While Brutus and his allies were stabbing Julius Caesar to death, a good chunk of the Roman working class was having a picnic. They drank wine, pitched makeshift tents out of branches and cloth, and toasted to as many years of life as cups they could down. It was the feast of Anna Perenna, the […]

All roads lead to Rome. It’s one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isn’t quite true. Led by Adam Pažout, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team found that cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul), and Corinth […]

Picture the Colosseum, and the image that comes to mind is almost always the same: a lion bursting into the arena, the crowd roaring, a doomed man backing away. Film and popular history have fixated on that single moment for so long that almost nothing survives in the public imagination about how the animal actually […]

As indicated in its statute of autonomy, the flag of Cantabria (in north Spain) is “formed by two horizontal stripes of equal width, white on top and red on the bottom”, with the coat of arms in the center. It is a banner that traces its origins back to the 18th century, but in recent […]

On November 26, 2007, the Austrian National Library did something it hardly ever does: it took the Tabula Peutingeriana out of its climate-controlled display case and allowed the public to see it for a few hours. Due to its extreme fragility, the scroll was exhibited for just one day in Vienna, coinciding with its inclusion […]

One of the greatest affronts suffered by the Roman legions took place in 321 BC, after the Battle of the Caudine Forks. Not only because of the forced surrender, without even fighting, but also due to the humiliation that officers and soldiers endured afterwards, being forced to pass, dressed only in their tunics, under a […]