Found in Antiquity

Tag: pliny

  • The Weasel in Antiquity: Pet or Pest?

    It’s a nice time for a light-hearted piece, and I’ve been dying to write this article for a while. It’s about pet weasels in antiquity. A surprising amount of respectable scholarship all the way from 1718 to 1997 has claimed that the Greeks and Romans kept tame weasels as household pets. At the very least,…

  • What would happen if Vesuvius erupted again?

    Here’s the deal. Vesuvius has erupted dozens of times since its last massive eruption in AD 79. But news reporters and documentaries, the most easily consumable sources of expert advice (that phrase badly needs inverted commas), tell me the volcano is overdue for another catastrophic eruption.[1] I haven’t got a background in the earth sciences,…

  • Bird feeds chicks her own blood

    So I was flicking over a manuscript in a digital collection, and saw a scene of Adam and Eve in Paradise. I looked up and saw birds in the trees. And I thought, that’s beautiful. I love birds. But then I saw blood…