The enemy in a Roman training yard did not move. He stood about six feet high, was sunk firmly into the earth and had no face beyond the one a recruit imagined for him. Against this wooden post, Vegetius says, the beginner learned to attack the head, sides and legs, to advance, retreat, spring forward … Read more
A freedom claim reached Pliny with an account attached to it. In Bithynia, children who had been exposed by their parents had survived because other people took them in and raised them. Some had then grown up in a condition of servitude despite having been born free. If they claimed their original status, could the … Read more
An embedded weapon presented a Roman surgeon with a problem of direction. Pull it back through the wound it had already made, and its edge or barbs might tear tissue again. Push it onward to a new opening, and the surgeon deliberately created another wound. Celsus does not hide that choice behind a heroic operation. … Read more
The Roman fleet faced 220 ships whose decks rose above its own. Their hulls were oak, their crossbeams massive, their anchor cables iron chain and their sails made from hides or dressed leather. Caesar says a Roman ram could not hurt them. Even towers added to the lower Roman vessels failed to erase the height … Read more
The room did not need a written charge. A Roman citizen stood before the censors with a friend beside him as advocate. Then, clearly and loudly, he yawned. In Aulus Gellius’s account, the officials almost converted that instant into a judgment on the whole man. They read the open mouth and broken attention as signs … 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 ladders bent under too many men. Some did not reach the top of New Carthage’s wall at all; the longer ones flexed, broke and dropped their climbers. Those who reached the highest rungs found themselves exposed and unable to step onto the battlement. Then the Roman signal sounded for retreat. To the defenders, the … 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
A large black ox faced outward from Pausias’s painting. It did not offer the broad side profile that would make its length easy to describe. Its chest stood before its body, and the painter refused the usual help of white highlights. Pliny says the animal still appeared long and solid. Pausias made the shadow cast … Read more
A black stone, a white stone and a third the color of vermilion reached a Roman workbench as separate pieces. Cut, aligned and cemented together, they left it as one sardonyx. Pliny says the join could be managed so well that skill itself failed to expose the fraud. The trick did not replace a gem … Read more
