Gaius Marius placed one leg before a physician and refused to be tied down. Plutarch says the Roman endured the knife without movement, groan or change of expression. Then the physician approached the second leg. Marius stopped him. The cure, he decided, was not worth the pain. The abrupt refusal completes the anecdote rather than … Read more
A damaged papyrus preserves the opening of an imperial decision that changed the legal identity of millions. In AD 212, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus—better known as Caracalla—extended Roman citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. The decree did not flatten the empire into one uniform society. It did something narrower and still enormous: it … Read more
Claudius did not stop at writing histories in Latin and Greek. Before he became emperor, he designed three additions to the Latin alphabet, argued for them in a book, and later used imperial power to put them into public circulation. Suetonius says the characters appeared in books, Rome’s daily gazette, and inscriptions on public buildings. … Read more
An Adriatic fisherman caught a turbot so large that selling it was dangerous. Juvenal imagines informers waiting to claim any remarkable creature for Domitian. The safest market was therefore the emperor himself. The fish reached the imperial villa, but the kitchen had no dish large enough to hold it. A ruler with armies, courts and … Read more
Rome entered 46 BC with a problem that could not be solved by declaring the next festival a little earlier. The civic calendar had slipped so badly against the solar year that dates no longer reliably named the seasons they were supposed to govern. Magistrates, courts, contracts, religious observances and military commands all depended on … Read more
Berenice had crossed the eastern Mediterranean to Rome and entered the household of the man expected to become emperor. She was a client queen, older than Titus, politically experienced, and already bound to the Flavian family by war and patronage. Ancient writers also say she was his lover. The relationship did not end because either … Read more
Roman soldiers formed on the shore facing the Channel. Artillery and siege engines were positioned as though an enemy waited beyond the water. Emperor Caligula boarded a warship, moved a short distance from land, returned, and took his place on a tribunal. Then came the order that made the scene infamous. The troops were to … Read more
A ship built to carry an Egyptian obelisk ended its working life beneath masonry. Claudius had the enormous carrier sunk in deep water outside Ostia, fixed with piles and incorporated into the foundation of a harbour mole. Above it rose a tower whose night light guided ships toward Rome. The transformation joined two imperial projects. … Read more
First came the ponies: some trained to harness, others still unbroken. Then the dogs, large and small. Nightingales, parrots and blackbirds followed. According to Pliny the Younger, Marcus Aquilius Regulus had every one of these animals killed at the funeral pyre of his only son. Pliny did not offer the inventory to prove that Regulus … Read more
The road should have stopped the flames. It separated Nicomedia’s almshouse from the temple of Isis, yet both public buildings burned. Private houses went with them. Pliny the Younger, governing Bithynia for Trajan, listed the failures with the severity of someone writing after a preventable disaster: violent wind, citizens who stood watching, and a city … Read more
