This is a replica of a Roman copy of a Greek fifth-century original of a man called Epimedes. We actually don’t know if he looked like this, because he lived earlier (6th-c BCE). But the eyes closed thing Epimedes has going on here is what I liked, because it’s the face many of us make […]
Epimedes and “Self-Referential Paradoxes” Read More »
In Rome during the first and second centuries, explicit evidence abounds about heterosexual desire for women, such as in the story of Europa, featured here in this first-century fresco from Pompeii. Another appears in the novel __Leucippe and Clitophon_, which relays the repeated abductions of the heroine Leucippe, who successfully escapes and consumates her romance
Ancient Roman Female Homosexuality Read More »
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
Ancient Rome and Homosexuality Read More »
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
Ancient Rome and Sexual Restraint 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
The Complexity of the “Venus Mosaic” Read More »
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
Ancient Roman Farming and Invasive Species Read More »
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 »
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
Ancient Roman Infant Burials Read More »
Most of us cherish the beauty of wilderness, and I venture that a lot of our feelings come from our knowledge that humans have put the environment in great danger — therefore, any non-human engineered landscapes we now consider especially precious.But people have not always looked at the non-human world in the same way: although
The Beauty of Ancient Roman Wilderness Read More »
This is the title page for one of the most fascinating and popular books of the Italian Renaissance – _De rerum natura_, or, _On the Nature of Things_, by the Ancient Roman Lucretius. The expense of the artwork and skill of the miniaturist – the copier was an Augustinian friar for Pope Sixtus IV dating
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Here you see a picture of Achilles making sacrifices to Zeus. It is a unique image, coming from a 5th-century CE manuscript thought to be the only one from Antiquity illustrating Homer’s epic poem _The Illiad_. The scarcity of such depictions belies the importance of Homer on Ancient Roman culture, because all educated people would
Homer and Christianity Read More »
Nine months ago (November 2020), archaeologists excavating a part of the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii found themselves in a rare Indiana Jones-esque situation. In a fancy villa to the north of the city, along this corridor, lay the burnt encasements of these two bodies.Figuring out what these two were doing in that fateful eruption
Pompeii and Social Hierarchy Read More »
The Ancient Romans had a litany of holidays for all sorts of occasions. Every August 23 were the Vulcanalia, festivities honoring the Roman deity Vulcan, featured here in this palm-sized bronze relief from the 2nd or 3rd century CE.Worship of Vulcan shows the way that Romans often bifurcated their attitudes towards their deities. Vulcan was
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This is the sixteenth-century painter Federico Barocci’s _Aeneas’ _Flight from Troy_. If the composition looks unsettling and chaotic, it should: it attempts to capture the turmoil of a man having to flee his homeland because of war. The violence propelling the family of Aeneas to escape Troy is mostly offstage, but the billowing fabric, darkened
Federico Barocci’s Aneneas’ “Flight from Troy” Read More »
*some* people get excited about the fall equinox because of pumpkin spice profusion. *I* get excited because I get to start celebrating Halloween with my thematic Instagram posts!And today I am thinking about Ancient Roman ghosts, which is a complicated subject because Romans had a variety of overlapping ideas about existence beyond the grave. Ancestor
Ancient Roman Ghosts Read More »
You are looking at one of Ancient Rome’s worst enemies, the ruler of the wealthy Kingdom of Pontus in Asia Minor, Mithridates the Great, aka Mithridates VI Eupator (135-63 BCE). He took the Roman empire into wars that exposed the weaknesses of the Republic, which collapsed in cataclysmic civil wars in just a generation after
Mithridates the Great and the Massacre of 88 BCE Read More »
What you see here is the Garden of Hercules, a very niche home discovered in the southeastern ruins of the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. What makes it special is the fact that it had a large garden designed specifically for flower-growing, and the remains of small glass bottles, irrigation techniques, and pollen samples suggests
The Garden of Hercules for Perfume Manufacturing in Ancient Rome Read More »
We’ve all heard about the toxic use of lead in cosmetics in history: it whitened the skin, which aristocrats from Ancient Roman times well into the 1800s thought was a good look. Of course, it also poisoned the users. The Early Modern employment of “Venetian Ceruse” was particularly popular, and was a combination of lead,
Venetian Ceruse in European Aristocratic Life Read More »
This Romano-British mosaic of combating gladiators speaks to the tradition of these bloody contests. It turns out, they were sanguineous in multiple ways — not only with the frequent slayings of the losers, but also in the way gladiator blood was revered for medicinal purposes.First appearing in the records about 260 BCE, gladiator fights originally
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