The ship had taken water through most of the night. A fierce wind struck from the side as it crossed the Ionian Sea, and passengers worked the pumps while the deck, ropes and hull answered the weather. Dawn brought no simple release. Gellius remembered a black sky, fog, whirlwinds and cloud forms that seemed ready … Read more
The king thought he had designed a question with no safe answer. Tarquinius Priscus asked the celebrated diviner Attus Navius whether the thing in his mind could be done. Attus consulted the signs and said it could. Only then did Tarquin reveal the trap: he had been thinking of cutting a whetstone in two with … Read more
The actor had reached the point where applause became a physical problem. Livius Andronicus performed in plays he had written, and the audience repeatedly called him back. According to Livy, the strain broke his voice. The performance still had to continue, but its author could no longer carry every part of it. The solution was … Read more
A bowl of beans sits at the center of one of antiquity’s most persistent biographical arguments. By the second century, Aulus Gellius could call it a long-established belief that Pythagoras avoided beans and ate no animals. The picture was memorable: the philosopher’s discipline could be reduced to a forbidden food that anyone understood. Gellius did … Read more
Roman collectors believed fire had made a metal that craft could no longer reproduce. When Corinth was captured and burned, the story went, copper, gold and silver melted together by accident. Objects made from the resulting alloy became trophies of discernment. Colour, scarcity and catastrophe gathered in one name: Corinthian bronze. Pliny the Elder repeats … Read more
Pliny the Younger reached Clitumnus and immediately regretted arriving so late in life. He urged his correspondent Romanus to make the same journey. Beneath a hill thick with old cypresses, water broke from several channels, gathered in a small whirlpool and widened into a pool so clear that coins and pebbles could be counted on … Read more
A plough moved through a field beside the River Nene in February 1975 and struck the remains of a Roman community’s precious metal. The first pieces did not gleam. Darkened, bent and damaged by agriculture, they could be mistaken for lead or pewter. They proved to be silver, part of a deposit hidden within the … Read more
Latinus did not sit upright on a throne while an official read the future. In Virgil’s story, the king slaughtered one hundred woolly sheep, spread their skins beneath him and lay down in a sacred grove. The answer would come only after waking authority had yielded to ritual sleep. Below high Albunea, a fountain echoed … Read more
Zoilus arrived in Alexandria with an aggressive literary identity. Vitruvius says the Macedonian called himself Homeromastix and read works attacking the Iliad and Odyssey before Ptolemy. The king was offended but withheld an answer. Later the critic fell into poverty and asked the same court for help. The reply made reputation into an economy. Homer, … Read more
At midday the soldiers began pointing him out. Socrates had been standing in the same place since dawn, absorbed in a problem that had refused to yield. Hours passed, the camp moved through its routines, and still he did not leave. By evening, curiosity had become an overnight watch. Some Ionian soldiers finished supper, carried … Read more
