Until next July 31 tourists will be delighted with refreshing drinks made with lemon, camomile and verbena tea, that is remedies used to ease the effects of hot weather, curative mud suggested by Pliny, and by the stories of ancient games in the amphitheatre, covered for the occasion with wide tents.   more »

An interesting survey of Roman wine from the Centre Daily Times on Sunday.   more »

After an exhaustive and not entirely unpleasant study of ancient sexual practices, it is Dr Blanshard's sober duty to report that the celebrated Roman orgy is a myth.   more »

I have just returned from a crowded week in Tunisia, travelling with Jules Verne Travel.

One of my reasons for choosing Tunisia was the mosaic collections at the Bardo Museum in Tunis and in the smaller but equally fine museum at El Djem.   more »

I've just been listening to Paul Cartledge on becoming a citizen in Sparta and Athens. It was the second of two 15 minute talks as part of The Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4.   more »

As I flicked on a light switch in my modest home a while back, I thought how magical that would appear to someone living in ancient Rome. At my fingers, I controlled power not even Caesar himself could imagine.   more »

"A very wise man once said 'never change a successful formula, only strengthen it'," said Terry Morrill, founder of Pacific Pavingstone, a Southern California company recently featured in Inc. 500 Magazine as the fastest growing paving stone company in America. "The system that the Romans used all those years ago still works today and we have strengthened it by using modern concrete paving stones. Who knows? Perhaps, two thousand years from now, someone will say 'Wow, look at this paving - it is still being used today!'"   more »

"There's some culture emanating, fairly high up I should imagine, that's directing people to think more in a very minimalist way: we've got an engineering structure in place and let's operate that engineering structure in the way that the Romans invented it for us," he said.   more »

The Independent of Friday 17th March 2006 has an 8-page supplement called 'The Secret of Happiness - why the ancients hold the key.'   more »

"A recent cleaning operation by laser revealed traces of haematite (red), Egyptian blue and malachite-azurite (green-blue) on the sculptures of the western frieze," senior archaeologist Evi Papakonstantinou-Zioti told AFP. The subject reminds me of my first visit to Greece, when my friend Mark ...   more »

I remember a very pleasant visit to the old museum, and being bowled over by the Romano-Egyptian portraits - so much so that my photos of two of them are among the faces, ancient and modern, in the panorama at the top of this page. My visit was just slightly spoiled by a ...   more »

I found The Dream of Rome part 1 entertaining, and am looking forward to part 2 next Sunday.   more »

After eight years of renovation, the Getty Museum will reopen its antiquities museum Saturday in a replica Roman villa on the California coastline.   more »

Recent findings from a mass grave in the Ancient Cemetery of Kerameikos in central Athens show typhoid fever may have caused the plague of Athens   more »

The founders hoped that, in America, we would see these virtues of ancient Rome, and they knew that under such a constitution the United States would grow into an empire.   more »

'The Parthenon sculptures which Elgin brought back have been in the British Museum far longer than Greece has existed as a country.'   more »

If you move fast you can get the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's life of the Emperor Claudius free on line. He's today's subject, and you can ...   more »

The Daily Telegraph reported the excavation of a villa under a Positano church:   more »

Being a lazy so-and-so, I drove right up to the gate of the oppidum. I shall not do that again.   more »

This seems to me a serious and balanced write-up of the forthcoming Rome series, from The Independent:   more »

The History Channel web site has a mini-site on Rome - engineering an Empire.   more »

You may not want to encourage younger pupils to watch this series on BBC 2 starting November 2nd, because of fairly extreme sex and violence - if we believe reports from the USA - but   more »

Another link from Explorator that may be useful in teaching Pompeii is this:

http://www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/index.html   more »

Classe, September 20 - The first-ever image of a soldier in the Ancient Roman navy has surfaced at a major imperial naval base at Ravenna .   more »

Aug. 9, 2005 — Two brothers are behind Rome's greatest monuments, according to Italian archaeologists who have discovered two furnaces that provided the bricks for buildings such as the Colosseum and the Pantheon.   more »

Discovery Channel has a feature on Pompeii here. It could be useful with Stage 12 of the Cambridge Latin Course.   more »

One or two books from OUP that might be interesting, including OUP's own blurbs. Children and Childhood in Roman Italy. Workbook I: Athenaze. Meno and Other Dialogues.   more »

This report should have been posted earlier, when a 'place-holder' appeared on the blog. I have only now put made my notes into readable form.
Lena Rubenstein and her husband Jonathan Powell were not only our academic hosts at Royal Holloway, as it were, but also both gave cutting-edge lectures.   more »

These are the notes that I made during Dr March's lecture, tidied up as best I can.   more »

Realising that I was probably one of the last seven people in the country not to have visited the Eden Project, I took the opportunity of going there yesterday   more »

Pompeii: The Living City
by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £20, pp386

Read the review.   more »

A world-class archaeological exhibition opened this week in Calabria, in the toe of Italy. .   more »

I followed up these two links from Explorator today.
1. A computer game for PlayStation 2, Shadow of Rome   more »

Eminent Classicist Mary Beard reviews 'Pompeii' by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence in today's Sunday Times. She finds much to praise, but warns against mistaking the lurid speculation for history. An extract from the review:   more »

A blog on the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean has just begun (first post on 28th May) and is already deep in child sacrifice.   more »

Thanks to Explorator I've been looking at these really interesting pages on Roman food, and winemaking in amphorae. They could be an addition to lessons on Cambridge Latin Course Book 1.   more »

80 pictures of Pompeii with a commentary by a well informed amateur are here.   more »

Here's a site that gives you a lot more than at first appears - a kind of Tardis. From the page linked above you can choose any of 15 historical periods between the stone age and contemporary Greece.

   more »

A virtual sculpture gallery does the obvious thing for our internet age. It shows a selection of ancient sculpture, Greek, Hellenistic and Roman, in its original and its digitally painted guise. I've put one pair on this blog, in the sculpture folder of the picture section.

Here's another one that caught my attention:   more »

I have to confess that I came to this lecture sleepy after a day in the open air on Hadrian's ...   more »