The proconsul remained on his horse as he approached a Roman consul. Nobody immediately told him to get down. The hesitation was understandable. The rider was Fabius Maximus, a former consul and the father of the magistrate in front of him. The lictors knew father and son lived in complete harmony. Household respect, seniority and … Read more
The imperial journey stopped because a mule needed a shoe. At least, that was the explanation offered beside the road. Vespasian suspected a different cause. The muleteer had created just enough delay for a man with a lawsuit to approach the emperor. Someone who could not order the travelling court to halt had apparently found … Read more
The will named an heir, then began giving the estate away. A house might go to one person, money to another, silver or land to several more. Each gift could be valid on its own, yet together they created a dangerous result: the person appointed to carry the inheritance might receive little reason to accept … Read more
A clerk finishes a notice and fixes it where Rome can encounter it. Some passers-by read. Others listen as a literate stranger works through the lines. A copyist selects what matters to a patron outside the city. By evening, one official text has become many conversations. The Romans used several kinds of acta, records of … Read more
A bronze tablet large enough to dominate a wall records no battle and flatters no victorious general. Its crowded columns list farms. They give owners, neighbours, valuations and sums of money. Read one line at a time, it resembles a rural mortgage register. Read as a whole, it describes how imperial capital was supposed to … Read more
A woman stands before a Roman praetor and refuses to let someone else turn her dispute into acceptable male speech. She returns with another case, and then another. We do not possess her words. What survives is the irritation of the men who remembered hearing them. Her name was Gaia Afrania. The later legal tradition … Read more
By the time Pliny inspected Nicomedia’s water problem, the city had already paid for failure twice. One aqueduct had consumed 3,329,000 sesterces and stood unfinished, effectively a ruin. A second scheme had raised another two million and had also been abandoned. The combined expenditure did not leave the city with reliable water. It left another … Read more
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
