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 ripe peach arrived at a Roman stall with a clock already running. Pliny the Elder gave it no more than about two days after picking. It could not wait through a long warehouse delay, improve during storage or be held until a seller liked the price. Once the branch released it, the fruit had … 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
The object is small enough to disappear between two hands. Its rim measures 89.5 millimetres across, its surviving body stands 47 millimetres high, and the whole copper-alloy pan weighs only 132.5 grams. Yet a line cut around that narrow rim holds four forts from the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, a technical phrase for the … Read more
A worker at Puteoli could begin with a bench that hardly promised brilliance: pale sand, flower of natron, coarse copper filings and water. The blue appeared only later, after those materials had been ground, mixed, rolled into balls, dried, enclosed in pottery and fired. In Vitruvius’s account, color was not gathered ready-made. It was constructed … Read more
The Rhodian envoys had finished their plea and left the senate chamber. Behind them remained the consequences of words spoken at home: during Rome’s war with King Perses, men in Rhodian assemblies had urged support for Macedonia if peace could not be secured. Rhodes had taken no official action, but after Perses was defeated and … Read more
Two enormous wooden theatres stood close together in Rome, but their audiences initially faced away from one another. Morning plays ran at the same time, the opposite orientation keeping one cast from drowning out the words of the other. Then the buildings moved. Each semicircular theatre balanced on a pivot. The structures revolved until their … Read more
Pliny the Elder admired Rome’s sewers as structures that seemed able to survive everything the city threw at them. Floodwater battered their floors and walls. The Tiber could drive water backward through their channels. Buildings collapsed overhead, fires shook the streets and earthquakes disturbed the ground, yet the masonry endured. He claimed that the channels … Read more
When Pliny the Younger recited his work, his wife Calpurnia sat nearby but out of sight. A curtain screened her from the audience while allowing her to hear what listeners said in her husband’s praise. The arrangement placed her at the edge of a public literary room: hidden from its gaze, close to its judgments. … Read more
