A stone inscription set up at Praeneste does something modern sports archives would recognize immediately: it turns a career into numbers. Gaius Appuleius Diocles raced for twenty-four years, entered 4,257 contests, won 1,462 times and accumulated 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. Those figures are so large that they can make him look like a legend … Read more
At sunset in 203 BCE, Roman troops left their camp in North Africa without the noise of a normal advance. They marched seven miles at an easy pace and deployed before midnight. Ahead of them stood two allied encampments: the Numidian king Syphax in huts of reeds and timber, and Hasdrubal Gisco with the Carthaginians. … Read more
South of ancient Rome’s center stands a hill that the landscape did not make. Monte Testaccio rises from fragments of transport jars, overwhelmingly amphorae that once carried olive oil. Estimates approach eighty million containers. Their handles, rims and walls accumulated into terraces high enough to become urban topography. The hill is often called a rubbish … Read more
A worshipper entering a Roman mithraeum did not step into a sunlit public temple. He descended or passed into a narrow, dim room. Raised benches flanked a central aisle. At the far end, the god Mithras drove a blade into a bull while a dog, snake and scorpion crowded the carved scene. The architecture pointed … Read more
On 8 November 63 BCE, Lucius Sergius Catilina walked into a meeting of the Roman Senate and found isolation waiting for him. Senators who might normally have greeted a former praetor moved away. The bench around him was left conspicuously empty. Across the chamber stood the consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, prepared to turn intelligence about … Read more
In 204 BCE, the Second Punic War had lasted fourteen years. Hannibal no longer threatened Rome’s walls, but he remained in Italy, harvests and alliances had been tested, and Romans wanted the war’s end to become thinkable. Their answer included a small dark object carried across the sea: the sacred stone of the Great Mother … Read more
In 67 BCE, Romans confronted piracy as a problem that reached from a captured ship to the price of bread. Raiding had disrupted routes, embarrassed magistrates and made the Mediterranean look less like Rome’s road than an open field of danger. The proposed answer was extraordinary: give Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus command over the entire sea … Read more
Pompeii preserved very few ancient women at monumental scale. Eumachia is the startling exception. Her name ran across the façade of a vast building beside the Forum, appeared again at a side entrance, and stood beneath a marble portrait placed in the rear portico. She did not survive merely as someone’s wife. She survives as … Read more
A scar in Roman stone does not always name the tool that made it. A broad flat mark may suggest a flat chisel; a combed mark may suggest a tooth chisel. Yet Roman workers also used stoneworking axes with flat or toothed edges, and Art of Making warns that distinguishing their traces from chisel work … Read more
A Roman marble carver could make a surface smoother by covering it with more marks. The rasp did not polish by erasing every trace at once. Its flattened ends carried fields of sharp points, and every rubbing stroke laid fine scratches across the stone. Later passes crossed and overlapped them until the rougher evidence of … Read more
