The object looked familiar before the excavators had finished uncovering it. A broad wooden ring surrounded a keyhole-shaped opening, smoothed into a form that could support a human body. It emerged in 2014 from the wet deposits of Vindolanda, the Roman fort and settlement south of Hadrian’s Wall. Stone latrine benches survive across the empire. … Read more
“At last love has come.” The surviving sequence attributed to Sulpicia begins not with a description of the beloved but with a decision about disclosure. Hiding her affair, the speaker says, would bring more shame than revealing it. She refuses to entrust the story to sealed tablets for one private reader. Reputation will carry it … Read more
On 18 May in the 90s AD, a clerk at Vindolanda began with a reassuringly large number: 752 men in the First Cohort of Tungrians. Then subtraction took over. Guards served the provincial governor. A far larger body stood at Coria, probably Corbridge. A centurion was in London. Other groups occupied damaged lines. By the … Read more
Citizenship reached a family in Roman Morocco through a sequence of hands. A local notable petitioned. A provincial governor supported the request. Emperors answered. A freedman checked the central register in Rome. Twelve senior men authenticated the copy. At Banasa, the result was cut into a bronze sheet large enough to make private favour publicly … Read more
A farm worker near Gossolengo lifted a strange piece of bronze from the soil on 26 September 1877. It was small enough to hold in two hands, roughly the length of a modern pencil case, yet its swelling lobes and central protrusions copied a sheep’s liver. Fine lines cut the upper surface into compartments. Short … Read more
A dog crossed a Roman workshop at exactly the wrong moment for the tile maker and exactly the right moment for archaeology. The clay beneath its paw was firm enough to hold a roof tile’s shape but wet enough to receive pads and claws. Nobody smoothed the damage away. Heat later turned the mistake into … Read more
A patient sat facing the light while another person held his head from behind. One eye was covered with wool. The surgeon took a needle fine enough to enter the side of the other eye, but not so fine that it bent away from his hand. A slight movement, the Roman medical writer Celsus warned, … Read more
A bronze man lifts his right hand above an audience that vanished more than two thousand years ago. The fingers are spread, the palm faces outward and the arm clears the folds of a narrow toga. His lined face is not youthful or divine. He looks like an officeholder asking a crowd to listen. The … Read more
The smaller leather guard still carries the pressure of a vanished fist. Its surface bends where knuckles once pressed from inside, while a coil of twisted hide remains packed beneath the striking face. The larger object is broader, more heavily worn and repaired. They are not a matching pair, and neither resembles the padded glove … Read more
The object fits in two hands and seems designed to provoke measurement. Twelve flat pentagonal faces meet in a hollow bronze shell. A circular opening pierces each face, but the holes are not all the same diameter. Rounded knobs sit at the corners. Every surface suggests a rule; none supplies the missing instruction. More than … Read more
