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The world of ancient Romans abounded in a number of amazing curiosities and information. The source of knowledge about the life of the Romans are mainly works left to us by ancient writers or discoveries. The Romans left behind a lot of strange information and facts that are sometimes hard to believe.
Gaius Julius Zoilos was born in the first half of the 1st century BCE in the Roman city of Aphrodisias (today’s southern Turkey). The excavations carried out there over the last fifty years have revealed his magnificent tomb. At first, archaeologists thought they were dealing with an aristocratic person until an inscription was discovered identifying him as “Gaius Julius Zoilos, freedman of the divine Julius Caesar”.
Roman priests, in addition to their cult activities, sometimes played another role – representing the function of “their” deity. A special case of such a priest was the flamin of Jupiter, the most venerable of the college of fifteen. He was concerned with observer rules, orders and prohibitions, which contained an extremely complex symbolism. On the surface it may seem that Jupiter’s flamin is a man like all the others: here he is an ordinary citizen and does not need to undergo any initiation in order to attain his dignity.
William Shakespeare, the famous English playwright, known to schoolchildren mainly as the creator of Hamlet and Macbeth, wrote many plays about the lives of historical figures, mainly of the old English kings. Among his works, however, there are also some directly related to ancient Rome, such as the drama about the life and the death of Julius Caesar. How faithfully did the writer render the events of March and the days after them? Did he change and colour the story, or did he base his work on detailed accounts of ancient historians?
Reconstruction of the famous ancient sculpture depicting a boxer in rest. It shows a naked boxer resting. The man was presented extremely realistically: you can see the furrows under the eye and blood on his body.
Carved silhouette of a Roman soldier on the tombstone. The object has survived to our times, as the stone was used for construction in London. The presented person is unknown to us by name.
