Translated from french (please notify us of errors) Athens, around 430 BCE. On the theatre stage, masked actors perform The Runaways, a comedy by the comic poet Cratinus of which only a few fragments have survived[1]. A character declaims: “Son of Pandion, king of the city with fertile soil, you know well which city is […]
Sapa, defrutum, caroenum… three names for an ancient syrup
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) Honey was expensive. Bees demanded time, care, and did not produce on demand. The vine, by contrast, was everywhere — and grapes, once pressed, yielded a must that could be cooked down until thick, dark, and sweet: a substitute for honey, less noble, but available in quantity […]
At the banquet of Mekone, humanity’s fate was sealed
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) A badly divided cut of beef, fire stolen from the gods, a mysterious jar rashly opened: it is around a primordial meal that, according to Greek mythology, the fate of humanity is sealed. By exploring this scene through the lens of the symbolism of the meal, we […]
Can Pompeii’s bread be recreated?
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Among everything the lava of Vesuvius seized in an instant in 79 CE were eighty-one round loaves, carbonised in the oven of Modestus’s bakery on the Via degli Augustali. They remained buried until 1861, when the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli drew them from the ashes and recorded them […]
From the greco-roman artolaganus to neapolitan pizza
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) In 2023, the discovery of a fresco in Pompeii caused a sensation. On a small table, next to fruit and a cup of wine, one can make out something that looks very much like a pizza. The news of the discovery of the “ancestor of pizza” travelled […]
Homer’s moly: twenty-five centuries of mystery
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) It is the most celebrated plant of antiquity, and the most elusive: moly (μῶλυ). Black root, milk-white flower, uprooted by gods alone. Homer made it the absolute antidote to Circe’s sorcery. Generations of scholars have attempted to identify it. Without incontestable result. But without giving up either. […]
The mandrake, a plant that defends itself
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) Its name is Mandragora, but the Ancients also knew it as kirkaia (κιρκαία) or Circaeon – the plant of Circe the sorceress.[1] The mandrake is one of the rare plants to have crossed the centuries with its reputation intact: mysterious, formidable, and stubbornly resistant to any who […]
Rooted in the cosmos, magical plants in antiquity
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) Nourish, heal, protect, bewitch, kill: in Greek and Roman antiquity, plants do all of this at once. The boundary between cookery, medicine, religion and magic does not exist — or at least not where we would draw it today. A single plant may appear in a recipe, […]
Olive-growing in Italy before Rome
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) It is tempting to assume that Italian olive cultivation began with the Romans – or at least with the Greeks, who supposedly handed down the press, the amphora, and the know-how. A study published in January 2026 in the American Journal of Archaeology by archaeologist Emlyn Dodd[1] […]
Gallo-Roman dodecahedron: twelve faces, zero answers?
Translated from french (please notify us of errors) There exists, in the museums of north-western Europe, an object whose purpose no one knows. Cast in hollow bronze, ranging in size from a fig to an apple depending on the specimen, it presents twelve pentagonal faces each pierced by a circular opening — all of different […]