A worker kept walking inside a wooden wheel, but the water rose on a different loop. Small bronze buckets descended on a double iron chain, filled at the lower level, climbed past the worker’s feet and turned over when they crossed the axle. Their contents fell into a conduit above. Vitruvius presents that apparatus only … Read more
Eighty talents changed hands for two painted panels: Medea caught inside her terrible decision and Ajax destroyed by his own shame. Julius Caesar bought both from the Greek painter Timomachus, then carried them into the public architecture of his new forum. Pliny preserves the price in one book of the Natural History. In another, he … Read more
Amastris possessed what Pliny the Younger called a very beautiful and lengthy street. Along one side, for its entire extent, ran a channel that people called a river. Pliny stood the polite name against what eyes and noses reported. It was, he told Trajan, really a sewer of the foulest kind. The short exchange in … Read more
A young man was about to leave Corinth. An oil lamp placed his profile on a wall, and the woman who loved him drew around the edge of the shadow. Her father, the potter Butades, pressed clay over those lines and fired the modeled face with the rest of his pottery. That is Pliny the … Read more
Pliny could close the windows of one bedroom and lose the sound of slaves talking, the murmur of the sea and the violence of a storm. Lightning no longer announced itself. Daylight disappeared. He credited the silence not to a single heavy door but to a passage left empty between the chamber wall and the … Read more
One grape bunch remained attached to its vine while a clay vessel closed around it. The pot had four handles so cords could suspend it from the plant. Its lid came in two pieces, allowing the halves to meet around the living stem. Inside, the fruit hung loosely enough to touch neither wall nor cover. … Read more
A stone struck an unnamed man, and one category of knowledge vanished. Pliny the Elder says the victim forgot the names of the letters—only those names. He does not say the man forgot his family, his surroundings or the event itself. The damage appears in the account as a narrow blank cut through an otherwise … Read more
Tongilianus had bought a house for two hundred. Then the building disappeared in what Martial calls an accident all too frequent in the city. A collection followed. Its value reached ten times the first figure. That is enough for Martial. “I ask,” the poet says, can Tongilianus not appear to have burned his own house? … Read more
Octavius had already committed himself. Roughly five thousand modii of grain ears had been bought, about three hundred denarii had gone down as a deposit, and the seller still needed to be paid. His letter to Candidus therefore asks for at least five hundred denarii, quickly. Without it, he says, the deposit will be lost … Read more
A large grub with two peculiar horns begins Pliny the Elder’s account. It becomes a caterpillar, passes through stages he names bombylis and necydalus, and after six months reaches the form his translator calls a silk-worm. Then it makes something like a spider’s web. Pliny does not leave that pale material attached to the insect. … Read more
