A detail of the frieze on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces depicts a team of bakers making loaves of bread. Photograph: the Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
A self-confident joker and wealthy self-made man, who must have made a small fortune out of a chain of bakeries in first-century BC Rome. All we know about him is from his large, expensive and wonderfully idiosyncratic tomb, still standing near the Porta Maggiore in Rome, constructed in the shape of baking equipment (the large circles imitate commercial kneading bowls). Around the top there is a detailed frieze with scenes of work in the bakery. And in case passersby still don’t get the point, there is the Latin inscription: “This is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, the baker and contractor –
Caecilius Jucundus was a banker in Pompeii, whose revealing account books were preserved in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. A canny wheeler and dealer – moneylender, auctioneer and payday loan man – he made his profit by simultaneously taking commission from sellers at his auctions and by lending cash to the buyers, on interest. Recently he has become the unlikely hero of young Latin learners as the lead character in the most popular Latin course in the country – the Cambridge Latin Course. The phrase “
The Empire Strikes Back
Livia, the wife of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, has had a bad press. The combination of misogynistic Roman historians and Robert Graves has given us the image of a nasty power behind the throne, happy to poison anyone standing in the way of her own plans. It’s a classic “blame the woman” tactic. Livia was not a shrinking violet, but she wasn’t as bad as she was painted, and much more long-suffering. One of her husband’s tricks, for the ancient equivalent of a photo opportunity, was to have her pose at a loom in the front hall of the palace – making her look like the perfect Roman wife.
We know him as the emperor Caligula, who briefly ruled the Roman world between AD37 and AD41. His real name was Gaius and he hated the nickname Caligula (it means “Bootikins”), given to him by the soldiers in the army camps where his publicity-conscious parents paraded him in full military kit, including boots (
). He’s the emperor who is supposed to have slept with his sisters and wanted to make his horse a senator. But most of this was invented or embroidered after a palace conspiracy that ended with Gaius’s assassination. Whether he was such a mad monster, we’ll never know.
Archaeologists Reveal Secrets Of Roman Prison That Held Both Christian Saints And Jewish Rebels
Remus is the forgotten half of the twins Romulus and Remus, who according to famous myth were left out to die, were discovered by a wolf and went on to found Rome. The story goes that they immediately quarrelled about where exactly the new settlement should be sited. Romulus got his way, and began to build defences. Remus trampled across the new city ramparts and Romulus had him killed. It was a story that defined Rome. The city was founded on brother killing brother, and on civil war. Ever after, Remus would be the symbol of radical opposition to traditional power.
An extraordinary woman known only through her long epitaph, offering a glimpse of the messy reality of ancient Roman life. The text explains that during her lifetime in third-century AD Rome, Allia Potestas had been the centre of a ménage à trois, living with two young men. She was not posh, and probably an ex-slave, and the epitaph describes her body in uncomfortable detail (right down to her lovely nipples), but it also insists that she was a perfect housewife. She was always up before her lovers and always in bed later (getting the housework done); unsurprisingly, she had rough hands. It’s a wonderful mixture of erotic fantasy and domestic drudgery.
A young boy from the provinces, who became the companion – some say the lover – of the emperor Hadrian, and travelled around the empire with him, often leaving the empress Sabina at home. But he had a mysterious end. In a Robert Maxwell-like incident, he drowned in the river Nile in AD130. Did he fall? Did he jump? Or was he pushed? Whatever the truth, Hadrian was overcome with grief, made Antinous a god, named a city after him and flooded the world with his portrait. There are more surviving statues of Antinous than of almost any other Roman.
For World's Fair Ice Rink, Fragments Of An Afterlife
Ovid, as he is normally known, was a learned and subversive poet under the first emperor Augustus – who paid the price for his subversion. No fan of the emperor’s campaign for moral improvement in Rome, one of his most famous poems was a hilarious spoof on how to find a lover (the Ars Amatoria, or Love Lessons). It was this, it is often thought, that finally made the emperor snap – and in AD8 Ovid ended up in a miserable exile on the Black Sea. Possibly his inappropriately close relations with the emperor’s daughter were an aggravating factor.
Regina has one of the most touching life stories from multicultural Roman Britain and is commemorated in a tombstone found near Hadrian’s Wall. It explains that she came from the south of the province, had somehow (kidnapping?) been enslaved – and had ended up in the north married to a man from Palmyra, by the name of Barates, who was perhaps trading here. She died aged 30 and Barates commissioned a memorial that shows her almost in the guise of a Palmyran matron, and the text is partly in Latin and partly Aramaic. We can only wonder what language they spoke at home.
It’s impossible to leave out Cicero, politician, polymath, star of modern novels and in many respects a frightful old reactionary. His lowest moment was executing a group of terrorists in 63BC, without trial, under the terms of a dubious prevention of terrorism act; and he briefly ended up in exile for it. But there was a lot more to Cicero. He was important in introducing philosophy to Rome and a renowned joker. “Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword” was one of his better quips, on catching sight of his daughter’s very short husband.All articles published by are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by , including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https:///openaccess.
Roman Empire Tapestries
Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.
Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.
The study of ornament in Greek and Roman art has been the focus of increasing scholarly interest over the last decade, with many publications shedding new light on the dynamics of ornatus in antiquity, and the discourses that shaped and situated it. Through an analysis of the depiction of gemstones in Roman wall painting, this article demonstrates the importance of ornamental details both to the mechanics of two-dimensional representation and to the interpretation of the images they adorned. I argue that by evoking the material qualities and sensual pleasures of real precious stones, painted gems served on the one hand to enhance the illusory reality of wall painting, and on the other to extol the delights of luxury and refinement—that is, of ornamentation itself.
Roman Art Hi Res Stock Photography And Images
Scholarship on Roman wall painting has traditionally privileged the figurative over the decorative. This has often been motivated by a desire to recover the appearance of lost Greek panel paintings, but even studies that have stressed the aesthetic and metapoetic sophistication of Roman frescoes on their own terms, and that have demonstrated their importance as a means of displaying wealth and social status within the Roman house, have focused for the most part on depictions of mythological narratives—or else on illusionistic architectural vistas—isolating both from the painted decorative details that accompanied their representation.1 If ornament has been considered in these studies, it has more often been seen as a tool for stylistic analysis and dating than given representational agency of its own (Squire 2018, p. 21).
It is clear from the ancient texts, however, that Roman viewers of painted frescoes did not separate figure from decoration—or work from frame—in the way that much of this scholarship would have us believe (Platt and Squire 2017). Of course, this is not a new observation,
Ovid, as he is normally known, was a learned and subversive poet under the first emperor Augustus – who paid the price for his subversion. No fan of the emperor’s campaign for moral improvement in Rome, one of his most famous poems was a hilarious spoof on how to find a lover (the Ars Amatoria, or Love Lessons). It was this, it is often thought, that finally made the emperor snap – and in AD8 Ovid ended up in a miserable exile on the Black Sea. Possibly his inappropriately close relations with the emperor’s daughter were an aggravating factor.
Regina has one of the most touching life stories from multicultural Roman Britain and is commemorated in a tombstone found near Hadrian’s Wall. It explains that she came from the south of the province, had somehow (kidnapping?) been enslaved – and had ended up in the north married to a man from Palmyra, by the name of Barates, who was perhaps trading here. She died aged 30 and Barates commissioned a memorial that shows her almost in the guise of a Palmyran matron, and the text is partly in Latin and partly Aramaic. We can only wonder what language they spoke at home.
It’s impossible to leave out Cicero, politician, polymath, star of modern novels and in many respects a frightful old reactionary. His lowest moment was executing a group of terrorists in 63BC, without trial, under the terms of a dubious prevention of terrorism act; and he briefly ended up in exile for it. But there was a lot more to Cicero. He was important in introducing philosophy to Rome and a renowned joker. “Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword” was one of his better quips, on catching sight of his daughter’s very short husband.All articles published by are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by , including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https:///openaccess.
Roman Empire Tapestries
Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.
Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.
The study of ornament in Greek and Roman art has been the focus of increasing scholarly interest over the last decade, with many publications shedding new light on the dynamics of ornatus in antiquity, and the discourses that shaped and situated it. Through an analysis of the depiction of gemstones in Roman wall painting, this article demonstrates the importance of ornamental details both to the mechanics of two-dimensional representation and to the interpretation of the images they adorned. I argue that by evoking the material qualities and sensual pleasures of real precious stones, painted gems served on the one hand to enhance the illusory reality of wall painting, and on the other to extol the delights of luxury and refinement—that is, of ornamentation itself.
Roman Art Hi Res Stock Photography And Images
Scholarship on Roman wall painting has traditionally privileged the figurative over the decorative. This has often been motivated by a desire to recover the appearance of lost Greek panel paintings, but even studies that have stressed the aesthetic and metapoetic sophistication of Roman frescoes on their own terms, and that have demonstrated their importance as a means of displaying wealth and social status within the Roman house, have focused for the most part on depictions of mythological narratives—or else on illusionistic architectural vistas—isolating both from the painted decorative details that accompanied their representation.1 If ornament has been considered in these studies, it has more often been seen as a tool for stylistic analysis and dating than given representational agency of its own (Squire 2018, p. 21).
It is clear from the ancient texts, however, that Roman viewers of painted frescoes did not separate figure from decoration—or work from frame—in the way that much of this scholarship would have us believe (Platt and Squire 2017). Of course, this is not a new observation,
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