A Roman seal box from London is only 22 millimetres wide and 19 millimetres deep. Open, it stands 24 millimetres high. Its base has three perforations and an opening on each side. Those holes are not damage. They are the working parts of a security system built from copper alloy, cord and wax. The security … Read more
Democritus faced a polished shield toward sunrise. In the story preserved by Aulus Gellius, the blaze reflected from brass destroyed the philosopher’s sight. He wanted fewer distractions while examining nature. Then the Roman playwright Laberius took the device away from philosophy and placed it in the mouth of a rich miser. The miser did not … Read more
The soldier saw a defeated man, not a king. His sword was already drawn when a young man who had never been able to speak forced out the name that changed the scene: Croesus. Aulus Gellius tells the story through Herodotus, but his chapter is interested in more than a marvellous cure. The son’s first … Read more
A voice crossed a Roman room, reached an ear, and immediately became a problem of matter. Had a body moved? Had air been struck? Was the voice the blow rather than the air, or a stream of particles too small to see? Aulus Gellius did not invent those alternatives. He gathered rival answers from Stoics, … Read more
A large ocean-going ship could reach the pepper markets of south India and still be stopped by the last river. At Nelcynda, the waterway was full of shoals and its channels were unclear. Outward-bound vessels dropped toward Bacare at the mouth and loaded in the roadstead instead. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea places this … Read more
The mules approaching Tegea appeared to carry grain. Their bags held chaff, and the men leading them were soldiers dressed as traders. A gate built to resist an army opened for a supply train. Frontinus places that trick beside other entries made through festival crowds, returning pack animals, a cargo vessel, a staged harbour quarrel, … Read more
Rome burned for three days and three nights. In Campania, cities lay buried after Vesuvius. A severe epidemic added a third emergency. Suetonius compresses all three into one passage, then slows down long enough to show Titus assigning different people and different property to the work. Former consuls, selected by lot, were sent to relieve … Read more
For Aulus Gellius, humanitas did not primarily mean being pleasant, compassionate, or friendly to everyone. He believed careful Latin writers used the word for education and training in the liberal arts, close to the Greek paideia. His proof was a single phrase from Varro about the sculptor Praxiteles. Someone of “more human” culture would know … Read more
Two of the most familiar family words in Latin became miniature theories of Roman kinship. Aulus Gellius reports that the jurist Antistius Labeo explained soror, “sister,” through separation from the birth household. Publius Nigidius explained frater, “brother,” as almost another self. Neither derivation would satisfy modern historical linguistics. Yet their asymmetry is revealing. One word … Read more
A Roman lictor was designed to be seen. He walked before a magistrate, carried the rods and axe of office, cleared a path, and turned public rank into movement through the street. Yet Aulus Gellius preserves a much smaller dispute about this conspicuous attendant: where did the word lictor itself come from? Two learned Romans … Read more
