Even slave in army
After the tragic defeat of the Romans at Cannae in 216 BCE Rome was so deprived of recruits that there were even enlisted slaves to the army. They were called voluntarii or volones.
If you have found a spelling error, please, notify us by selecting that text and pressing Ctrl+Enter.
Unknown Facts are curiosities revealing little-known, surprising, or rarely discussed information from the world of ancient Rome and antiquity. This category includes unusual details, curiosities, and facts that offer a less obvious perspective on the Roman Empire.
After the tragic defeat of the Romans at Cannae in 216 BCE Rome was so deprived of recruits that there were even enlisted slaves to the army. They were called voluntarii or volones.
Ancile was the oval shield of the same the god Mars, which Jupiter offered to the king Numa Pompilius, the second in the history ruler of Rome. According to the messages, the capital city was to exist for as long as ancile was safe. On the advice of the nymph Egeria, Numa had eleven identical shields to prevent theft.
Elian Claudius, a Roman writer and rhetoric teacher who lived in the times of Septimius Severus, noticed that if someone is wearing a shoe, the animal behaves exactly the same. Hunters wanting to catch an animal used a trick.
Cats in ancient Egypt were sacred. In the middle of the first century BCE Diodorus Siculus witnessed how the Egyptian crowd lynched a member of the Roman embassy who accidentally killed a cat. People did not respond even to the request of Pharaoh Ptolemy XII.