After the Tiber flooded Rome, two senators put a vast question before the Senate. Lucius Arruntius and Ateius Capito asked whether rivers and lakes feeding the Tiber should be diverted from their courses. The proposal treated inundation as a problem that might be moved through the landscape: reduce the water reaching Rome by changing what … Read more
Vespasian’s funeral procession had already put a price on imperial memory: ten million sesterces. The figure enters Suetonius’s biography through a question shouted by Favor, a leading actor of mimes. Favor was wearing the dead emperor’s mask and performing the actions and words by which Vespasian had been known in life. When the officials gave … Read more
Before an army crossed a frontier, a sentence had to cross it. In Livy’s account, a wool-covered envoy stood at another people’s boundary and called Jupiter, the boundary itself and righteousness to hear him. He repeated his demand to the first person he met, at the gate and in the forum. Only after waiting, returning … Read more
Five people could still meet. Six could not. Even among the permitted five, no more than two could be men and no more than three women. A priest, a presiding officer, a common treasury or a mutual oath could turn the gathering from tolerated worship into a capital case. The surviving order is so exact … Read more
The crowd had already chosen an ending. Priscus and Verus had fought for a long time without separating themselves, and the spectators loudly demanded that both be released. The ruler did not immediately give them what they wanted. In Martial’s poem, Caesar remained inside the announced rule: the contest had to continue until a fighter … Read more
Vespasian had already acted before Rome finished defining the legal basis on which he could act. The surviving bronze text associated with his imperial powers confronts that sequence directly. Near its end, it declares that measures undertaken, ordered or decreed by him before the law was proposed were to be valid as if the Roman … Read more
The edict did more than ask Rome’s richest women for money. It ordered 1,400 of them to declare their property, threatened penalties for concealment or false valuation, and promised rewards to informers whether free or enslaved. The Second Triumvirate needed cash for another Roman civil war. Its shortage was being converted into an inspection of … Read more
Lake Nemi is small enough to see across, yet Caligula placed two vessels on it longer than many modern houses are deep. One hull measured about 71 metres, the other 73. They carried marble, bronze roof fittings, pumps, anchors and elaborate architecture on water that offered no practical route to anywhere else. Among the mechanical … Read more
In 63 BCE, Cato the Younger rose in the Roman senate during the crisis surrounding Catiline. His words moved faster than an ordinary copyist could write them. Yet one version of the speech survived, and Plutarch explains why: Cicero had stationed skilled writers around the chamber who could compress many words into a few short … Read more
Citizenship reached a family in Roman Morocco through a sequence of hands. A local notable petitioned. A provincial governor supported the request. Emperors answered. A freedman checked the central register in Rome. Twelve senior men authenticated the copy. At Banasa, the result was cut into a bronze sheet large enough to make private favour publicly … Read more
