13 collections · 13 open
Collections
Each collection gathers works chosen for concrete observational content rather than canonical status — what something cost, how long it took, who did the work, what it smelled like. A work sits in every collection it belongs to, so Herodotus turns up under travel, religion, food and death.
Membership is currently per work, not per passage. A collection lists the works that plainly belong to its subject, which means a long work joins on the strength of part of itself: Herodotus Book 2 is filed under death and memory because the embalming chapters are in it, not because all 201 of its passages are about burial.
That is why these pages count works and places and never passages. A passage count would read as "this many passages about this subject", which at work-level membership is not true. Tagging individual passages would fix it, and is deliberately not being done by a model: a subject tag is a claim about what a passage is, and nothing on this site lets the model make a claim a person has not checked.
01
Daily Life
Thirty Theophrastus sketches as the anchor — a page each, every one dense with objects and social routine. Then houses described from the inside because the layout is the evidence, jury pay counted out and spent, and laundry lists on papyrus.
Here now: The training of a wife — Oeconomicus 7-10 · For Marcus Caelius — the trial that became a character assassination · Satires 1.5 — the journey to Brundisium
3 works
16 places mapped
02
Food and Drink
Recipes with real quantities that can be cooked and checked. A fish catalogue that will not stop. Two entire books of two-line gift labels, over three hundred of them, each wanting exactly one note and no more.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · Anabasis, Book 4 — the march to the sea · Satires 1.5 — the journey to Brundisium
4 works
38 places mapped
03
Women's Lives
Mostly hostile testimony, and still the fullest record there is. A dowry itemised down to the furniture. An inheritance case turning entirely on whether a woman's son was legitimate. Six poems by the only Roman woman whose love elegy survives. A prison diary in a woman's own voice, until an editor takes over for the execution.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · The training of a wife — Oeconomicus 7-10 · Ab Urbe Condita 34 - repealing the Oppian Law · For Marcus Caelius — the trial that became a character assassination
4 works
12 places mapped
04
Slavery and Manumission
Rations in exact measures, graded by whether the man is in chains. Equipment inventories with people in the first category. A bank manager who had been owned by the bank's founder. And the senate debating whether to execute four hundred people because one of them killed the man who owned them all.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · The training of a wife — Oeconomicus 7-10 · Poroi — ways and means to raise Athens' revenue · Solon — the man who cancelled the debts · The Life of Epicurus — the slanders, the will, and a letter written while dying
5 works
16 places mapped
05
Medicine and the Body
The Hippocratic case histories, each one a paragraph: the patient, the street they lived on, the day, the symptom, the outcome. Most die. The plainness is the point, and it is the plainness that makes them hard to read.
Here now: Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · Airs, Waters, Places — how where you live decides what kills you · The Plague at Athens — Thucydides 2.47-54
3 works
7 places mapped
06
Death and Memory
Several hundred short epitaphs — shipwrecked sailors, dead children, dogs, cicadas, and a striking number of drowned men. And one man dictating his own tomb: the frontage in feet, the reliefs, the ships, a sundial so that anyone checking the time has to read his name, and an instruction that nobody is to relieve themselves near it.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · The Apology of Socrates — a defence that refuses to plead · The Plague at Athens — Thucydides 2.47-54 · The Life of Epicurus — the slanders, the will, and a letter written while dying · On Funerals — the business of mourning · Letter to Menoeceus — death is nothing to us, and pleasure is not what you think
7 works
24 places mapped
07
Law, Courts and Procedure
The machinery, reconstructable from the text. Allotment machines with bronze tickets and coloured dice, a water clock timing the speeches, two kinds of ballot with hollow and solid axles so a juror's vote could be felt but not seen, and tokens exchanged for jury pay on the way out.
Here now: Ab Urbe Condita 34 - repealing the Oppian Law · For Marcus Caelius — the trial that became a character assassination · The Apology of Socrates — a defence that refuses to plead · Solon — the man who cancelled the debts · The Principal Doctrines — forty sentences meant to be known by heart
5 works
7 places mapped
08
Economics, Money and Markets
Maritime credit, banking, mine leases, estate accounts and one full-scale financial panic. The showpiece is the Lacritus bottomry contract, quoted verbatim in court: rate, collateral, permitted ports, jettison clause, penalty terms. It is the only surviving maritime loan agreement from classical Greece and it draws as a priced route.
Here now: Clouds — the play Socrates was still answering at his trial · De Officiis 1 - what a decent man may do for money · The Ship, or The Wishes · Poroi — ways and means to raise Athens' revenue · Ab Urbe Condita 34 - repealing the Oppian Law · Annals 6 — the last years of Tiberius, and the credit crisis of 33 · The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea · Solon — the man who cancelled the debts
8 works
32 places mapped
09
Technology and Infrastructure
Discharge rates tabulated by nozzle size, the specific fraud committed by the water men, hoists and odometers and a steam turbine built as a toy, and a mountain in Spain undermined and brought down by released water with the workers still described.
Here now: Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · On Architecture, Book 10 — machines, and how they multiply a man · Geography, Book 17 — Egypt and North Africa
3 works
13 places mapped
10
Travel and the Road
Sea and road, in the words of people who were on them. A helmsman who downs tools at sunset in the middle of a storm because the Sabbath has started; a merchant's handbook of which harbours have no shelter; bad water at Forum Appii; a desert where the only route markers are the bones of the people who went first.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · Anabasis, Book 4 — the march to the sea · The Ship, or The Wishes · The Life — the Galilee command · A True Story · Geography, Book 17 — Egypt and North Africa · The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea · Indica 18–43 — the voyage of Nearchus · Airs, Waters, Places — how where you live decides what kills you · Acts 27 — the voyage to Rome and the shipwreck · Satires 1.5 — the journey to Brundisium
12 works
87 places mapped
11
Religion in Practice
Weighted towards ritual mechanics and money rather than belief: what initiation cost and how long you waited, the order in which the altars at Olympia were used, and a working oracle reverse-engineered step by step by a hostile expert who had watched it closely.
Here now: Histories, Book 2 — the Egyptian inquiry · Clouds — the play Socrates was still answering at his trial · Alexander the False Prophet — a new god with a puppet snake, and the Epicureans who called it · The Apology of Socrates — a defence that refuses to plead · Acts 27 — the voyage to Rome and the shipwreck · On Funerals — the business of mourning
6 works
27 places mapped
12
The Garden and Its Critics
Almost everything Epicurus wrote is lost. What survives whole survives because one late compiler, Diogenes Laertius, copied it into a single book: three letters, forty numbered doctrines, a will, and the note he dictated on the day he died. This collection is that book, split into the pieces it is actually made of — and then the argument about it. Plutarch, four centuries later, sets out to prove that a life lived this way could not even be pleasant. Lucian, writing to an Epicurean friend, describes a con man founding a snake cult on the Black Sea and burning a copy of the Principal Doctrines in the marketplace, because the Epicureans were the people calling him a fraud.
Here now: Alexander the False Prophet — a new god with a puppet snake, and the Epicureans who called it · That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible · Letter to Herodotus — the physics, compressed for memorising · The Life of Epicurus — the slanders, the will, and a letter written while dying · The Principal Doctrines — forty sentences meant to be known by heart · Letter to Menoeceus — death is nothing to us, and pleasure is not what you think
6 works
0 places mapped
13
The Greeks, in Order
Epic first, then tragedy, then the historians, then comedy, then Plato — read in the order they were written, so you can watch the arguments start. Homer sets the terms. Aeschylus and Sophocles put them on trial in front of an audience. Herodotus and Thucydides ask what actually happened. Aristophanes laughs at all of it, Socrates included. Then Socrates is put to death, and Plato spends the rest of his life on the question of whether Athens was right to do it.
Here now: The Odyssey — ten years to get home, and a house full of men eating the estate · Clouds — the play Socrates was still answering at his trial · The Apology of Socrates — a defence that refuses to plead
3 works
17 places mapped
Order follows the build plan — rights work first, then whatever is already loaded. It is not a ranking. What stands in the way of each unopened collection is named in its own row and again on its page.