An excavation of the Colosseum’s sewer systems has revealed the ancient Roman versions of Cracker Jacks and ballpark franks and it’s melon and mutton. The study aims to learn more about how the ancient sewer and hydraulic systems operated under the Flavian Amphitheater with a particular focus on solving the mystery of how the underground was flooded during water spectacles. In January 2021, wire-guided robots were sent to video record and laser scan the drains and sewers under the arena. A year later, a stratigraphic excavation of the south collector of the sewer network began, clearing 230 feet of muck that contained archaeological treasure in the form of ancient garbage.

Sewers are often constipated with archaeological material from the very bowels of daily life in the ancient city, and the sewers under the Colosseum contain a unique variety of organic remains left by both the spectacles and the spectators. The excavation of the south collector brought in a rich harvest: the discarded remains of chestnuts, walnuts, pine nuts, hazelnuts, figs, peach pits, plum pits, cherry pits, olive pits, blackberries, elderberries, melon seeds and grape seeds, evidence of the snacks consumed by the audience in the bleachers during the games. They didn’t just have snacks in the stands. It seems spectators rigged up braziers so they could grill up some meat, mostly pork and mutton, as they watched people and animals being butchered for sport.

Remains of animals who starred in the games were found as well. There were bones of bears of different sizes, possibly used in acrobatic displays, lions, leopards, ostriches and deer, likely used in the venationes (staged animal hunts). There were also dogs of different sizes. The smallest was less than a foot in height, but stocky and strong, a predecessor of the dachshund. Remains of plants that grew in the Colosseum showed a wide degree of biodiversity, ranging from blackberries to boxwoods and laurels. Some of the plants were spontaneous growth (the international animal and human feces spread led to hundreds if not thousands of different non-native plants taking root in the Colosseum); the evergreens were probably deliberately planted for landscaping.

The excavation also recovered artifacts. As you would find under the sewer grates of the sports arena today, there’s a lot of spare change down there. Archaeologists unearthed 53 bronze coins from the Late Imperial era, and a rare orichalcum sestertius struck in 170-171 A.D. to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the ascension of Marcus Aurelius to the imperial throne. Personal objects found include bone game dice, a bone pin and clothing elements (shoe nails, leather, studs).

I can’t embed this video from the Facebook page of the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum, but do yourself a favor and follow the link because it shows urban spelunkers from the organization Roma Sotterranea (Underground Rome) exploring the sewer, squeezing through uncomfortably tight, mucky spaces and pointing out the brick stamps inscribed with the names of the makers which identify the period when that stretch of construction or repairs was done.

An exceptionally rare gold medallion issued by the emperor Maxentius around 308 A.D. that is one of only two known surviving in the world will be sold at auction next week. It is a quaternio, meaning a single gold coin worth four aurei, although of course it was not intended for circulation. It was a commemorative issue for Maxentius to celebrate his reconstruction of the Temple of Venus and Roma in the Eternal City.

The Templum Veneris et Romae was a double temple dedicated to the goddess Venus Felix, mother of Aeneas and through him of the Roman people, and to Roma Aeterna, the deity who was the personification of the city and larger state. The temple was constructed by Emperor Hadrian in 135 A.D., but he didn’t just order it built. He fancied himself something of a draftsman/architect and he personally designed the plans for this temple. They were not universally acclaimed, to put it mildly, and when Trajan’s revered architect Apollodorus of Damascus voiced his objections to Hadrian’s plan, the emperor had him executed and built it the way he wanted.

Here’s Cassius Dio’s account (Roman History, LXIX.4) of their animosity and its fatal conclusion:

[T]he true reason was that once when Trajan was consulting him on some point about the buildings he [Apollodorus] had said to Hadrian, who had interrupted with some remark: “Be off, and draw your gourds. You don’t understand any of these matters.” (It chanced that Hadrian at the time was pluming himself upon some such drawing.) When he became emperor, therefore, he remembered this slight and would not endure the man’s freedom of speech. He sent him the plan of the temple of Venus and Roma by way of showing him that a great work could be accomplished without his aid, and asked Apollodorus whether the proposed structure was satisfactory. The architect in his reply stated, first, in regard to the temple, that it ought to have been built on high ground and that the earth should have been excavated beneath it, so that it might have stood out more conspicuously on the Sacred Way from its higher position, and might also have accommodated the machines in its basement, so that they could be put together unobserved and brought into the theatre without anyone’s being aware of them beforehand. Secondly, in regard to the statues, he said that they had been made too tall for the height of the cella. “For now,” he said, “if the goddesses wish to get up and go out, they will be unable to do so.” When he wrote this so bluntly to Hadrian, the emperor was both vexed and exceedingly grieved because he had fallen into a mistake that could not be righted, and he restrained neither his anger nor his grief, but slew the man.

The temple was huge, built on a platform 475 feet long and 330 feet wide along the Sacred Way on the slopes of the Velia hill next to the Colosseum. More than 100 feet high, it was the largest temple in the city and for centuries one of the most important shrines in the empire. Construction of the temple is what spurred the removal of the colossal statue of Nero, which gave the Flavian Amphitheater its nickname. (The machinery Apollodorus talks about being stored in the temple were the apparatuses used in the spectacles at the amphitheater.) Hadrian took a non-standard approach to temple design, placing the cellae (the rooms where the images of the goddesses dwelled) back-to-back instead of side-by-side. This was a bit of an anagram pun on Hadrian’s part. AMOR (love) is ROMA spelled backwards.

When the temple was heavily damaged in a fire in 307 A.D., Maxentius rebuilt it. He did not follow in Hadrian’s architectural footprints, but instead had it reconstructed in the apdsidal form with vaulted ceilings that was typical of early 4th century Rome. He replaced the burned wooden ceiling with a stone coffered vault and doubled the thickness of the walls to support it. He also redid the cellae so they conformed to the classical design that Hadrian had eschewed. Most of the temple was destroyed in an earthquake in the 9th century and the church built in the ruins, but the remains of the cella and vaulted apse still stand today.

Maxentius made this project the cornerstone of his imperial identity. For four years, the rest of his reign until his death in battle against Constantine in 312 A.D., he struck widely circulated bronze and silver coins depicting himself on the obverse and the goddess Roma sitting in a hexastyle temple on the reverse. The inscription on the reverse, CONSERVATOR VRBIS SVAE, means “preserver of his city,” and Maxentius certainly strove to earn the title. He poured money into the renewal of Rome, restoring old public buildings and constructing new ones.

In addition to the circulating coins, the emperor had special issue ultra-valuable, ultra-fine commemorative gold medallions made conveying the same sentiment. The one coming up for auction features the bare head of Maxentius facing left on the obverse, and Roma seated on a shield decorated with the she-wolf and twins Romulus and Remus. A winged Victory stands on a globe in Roma’s hand. The pre-sale estimate is $100,000 – $200,000, but it could well go much higher. An even finer issue of an eight-aurei medallion featuring Maxentius on the reverse as well, holding a scepter and receiving a globe from Roma, set a new world record for Roman gold coins when it sold at auction for $1.4 million in 2011.

Maxentius would be the last emperor to live in Rome, but his dedication to the physical fabric of the city was forgotten, largely by design of his successor. Constantine issued a damnatio memoriae decree against Maxentius, destroying all public references to him, including the inscriptions on the buildings he had restored or constructed. Constantine took all the credit for them instead, propped up by Christian writers villainizing his former rival as a tyrannical brute and lionizing Constantine, who built a new capital a thousand miles away and named it after himself, as Rome’s reviver.

The remains of a vividly frescoed domus under the Baths of Caracalla in Rome have opened to the public for the first time. The two-storey domus was built during the reign of Hadrian in the 2nd century, part of an upscale neighborhood adjacent to the Capena Gate that was demolished in 206 A.D. to make way for the great public baths that would be built during the reigns of the emperor Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla between 212 and 217 A.D. There is evidence that the structure underwent several phases of renovation and alteration, including being subdivided into an apartment building with an elegant luxury domus on the ground and first floor and apartments for the high middle class on the upper floors.

The rooms were vividly painted with faux architectural panels, animals, objects, floral elements, figures and landscapes in a style that was fashionable in the mid-2nd century. One room’s decorations are striking examples of Roman religious syncretism, depicting images of Greco-Roman and the Egyptian gods whose cults had a wide following among the Roman upper classes.

This room was initially believed to have been the lararium, the space dedicated to the worship of the gods of the household, but study of the imagery found that it was a devotional space that at different times was dedicated to Roman and Egyptian deities. The fresco of architectural vistas with human figures, the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, and Dionysus is the older of the two, dating to between 134 and 138 A.D. The other contains depictions of foreign gods — the jackal-headed god of the dead Anubis, Isis with a lotus flower and feathers, a barely visible Serapis — and was painted in the last decades of the 2nd century.

The remains of the structure were first discovered during the excavation of the eastern palaestra of the Baths in the 1860s and 1870s. Hundreds of fragments of ceiling frescoes were recovered in excavations of the triclinium (the dining room) of the domus in 1975. The fragments were recovered and some of the frescoes in the other rooms detached for study and conservation.

A recent campaign of stabilization, restoration and reinstallation of the removed frescoes has made it possible for the domus to open to visitors as a stop in the tour of the Baths of Caracalla. The fresco on the vaulted ceiling of the triclinium has been pieced back together and displayed for the first time at the new entrance to the domus.

Director of the Baths of Caracalla, Mirella Serlorenzi, explains what makes this building, dubbed “the house where the gods lived together,” unique: “The presence in the same environment of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva together with Anubis, Isis and probably Serapis is the sign of that religious syncretism typical of ancient Rome since its foundation. But the rooms we are now opening are of great interest also because they show the microcosm of a private house and the macrocosm of a large imperial facility, the Baths of Caracalla, at a distance of a few meters from each other. A suggestive comparison that prompts us to present a small preview of the ceiling of a second room of the domus, the Triclinium, now the subject of studies and research for its overall restoration.”

The Mausoleums of Saxa Rubra, two ancient tombs on the northern outskirts of the modern city of Rome, are for the first time open to the public every third Thursday of the month. Surrounded by modern construction along the Via Flaminia, the 2nd century tombs are little known and easily missed in the bewildering density of historical sites in Rome, but they are of great archaeological significance.

The tombs are on the 8th kilometer of the Via Flaminia, the ancient Republican road leading north out of the city. They were both carved out of the red tufa outcroppings that Saxa Rubra (meaning “red cave”) was named after. 

An inscription identifies the larger of the two tombs as that of Quintus Nasonius Ambrosius, freedman of the Nasonian family, and his wife freedwoman Nasonia Urbica. It was discovered in 1674 during works in preparation for the Jubilee year of 1675. From the moment it was found it was treated in the worst possible way. The history of this tomb is a microcosm of how cultural patrimony can be obliterated by neglect, ignorance and greed. The information panels in the tomb tell the story.

The workers who found the tomb broke through its frescoed ceiling, putting a hole in it and destroying a section of the plaster. The front entrance to the funerary chamber was framed by a temple façade with four pilasters supporting a triangular pediment, also carved out of the same living rock.

Inside they found a rectangular funerary chamber with three niches on its long sides and one at the apex. The walls were divided into two registers separated by a cornice. The bottom register has the niches; the top register alternating lunettes and squares. It was adorned with mosaic floors and elaborate frescoes on every stuccoed surface of the walls, niches and ceiling.

Detailed drawings of the tomb and frescoes by painter and engraver Pietro Santi Bartoli published in 1680 document an absolute riot of richly detailed scenes from mythology (Oedipus and Sphinx, Orpheus charming the animals) and literature, as well as architectural trompe l’oeil (Corinthian columns, cornices, pediments, friezes), floral garlands, animals, urns, allegorical figures (the four seasons, happiness, and some amazing hunt scenes, including one with a pair of rather odd-looking lions attacking a party of shielded men and another with a pair of oversized leopards attacking the men attempting to entrap them, likely for the arena.

The fresco over the inscription referring to Nasonius and Nasonia depicts Ovid as poet laureate with the god Mercury and the Erato, muse of lyric and erotic poetry.  This is a bit of a name-drop by the owners of the tomb, associating themselves by implication with great Augustan-era poet Publius Ovidius Naso, author of the Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses. There is no actual family connection between Nasonius and Ovid (Naso was a cognomen of the gens Ovidia; the freedman has adopted his former owner’s name (gens Nasonia) as his own).

The discovery was celebrated at the time, but not in any way protected. From the time of its discovery through the late 19th century, even after Rome was made capital of a unified Italy in 1870, the frescoes were pried off and sold piecemeal to a variety of willing buyers including the British Museum. The mosaics were torn up. By the turn of the century even the façade had been destroyed. The fraction of frescoes remaining were damaged and faded to the point of being almost unrecognizable as the works Bartoli had so meticulously recorded two centuries before.

The new information panels in the Tomb of the Nasonians recount the whole sad tale and use Bartoli’s drawings to give visitors a glimpse into what the tomb looked like when it was first discovered.

The second tomb is a soothing balm after the Tomb of the Nasonians. An inscribed marble slab at the door dedicates it to a woman named Fadilla from her loving husband. It was intact and in beautiful condition when it was discovered in 1923. It’s a smaller space but it is luxuriously appointed with a black-and-white mosaic floor with birds, meanders and other shapes in alternating octagons and squares. The walls and ceilings are fully stuccoed and frescoed with winged Cupids, deities, urns, animals (peacocks, antelopes), outlined in colored paint to create curved and polygonal sections.

Fadilla’s tomb was left unmolested, surviving Fascism, World War II and municiple neglect, which thankfully in this case turned out to be remarkably benign. The contrast between the two tombs is marked. This video’s auto-translated closed captions are terrible, but it’s worth watching even if you can’t understand Italian for the video tour of the two tombs.