Cato’s farm did not issue the same wine all year. It counted forward from the vintage. For three months, the hands received after-wine made from grape residue. In the fourth month came a hemina a day. The daily amount rose again through months five to eight, then reached three heminae in the final four months. … Read more
The crown weighed exactly what Hiero expected. That was the problem. The king of Syracuse had supplied gold for a costly votive crown. When the finished work returned, it was beautifully made and matched the assigned weight. Then a report alleged that part of the gold had been removed and replaced with silver. The suspected … Read more
The cow was at the altar. The prophecy had reached Rome before she did. Livy says a Sabine head of household owned an animal of astonishing size and beauty. Soothsayers had declared that sovereignty would belong to the state whose citizen sacrificed her to Diana. The owner drove the cow into Rome, brought her to … Read more
An elephant stood over a writing surface and traced a sentence in Greek. Pliny the Elder attributes the report to Mutianus, a man who had been consul three times. The animal supposedly wrote in the first person that it had made the inscription and dedicated Celtic spoils. In the same chapter another elephant rehearsed a … Read more
Rome’s stolen water disappeared through openings small enough to hide beneath a street. When Frontinus audited the aqueduct system, he found discrepancies at every scale. Claudia carried 4,607 quinariae at its intake although official records credited it with 2,855. Before the flow reached a settling reservoir, legitimate grants and secret diversions had already reduced it. … Read more
Poppaea’s bath did not fit inside a travelling chest. It walked behind her. Pliny the Elder reports that Nero’s wife kept five hundred asses with foal in her company and bathed her entire body in their milk. She believed the treatment whitened and softened her skin. The number is startling, but it also exposes something … Read more
Marcellus brought a wooden assault tower toward Syracuse on paired ships. Plutarch calls the machine a sambuca, after a musical instrument its shape resembled. Before it reached the wall, a stone weighing ten talents struck it. Then another followed, and another. The blows crushed the engine’s foundation, shattered its frame and shifted it off the … Read more
A cargo accident brought an orca into Claudius’s new harbour at Ostia. Pliny the Elder says hides shipped from Gaul fell overboard while the harbour was under construction. Their smell or presence drew the animal into shallow water, where it fed for several days. Then wind shifted the sand around the channel it had made. … Read more
Alexandria’s audience had already made up its mind. The favorite poet had pleased the crowd, and six of the seven judges were ready to reward him. The seventh judge produced the opposite ranking. Aristophanes said the best poet was the competitor whom the public had liked least. Vitruvius says the king and the multitude reacted … Read more
A wall in Utica began with five years of waiting. Vitruvius says the city allowed no brick into a building unless it had reached that age and received a magistrate’s approval. His own general advice was already patient: the best bricks, he wrote, had dried for at least two years. Utica more than doubled the … Read more
