The advertisement did not wait inside an office. It occupied a wall beside an entrance in Pompeii, painted in red letters large enough to catch people moving along the street. Behind it stood a property that could offer much more than one room: baths, commercial spaces and accommodation above ground level. The name attached to … Read more
A pair of red wool socks in the Victoria and Albert Museum ends in four points, not two. Each foot has one pocket for the big toe and another for the remaining toes. The division looks odd only until a sandal enters the picture. A thong could pass through the gap while wool still covered … Read more
Peter Whatling had lost a hammer in a Suffolk field. On 16 November 1992, his friend Eric Lawes brought a metal detector to help find it. The signal that changed the search did not lead first to the tool. Lawes lifted silver spoons, gold jewellery and Roman coins from the soil—and then did the most … Read more
A Roman orchard keeper could change a tree without uprooting it. The operation began with removal: a saw took off the stock, a knife smoothed the wound, and a wedge opened living wood. Then came the more delicate act. A young shoot from another tree had to be pared, fitted and bound so closely that … Read more
The most revealing Roman bank archive did not survive in a marble office or a state treasury. It survived in a wicker basket. Road workers found it in 1959, in a building south of Pompeii where decorated dining rooms opened onto a small garden. Inside were wooden writing tablets whose wax once carried loans, guarantees, … Read more
The gladiators were not the only armed men at Pompeii’s amphitheatre in AD 59. Visitors from neighboring Nuceria traded taunts with the home crowd. Insults followed. Then stones crossed the seating. By the time blades appeared, a show designed to stage controlled violence had produced uncontrolled violence among its spectators. Tacitus compresses the escalation into … Read more
Four lines at the bottom of a sandstone monument carried a longer journey than most Roman roads. Three were cut in Latin. The fourth used Palmyrene Aramaic. Above them sat Regina, not as an emperor, priestess or mythic heroine, but as a richly dressed woman with wool-working tools and an open jewellery casket. The stone … Read more
Galen did not need someone to explain what a burned library meant. In 192 CE, fire tore through central Rome and destroyed three imperial libraries near one another on the Palatine. It also reached the rented storerooms where scholars kept personal books, copies and work in progress. Galen lost both the sources he trusted and … Read more
The silver did not glitter when excavators reached it in December 1930. In a cellar of Pompeii’s Casa del Menandro, 118 pieces of plate had been wrapped in textiles and lowered into the bottom of a wooden chest. A second box rested above them. It held gold jewellery, precious stones, wire and coins. The arrangement … Read more
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
