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
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
