methodus · how this site is made

there is no university behind this site, and no department that vouches for it. there is a method, and the method can be read in full. this is the back room: where the sources come from, how what gets published is checked, what a machine does here, and what has been corrected after publication.

the sources

every entry starts at the ancient source, not at a summary of the ancient source. every claim, quotation, name, date and figure is checked against the primary text and cited by book and section: livy, suetonius, plutarch, ovid, tacitus, appian, dionysius of halicarnassus, polybius, macrobius.

the floor is double: at least one classical source and at least one modern work per entry. when a rite or an episode rests on a single ancient author, either a second citation goes in or the text itself says the source stands alone. since august 2026 the build checks that floor, so a new entry that misses it does not ship. one entry that predates the check is still held up by ancient authors alone, and is deliberately left that way: it belongs to the frozen control group used to measure whether any of this work does anything. it is recorded as debt and gets fixed in 2027, not hidden.

the sources are not an ornament at the end: they live in the file header, with the exact reference, and print at the foot of the entry. if something in the script cannot be anchored to a citable source, the source gets found, the claim gets hedged, or it goes.

the checking

before the web version is written, every script goes through a pass that hunts five specific failures, because those five keep coming back: pinning a quotation on the wrong author; placing a term or an institution before it existed; merging two distinct episodes or two distinct punishments into one; taking as settled what only one source reports; and asserting as fact what is contested, legendary or hypothetical.

that is where the hedge comes from. every entry carries at least one explicit qualification, spelled out inside the body of the text rather than buried in a note. "according to tradition" is necessary, but on its own it is not enough.

video scripts are written around platform moderation, with euphemisms that are not needed here. moving them to the web restores the proper word.

and the published corpus is re-audited from time to time. whatever turns up gets corrected, and the correction is logged below.

the machine

plainly: the starting scripts are drafted with machine assistance, and part of the verification — the citation-by-citation check, the hunt for anachronisms — leans on it too.

what the machine does not do is decide. no entry ships without my reading it end to end, and what is asserted here carries my name, not the tool’s. when something is wrong, the mistake is mine and it ends up in the table below.

the english, catalan and german translations come out of the spanish with the same assistance and are reviewed afterwards. spanish is the original and the reference version; catalan and german are still awaiting a full native review, and i would rather say so here than wait for it to show.

the masthead images are not generated: they are public-domain or openly licensed works, credited one by one on the entry that uses them.

the corrections

correcting in silence is a way of lying. when a published entry carries a real error, it is fixed, and the correction shows up here in full.

the log starts on 1 june 2026, the date of the first systematic review of the already-published corpus. the table records corrections of fact: a wrong date, a wrong attribution, two different things merged into one, a claim with no source behind it. it does not record typos, style edits or citation-format tidying, and it does not claim to be the site’s complete diary: that is the repository history, which is public.

date	page	what was wrong	what changed
2026-06-01	the only untouchable women	the entry dated the founding of the vestal order to the 7th c. bce.	re-dated to the 8th c. bce, the traditional reign of numa.
2026-06-01	the only untouchable women	letting the sacred fire go out was shown as carrying the same punishment as breaking the vow of chastity: live burial.	separated. letting the flame die was a grave but reparable fault, punished by flogging; only incestum carried burial.
2026-06-01	the monopoly of the auguries	"religions of rome" was attributed to mary beard alone.	attributed to beard, north and price.
2026-06-01	the millionaire who bought rome	the cloaca maxima was described as already vaulted under tarquin the proud.	corrected: an open channel in origin, stone-lined in the regal period and vaulted only centuries later.
2026-06-01	the battle of lake regillus	livy was said to place the battle in the consulship of a. postumius.	corrected to his dictatorship, adding livy’s own admission that his sources disagreed.
2026-06-01	the first general strike	the variant placing the secession on the aventine was credited to dionysius of halicarnassus.	credited to piso, whom livy cites and rejects.
2026-06-01	the punishment of decimation	the entry stated that the law obliged the other nine men of the group to kill the condemned man.	corrected to what polybius says: he was beaten to death before the whole camp; that his tentmates were the executioners is later tradition.
2026-06-01	the sound of bronze that terrified all of europe	the quinquatria was presented as a festival in honour of mars.	corrected: the festival belongs to minerva.
2026-06-01	the 3 last orders of the emperor before dying	septimius severus was said to have taken the throne thirteen years before his death in 211.	corrected to eighteen: he took it in 193.
2026-06-01	the most dangerous roman title in history: father	the wife was listed among those under the paterfamilias’s patria potestas.	removed: a roman wife was not, as a rule, under her husband’s potestas.
2026-06-01	the exact moment the roman republic collapsed	plutarch was credited with identifying "alea iacta est" as a quotation from menander.	corrected: plutarch reports that caesar spoke in greek; tracing the line to menander is modern philology.
2026-06-01	whips and chaos: the real roman festival of fertility	the lupercalia passage was cited to plutarch’s "life of romulus".	corrected to "life of caesar" 61.
2026-06-01	the disturbing straw tribute of the roman priestesses	ovid was shown endorsing the human-sacrifice origin of the rite.	corrected: ovid distrusts that explanation. varro (de lingua latina v.45) and dionysius (i.38), who do transmit it, were added.
2026-06-10	the invention of the consulship	lucius junius brutus was named as the first man to hold the consulship.	corrected: the first pair was brutus and tarquinius collatinus.
2026-06-10	the untouchable politician of rome	whoever killed a man declared sacer was said to confiscate his goods.	corrected: his property was consecrated to the gods — to ceres, in the tradition — not confiscated.
2026-06-10	divide and conquer, the network of allies	conquered land was said to be shared out per soldier on terms close to a citizen’s.	corrected: it became ager publicus, and formal distributions — colonies and viritane assignments — were reserved to roman and latin citizens.
2026-06-10	the first monopoly of rome	the pons sublicius was described as charging a toll.	the toll had no source behind it and was removed.
2026-06-10	the consul and the ultimate penalty	the plot was told as tarquin bribing discontented young aristocrats.	corrected to livy: envoys sent on the pretext of recovering his property, who committed the vitellii and the aquilii.
2026-06-10	the millionaire who bought rome	tarquinius priscus was said to win the old king’s trust by lending him money.	corrected: the sources credit generosity, hospitality and counsel.
2026-06-10	the farmer who saved rome	cincinnatus’s sixteen-day campaign was told as a total victory.	added: the aequi attacked again in 457 and 455 bce, and modern historians doubt the annihilation the tradition describes.
2026-06-10	the darkest day of rome	the senators who stayed to await the gauls were narrated as plain reporting.	attributed and flagged: livy’s devotio scene is single-source, dramatised and of disputed reliability.
2026-06-10	the gallic sack and humiliation	the total burning of the city was stated as fact.	qualified: archaeology confirms only localised destruction, and the loss of the archives is a disputed reading rather than a settled consequence.
2026-06-17	the hill and the sacred birds	the cognomen capitolinus was presented as earned by manlius’s deed.	qualified: many historians read it the other way round — the name, tied to where his family lived, came first, and the deed was embroidered to explain it.
2026-06-17	how the roman empire decreed the dogma to crush dissent	bishops who signed at nicaea were said to receive support and privileges.	the claim had no source behind it and was removed; the exile of those who refused, which is attested, stayed.
2026-06-17	the truth behind julius caesar's 23 stab wounds	the word "forensic" was derived from antistius reading his report in the forum.	removed and named as a folk etymology: forensis long predates the case.
2026-06-18	the punishment of decimation	decimation was described as dividing the unit into groups of ten and drawing lots inside each one.	corrected against polybius vi.38: roughly a tenth of the guilty were drawn — "sometimes five, sometimes eight, sometimes twenty".

if you find an error, write to me at hola@yodidac.com and it will end up in this table.