Stories tagged ancient Rome
Marble bust of Gaius Julius Caesar: This is not the recently discovered one, but rather a typical posthumous bust of Caesar. Evidently all busts of the dictator in Rome were posthumous.Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsArchaeologists have recovered the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar . The marble bust was found last autumn along with other statuary at the bottom of the River Rhone, near Arles, France, and has been dated to 46 BC. The bust’s likeness is a typical Republican-era representation of the balding dictator but unlike other busts of Caesar, it predates his assassination by two years.
Republican members of the Roman Senate, including Caesar’s perceived friend, Brutus, stabbed the dictator to death in 44BC.
Luc Long, the archaeologist leading the excavation, said the bust was probably thrown into the river after the assassination because “it would have not been good at the time to be considered a follower of his.”
"In Rome you don't find any statues of Caesar dating from the time he lived, they were all posthumous," Long added.
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The Caligae: Not to be worn with socks. (image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)Archaeologists have uncovered a two thousand and change-year-old footprint of a Roman soldier inside a stone wall surrounding the ancient city of Hippos
The find is interesting in that it suggests that soldiers helped build the wall. Or, at least, that this soldier did.
I for one don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve been putting my footprints all over the place for years, including on the property of scientists, and they could hardly care less. And what has a legionary got over me? Nothing, obviously. I’m taller, I’m not dead, and I have never attacked a Goth person. These are all important factors in the sort of popularity contest we should be having here.
An interesting side note: Hippos is located in what is now Israel, in an area described by the New Testament to have been the location where Jesus performed miracles. The footprint may indicate that Hippos received some sort of miracle involving comfortable-yet-practical footwear. That’s my theory anyway.
Well, I hate to lie (or do I?), but Grand Theft Auto Rome isn’t actually in the works.
Still, with a some (lots of) imagination, before long we might all be causing a little morally reprehensible havoc in ancient Rome.
Oh, wait, there weren't cars in ancient Rome.: I may have been lying about the videogame. Still, it could be fun. (photo by Argenberg)
For the last ten years, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, along with computer scientists and architects from Italy, have been working on a project to digitally reconstruct ancient Rome, circa A.D. 320.
Rome, at this time, would have been the cultural hub of the western world, and had reached a population of around one million.
Employing the same techniques used to simulate modern cities, these scientists and artists have been working to recreate Rome street by street, temple to temple, in “Rome1.0.”
As someone who has worked at archaeological sites, I find the prospect of having a complete, scaled-down, and fully explorable model of something that would otherwise just exist in excavation logs and site reports is pretty neat. The imagination always adds perspective, but it would be awfully cool to be able to travel through an ancient site just as some one could have 1700 years ago.
Rome Reborn will continue map the ancient city, and there are plans to follow its progression from the late Bronze Age, to its fall in the 6th century A.D,
Analysis of remains from a gladiator graveyard has revealed new information about how the battling athletes had lived their lives.
Tough times for the losing gladiators: Pollice Verso. 1872 gladiator painting by Jean-Leon Gerome. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.It’s the first scientifically verified cemetery of it’s kind and is adding much to gladiator lore and legend, with new information on how they lived and died.
The site was first found about 5 years ago in Ephesus, a major Roman city in Turkey, and contained the mixed remains of some 67 individuals, nearly all of them under 30 years of age. Many showed signs of healed wounds.
For much of the past five years, two Austrian forensic anthropologists at the Medical University of Vienna have been studying and cataloguing the remains. Professors Karl Grossschmidt and Fabian Kanz have analyzed every bone measuring for age, injury and cause of death. The study’s results have surprised even them.
One of the skeletons showed signs of two major healed wounds to the skull, and tested as being much older than the others – 50 years of age at the time of death, a ripe old-age for Roman times. This evidence, along with a gravestone dedicated by two young gladiators to the memory of a trainer named Euxenius, suggests that the remains may be those a former gladiator-turned-trainer.
Gladiators were the professional athletes of ancient Roman times, battling each other, or even wild animals or condemned criminals, for the amusement of the masses in arenas spread throughout the Empire. Sometimes the battles were to the death.
Like today’s professional athletes, gladiators were venerated by the Roman populace, and celebrated in everything from mosaics to graffiti. Images of the sporting fighters grace nearly 1/3 of the oil lamps found in archaeological sites around the ancient empire.
But the adoration sometimes came at a price. Some of the corpses show signs of mortal wounds, such as blows to the head with three-pointed tridents.
"The bone injuries - those on the skulls for example - are not everyday ones, they are very, very unusual, and particularly the injuries inflicted by a trident, are a particular indication that a typical gladiator's weapon was used," Professor Karl Grossschmidt said.
Other scars indicate some sort of blunt hammer-like instruments were sometimes used, possibly by an assistant in the arena to relieve wounded battlers from their suffering.
"I assume that they must have been very severely injured gladiators, ones who had fought outstandingly and so had not been condemned to death by the public or by the organizer of the match, but who had no chance of surviving because of their injuries. It was basically the final blow, in order to release them," said Professor Kanz.
But some gladiators met other fates.
Written records tell that if the crowd was dissatisfied with a fighter’s performance or his lack of courage, demands for his death could be heard across the arena, and he would be expected to accept his fate with some semblance of dignity. Relief pictures from those times show a kneeling man being done in by having a sword rammed down his throat and into his heart.
Despite the gruesomeness of it all, the gladiators seemed to have been treated well in general. They were well fed especially before matches. Analysis of their bones show high levels of strontium, indicating a strict vegetarian diet, probably barley and beans. Strontium is also known to strengthen bones and speed-up the healing process.
"The Romans may have known more about the human body than we ever thought possible," said Dr Kanz.
Some of the corpses –including that of Euxenius- also showed evidence of high-level medical treatment, such as amputation and head surgery. Galen, considered the father of modern surgery, lived and practiced only 60 miles away, and was also known to have worked at a gladiator training school. Strong evidence of his techniques were noted on many of the remains Kanz and Grossschmidt examined.
Gladiators entered each match with about a 1 in 3 chance of surviving the battle, but if they lasted three years, they would win their freedom, and sometimes, like Euxenius, they would become teachers at the gladiator training school, and live out their lives quite comfortably.
LINKS AND MORE INFO
Gladiators at Ephesus
BBC website story
Panoramic Virtual Tour of Ephesus
More photos of Ephesus
BBC Television press release
