Tag
An Augustan denarius held about 3.8 grams of silver. An antoninianus of Claudius II, struck about 290 years later and tariffed at two denarii, held about six hundredths of a gram. The face value stayed put. Almost everything else went. Nobody sat down and decided to wreck the …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a marble sarcophagus panel from sixteenth-century Italy shows the ancient port of Rome in relief: harbor …
In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, a reproduction of a Roman maritime mosaic hangs above a scale model of a Roman grain ship. The mosaic — a …
Ninety percent of the people in the Roman Empire worked the land. This is the number that most discussions of Rome skip past in their attention to the …
Roman contract law was the legal infrastructure of the Mediterranean economy. The capacity to make binding agreements enforceable by courts — across …
The Romans mass-produced glass. This statement requires emphasis because it contradicts the common assumption that mass production is a modern …
Rome’s mines were among the most productive and the most deadly operations in the ancient world. The silver mines of Spain, the gold mines of Dacia, …
Rome was not the first state to use coinage, but it was the first to use it at the scale of an empire. The denarius — the standard silver coin of the …
Roman law recognized that people harmed each other in ways that were not crimes but that required legal remedy, and it organized those harms into a …
Rome and China never met. The two largest empires of the ancient world existed simultaneously — the Han dynasty and the Roman principate overlapped …
