The most quoted words on Vindolanda Tablet 346 are the easiest ones to smile at: socks, sandals and underpants. They survive in an ink letter from the Roman frontier, broken across ten pieces of thin wood. The familiar objects seem to pull an ancient parcel straight into the present. Yet the tablet is valuable precisely … Read more
Pliny the Younger knew how his story sounded. He told Caninius that it was true, though very much like a fable, and suitable for a poet. He had heard it at dinner from a man he considered trustworthy. Those assurances do not turn the letter into a modern field report. They tell us that credibility … 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
Caravans made Palmyra famous, but camels and silk do not explain how a city benefited from movement. Goods had to enter, services had to be priced, disputes had to be settled and collectors had to know what they could demand. Palmyra put part of that machinery into stone. The monument now called the Palmyra Tariff … Read more
Three philosophers arrived in Rome carrying a problem measured in five hundred talents. Athens had lost a case connected with Oropus and wanted the Senate to reduce or reverse the punishment. Its ambassadors in 155 BC were not routine envoys: Carneades led the Academy, Diogenes represented the Stoics, and Critolaus headed Aristotle’s Peripatetic school. Roman … Read more
An Athenian audience knew what the urn was supposed to mean. In Sophocles’ Electra, the heroine receives what she believes are the ashes of her dead brother Orestes. Her lament belongs to the plot: the vessel is a prop, the death a deception, and the grief a test the actor must make convincing. Aulus Gellius … 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
A young mother slept after a long, difficult labor. In another part of the house, the philosopher Favorinus asked whether she would nurse her newborn son herself. Her own mother answered for her: the daughter had suffered enough, and wet nurses should take over the additional work. Aulus Gellius says he stood among the visitors. … Read more
Long after Rome’s first naval triumph had ended, its sound could still be heard after dinner. An old Gaius Duilius walked home through the city with two attendants: one playing a flute, the other carrying a wax torch. Cicero says he saw this more than once as a child. The detail is small enough to … Read more
One hundred men stood between four thousand talents of siege machinery and a city wall. Vitruvius says the immense tortoise attributed to Hegetor of Byzantium could roll forward, shift right or left, raise its ram and lower it. Its iron beak did not hang from a simple shed. It worked inside a timber building that … Read more
