A Roman ship came up the Tiber carrying an answer to an epidemic. According to the story preserved most vividly by Ovid, a sacred serpent had boarded at the Greek healing sanctuary of Epidaurus. As the vessel reached Rome, the snake slid onto the island in midstream, coiled among the reeds and chose the place … Read more
In AD 218, twelve Roman priests closed the doors of a sanctuary and began to dance. Their song asked the Lares for help and Mars not to let ruin fall upon the people. Yet its words did not sound like the Latin used in the streets, courts or imperial palace outside. The hymn belonged to … Read more
A dark green cup can become red without dye, heat or a change of vessel. Put light in front of the Lycurgus Cup and much of its glass reads as olive green. Move the light behind it and the body glows ruby. The object seems to change its material while remaining still. The effect belongs … Read more
Rome did not treat prophecy as a voice that anyone could quote whenever politics became difficult. Its most famous prophetic collection was locked away, placed under named guardians and opened only after the Senate decided that ordinary answers were no longer enough. The arrangement looks paradoxical. A city that feared omens preserved dangerous verses at … Read more
At Misenum on the afternoon of the Vesuvius eruption, Pliny the Elder was not standing at a villa window waiting to become a martyr to science. He commanded the Roman fleet. When an unfamiliar cloud rose across the Bay of Naples, curiosity sent him toward his writing tablets, but a message from a trapped friend … Read more
A worshipper entering a Roman mithraeum did not step into a sunlit public temple. He descended or passed into a narrow, dim room. Raised benches flanked a central aisle. At the far end, the god Mithras drove a blade into a bull while a dog, snake and scorpion crowded the carved scene. The architecture pointed … Read more
In 204 BCE, the Second Punic War had lasted fourteen years. Hannibal no longer threatened Rome’s walls, but he remained in Italy, harvests and alliances had been tested, and Romans wanted the war’s end to become thinkable. Their answer included a small dark object carried across the sea: the sacred stone of the Great Mother … Read more
A scar in Roman stone does not always name the tool that made it. A broad flat mark may suggest a flat chisel; a combed mark may suggest a tooth chisel. Yet Roman workers also used stoneworking axes with flat or toothed edges, and Art of Making warns that distinguishing their traces from chisel work … Read more
A chisel can have a narrow edge and still be too wide to follow its own cut. As a groove deepens, the shaft above the edge begins rubbing the walls. Roman channelling tools solved that problem with a shape that changes depending on where one stands: narrow from above, thicker from the side. Art of … Read more
Roman carvers sometimes struck stone with three teeth at once. A typical tooth chisel had three to five teeth across an edge only part of a centimetre to ten centimetres wide. Each hammer blow divided itself into neighboring contacts, leaving shallow parallel lines instead of one isolated pit. The Art of Making project places the … Read more
