Maggiore, the monument announces a baker, contractor and public servant in letters large enough for traffic to read. Above them, ranks of cylinders and a relief sequence turn commercial machinery into funeral … Read more
A torn papyrus preserves a ship called the Hermapollon, sixty boxes of Gangetic nard, thousands of pounds of ivory and a cargo valued in talents and drachmas. It is easy to read those fragments as an exotic shopping list. The more important revelation is less glamorous: Roman trade with India was held together by clauses … Read more
A stone inscription set up at Praeneste does something modern sports archives would recognize immediately: it turns a career into numbers. Gaius Appuleius Diocles raced for twenty-four years, entered 4,257 contests, won 1,462 times and accumulated 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. Those figures are so large that they can make him look like a legend … Read more
South of ancient Rome’s center stands a hill that the landscape did not make. Monte Testaccio rises from fragments of transport jars, overwhelmingly amphorae that once carried olive oil. Estimates approach eighty million containers. Their handles, rims and walls accumulated into terraces high enough to become urban topography. The hill is often called a rubbish … Read more
Pompeii preserved very few ancient women at monumental scale. Eumachia is the startling exception. Her name ran across the façade of a vast building beside the Forum, appeared again at a side entrance, and stood beneath a marble portrait placed in the rear portico. She did not survive merely as someone’s wife. She survives as … Read more
A Roman marble carver could make a surface smoother by covering it with more marks. The rasp did not polish by erasing every trace at once. Its flattened ends carried fields of sharp points, and every rubbing stroke laid fine scratches across the stone. Later passes crossed and overlapped them until the rougher evidence of … Read more
A flat chisel carries two corners into every cut. On an open surface they help define a clean edge; inside a hollow, either corner can bite before the centre arrives. Roman stone carvers had another option. The roundel replaced the straight cutting edge with a curve, from an obvious semicircle to one so slight that … Read more
