Closed, it is only a small bar of silver hardware. Open it, and a table setting seems to unfold from a traveller’s hand. A three-pronged fork swings away from the body. So do a spoon, a spatula, a narrow pick and a spike. An iron knife once completed the set, but its blade has largely … Read more
A trader could argue about the size of a jar. The stone could answer. On the western side of Pompeii’s Forum, a marble counter presented a row of hollow standards for checking how much a vessel really held. Grain or liquid went into the appropriate basin, a cap closed it, and the contents were released … Read more
It is small enough to disappear inside a closed hand. The London Museum’s copper-alloy pestle measures only 61 millimetres long and bends like a narrow crescent. One end carries a loop. Its companion set included a matching mortar, tweezers and a nail cleaner. Nothing about that scale suggests a workshop machine, yet the worn metal … Read more
The stone does not look like a wheel. In Pompeii’s bakeries, the fixed lower piece rose like a blunt cone, while the upper piece narrowed at the middle and opened again above it. Put together, the pair looked closer to an hourglass than to the flat millstones familiar from later windmills. Grain entered at the … Read more
The man did not knock the Portland Vase from its case by accident. On 7 February 1845, William Lloyd entered the British Museum, picked up a nearby carved object and struck one of the most famous Roman glass vessels in the world. The vase collapsed into 189 recorded fragments. A museum attendant had been close … Read more
The gift was iron, about 132 millimetres long, and cheap enough for its own inscription to make fun of the buyer. Scratched around the slim sides was a Latin message from someone who claimed to have come from Rome. The traveller brought a pointed present, asked to be remembered and apologized that an empty purse … Read more
Four silver cups begin at Gades, the Atlantic port now called Cádiz, and end at Rome. Between those names, narrow columns of letters give station after station and the distance to the next one. The road does not appear as a line. It circles the vessels, making a journey of 1,840 Roman miles small enough … Read more
A late Roman neck ring survives with a voice attached to it. The voice is not the wearer’s. A small bronze plate orders whoever reads it to seize a fugitive, return him to a man called Zoninus and collect a solidus. The person inside the iron is never named. The object now called the Zoninus … Read more
A Roman wall can lose its blue without losing the material that made it blue. To the eye, weathered plaster may look grey, brown or almost bare. Under the right illumination and camera, scattered particles answer with a strong near-infrared glow invisible to human sight. Those particles belong to Egyptian blue, a synthetic pigment whose … Read more
In 1931, excavators working at Aquincum found rows of corroded pipes and metal fittings in the ruins of a Roman building. The pieces did not look like a complete instrument. Collapse, fire and centuries underground had flattened the wooden frame and scattered its mechanism. An inscription made the wreck intelligible. The object had been a … Read more
