For those who came here via my email, can you believe I spelled "salvete" wrong? I'm going to blame autocorrect, who kept trying to change it to "salivate." And now all I can picture is a bunch of Romans yelling that at each other. So, enjoy that mental image with me!
One of the things I love so much about people who are passionate about history are the number of them who get out there and recreate historical things. From recipes, to clothing, to weapons, to music, the list really is endless.
During lockdown, I got into book binding. I still make a bunch of mistakes, but wow, there is just something so satisfying in learning a new skill, even if it's one as weird as that. My first major project was printing and binding the book that my sister wrote her thesis on: Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and The Natural History of Man, by William Lawrence, F.R.S. What can I say? We really know how to party in my family. The best part was, the PDF that was uploaded to Project Gutenberg has about twenty pages of advertisements in the back, so I got to include those as well:
Now obviously there isn't much use for bookbinding when it comes to recreating texts from Ancient Rome, but yes, I do want to figure out how to make scrolls! Fortunately, there are a lot of other people out there with the skills to recreate ancient day-to-day items.
In Sub Rosa, both Valerius and Atreus have wax tablets, the notes app of their time. Valerius's, naturally, is fancier. I was delighted to discover that there are a whole lot of wax tablets for sale in places like Etsy and eBay, and naturally I had to buy one. To be honest, I haven't used it much because it's a pain to have to light a candle to heat the end of the stylus every time I want to erase what I've written. Fun fact: some people recommend using a blow torch!
Here's my wax tablet and broze stylus. The pointy end of the stylus is for writing, and the flat end is for erasing. The tablet is made up of two boards with wax inside, held together by leather.
And here's some messy writing. Users of DuoLingo will regnise that as "Wine makes me sick." I tried to find "We must not sacrifice the dog," a phrase I repeated a lot the day that Tully ate my pillow.
In Roman times, children used wax tablets to learn how to write. There's no point wasting expensive paper on that, after all. And adults, of course, used wax tablets for a lot of things: grocery lists, calculating sums, planning their days, and, if you're a plebeian vigile with a chip on your shoulder and a bloody crime to solve, a list of murder suspects.
Are there any examples of historical items that you'd love to have a recreation of?
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