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Rome’s reputation for hydraulic sophistication rests almost entirely on what came in. The aqueducts are celebrated, documented, still standing in fragments across three continents. What went out receives less attention — which is itself a Roman attitude, one the city encoded in …
Roman naming conventions are among the more counterintuitive aspects of the culture for modern readers, and the confusion they generate is not merely …
Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes …
On the morning of August 24, 79 AD — though some scholars now argue for a date in October based on pomegranate seeds and autumn clothing found in the …
Romans played games everywhere. Game boards scratched into the steps of the Colosseum, carved into the pavements of the Roman Forum, incised into the …
Roman education was not a system. There was no state curriculum, no network of public schools funded by the central government, no standard …
The Roman family was not organized around the modern concept of the nuclear household. It was organized around the paterfamilias — the father of the …
Roman medicine was Greek medicine operating in Latin. The systematic approach to understanding the body that the Romans inherited and developed had …
It hangs from a chain in a museum case in Hannover, small and bronze and entirely matter-of-fact about what it is. A winged phallus with bird legs, …
The Roman tavern — the caupona or taberna — was the social space of the working poor and the urban transient, serving wine, hot food, and a place to …
