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Conqueror of Dacia. Subduer of Parthia. The Roman Emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus — or Trajan as he is known to history — died on August 8 in the year AD 117. By most measures, Trajan was a superior emperor. In his satirical work The Caesars, written in AD 361, the emperor Julian the Apostate puts these words into the mouth of Trajan in defense of his reign and exploits before the gods: "O Zeus and ye other gods, when I took over the empire it was in a sort of lethargy and much disordered by the tyranny that had long...

The fragment above an artist’s impression of how the fish bottle would have looked. Credit: National Trust/Rod Kirkpatrick/F Stop Press ============================================================ Peter Moore discovered a fragment from a 1,800 year-old glass fish at the National Trust's Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire. The shard of intricately decorated glass is so rare it took experts from around the world two years to identify it. Wealth and influence Peter discovered the fragment while part of a team carrying out a dig to understand more about the north wing of the villa. The glass fish may have been used to hold exotic perfume and...

Lost Church of the Apostles where Jesus’ disciples once lived ‘finally found’ The legendary Church of the Apostles, believed by Christians to be the site of some of Jesus’ disciples’s homes, has likely been discovered. The incredible discovery was made in an area believed to be the ancient village of Bethsaida by the Sea of Galilee. This is where some religious scholars believe Jesus’ disciples Peter and Andrew lived. Kinneret Academic College and Nyack College of New York archaeologists believe the ancient Jewish village of Bethsaida, which is mentioned in the Bible’s New Testament, was far larger than previously thought....

A 1700-year-old letter that was recently discovered is said to reveal the way Christians actually lived centuries ago.230 AD The Papyrus P.Bas. 2.43 was written by a man named Arrianus to his brother Paulus, who was believed to be named after the apostle Paul. The letter has been dated to 230s AD and is thus older than all previously known Christian documentary evidence from Roman Egypt.It describes day-to-day family matters and provides insight into the world of the first Christians in the Roman Empire.“The earliest Christians in the Roman Empire are usually portrayed as eccentrics who withdrew from the world...

Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence. Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing them up with aggravating circumstantiality. He takes a living delight in this labor of love--for such it is to him, especially if he knows that all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one that will contain the dreadful intelligence. A feeling of regret has often come...

ACT I SCENE I. Rome. A street. Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners FLAVIUS Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a labouring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? First Commoner Why, sir, a carpenter. MARULLUS Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? You, sir, what trade are you? Second Commoner Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler. MARULLUS...

The Great Theater at Apamea in northern Syria vies with the Large Theater at Ephesus, Turkey for the honor of being the largest extant Roman edifice of its type to have survived the ravages of time. Both buildings are estimated to have held audiences of over 20,000 persons, and both may have had their origins in an earlier Greek Hellenistic structure that was overbuilt in the Roman Era. Only one other theater, the Theater of Pompey in Rome, is known to have been larger. However, Pompey's lavish building is buried under the modern streets of the city, and its surviving...

An Egyptian-Polish archaeological mission, including archaeologists from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, has uncovered the remains of a vast residential settlement. Inside of one of houses found is a well-preserved mosaic floor. Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Ahram Online that the discovery of the mosaic floor does not only show the affluence of the residents of those homes, but also to the popularity of mosaic art in Alexandria. Aymen Ashmawi, head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector, explained that the settlement dates between the 4th and 7th centuries...

Objects from a possible Roman shipwreck have been found off the coast of Kent in one of the most unusual archaeological finds in living memory. The chance discoveries were made by a kayaker in the sea off Ramsgate. The tide was low enough and the water clear enough for him to reach down and pull out beautiful cobalt blue glassware and high-status Roman pottery, called Samian ware. Mark Dunkley, a marine listing adviser with Historic England, said it was the sort of find which just did not happen in the UK. "It is the rarity of the material and the...

On a blistering July morning in Rome, a man in a white hazmat suit is collecting samples from a pile of festering and oddly shimmering liquid that has seeped from a dumpster into the cobblestone lanes near the Roman Colosseum. Around the corner, traffic is backed up on a major street as a massively overfed seagull and a diseased-looking raven tussle over the carcass of a bloated rat. Garbage bags ripped open by rodents spill the contents—rotting food and curdled milk—onto picturesque squares. Citizens have taken matters into their own hands, liberally scattering rat poisoning in the overflowing dumpsters, but...

Archaeologists have discovered the wreck of a Roman-era ship off the east coast of Cyprus. In a statement, Cyprus’ Department of Antiquities explained that the wreck is the first undisturbed Roman shipwreck found in the Mediterranean island nation’s waters. The ship is loaded with amphorae, or large ancient jars, which are likely from Syria and ancient Cilicia on modern-day Turkey's southeastern coast. Analysis of the shipwreck will shed new light on seaborne trade between Cyprus and the rest of the Roman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean, officials explained in the statement. The wreck was found near the resort town of...

On the 26th of June AD 363, the last pagan Roman Emperor, Flavius Claudius Julianus, known to history as Julian the Apostate, perished from a wound he received while fighting off a Persian ambush. The pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus—a witness to the event and an admirer of Julian—described the scene as follows: When we marched on from this place, the Persians, since their frequent losses made them dread regular battles with the infantry, laid ambuscades, and secretly attended us, from the high hills on both sides watching our companies as they marched, so that the soldiers, suspicious of this, all...

Portus Romae was established in the middle of the first century AD and for well over 400 years was Rome's gateway to the Mediterranean... Lead author, Dr Tamsin O'Connell of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge said, "The human remains from the excavations at Portus belong to a local population involved in heavy, manual labour, perhaps the saccarii (porters) who unloaded cargoes from incoming ships. When looking isotopically at the individuals dating to between the early second to mid fifth centuries AD, we see that they have a fairly similar diet to the rich and middle-class people buried at...

Space impact 'saved Christianity' By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history? About the size of a football field: The impact crater left behind A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and...

On this date in AD 337 ended one of the most impactful lives in all of human history. The Roman emperor Constantine the Great passed from human existence to eternal life on May 22, AD 337. (Click here if you need a refresher on Constantine's many and long-standing accomplishments.) A primary account of Constantine's final days and death may be found in the Vita Constantini of the historian Eusebius Pamphilus--a Christian bishop who knew Constantine personally. The entire Vita is well worth reading, but here are a few snippets detailing the final sickness and death of the emperor after 31...

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower. The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region...

Full title: 2,000-year-old remains of nomadic 'royal' unearthed by Russian farmer includes 'laughing man,' haul of jewels and weapons A farmer digging on his land in Russia discovered something unexpected: a 2,000-year-old burial mound containing the remains and artifacts of a nomadic royal — including a strange "laughing" man skull. The trove of amazing jewelry, weapons and other artifacts was found by farmer Rustam Mudayev in a grave near the Caspian Sea, according to The Daily Mail. Mudayev consulted with the Astrakhan History Museum, which eventually organized an expedition to the village where the remains were found. "After inspecting the burial site we understood...

A beautifully decorated room has been discovered at Emperor Nero's famed Domus Aurea (Golden House) in Rome and brought back to light after 2,000 years. The hall is decorated with panthers, centaurs and a delightful sphinx. Experts chanced upon the room while they were doing restoration work on the vault of a neighbouring part of the palace... It was made thanks to a platform erected to restore the vault of room 72 od the sprawling and sumptuous complex, one of the 150 rooms hitherto rediscovered in the grand House the controversial emperor built in 64 AD after the great fire...

On May 15, anno domini 392, the young Western Roman Emperor Valentinian II was found dead in the imperial residence at Vienne in southern Gaul. It is said he was hanged using his own handkerchief. Son of the great warrior emperor, Valentinian I, the younger Valentinian had been declared emperor when he was only four years old upon the premature death of is father in AD 375, even though his half-brother, Gratian, already ruled as co-emperor in the West. Under the regency of his mother, the forceful Empress Justina, and the protection of the army, Valentinian II came to an...

The deepest layers of carbon-14 dated ice found in the Col du Dôme of the Mont Blanc glacier in the French Alps provide a record of atmospheric conditions in the ancient Roman era. Published in Geophysical Research Letters, the study, led by an international team and coordinated by a CNRS scientist at the Institute for Geosciences and Environmental Research (IGE)(CNRS/IRD/UGA/Grenoble INP)*, reveals significant atmospheric pollution from heavy metals: the presence of lead and antimony (detected in ancient alpine ice for the first time here) is linked to mining activity and lead and silver production by the ancient Romans, well before...