A heavy load presses a wooden beam, and the expected picture is simple: the middle sags. Aulus Gellius gives palm wood a different response. Stack on weights until the burden seems too great, he says, and the timber does not hollow downward. It rises against the pressure and takes a convex form. Gellius calls the … Read more
Rome below the Capitol was full of enemy movement, smoke and ruined houses. The defenders on the height could hear cries, the crackle of flames and buildings falling in the city they could no longer control. Gallic posts watched the exits so that nobody inside the blockade could slip away. Gaius Fabius Dorso did not … Read more
The door opened, and the building answered like thunder. Beyond it, most of the route had to be crossed in darkness. A visitor who kept moving through the galleries could discover that the architecture had delivered him back to the place where he began. This is the Egyptian Labyrinth as Pliny the Elder asks his … Read more
On the Kalends of March, year-old laurel came down from Roman sacred places. Fresh branches replaced it at the flamines, the doorway of the ritual king and an old curia. At Vesta’s hearth, dry leaves were removed and a new fire was kindled inside the shrine. By Ovid’s lifetime, January already opened the civic year. … Read more
Inside the private cabinet of a defeated king, Pompey found a recipe. Pliny says it was written in Mithridates’s own hand: two dried walnuts, two figs, twenty leaves of rue and one grain of salt. The ingredients were to be pounded together and swallowed fasting. The promise was immense but carefully bounded. The person who … Read more
On the Ides of March, Romans carried wine cups to the grass beside the Tiber and began counting. Each cup represented a year they wanted to live. Ovid imagines one man drinking toward the fabulous lifespan of Nestor and one woman trying to reach the age of the Sibyl. The arithmetic belonged to a feast, … Read more
One hundred Roman women stood inside a selection whose surviving record gives only one name. From that group, Pliny the Elder says, the matrons chose Sulpicia, daughter of Paterculus and wife of Fulvius Flaccus. Their judgment named her the most modest woman and assigned her a public sacred task: dedicating an image of Venus. The … Read more
The horse stood at Argos with the qualities buyers wanted to exaggerate and witnesses wanted to remember: extraordinary size, a high neck, a thick shining mane and a rich bay coat. Cornelius Dolabella was travelling toward Syria when its fame pulled him off his route. He paid one hundred thousand sesterces for it. Aulus Gellius … Read more
A magistrate began a public prayer, but the voice was not his alone. One attendant read the formula ahead of him from a written ritual. A second listened for every word. A third guarded the silence around them. At the edge of the ceremony, a musician played the flute so that stray speech could not … Read more
Veii had been conquered, but its great goddess could not be treated like an ordinary prize. Livy says the Romans selected youths, made them wash, dressed them in white and sent them into Juno Regina’s temple with profound reverence. Etruscan custom, as he understood it, had normally allowed only a priest from a particular family … Read more
