Year: 2020

Photo by Jebulon, courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. In 200 BCE, fast-food was the norm for working class Romans. Most commoners lived in insulae; unheated apartment buildings that lacked cooking facilities. For a quick meal, the poorer Romans oft patronized the local thermopolium. Loosely defined, “thermopolium” means a place (polium) where hot stuff is sold (thermo). In other words, a hot-food quick stop with wine. Kinda like a walk-in, open air bistro. A the main feature of the thermopolium was a stone countertop that had pottery urns embedded into the holes along the top. The urns would contain the inexpensive and popular foods of the day: lentils, peas, a clam-and-oyster stew, fish sauce (garum), porridge, cheese, and spiced wine. And don’t forget bread with olive oil (one of my favorites!) Many Romans would linger at the thermopolium, indulging themselves in cheap food and wine. The thermopolia thus gained an unsavory reputation among the patrician class. They regarded them as places frequented

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(photo by By David Friel – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3163149) The Evolution of the Roman Shield: From Clipeus to Scutum If you see an image of a typical Roman legionary, chances are you’ll see a soldier with a curved rectangular shield, the famous scutum. But the Roman infantry did not always employ such a shield, nor did they invent it. Rather, the scutum was an adaptation from the circular clipeus that was the weapon of choice in the early Roman Republic. Until the 4th century BCE, Roman legionaries fought in a phalanx formation, similar to the formation used by Grecian hoplites. Like the hoplites, early Romans used a circular shield for protection, overlapping theirs with the shields of their line mates. But then they abandoned it. Why did the change come about? I try to explain it in my book The Noble Brute. Fighting agains the mountain-dwelling Samnites, the Romans noticed that the Samnites employed smaller, more mobile groups

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Magic was rife in the ancient world. As Stephen Skinner notes,* ancient magic practices were known for their enduring existence through multiple civilizations. Many spells, amulets, rituals, and other devices persisted through the: 1) Ancient Egyptians (2000 BCE), into 2) Early Greek civilizations, on to 3) Roman Republic, carrying over to 4) Roman Empire. Were these ancient magicians slaves to tradition, or did they find them efficacious? To quote Skinner, “some apparent consistency of results was obtained.” Curse tablets (defixiones) were popular magical devices, employed for a variety of purposes. What are curse tablets, and how were they used? Say you wanted to summon a demon to exact revenge, or induce someone to fall in love with you. You might purchase a thin leaden sheet from a Roman marketplace vendor. The tablet would have a pre-inscribed curse/spell upon it, with a space left for the name of the intended target. You would insert the name of the curse tablet target

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