As ancient Rome grew in power and influence, wealthier Romans began to build country houses outside the city. In Latin, such an estate was called a villa. Caretakers, groundskeepers, and domestic help were needed to maintain the house and property, so the Roman landowner built other small dwellings around …
Roman patricians and plebeians ate with their fingers, as did all European peoples until the dawning of a conscious fastidiousness at the beginning of the Renaissance. Still, there was a right and a wrong, a refined and an uncouth, way to go about it. From Roman times onward, a …
This is from the preface to Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1721: Some have remark’d that there is a constant Resemblance between the Genius of each People and the Language which they speak, and thence The French who are a People of great Vivacity have a Language that …
St. Pantaleone was a fourth-century Christian physician and martyr known as the “all-merciful.” Beheaded under orders of Roman emperor Diocletian, he became the patron saint of Venice, and a reliquary containing his blood (allegedly still liquid) is housed in the Italian town of Ravello. Pantaleone is probably the only …
I was saddened to read recently that brontosauruses never actually existed. Not only does that mean that one of the toys of my childhood was mischristened, it also means that there is no creature called a thunder lizard, and I think that’s a shame. You see, sauros was just …
Today medical care is considered a priority in Europe and elsewhere around the world. But this has not always been the case. Surviving written records from past civilisations reveal that care of the sick was not usually considered a priority. Sometimes a chronically or terminally ill person was just …
When Christopher Columbus and his crew first arrived in the Americas, they noticed that many of the native people chewed the dried leaves of a plant that was unknown in Europe. They also noted that some people placed burning leaves in a cylinder, called a tabaco, and inhaled the …
In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans used strips of the pith (interior) of the papyrus plant to form sheets of writing material. The Romans called the leaf of the papyrus plant scheda, a derivative of which was used to form the word schedula, Latin for a “small …
In ancient Greece, every actor was evaluated according to ability and then ranked as a protagonist, deuteragonist, and tritagonist. The prefix told the actor’s position: protos means “first,” deuteros means “second,” and tri translates to “three.” The “agonist” in each of the rankings traces its origin to the Greek …
What exactly is Foolscap? Foolscap paper is one of those things that I’ve never really been sure about and to which I have never really thought about. I had never, for example, noticed that it’s a contraction of fool’s cap. But it is. That’s odd because foolscap is an old …
