A bronze man lifts his right hand above an audience that vanished more than two thousand years ago. The fingers are spread, the palm faces outward and the arm clears the folds of a narrow toga. His lined face is not youthful or divine. He looks like an officeholder asking a crowd to listen. The … Read more
The man approaching Nero was already a king in every sense that mattered east of the Euphrates. Tiridates belonged to the Arsacid house, had the backing of his brother Vologases I of Parthia and had survived a contest in which Roman armies could destroy Armenian capitals but could not dictate a durable settlement. In Rome, … Read more
Nothing in the Roman crowd’s ordinary catalogue of animals prepared it for the neck. The creature entered Caesar’s games with the spotted hide of a great cat, the body of a browsing hoofed animal and a head lifted above the people around it. Cassius Dio paused his political narrative to describe the proportions. Rome had … Read more
In 1528, a vineyard worker on Lyon’s Croix-Rousse hill uncovered the lower part of a bronze inscription. Its columns did not preserve a law, an army list or a dedication to a god. They preserved an emperor speaking through interruptions, digressions and a blunt request that Rome stop treating provincial origin as a permanent barrier … Read more
Pliny the Younger had governed, prosecuted and pleaded cases, yet one set of hearings stopped him. Christians were being brought before him in Bithynia-Pontus, and he did not know what the governing rule was. Should age matter? Was renouncing the faith enough? Was the name itself punishable, or only crimes attached to it? His answer … Read more
The disguise survived the doorway. It survived the servants who admitted a young female musician into Julius Caesar’s house. Then the intruder spoke. A maid heard a man’s voice in a building cleared of men for the secret rites of the Bona Dea, screamed, and turned a private corridor into the most dangerous room in … Read more
In 195 BC, Roman magistrates found the approaches to public business occupied by people who could not cast a ballot. Women stood in streets and at entrances, intercepted men on their way to the Forum and pressed a question that Rome had postponed for twenty years. A wartime law still controlled the gold they could … Read more
Around the end of the first century BC, a Roman widower had an extraordinary account of his marriage cut into stone. The surviving slabs do not preserve his name or his wife’s with certainty. What they preserve is a sequence of emergencies: murdered parents, a contested will, civil war, guards, hiding places, a violent petition … Read more
Agrippina stepped from the ship at Brundisium holding an urn. Germanicus had left Italy as the empire’s most admired young commander. He returned as ashes carried by his widow, with their children following behind. Tacitus makes the harbor almost motionless before the crowd’s grief breaks through. The landing came in AD 20, after Germanicus died … Read more
In 1981, six bronze plates recovered in southern Spain opened a town hall that had been silent for nearly nineteen centuries. They belonged to the Municipium Flavium Irnitanum, a community in the modern province of Seville that was scarcely known before its municipal charter appeared. The metal did not preserve a heroic speech. It preserved … Read more
