a day like today
in rome.
rss the original roman calendar was a set of tables — lists of the days on which one could do justice, sow, celebrate or fight. fasti takes the same idea for ancient rome: every day of the year, one ephemeris told in sixty seconds.
the realpolitik behind the edict of milan
the so-called edict of milan was neither an edict nor issued in milan. it was a letter that licinius posted in nicomedia on 13 june 313, and behind the tolerance there was as much faith as a very cold calculation of power.
ivlivs
the first column is the nundinal letter — the eight-day market cycle. the second, the roman classification of the day: fastus, nefastus, comitialis. the cinnabar dots mark days with a published ephemeris.
what happened in june →days that rome.
why your year begins today and not in spring
1 january is not a natural or astronomical date: it is a roman military formality. the day the consuls took office and the people honoured janus, the two-faced god who looks to the past and the future at once.
they tore out his tongue for his speeches
the birth of marcus tullius cicero, the man who climbed to the top of rome without lifting a sword, only with words. that is why, when they killed him, beheading was not enough: they pierced his tongue with needles.
the only king the roman empire allowed to live
rome hated its kings with a visceral terror, but its religion required that certain rites be officiated by one. the solution was a gilded cage: a priest with the title of king and forbidden by law from touching power.
the exact moment the roman republic collapsed
the roman republic did not fall to an invasion or a catastrophe: it collapsed because a general decided to cross a ridiculously small stream with his army. by crossing the rubicon, julius caesar committed high treason and signed the death warrant of the state.
the day rome applauded its first absolute dictator
the greatest autocratic system of antiquity was not imposed at swordpoint, but in a senate meeting drowned in applause. octavian pretended to give back the republic and they begged him to stay. he walked out with a new title: augustus.
he hid fearing his end and emerged emperor
in the middle of a palace massacre, claudius hid behind a curtain convinced he was next. a soldier saw his feet poking out. instead of killing him, he knelt and saluted him as emperor. that is how the court "fool" came to the throne.
the monument to peace funded with war booty
rome raised the most beautiful altar ever dedicated to peace. legend says it paid for it with gold torn from the peoples it had just crushed in war. the ara pacis is a marble masterpiece and, underneath, a perfectly polite military threat.
the 3 last orders of the emperor before dying
dying in britannia, septimius severus left his two sons a testament of three lines, brutal and cynical: be united, fill the soldiers with gold and despise everyone else. caracalla learned the money part. of the unity, nothing.
the most dangerous roman title in history: father
how do you get an entire empire to thank you while taking away its voice: by having them call you papa. when augustus accepted the title of father of the fatherland he was not receiving flattery, he was redefining what it meant to be father in terms that evoke the absolute authority of a paterfamilias.
how to outwit the emperor's poison taster
killing a rival in rome was hard; killing him when a taster samples everything he ingests demands criminal ingenuity. nero solved the problem with an undetectable trick and erased his half-brother britannicus in front of the entire court, without losing his composure.
whips and chaos: the real roman festival of fertility
every 15 february, priests naked and ritually marked with blood ran through rome whipping women with goatskin thongs. the purification rite that gave the month its name and survived nearly a thousand years.
the day the dead demanded food in the streets of rome
every 21 february the romans carried bread, salt and violets to the tombs to feed their dead. the feralia closed nine days of mourning and, in a story ovid records, was born of the terror that the deceased might return hungry.
if you moved this stone, any citizen could kill you
shifting a boundary stone was, for rome, a sacrilege so grave that archaic law authorised killing the culprit without punishment. every 23 february the terminalia consecrated those markers to the god terminus.
the roman politician who changed the religion of europe forever
constantine the great converted to christianity between faith and strategy: he staked his power on a persecuted and well organised minority. one man's military calculation redrew the religious map of europe.
the day masters served dinner to their slaves
1 march was the true roman new year. the vestals rekindled the sacred fire of the state and roman matrons served their own slaves at table in a ritual inversion of the hierarchies.
how the worst war machine in history woke up
march was not the month of spring, but of mars and war. on the equirria of 14 march rome celebrated the ritual lustration of its horses in brutal races, a sacred act where they also checked which had survived the winter.
the truth behind julius caesar's 23 stab wounds
julius caesar's end was not a solemn act in the senate but a chaotic scuffle in which the conspirators wounded one another. of the 23 stab wounds, according to a single source, only one was fatal.
the exact moment a roman boy lost his childhood
in rome you did not become an adult on the day of your birthday. on the liberalia of 17 march the young man put aside his childhood amulet, donned the white toga of the citizen and, with it, came of age to go and die on the frontiers of the republic.
the sound of bronze that terrified all of europe
in the chaos of battle the general's voice was useless: roman infantry moved to the roar of the tuba. every 23 march the tubilustrium purified the tubas before the war season.
the day the entire world sold itself to the highest bidder
in 193 ce the praetorian guard killed the emperor pertinax and auctioned the roman empire from the walls of their camp. the senator and ex-consul didius julianus bought it. it lasted 66 days.
rome worshipped a foreign meteorite while winning the war
desperate to defeat hannibal, the roman patricians imported from anatolia the cult of cybele, a goddess enclosed in a black stone of meteoritic origin. they accepted oriental magic, but shielded roman sobriety by law.
the cruel fire ritual in the arena of the circus maximus
every 19 april, rome closed the cerealia by releasing foxes with burning torches tied to their backs across the arena of the circus maximus. modern historiography reads it as sympathetic magic against grain rust, in a city haunted by hunger.
the murder that cemented the walls of the roman empire
the traditional date of rome's birth, 21 april 753 bce, does not celebrate a palace but a furrow drawn by a plough and a fratricide. according to legend, romulus killed remus for leaping over the sacred line, and turned border violence into a foundational act.
the real reason rome depended on wine
every 23 april, the vinalia priora opened the amphorae of the latest harvest. wine was more than a luxury: it provided dense calories and, according to many scholars' reading, masked a water that often sickened or killed.
the scandalous festival that shattered roman morality
every late april, the floralia suspended the rules of rome: the sober toga fell, sex workers took the centre of the public stage and the plebeian aediles bankrolled the chaos. a safety valve designed to keep social pressure from exploding.
the roman emperor who traded absolute power for a vegetable garden
diocletian pulled the empire out of the abyss of the crisis of the third century, installed a regime of absolute power and designed the tetrarchy. and then, on 1 may 305, he did what no emperor had done: voluntarily abdicate and retire to grow cabbages.
the dark roman ritual to repel ghosts at midnight
at the lemuria, the roman patriarch rose barefoot at midnight, filled his mouth with black beans and spat them over his shoulder to drive away the hostile spirits of his dead. the domestic terror of the civilisation that ruled the mediterranean.
the day the roman empire admitted rome no longer mattered
on 11 may 330, constantine inaugurated constantinople and shifted the empire's centre of gravity to the bosphorus. a military and economic decision that guaranteed a further thousand years of life to the state in the east and sealed rome's decline.
the disturbing straw tribute of the roman priestesses
every 15 may, the vestal virgins threw thirty rush effigies bound like prisoners into the tiber. a rite that ancient historiography itself read as the civilised echo of old human sacrifices.
how the roman empire decreed the dogma to crush dissent
in 325, constantine summoned hundreds of bishops to nicaea, summoned them to his palace and demanded a single dogma. for the emperor, theology was secondary; what was at stake was the public order of an empire.
constantine's master calculation on his deathbed
constantine the great postponed his baptism until his final agony so as to die absolved of the purges he himself had ordered against his son and his wife. the conversion of the empire, read as a last play of power.
the brutal and final collapse of the eastern roman empire
on 29 may 1453, after 53 days of siege and under the fire of mehmed ii's artillery, constantinople fell. the last emperor, constantine xi, stripped off the purple and died fighting like a common soldier. rome did not surrender on parchment: it went out in combat.
the end of the man who bought the empire
sixty-six days after buying the empire at auction, didius julianus discovered in an empty hall of the palatine that money does not buy the loyalty of those who wield the swords. on 1 june 193 they left him alone, and an ordinary soldier came looking for him.
the vandal sack that emptied rome in fourteen days
the vandal sack of 455 was not a fit of barbarity but an inventory carried out in cold blood. for fourteen days, genseric's troops emptied rome of its gold, its treasures and its hostages, and carried off even the menorah from the temple of jerusalem.
the child emperor who scandalised rome
on 8 june 218 a battle at the gates of antioch handed the empire to a fourteen-year-old syrian priest. rome expected a pliable puppet and received a foreign god sealed inside a black stone.
the last of augustus' blood
on 9 june 68, nero cut his own throat in a freedman's villa on the outskirts of rome. with him the blood of augustus was extinguished, and the secret that would change the empire came to light: an emperor could be made outside the city.
the sacred bunker of the vestals
during the vestalia, in the middle of june, rome's most secret sanctuary lay open for a few days. inside burned the fire that, so the belief went, kept the city alive. the most lethal superpower in the world entrusted its survival to a flame of firewood and to six women.
fasti is the voice of the encyclopædia.
every ephemeris is an invitation: sixty seconds on tiktok, four thousand words in the encyclopædia. fasti opens the door; encyclopædia is the whole room.
an ephemeris on tiktok. and here too, in editorial form.
links to the encyclopædia entries that hold it up.
keeps its own academic apparatus: sources, quotations, bibliography.