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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.
The painting depicts a young man. It is a so-called Fayum portrait—a unique type of portrait created in Egypt during the Roman period, roughly from the 1st to the 3rd century CE. These portraits were painted on wooden panels using the encaustic technique (paint with wax).
Qasr Bashir in Jordan is the well-preserved ruin of a Roman fort built during the reign of Diocletian (284-305 CE). During this time, the Romans constructed smaller but better fortified strongholds than before.
Sparsiones referred to the practice of sprinkling water on the audience gathered in Roman amphitheaters and theaters. The water was often flavored, intended both to cool the audience and to enhance the atmosphere. The word literally means “sprinkling” (from the Latin sparsio).
Marble bust of Roman. The artifact is located at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Beautiful Roman fresco that decorated the cubiculum (bedroom) of the Villa Synistora in Boscoreale (southern Italy), dating to the mid-1st century BCE.
Roman fresco depicting a woman wearing a tragic mask. The painting was executed in the Third Pompeian style (focusing on aesthetic effects rather than the illusion of space); it was found in the triclinium of the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii. The object dates to the 1st century CE.
Fragment of a Roman fresco depicting the preparation of a meal. The object dates to the 1st century CE.
Roman mosaic depicting an elderly woman. The artifact was discovered in Italica, southern Spain. Dated to the 3rd century CE, it is located at the Archaeological Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.
The gray dormouse (Glis glis) is a rodent similar in size to a rat, found throughout almost all of Europe. The ancient Romans valued it for its meat – initially, they only hunted it, but by the 1st century BCE, it was already widely farmed. Varro describes dormouse rearing in his work De re rustica (“On the Rural Economy”), while Apicius provides a recipe for its preparation in De re coquinaria libri decem (On the Ten Books of Culinary Art).
