In 1964, excavators beside the headquarters building at Roman Corbridge met iron before they understood the object around it. The metal belonged to a chest whose timber and leather had mostly yielded to the ground. Inside lay armour plates, weapons, tools, writing materials and the compressed traces of things that ordinarily disappear. It did not … 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
On the Ides of May, a procession reached Rome’s oldest wooden bridge carrying bodies that had never lived. They had heads, trunks and limbs, but they were bound from river rushes. Pontiffs, Vestal Virgins and magistrates stood above the Tiber as the human-shaped bundles were cast into the current. The figures were called the Argei, … Read more
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 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
Beneath one block of Herculaneum, archaeologists entered a tunnel eighty-six metres long and began bagging what the city had tried to flush away. The work eventually produced about 750 sacks of ancient sewage. Mixed through it were food remains, pottery, coins, beads, a lamp and a gold ring set with a gemstone. The deposit had … 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
The Roman soldiers did not meet their enemy on an open wall. They crawled into a tunnel beneath Tower 19 at Dura-Europos, lamps and shields squeezed between timber and earth. Ahead lay Sasanian miners trying to bring down the city’s defenses. In the confined darkness, the first decisive blow may have been a cloud. Excavators … 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
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
