Slavery in the Ancient Roman Empire was an entrenched and ubiquitous part of life. Around one of every seven people in the second century was enslaved, and that fact shaped the social lives of Romans in all sorts of ways, including how they thought about sex.This is a sketch of a fourth century CE slave […]
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The prevalence of slavery in Ancient Rome impacted the sex lives of Roman men, both free and slave. One of the ways it did was by how people thought about male-to-male sexual intercourse.In Classical Athens, there was a common practice of pederasty among men of different ages: an older man was a sort of tutor
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The Ancient Romans were not shy about generating erotic sex scenes in their art and literature. In the Late Empire of the second and third centuries, so much evidence surrounding the pleasures of sex abounded that it can be easy to imagine the Romans (well, the male citizen Romans) solely as pleasure-seeking sensualists.But we also
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Here is a picture of the Flemish artist Hans Memling’s _Allegory of Chastity_, and although it was done in the 15th century, it testifies to the long-term effects of Christianity’s radical sexual revolution that had begun a millennium and a half before.Here you see Chastity, besieged by the lions of sexual behavior that would threaten
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The Italian city of Ravenna boasts the highest concentration of mosaics from the Late Antique period of Roman history. And featured here you see one of the most famous — a scene from the Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Set against the tiled background of shimmering gold, these two women calmly march forward.
Portion of the Italian Mosaic “The Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo” Read More »
For some reason I thought Virginia’s First Landing State Park evoked a _The Pirates of the Caribbean_ vibe. With its dense canopy of bald Cyprus trees emerging from the swamps, the forest’s beauty was accompanied with the sounds of frogs, birds, and cicadas.First Landing, like so many other spots of preserved forest in this country,
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A lovely chapter in human history was undertaken with the formation and development of south-eastern Virginia’s Back Bay Natinal Wildlife Refuge. Formed in 1938 to provide a safe migration zone for migratory bird species, the Back Bay NWR was doubled in size to include over 9,000 acres in the 1980’s as the Virginia Beach area
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In their rapacious desire to showcase their specialness, the ultra-rich have often turned to ridiculous fashion. With hindsight, those of us from less elite groups have been able to have the last laugh because we can see the trends of the rich from a broader perspective — the more fashion has moved away from the
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The 14th-century BCE Pharaoh Tutankhamun’ s burial is the most famous in Egyptian history. Although the tomb was discovered in the early 20th century, it was only in 2016 that a team of scientists demonstrated that the object shown here was made of a substance more valued than gold: it is a dagger with an
Pennsylvania is known for its atypical religious history, but when you start to investigate, you begin to realize just how unusual this history is. For instance, there is a legacy of German Christian mysticism extending back to hermits who lived in the 1600s. In central Pennsylvania, this expression was dramatically marked by the foundation of
German Christian Mysticism – The Ephrata Cloister Read More »
My most favorite ghost stories these days come from historian Robin Fleming’s new book, _The Material Fall of Roman Britain_. Nothing captures the immediacy of the disappeared Empire in the hinterlands of Rome’s remote northwest like it. Practically none of the evidence from this time comes from written documents, so Fleming utilizes archaeology to tell
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Where I live in south-central Pennsylvania, farmers and outdoor enthusiasts are well aware of new invasive species posing a threat to our forests and crops, like the Emerald ash borer and the Spotted lanternfly. It is easy to be lured into a myopic idea that the migration of fauna and flora mostly affects humans today
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How you carry and cook your food and water has been the most important question of the day for most humans since Neolithic times. (A quick backpacking trip can serve to remind oneself of this truth.) So when containers change, it means your life does too, and this was certainly the case for the British
Changing Pottery of Ancient Britain Read More »
You know the Biblical saying about beating swords into ploughshares? Well, refashioning iron was a thing throughout history. The best sorts of iron tools were often not just made from steel (you would want that for the sharpest edges) but from a combination of iron alloys. And getting all of this together needed the sort
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TW: deceased infants; infant burialThere is so much that archaeology cannot tell us about the dead. We have piles of bones from the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods in Britain, artfully arranged, oddly located, age-specific, and unusually accompanied. But what the internment of the dead actually meant to the living is ultimately inaccessible to
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Today’s post is about a single flower, a kind that no longer exists. But at one point, the “Semper Augustus” tulip swayed stock markets, comprised the fortunes of rich men, and exemplified the highest expression of commodified beauty.From 1600 to about 1720, the Dutch Republic commanded the highest per capita income in the world, garnered
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Renaissance Italy’s wealthiest groups competed for power in many ways, amongst them through women’s jewelry. It was a complex Game-of-Thrones-esque time, when many different ambitions came into play — the moralizing Franciscans who preached against conspicuous displays of wealth, the male merchants who often vied with the nobles for political control, and the elite women
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“Humor is just another defense against the universe,” quipped the great Mel Brooks, and the great comedian’s sentiments extend far back in recorded history. I like thinking about how long humans have been teasing, cracking jokes, and finding play with the absurd. The general scholarly consensus is that the oldest written joke goes back to
First Humor from Hierocles and Philagrius Read More »
The lunar crater you see here is Aristarchus, and we’re not going to be be able to get any closer than that to an accurate portrait of the eponymous Ancient Greek astronomer because most of his writings — as well as any contemporary sculpture or paintings of the man — are lost to the sands
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This is Polly Matzinger, and even though this is a history Instagram post, she is an active scientist. But her discoveries about the way the immune system works have changed how scientists think about the ways living things fight off harmful pathogens, thus ensuring Matzinger a place in humanity’s historical records.Before I say anything about
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