Rome lasted long enough to become a habit, and a surprising amount of it is still in service: the roads, the water channels, the words inside our own sentences. These stories take the empire at eye level, from a boy emperor's pension to a hill built of broken oil jars, and they correct several things everyone knows.
Every tile in a Roman History game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Emperors and Leaders
nine stories
1Rome's birthday was worked out, not remembered
On the tile: Romulus753 BCLegend
Rome's birthday is a calculation rather than a memory. Roman scholars counted backward through their king lists and landed on 753 BC, and the version proposed by the antiquarian Varro is the one that stuck. April 21 came with it, because Cicero already knew that day as the city's birthday and it coincided with the Parilia, a shepherds' festival of bonfires and sheep pens. The twins, the she-wolf and the quarrel that killed Remus stay where they started, in legend.
The Romans liked telling this one on themselves. In the fifth century BC, with an army in trouble, the Senate handed Cincinnatus dictatorial power, and the tradition is that the messengers found him working his own fields. He won the war and gave the power straight back: Livy writes that he resigned on the sixteenth day an office granted for six months. Much later, American officers named their veterans' society after him, and in 1790 one of them renamed a town on the Ohio River. It is now Cincinnati.
Captured by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa, the young Caesar was insulted by his own price. They asked twenty talents; he laughed at them for not knowing whom they had taken and told them to ask fifty. For thirty-eight days he behaved like a guest who owned the place, writing poems and speeches, reading them aloud, and calling anyone who failed to admire them an illiterate barbarian. He also promised, laughing, to hang them. Once ransomed, he manned ships and caught most of them.
4The speech that cut a tax list by a thousand names
On the tile: Hortensia42 BC
The men running Rome needed money for a civil war, so they ordered the 1,400 richest women to declare their property for taxation. The women pushed their way to the triumvirs' tribunal in the Forum and put up Hortensia, daughter of the celebrated orator Hortensius, to speak for them. Appian preserved her case: women had no share in making policy and should not be singled out to pay for it. The list was cut from 1,400 to 400, and men of large fortunes were assessed instead.
August is named for a man who passed over the obvious month. In 8 BC the month Sextilis was renamed for Augustus, and Cassius Dio reports that people generally wanted September to get the honor, because that was when he had been born. Augustus preferred the other one. Sextilis was the month in which he had first been elected consul and had won many great battles, and he would rather be remembered for the record than for the birthday. The name is still on the calendar.
The fiddle was about a thousand years away; music historians date the viol family to roughly the eleventh century. When the fire broke out in July of AD 64, Tacitus places Nero at Antium, returning only as the flames reached the property linking the Palatine to the Gardens of Maecenas. He then opened the Campus Martius, the buildings of Agrippa and his own gardens to people who had lost everything, and brought down the price of grain. Tacitus records the singing story too, and labels it a report.
The most quoted Stoic work was never meant to be a work at all. Marcus Aurelius, emperor from 161 to 180, kept a notebook while campaigning in central Europe, probably around 171 to 175. He wrote it in Greek rather than Latin, and the oldest heading attached to it is not a title but a description, ta eis heauton: to himself. He was reminding an emperor how an emperor should behave, and the audience he had in mind was one person.
Septimius Severus was born around AD 145 in Lepcis Magna, a harbor city on the coast of what is now Libya. He died on 4 February 211 in York. In 208 he had crossed to Britain with a great army, led it north of Hadrian's Wall deep into what is now Scotland, and never made the journey home. One life ran from North Africa to northern England without ever leaving the empire, and he governed the whole of it from both ends.
The last emperor in the West carried names from the beginning of the story: Romulus, like the founder, and Augustus, like the first emperor. Rome called him Augustulus, the little Augustus, because he was a boy when his father Orestes raised him to the throne in October 475. The commander Odoacer deposed him the next year and, taking pity on his youth, spared him, granting an income of six thousand solidi and sending him to relatives in Campania. The imperial regalia went to Constantinople.
One hill in Rome named a whole class of buildings. Augustus kept his house on the Palatine, and the Latin name of the hill, palatium, drifted into meaning the imperial residence itself. It traveled through Old French palais and arrived in English in the early thirteenth century as palace. By about 1300 it meant any magnificent or stately dwelling. The building type changed completely. The address stayed inside the word.
The building's real name is the Flavian Amphitheater, and its site was a rebuke: the ornamental lake of Nero's Golden House, handed back to the public as a place of spectacle. Vespasian began it, and it was finished under Titus in AD 80, holding something like fifty thousand people. The nickname comes from the colossal bronze statue of Nero that stood nearby. The name passed to the building around AD 1000, by which time the statue had probably already fallen. Part of the pedestal Hadrian built for it still stands.
For a century after Pompeii was rediscovered, excavators kept breaking into empty spaces in the hardened ash. In 1863 Giuseppe Fiorelli, who was bringing scientific method to the dig, understood what they were. The ash had set around bodies and clothing, which later decayed, leaving molds. He had liquid plaster poured in, waited, then chipped the ash away. A little over a hundred casts have been made since, and most of them are what they appear to be: people who did not get out in AD 79.
Herculaneum's library outlasted the eruption of AD 79 by being carbonized. Hundreds of scrolls came out of the Villa of the Papyri in the 1750s, too fragile to unroll and effectively unreadable. Brent Seales spent two decades teaching computers to open them virtually instead. In 2023 a student picked out a single word inside an unopened scroll, the Greek for purple. In February 2024 three students shared a $700,000 prize for reading about five percent of one scroll, Epicurean philosophy about pleasure.
It is not the border between England and Scotland and never has been. The Wall runs 73 miles, or 80 Roman miles, from the Tyne to the Solway, lying entirely inside England, with the modern border to the north of it. It also predates the question: building began in AD 122, when neither country existed, and what Hadrian wanted was a frontier that separated Romans from everyone else. Three legions did the work over at least six years, and the forts were held for some three centuries.
6Roman Britain complained to a goddess about theft
On the tile: Curse tablets2nd-4th century AD
At Aquae Sulis, now Bath, about 130 people took their grievances to a goddess. They scratched them onto small sheets of lead or pewter, rolled them up and dropped them into the sacred spring, asking Sulis Minerva to deal with whoever had walked off with a cloak or a few coins while the owner was bathing. They date from the second to the late fourth century AD. In 2014 they were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World UK register.
Monte Testaccio stands about 150 feet high and nearly a mile around, and it is made entirely of smashed pottery: something like twenty-five million oil jars, most of them shipped from southern Spain. The thick-walled jars broke into big curved pieces that were worthless as scrap, and the oil residue turned rancid, so nobody wanted them back. Rome dumped them methodically instead, stacking sherds behind retaining walls of jars and dusting the heap with lime to control the smell.
Three Roman legions, the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth, were annihilated in Germany in AD 9, and the battlefield stayed unidentified for most of the time since. In 1987 a British officer named Tony Clunn searched at Kalkriese, north of Osnabrück, with a metal detector, working with the archaeologist Wolfgang Schlüter. He came back with 162 silver coins, none of them later than the reign of Augustus, and three lead sling bullets that only Roman troops would have left behind. Kalkriese has been read as the Varus battlefield ever since.
Diocletian stepped down from the throne on 1 May 305 and retired to a building made for the purpose on the Dalmatian coast, half luxury villa and half fortified camp, entered through a northern gate later known as the Golden Gate. The palace never emptied out again. Later residents fitted houses and shops into its halls and walls, his mausoleum became the cathedral of Split in the seventh century, and in 1979 the historic core, palace and town together, went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Modern marine concrete crumbles in seawater. Roman piers and breakwaters are still there, and they are stronger now than when they were poured. A team led by the geologist Marie Jackson worked out why in 2017: seawater percolating through concrete made of volcanic ash and lime dissolves parts of the ash and grows interlocking crystals, aluminous tobermorite and phillipsite, that toughen the cement. Pliny the Elder noticed the effect without the chemistry, describing a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.
Picture a Roman aqueduct and you picture arches, but arches were the exception. Most of the channel ran underground, roofed over and invisible. Rome's first, the Aqua Appia of 312 BC, was almost entirely buried; Frontinus, appointed water commissioner by the emperor Nerva, logged 11,190 paces in all, of which 11,130 ran underground and only 60 sat on masonry and arches near the Porta Capena. He also gave the reason. Buried water was much harder for an enemy to destroy.
The Pont du Gard is the showy part of a patient problem: moving water 50 kilometers from a spring near Uzès to the baths and fountains of Nîmes. The bridge lifts the channel 49 meters above the river on three rows of arches, the tallest bridge-aqueduct the Romans built. The aqueduct as a whole drops an average of 25 centimeters per kilometer, a slope no eye could detect. It delivered tens of thousands of cubic meters a day, and around a thousand men built it in five years.
Rome's great sewer began as a stream through a marshy valley, walled and regulated in the sixth century BC by one of the Tarquin kings, and the ground it drained became the Forum. It ran as open water at first and was roofed over only in the second century BC. Pliny the Elder wrote of a city on stilts, beneath which men had sailed when Agrippa was aedile. Parts of the system still carry water, although what passes through the ancient channel now is a trickle.
The inscription across the porch credits Marcus Agrippa, who put a temple on the spot around 27 BC. The building behind it is not his. Agrippa's temple burned, and Hadrian raised the domed rotunda in the 120s, then left the older name on the front. The Historia Augusta says Hadrian built public buildings everywhere and inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan, dedicating his restorations to their original builders. It has been a church since 609.
A Roman cage cup from the fourth century AD does something glass is not supposed to do. Light it from the viewer's side and it is green; put the light behind it and it glows deep red. The effect is called dichroism, and the cause is metal: gold and silver particles measured in billionths of a meter, suspended through the glass. The silver scatters the green, the gold transmits the red. It is the only intact piece of ancient glassware known to do it.
Caesar could have crossed the Rhine in boats. He wanted a bridge, because a bridge said something that boats did not. His engineers drove paired timber piles into the riverbed and framed a roadway over them, and by his own account the whole work was finished ten days after his men started collecting the timber. He marched across, spent eighteen days on the far bank, came back, and had the bridge pulled down behind him. The message had already been delivered.
Near Arles in southern France, a hillside holds the foundations of sixteen waterwheels set in two parallel flights of eight, fed by an aqueduct. Each pair scooped up the water and dropped it onto the pair below. Gearing let the millers use flatter stones, turning faster than the animal-powered kind, and the mills ground grain from the second century AD through at least the fourth, probably the largest milling installation known from the Roman world. Broken millstones from the site now sit in the museum at Arles.
Cassius Dio described Trajan's bridge over the Danube and then spent a paragraph being amazed by it: twenty piers of squared stone, 150 feet high above the foundations and 60 feet wide, standing 170 feet apart and joined by arches. What impressed him was not the span but the riverbed, so deep, so full of eddies and so muddy that placing anything on it seemed impossible. His verdict was that "there is nothing which human ingenuity cannot accomplish."
It was never a room where diners went to empty their stomachs between courses. A vomitorium is a passage in an amphitheater, one of the openings through which a packed crowd spewed forth into the seats, which is exactly what the Latin verb means. The word first appears in Macrobius in the fifth century AD, describing architecture. The dining-room version shows up in nineteenth-century writing and spread in the twentieth, which makes it a modern fantasy about Romans rather than a Roman habit.
The favorite office fact, that soldiers were paid in salt and that this gives us the word salary, does not survive a look at the sources. No ancient writer says it. Soldiers were paid in coin, principally silver, through the stipendium handed over three times a year; Julius Caesar doubled it to 225 denarii. The Latin salarium is connected to salt, but as an allowance, most likely money given so the recipient could buy some. The pay was real. The salt came later.
Gladiators were nicknamed hordearii, barley eaters, and their bones back up the joke. From a cemetery at Ephesus, in use during the second and third centuries AD, the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Bern studied 22 of them. Isotope and trace-element analysis found a diet built on grain and legumes. Their strontium levels ran well above those of ordinary residents, which fits the drink of plant ash that ancient writers describe gladiators taking after fights, in effect for the calcium.
Everyone knows the verdict: thumb down, and the loser dies. Jean-Léon Gérôme painted exactly that in 1872, a crowd booing with thumbs turned down at a victorious gladiator standing over his opponent. He called it Pollice Verso, and the Latin means only a turned thumb, specifying neither up nor down. No surviving record confirms which direction meant death and which meant mercy; the modern reading owes more to the movies than to Rome. The painting has hung in Phoenix since 1968.
An inscription honoring Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a driver from Lusitania, keeps his numbers: 4,257 races, 1,462 wins, and prize money of 35,863,120 sesterces, with retirement at 42. Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania ran the figures for Lapham's Quarterly and pointed out what that sum could do, such as buying grain for the entire city of Rome for a year. On that reckoning, the best-paid athlete in history drove a four-horse chariot in the second century AD.
Garum was made by layering fish, especially the guts, with salt and aromatic herbs and leaving the vats in the sun for months, then drawing off the liquid. Romans put it on nearly everything, in grades running from cheap to ruinous, and Pliny the Elder compared the finest kind to expensive perfume. Production was industrial: Baelo Claudia in Spain, near the Strait of Gibraltar, was a major center. One Pompeian, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, built a fine house on the proceeds.
After a serious fire in AD 6, Augustus organized a permanent fire service: about 3,500 freedmen, a number later doubled, in seven cohorts, each covering two of the city's fourteen districts. They worked with buckets, sponges and brooms, hand-operated water pumps, and engines for pulling down buildings to make firebreaks. They also patrolled after dark, watching for the first sign of smoke and for thieves and burglars, which put them somewhere between a fire department and a police force.
A Roman seeking office wore a specially bright toga, the toga candida, probably whitened with fine powdered chalk to advertise the purity of his intentions. The word for a man dressed that way was candidatus, meaning white-robed, from candidus, bright or shining. English took it whole as candidate. The same bright Latin root turns up in candid, which is either an accident or the oldest joke in politics. The garment is long gone. The vocabulary is still running for office.
Saturnalia opened on December 17 and, in Cicero's day, ran seven days. The ordinary rules were suspended: slaves were treated as equals and waited on at table, and everyone wore the pilleus, the felt cap of a freed slave, with colorful dinner clothes in public instead of the toga. People called on friends and gave wax candles and small clay figures called sigillaria. Not everyone joined in. Pliny the Younger says he withdrew to his room while the household celebrated.