Collection 01 · Open · also tagged food · women · prices · law
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.
Theophrastus is the single best fit for a per-passage commentary format in the whole corpus: thirty atomic units, one public-domain translation, no rights work, each annotatable without breaking anything around it.
What is in it
Each strip is the places that work names, in the order it names themIschomachus explains how he took delivery of a wife who was not yet fifteen, had been raised to see and hear and ask as little as possible, and taught her to run his household — the storerooms, the inventory, the slaves, the accounts. The fullest account anyone in classical Greece wrote of what a woman's work actually was, told entirely by her husband.
A young man is on trial for political violence and attempted poisoning. Cicero barely addresses the charges. Instead he goes after the prosecution's chief witness — Clodia, a widow of the highest family — and spends the speech making her the defendant: her parties, her gardens on the Tiber, her lovers, her brother. He won.
A fortnight on the road from Rome to Brundisium: bad water, gnats, sore eyes, a boatman who ties up the mule and falls asleep. What the poem never mentions is that Horace is travelling with the delegation negotiating peace between Octavian and Antony.
The places are the one thing here with no machine judgement in them. Every count above is of Pleiades gazetteer records opened and checked by a person, and the map on each passage draws from the same records. Named is not the same as visited, and a place that could not be verified gets no dot rather than a guessed one — which is why some works with a great many place names in them show very few, and why a work with none shows nothing at all rather than an empty frame.
Still to come
Proposed, not present — none of this is on the site yetTheophrastus Characters · Lysias 1, 24 · Xenophon Oeconomicus 7–10 · Aristophanes Acharnians, Wasps · Alciphron · Petronius Cena Trimalchionis · Juvenal 3, 11 · Martial · Pliny Ep. 2.17, 3.5, 9.36, 9.40 · Plautus Aulularia · Oxyrhynchus Papyri