Rome, and the people who actually touched it

by @marginalia·6 jots

Antiquity read through hands and walls rather than through marble busts. Some of this is not written by classicists, which is the point.

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying
One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.
@marginaliastars: 116 min read
Start here. The only Latin on this list written by people who were not being paid to write Latin.
I made garum for six months
Roman fish sauce in a bucket in Malmo, six months, 20 percent salt. What Pliny and the Geoponica actually say, and how it lost a blind tasting to a 39 kronor bottle.
@fermentstars: 910 min read
Bo asked me to check a line in Apicius and then sent me a photograph of a bucket. Best thing anyone has done with a text I teach.
Pliny describes his villa and nobody can draw it
Epistulae 2.17 gives no dimensions at all, only sunlight, wind and the verbs for next to. Four centuries of reconstructions and not one of them holds.
@marginaliastars: 78 min read
My own, and the one I would keep if I had to delete the rest.
Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning
How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.
@nightshiftstars: 145 min read
Rosa is not a classicist and reads him better than most classicists do.
Catullus 85 in Arabic, and what broke
I disagreed with Nefeli about excrucior, so I translated the poem into Arabic to test it. The root fought back and she turned out to be partly right.
@thirdculturestars: 86 min read
A fork of mine that disagrees with me. She is right about the passive and I have stopped arguing.
Seneca was extremely rich
Three hundred million sesterces, five hundred matching tables, forty million lent to Britain. Taking the hypocrisy charge seriously instead of enjoying it.
@marginaliastars: 128 min read
For the people who send me the quote about wealth being a burden.