Protogenes approached the painting called the Ialysus as if endurance could be designed. Pliny the Elder says he laid down four coats of paint, leaving three beneath the surface so that age or injury could remove one and reveal another. The painter also disciplined his own appetite, living on soaked lupins while he worked because … Read more
Demetrius Poliorcetes brought Rhodes a siege tower that Vitruvius describes as 135 feet high, 60 feet broad and 360,000 pounds in weight. Hair and rawhide protected its timber frame against a 360-pound stone shot from a ballista. The machine was designed to survive impact, approach the wall and turn mass into access. Rhodes had already … Read more
Every morning in the reign of Tiberius, a raven left a shoemaker’s shop and flew into the Roman Forum. It settled at the Rostra, greeted Tiberius, then Germanicus and Drusus by name, acknowledged the passing Roman people and returned to the workshop. Pliny says the attendance continued with remarkable consistency for several years. A neighbouring … 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
Mark Antony was having no luck with a fishing line, and Cleopatra was there to see it. Irritated by failure in front of her, he ordered fishermen to swim below the boat and fasten fish already caught to his hook. Two or three convenient successes came out of the water. Cleopatra recognized the trick, admired … Read more
Nineteen thousand condemned men took their places aboard galleys on Lake Fucinus while the mountains filled with spectators. Claudius had chosen the opening of a drainage tunnel for a naval spectacle on a scale that turned a landscape into an arena. Ships with three and four banks of oars moved across the lake. Timber rafts … Read more
The moon disappeared over two armies waiting near Pydna. After supper, while the camps settled for the night, the full moon lost its light by degrees, changed colour and became totally eclipsed. Roman soldiers clashed bronze vessels and raised torches and firebrands. Across the plain, Plutarch says, fear moved through the Macedonian camp with a … Read more
A boat carrying marble reached the edge of a large lake near Nicomedia and stopped where the cheap part of its journey ended. Fruit, timber and other local goods could cross the water with little labour or expense. The sea was still beyond the high road, however, and everything had to be unloaded, placed on … Read more
Pliny the Younger had counted the snails before his guest failed to appear. Septicius Clarus had accepted an invitation to dinner, but the couch reserved for him stayed empty. Pliny answered with a letter that reads like a bill written by a host who is too amused to send a real invoice and too irritated … Read more
Vitruvius begins his well-safety instruction with the moment a worker should not descend. Air can rise through fissures into a deep excavation, he writes, and the resulting exhalation can stop a digger’s breath. Anyone who fails to escape quickly may die below. His precaution is small enough to fit in one hand. Before sending a … Read more
