Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Two Roman funerary stelae found near Bologna: one shows a mortar, the other a swineherd. Together, these two-thousand-year-old stones may tell the story of how the famous mortadella began. In October 1894, in the Santa Viola district west of Bologna, workers extracting gravel from the bed of […]
Palamedes, the hero who lost the game to Odysseus
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Outside Troy, the Greek soldiers are bored and supplies are running short. To keep them from sinking into idleness, one of them, Palamedes, is said to have invented board games and dice. Ancient authors thus credit him with an odd military discovery – a war in miniature, […]
The suspect art of sucking ancient beer through a straw
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) For more than a thousand years, Greeks and Romans regarded beer as a drink of foreigners and barbarians: Thracians, Egyptians, Gauls, Germans. They associated it with rot, poverty and a lack of virility. They even turned it into an insult hurled at an emperor. Yet, behind this […]
The Roman apothermum: when milk muscles in
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Milk, semolina, honey, nuts and dried fruit, pepper and sometimes even garum: the apothermum is often presented today as a typical dessert of ancient Rome, supposedly enjoyed on leaving the baths. Yet the ancient recipe preserved in Apicius’s De re coquinaria contains neither milk nor honey. As […]
Meditrinalia festival: to your health!
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Celebrated on 11 October in the Roman world, the Meditrinalia are often regarded as a kind of grape harvest festival. In reality, the occasion celebrated not so much the harvest and the making of new wine as the healing virtues attributed to a certain drink. The Romans […]
Children on the menu at the Bacchanalia? Investigating an ancient rumour
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Children torn apart during orgies, mothers devouring their offspring, a god of wine slaking his thirst with blood. Over the centuries, these images have clung to Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), the most elusive of the gods. But behind the sensational tale, the historical traces are slim: […]
When Jupiter gave humans their daily acorn
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) For a long time, the fruit of the oak, a tree associated with Zeus (Jupiter), served as food for humans. But for the Roman poets, the matter was settled: Ceres had given wheat to mankind and the acorn had been relegated to the pigs. Yet it did […]
To leaven or not to leaven: bread-making methods in ancient Rome
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) Bread is one of the most obvious markers of Roman identity. Yet how the Romans made it rise remains little known. The ancient sources – scarce but precise – allow us to reconstruct their methods. They show leavened and unleavened breads existing side by side, the latter […]
Saffron in antiquity: red gold with a thousand uses
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) In Rome, saffron was expensive enough to attract counterfeiters. Spice, dye, perfume, medicine and status symbol, it turned up everywhere – even in theatres. The trick was making sure you had bought the real thing. Someone hands you a pinch of dark red filaments. You rub them […]
Olives to get rich: Thales’s wager
Translated from French (please notify us of errors) For everyone, Thales is the author of a theorem still taught 2600 years after him. Yet the Greek sage was regarded as a universal mind. According to ancient authors, he was nonetheless mocked for his poverty: what use was so much learning if it could not even […]