The History Blog

Needless to say, it was found by an amateur metal detectorist. Danny Mills found the virtually intact bronze lamp at a metal detecting rally in Glemsford, near Sudbury, Suffolk, last fall. He reported it to local archaeologists and the landowner later donated it to the Ipswich Museum. Now the lamp has been restored and is on display at the museum.

It’s the only Roman lamp of its kind ever found in the UK. The British Museum has some fragments of similar lamps, but the only other place a lamp so complete has been uncovered is in Pompeii.

Conservator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Emma Hogarth, who restored the object said it is a rare and exquisite example of craftsmanship.[...]

The lantern resembles a modern hurricane lamp and the naked flame would have been protected by a thin sheet of horn — now decomposed — that had been scraped until it was translucent.

“What is particularly amazing about the lantern is that the chains it was suspended from still look and move like any modern chain and had not corroded into a metal lump,” said Hogarth.

The lamp dates to between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D. Suffolk had a number of wealthy villas in the 2nd century. The quality of the lantern suggests that it may have come from one of them.

And now in an even rarer treat, here’s some video taken of the find on the day of the rally:

It’s the second largest coin hoard ever found in Britain — the first was 54,912 coins found in 1978 — and our hero is yet again an amateur metal detectorist who not only found this huge pot crammed full of Roman coins from the 3rd century, but who had the presence of mind not to unearth the pot when he realized it was under the top coins. Dave Crisp stopped what he was doing and called in the experts.

After his metal detector gave a “funny signal”, Mr Crisp says he dug down 14in before he found what had caused it.

“I put my hand in, pulled out a bit of clay and there was a little Radial, a little bronze Roman coin. Very, very small, about the size of my fingernail.” [...]

The coins were all contained in a single clay pot. Although it only measured 18in (45cm) across, the coins were packed inside and would have weighed an estimated 160kg (350lb).

Archaeologists excavated the pot itself, so they were able to keep the 2′ tall vessel intact and to pinpoint the different layers of coins. This information upends a key assumption about coin hoards: that they were buried for later recovery by people fleeing conflict. The layers suggest instead that the community added to the pot at regular intervals, possibly making votive offerings to the gods.

The hoard also includes 760 Carausius coins, the largest group from the reign of this separatist local emperor. Among them are 5 silver denarii, the only silver denarii being struck at that time anywhere in the Roman Empire. Carausius was a naval commander who usurped power in Britain and northern Gaul in 286. He ruled until 293 when his finance minister assassinated him and seized power for 3 years until Rome got Britain back.

The hoard is now at the British Museum where experts will evaluate it. Assuming it’s declared treasure (which it will be), the Museum of Somerset will pay fair market value and Dave Crisp and the property owner will get to divide the money.

There’s an interview with the Mr. Crisp and lots of nice views of the hoard in this news story:

Yes, my beloved painting of Rome by J.M.W. Turner has left me for a dude with money. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles opened wide its bottomless wallet today and snagged Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from Sotheby’s in London for a record-breaking $45 million. The previous most expensive Turner ever was an 1841 painting of Venice called Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio which solds 4 years ago at Christie’s New York for $35.9 million.

The pre-sale estimate was $18 million to $27 million, which was obviously on the low side given the extremely high quality of the piece and it’s excellent condition. It’s only been owned by 2 people, has been under the glass the whole 171 years since Turner added his last crosshatch, and is even in its original frame. Six bidders duked it out rough and hard. It only took 5 minutes for the price to reach $40 million (the extra $5 million goes in fees to Sotheby’s) and for all the other bidders to give up.

The Getty is happy as a very rich clam, needless to say. They didn’t even reach the limit of their budget, so from their perspective it’s a steal. It’s also a major boon to the city of Los Angeles, because this painting will make it the city with the third largest number of Turners after New Haven (on account of Yale) and Washington, D.C. (on account of the National Gallery).

They shouldn’t count their Turners before they hatch, however. By UK law, any significant piece of art that has been on British soil for more than 50 years needs a license to be sold and exported. If a British organization of museum can come up with a sum equal to the sale price, the license is not issued, the fureigners get their money back and the locals get to keep the art. The Getty has some painful memories on that score.

The Getty knows the drill: In 2002, it tried to buy Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” from the Duke of Northumberland. The sale was a no-go: The National Gallery in London got the painting instead after coming up with $46.6 million over the ensuing two years to buy the painting in the Getty’s stead.

That doesn’t seem likely to happen again, though. The big budget UK museums have Turners so they probably won’t attempt to scare up such a huge sum for the Campo Vaccino.

The Yewden Villa in the Thames Valley was extensively excavated in 1912. Archaeologists at the time determined that it was a high status Roman villa occupied during the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. The artifacts, pottery and human remains uncovered at the site were packed into 300 boxes and stored at Buckinghamshire County Museum, then the site was reburied and allowed to revert to a wheat field.

Although the site remains a field today with no visible Roman structures, the stored boxes and the detailed field reports of head archaeologist Alfred Cocks have recently been rediscovered. Archaeologists today, however, are interested in an aspect that aroused little comment a hundred years ago: the skeletons of 97 infants found buried on the grounds of the villa.

It’s common to find a few burials at villas, and since infant mortality was so high, children are often among them. But to have nearly a hundred bodies in a residential area is unheard of, especially when all of them are around the same age: neonates. The best way to tell how old an infant was when he died is to measure the bones, which can pinpoint the age of the baby to within 2 weeks. All of these babies died at around 40 weeks gestation, so right at birth.

If they had died of natural causes, it stands to reason there would be a variety of ages among the remains. The sameness strongly suggests mass infanticide. Archaeologists now think that all these babies may have been the children of a workforce on the site and thus deliberately killed.

Archaeologist Dr Jill Eyers said: “The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it’s got to be a brothel.”

With little or no effective contraception, unwanted pregnancies could have been common at Roman brothels, explained Dr Eyers, who works for Chiltern Archaeology. [...]

“There is no other site that would yield anything like the 97 infant burials,” said Dr Simon Mays, a skeletal biologist at English Heritage’s Centre for Archaeology, who has been investigating the finds.

Prostitutes in Roman brothels were often slaves, so by law their children would also have belonged to the master, and given the business model, they would be very likely to get pregnant on a regular basis. Another less likely theory is that the building was used as a imperial supply depot. Many writing implements were found on the site indicating a literate workforce, and there were a large number of kilns used for drying corn. If many of those workers were female, they might have had to kill their babies to keep their jobs.

Cock’s 1921 report (World War I interrupted its publishing) described the grounds as “littered” with the remains of babies, but no markers seem to have been left for them.

“A few were laid at length, but the majority were evidently carried and buried wrapped in a cloth or garment, huddled in a little bundle, so that the head was almost central, and the knees above it,” the report said.

“As nothing marked the position of these tiny graves, a second little corpse was sometimes deposited on one already in occupation of a spot, apparently showing that these interments took place secretly, after dark.”

The oldest known images of apostles Andrew and John have been found under layers of white calcium deposits in the 4th century catacombs of St. Tecla in Rome.

That’s the same catacomb where wall paintings of Saints Peter and Paul were discovered last year. There are earlier images of Peter and Paul extant, but only as part of group paintings. These are the earliest known solo portraits of Peter and Paul, and the portraits of Andrew and John predate the previous oldest-known representations by a century.

“John’s young face is familiar, but this is the most youthful portrayal of Andrew ever seen, very different from the old man with grey hair and wrinkles we know from medieval painting,” said project leader Barbara Mazzei.

Discovered in the 1950s and as yet unseen by the public, the St Tecla catacomb is accessed through the unmarked basement door of a drab office building, beyond which dim corridors packed with burial spots wind off through damp tufa stone.

They’re part of a group of elaborate, richly colored paintings which suggest the catacomb housed a noblewoman. The image of a bejeweled woman dressed in elegant clothing standing with her daughter between two saints is painted in one of the arches. Archaeologists believes she was the owner of the catacomb and patron of its arts.

Besides the apostles, there are paintings of Christ as the Good Shepherd, a nude Daniel with lions at his feet, and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Peter drawing water in the Mamertine prison, Mary and the three Wise Men, Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and more. The paintings are set against saturated red and black backgrounds, colors often associated with imperial Roman art.

We wouldn’t know these colors existed if it weren’t for a new restoration technology. When archaeologists first opened the catacomb in 2008, the walls and ceilings were all covered in white. The closed and moist environment inside the catacomb created thick deposits of white calcium carbonate inches thick in some places. The incrustations were removed by a laser which can be calibrated by color, so archaeologists programmed it to remove only the white calcium carbonate. The laser stopped precisely at the colored paints which revealed the magnificent richness of the work without any fear of damaging it.

In the past restorers had to scrape the calcium off with brushes and scalpels. To ensure that they didn’t scrape off any of the paint, they had to keep a layer of white film obscuring the art. The laser procedure is just as painstaking, mind you, because they have to do it one pinpoint at a time, but the precision of the tool opens a whole new world of possibilities for restorers.

The four apostles are an unusual combination. Peter and Paul are together a lot, of course, especially in Rome where they both died, but Peter, Paul, Andrew and John don’t often get depicted together. The fact that all four were depicted in individual medallions around the central figure of Christ the Good Shepherd suggests that they were devotional icons, not just narratives, of the four most important apostles of the era. These paintings could well have been models for later representations; they lend insight into the dawn of apostle worship in early Christianity.

The catacombs will not be opened to the public — they are too delicate to cram hundreds of moist, secreting, respiring bodies into — but some the pontifical commission may allow the occasional small group to get a private tour.

Archaeologists excavating a Roman burial site in York believe they may have found the largest, best preserved gladiator cemetery in the world. The previous contender was in Ephesus, Turkey, and had about 60 people buried there and their remains were fragmentary. The York graveyard has yielded 80 skeletons over the past 10 years, many of them complete.

The ages, body types and violently-inflicted injuries on the bones mark many of these skeletons as belonging to gladiators or to other people who died in the arena. One man was killed by a large carnivore of some kind — lion, tiger or bear — and others bear wounds from weapons. Almost all the skeletons are male of above average height and build. Although they died at different times over a range of 250 years and came from all over the Roman Empire, 85% of the skeletons show remarkably similar physical stresses, primarily on the right arms.

One important piece of evidence is the unusually high number of men with their right arms markedly longer than their left – a feature mentioned in ancient Roman literature in connection with gladiators.

About a quarter of the 80 skeletons excavated at the York site display this characteristic, and around half of those have particularly significant asymmetry, with right arms between 1 and 1.8cm longer than their left, according to a detailed survey of the material carried out by forensic anthropologists at the University of Central Lancashire.

The discovery suggests that some men started their training at an early age, probably in their early to mid teens. Arm length asymmetry can only develop prior to reaching skeletal maturity.

Most of them were decapitated before death by a sword blow to the back of the head, which suggests that at least in York, the fatal blow was a head chopping rather than the more traditional stab in the neck. Some of the skulls had holes in them like the ones found in the Ephesus cemetery, suggesting they died from a hammer to the head.

All of the men were buried respectfully, so they can’t have been raiders like the decapitated Vikings found in pit in Dorset. Fourteen of them were buried with grave goods like pottery and animal remains, so they had property worth bringing with them to the underworld and maybe even the support of a burial guild ensuring that proper sacrifices were made for their dead brethren.

The most impressive is that of a tall man aged between 18 and 23, buried (probably in a coffin) in a large oval grave at some time in the 3rd century. Interred with him are the remains of substantial joints of meat from at least four horses (represented by 424 horse bones) possibly eaten at his funeral, as well as some cow and pig remains. He had been decapitated by several sword blows to the neck. After burial, a low mound up to a metre high seems to have been placed over his grave.

Significantly, the man who had been killed by the bear or lion was buried in an adjacent grave, along with two others with similar ritual deposits. These men had also been decapitated. Scientific analysis of their bones suggests that they came from an extremely hot environment, possibly North Africa.

Now, we still don’t know for sure that all the people buried in this cemetery were gladiators. They could have been soldiers, for instance. Another theory is that it was a burial ground for people classifed as infames.

Infamia was social condemnation brought on by certain professions (prostitution, acting) or by immoral acts (army desertion, adultery, contracting to kill wild animals in the arena for pay). During the Roman Republic infamia resulted in loss of public rights like voting rights and running for certain offices, but by the time Britania was Romanized, those sorts of rights were rendered moot by the very fact of Empire. Infamia also wasn’t gender-specific and it didn’t make your arm longer than your left.

There will be a documentary on the York skeletons shown on Britain’s Channel 4 next Monday, June 14th: Gladiators: Back From The Dead. For those of us out of range of British television, the show will be uploaded to their website after it airs.

This is the full author Q & A that I quoted just a teeny portion of in my review of A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J.C. McKeown. I emailed him the questions and he kindly emailed me back his answers.

Q: I’d like to know more about your factoid collection process. Had you taken any notes as Aulus Gellis had (Preface, pg. VIII), by jotting down oddities as you casually encountered them in your personal and professional reading, or did you review the sources explicitly to collect items that would serve as incentives for your Classical Latin exercises? Maybe some of both? Did you go through the sources all over again when you decided to make a book of it?

A: I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years. I like to read Latin and Greek for a couple of hours every day, regardless of what else I am doing, and my texts have a lot of passages underlined or commented on in the margins, so it was easy to pick them out.

I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about 90 items and grew from there.

For a lot of the stuff that appears in the book it would be hard to go looking for it specifically. For example, nobody would really set out to inquire how many testicles the dictator Sulla had or, if they did want to know, the problem would be where to look, but the answer comes out of the blue right at the end of Justinian’s Digest – the cornerstone of so much modern Western law.

Q: Aelian describes the Byzantines as living in taverns and renting their homes to strangers. (Foreigners, pg. 110) Leeds University’s Clare Kelly Blazeby recently advanced a theory that mainland Greeks 500 – 700 years before Aelian was writing used their homes as taverns and brothels. Could there be a kernel of truth rooted in a Greek practice that spread to the eastern Hellenic world over time? Do you ever follow up on something you’ve encountered in the literature, even something fairly outlandish to our sensibilities, to see if there might be a historical basis for it?

A: This is a good example of my really not know what someone else could
make of it. It only made it into the book because it was curious. For what it’s worth, although Aelian wrote in Greek and obviously had access to a lot of very interesting sources now lost to us, he probably lived his whole life in Italy so maybe he is not the best authority for this sort of thing, but again I am not making a judgement on my source, just quoting it.

Q: I found myself following up on many individual curiosities. Additional research, pursuing a tangent, is so easy to do in the Internet era. In fact, it took me much longer to read your book than the number of pages and easy pace would suggest just because I kept running after factoids. Did you include hyperlinks to additional reading and original sources in the Classical Latin online exercises?

A: There are no hyperlinks in the text of Classical Latin itself. Many of the sources are not, I suspect, available online. I really regret not having easy and full online access to e.g. the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, because it is so useful in lots of ways. On my Web site, www.jcmckeown.com, I did include links to interesting web sites under the tab Mundus Araneosus (a world full of webs).

Q: It seems to me A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is a book that could become the pivot of a huge network of information if you had an online version. A companion DVD with links to online editions of the sources, for instance, or even a full digital version of the book where every reference, footnote and bibliographical credit is an active link. Can you envision putting together something like that even for a book that is also traditionally published? Would it increase your workload past the point of it being worthwhile?

A: I dare say this would all be possible, but I’m not the world’s greatest computer user and the idea of me being a spider at the center of a huge Web is improbable. In any case, my wife cannot abide spiders.

Q: Marcus Aurelius’ description (Medicine, pg. 70) of the public baths upended my long-held assumption that they were indicative of general hygiene. I never considered how dirty, stagnant, greasy and petri-dish-like these unchlorinated pools full of oiled down people must have been. Meanwhile, Pliny described the barbarian Gauls and Germans using soap. (Foreigners, pg. 104) Do you think we still carry biases about who is or isn’t “civilized” from the classical texts, even without consciously realizing it?

A: Good point. As an Irishman whose country the Romans did not consider worth conquering because the people would not even make good slaves, I’m glad to see there is an upsurge in interest in Celtic art, which really is powerful and beautiful in its utterly unclassical way. Rome must have been dreadful when, for example, three hundred oxen were sacrificed at one time. It’s appalling to think of the blood, esp. if they performed these rituals at the height of summer.

Q: There’s an exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia right now called “Ancient Rome & America” about the powerful influence Roman mythology, politics, ideals, art and literature exerted on the nascent United States. The Founding Fathers and early leaders would have all been far more familiar with the classical authors than most of us are today. They would have been more like you, in fact, in that respect. Do you encounter the legacy of Rome everywhere you go, or do the vast differences between the Roman mindset and ours stand out more than the commonalities?

A: My wife says that I generally go around in a fog with little or no interest in anything outside our personal life that has happened since about A.D. 300. There is an implication in this question that I am looking for or finding lessons to be drawn from the past for the present and I’m flattered if you would think I have such a high purpose. I really don’t. Every reader will have to make up their own mind about the implications of each item in the book, if indeed there are any.

Q: I’m curious to know more about the early imperial plague pit found in 1876 that still reeked after almost 2,000 years. (Medicine, pg. 75) Bill Thayer’s excellent website pointed me to Rodolfo Lanciani’s 1888 book for an account of the find. Lanciani said the human remains turned to dust as soon as the pit was opened, but that the whole Servilian Agger area smelled revolting once dug up several years later, not the pit itself. What was your source?

A: If this were an academic book, I would have quoted my source. I’m pretty sure this item was a late candidate for entry into the book and I jotted it down casually. I’m sorry that I cannot tell you where I found it. I do remember talking to an archeologist colleague of mine to confirm the accuracy of what I was saying.

Q: What exactly did the primitive liposuction procedure performed on Caesianus’ son entail? (Medicine, pg. 68)

A: Pliny says that fat is not sensate, because it has neither veins nor arteries, and that this is why mice can nibble at living pigs. Then he goes straight on to say merely that “fat was withdrawn [literally “detracted”] from Apronius, and his body was relieved of the weight that made it impossible for him to move”.

Q: Is that one anecdote from Suetonius about Claudius’ slip of the tongue in front of the fighters in the Fucine sea battle (Spectacles, pg. 145) really the only source for the widespread belief that gladiators hailed the emperor with “we who are about to die salute you”?

A: I believe it is.

Q: You include reactions to antiquity from post-Fall Rome and Italy along with your ancient source material. Do you have a general interest in Italian history and culture, and if so, which came first: a passion for the literature or a passion for the place?

A: When I was student I spent all my summers in Greece and was a late bloomer in appreciating Italy. You may be thinking particularly of the “Wedding Cake” [ie, the Victor Emmanuel Monument], that utterly spoils the Capitol. I think I said that just because I find it an appalling and quite inappropriate building. I’m mostly just interested in things that happened 2,000 years ago but I felt I could vent on this one since every modern day Roman seems to agree.

Q: Was the excellent pasquinade “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini” (Buildings, pg. 180) actually posted on the Pasquino or on one of the other talking statues, or just published and passed around?

A: I don’t know. I used the word pasquinade as a general term for I was mostly just interested in the clever expression itself.

Q: Is there a greater name in the history of the world than Fabius Ululutremulus? (Pompeii and Herculaneum , pg. 182)

A: If you come across it, please let me know.

Q: I was delighted to see a whole chapter on toilets, in large part because I found A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities to be an ideal example of bathroom reading material: short, digestible items that you can read quickly or linger over at length and then easily pick up where you left off. We have to do something to keep us occupied in there, after all, now that convivial socializing during excretory functions is no longer in vogue. Do you find that disconcerting or complimentary? (I very much hope it’s the latter.)

A: One of my friends has told me that he is reading it “in the little room”. As long as people read it and enjoy it, it really doesn’t matter where they read it.

Q: You describe Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things as one of the greatest poems ever written in Latin. (Toilets, pg. 187) What other ancient authors and works would you rank as superlatives in their own genres?

A: Personal bias comes into this, though few would question Vergil and Ovid’s right to rank very high, and also Tacitus and Juvenal. I find it easier to demote people from the high pedestal they seem to be on these days. Martial’s Epigrams, for example, strike me as tedious and small-minded, and not particularly artistic. I keep meaning to read right through Demosthenes, but I simply don’t find his language very interesting – I know this is a defect in me, for he had such a reputation in antiquity. I think I would love Sappho’s poetry, if only it weren’t so depressingly fragmented.

Oxford University Press sent me some books to review (no money changed hands or influence was brought to bear, trust) and the first one I dived into was A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire by J.C. McKeown. Much like actual cabinets of curiosities, the book collects all kinds of notable tidbits from ancient Roman authors. Some are precious gems, some colorful corals and some just sort of weird-looking rocks.

McKeown, a classics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes it clear in the preface that he’s not making any historical or factual assessments. He’s just sharing the wealth that he’s encountered in his perusals, which is for the best, because to paraphrase Obelix, those Romans were crazy. As McKeown so felicitously puts it:

As it happens, I personally find it hard to believe that a six-inch fish could have held back Mark Anthony’s flagship during the Battle of Actium, or that Milan was founded because a woolly pig was seen on the future site of the city, or that the phoenix appears every five hundred years, or that touching the nostrils of a she-mule with one’s lips will stop sneezing and hiccups, or that fish sauce is an effective cure for crocodile bites, or that any Roman emperor was eight foot, six inches tall. I strongly suspect that goats do not breathe through their ears, and there are no islands in the Baltic Sea inhabited by people whose ears are so enormous that they cover their bodies with them and do not need clothes. I do not myself wear a mouse’s muzzle and ear tips as an amulet to ward off fever, nor do I know precisely how one might attach earrings to an eel. (Preface, pg. VII)

The chapters on medicine and religion are particularly replete with this kind of off-the-wall quasi-fact, and yes, they are all awesome, but even the entirely believable observations can be mind-blowing.

For example, Roman encyclopedist Celsus in his volume On Medicine counseled people with wounds to avoid the public baths because “bathing makes [the wound] moist and dirty, and that often leads to infection. (Celsus On Medicine 5.28)” Marcus Aurelius went even further in his Meditations where he called bathing “olive oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, everything that is disgusting (Meditations 8.24).”

I had always assumed that the Roman penchant for copious bathing was indicative of general hygiene, but those eye-witness comments made me realize that the baths couldn’t help but have been pools of nastiness. Most of them weren’t spring-fed but filled and emptied like any other pool, only there was no chlorine, no filter and not even any soap. Can you imagine the sheer quantities of dirt, oil left over from the scraping that stood in stead of washing, human excretions and secretions of every variety that must have been floating in those baths?

That wasn’t the only tidbit that sent me on a voyage of discovery. In fact, this book is ideal for the history nerd/research monkey who loves following up on a good clue. I spent two whole weekends link hopping and Googling to find out more about an anecdote in the book. For anyone like me, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities is just the beginning, the nucleus of a do-it-yourself network that you, the Internet, and your library can create. It gave me visions of where digital books could go over the next few years: every source linked to, every footnote connected to further information.

I had an opportunity to ask the author some questions about the book and his process. McKeown can’t exactly picture himself as the “spider at the center of a huge Web” of networked links. He went about collecting these facts in a more traditional manner, and some sources may not even be available online. (Also his wife is apparently arachnophobic.)

I have a tendency to enjoy and remember trivial facts and stories like these. The majority were gathered during my reading over the years. I like to read Latin and Greek for a couple of hours every day, regardless of what else I am doing, and my texts have a lot of passages underlined or commented on in the margins, so it was easy to pick them out.

I wasn’t originally setting out to write a book. I started using quirky facts in class to keep students interested in learning Latin and then, when I spun the Web site to accompany my textbook, Classical Latin, I incorporated interesting stories to appear randomly at the bottom of each page as an incentive for students to continue with the online exercises. It started with about 90 items and grew from there.

For a lot of the stuff that appears in the book it would be hard to go looking for it specifically. For example, nobody would really set out to inquire how many testicles the dictator Sulla had or, if they did want to know, the problem would be where to look, but the answer comes out of the blue right at the end of Justinian’s Digest – the cornerstone of so much modern Western law.

Yes, I would enjoy feasting on this man’s tasty, tasty brains.

There is a downside to his approach, however. When he introduces a contemporary reaction to a classical anecdote, the facts can be hazy. It doesn’t happen often — the vast majority of the book cites Roman and Greek literature — but I did encounter two questionable claims. One is that our phrase “parting shot” comes from “Parthian shot”, after the famed archers of the Parthian cavalry who were so skilled that they could fire their bows over their shoulders as they rode away from the battle field. It seems, however, that the literal “parting shot” expression appears in English texts earlier than the Parthian version.

The second iffy claim was one that sent me on the most wonderful romp through archaeology in post-Unification Rome. While discussing plagues and the burial of the dead, McKeown says:

A pit one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred feet wide, and thirty feet deep, containing an estimated twenty-four thousand corpses from the early imperial period, was discovered outside Rome in 1876; when it was opened, the stench was still intolerable. (Medicine, pg. 75)

You can see why I had to follow up on that kind of juicy tidbit. After some Googling and a trip to one of my favorite sites, LacusCurtius, I found a book called Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries written in 1888, just 18 years after Rome joined a unified Italy, by Rodolfo Lanciani, the first official archaeologist of the new Italian capital. On pages 66 and 67 of chapter 3, he discusses finding that very pit on the Esquiline hill in 1876.

He found plenty of ooze and stench in his excavations of the area, but the actual 1876 pit wasn’t the locus of it. The bones turned to dust as soon they were exposed to air. It was in 1884 at a nearby spot that he and his diggers encountered the remains of a garbage dump (plenty of bodies, human and animal in that one too) which was so rank he had to give his team regular breaks so they could go off somewhere and breathe.

I asked McKeown if Lanciari was his source, and he said that it was a late entry into the book that he had jotted down casually. He couldn’t exactly recall the source but he did remember talking to an archeologist colleague to confirm the anecdote’s accuracy.

Obviously it’s no huge deal, but it’s a grain of salt to keep with you when you read the small portion of the book that isn’t a direct quote of an ancient source.

Final verdict: this book is awesome. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the ancient mind, life, culture, society. It’s a boon for anyone with a yen for chasing after historical details, and as I proudly told the author, it’s an outstanding bathroom book. It’s easily digestible, easy to follow, and easy to pick up where you left off. Throw out your cheesy magazines and leave this on the tank. Your guests are sure to thank you, not to mention bring up far more interesting lines of conversation at the dinner table than they would have if they’d just put down last year’s fall shoe issue of Cosmo.

After all, we don’t have community toilets that we all sit on together to socialize during excretory functions. Vacerra, that friend of Martial’s who spent all day in the community latrine hoping to scrounge a dinner invitation from one of his fellow crappers (Toilets, pg. 190), would have to find a new way to freeload.

Carlisle Castle was first built by William the Conqueror’s son on the site of an ancient Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall in 1093. It was part of Scotland back then — now Cumbria is part of England — and it has seen many a battle and intrigue over the 900 years of its existence. Mary Queen of Scots was even locked up there for a few months.

Over the past 10 years, there’s been an extensive archaeological dig on the castle grounds. The dig has just officially ended, and the final tally of Roman artifacts uncovered is a staggering 80,000.

Senior executive officer for Oxford Archaeology North, Rachel Newman, said: “The area was very damp 2,000 years ago, and therefore rare evidence survived for how the Romans and their medieval successors lived, in the form of the foundations for their timber buildings, as well as parts of Roman tents and saddles, their shoes, and wooden and leather possessions.

“Many thousands of objects were excavated, including less fragile material, such as pottery, metalwork, both jewellery and everyday utensils, coins, and stone objects.”

“All this evidence provided a wonderful glimpse into how people lived 2,000 years ago, and also in medieval Carlisle, more than 1,000 years later.["]

Some of the everyday items include nit combs, one with a louse still embedded in the tines, and large numbers of beef bones. Roman soldiers stationed in Carlisle were partial to beef shoulders, apparently. The articulated neck guard, on the other hand, is an extremely rare find.

The huge collection of artifacts from this decade-long excavation will go on display in the new Roman gallery of Carlisle’s Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery next year. The Tullie museum already has some Carlisle Roman artifacts on display which you can browse in their nifty iRomans website.

I particularly like the Roman version of military dogtags, a bronze disc with the soldier’s name on it worn as part of the armour. I’m also delighted to see wooden tent pegs from the earliest period of Roman habitation before they constructed the permanent fort. For some reason I can’t explain, I’m completely fascinated by ancient tents. Some of those officers’ tents were seriously fancy digs.

A cricket pavilion in Musselburgh, East Lothian, is undergoing renovations. Because Lewisvale Park, where the pavilion currently stands, is in a Scheduled Ancient Monument area, the developers hired an archaeology firm to survey the site before pouring new foundations.

The archaeologists have uncovered two Roman-era altar stones, one dating to the 2nd century A.D. and dedicated to the god Jupiter. The other has yet to be dated. They both have intricate carving around the edges and on one side, and show signs of having been toppled over at some point. We won’t know what the inscriptions say until the dirt that has accumulated from that toppling is removed.

Some postholes, a lead bowl and both fine and handmade pottery were also found along with the stones, but the latter are the big news because they’re a rare find as far north as Scotland.

Councillor Paul McLennan, cabinet member for community wellbeing at East Lothian Council, said: “The discovery of these remains is particularly exciting, as it is not often that Roman altar stones are discovered during an archaeological excavation in Scotland.

This helps with the emerging picture of life in and around the Roman fort at Inveresk during the 2nd century.”

Inveresk was first settled by Romans after they invaded Scotland in 80 A.D. In addition to the fort, they also built a bridge that is still in use (with some rebuilding over the centuries) by pedestrians today. The civilian settlement included an amphitheater and a bathhouse.

The altar stones and the other artifacts found on site have been removed for conservation and study, so now the construction on the cricket pavilion can proceed apace. I guess the postholes are out of luck.