Writerhof

Posca! No, it's not the namesake character from Puccini's opera "Tosca" that is meant, but actually Posca: This is what the Romans called a drink made from diluted wine or vinegar and water. They used it to disinfect the often not-so-clean water that...

This saying - O times! O morals! - was coined by Cicero in his speeches against Catiline, recorded by his freedman Marcus Tullius Tiro in an early form of what we now know as shorthand. After losing the consul election for the year 63 BC, a certain...

Friday eight in the morning, political science seminar. On this gray autumn morning, I threw on my old leather jacket, left the house unmotivated, and took the tram to an old concrete university building that will soon be demolished anyway. The room...

...this is how I imagine the "scent" of an average person in the Fertile Crescent during the early Bronze Age. Perhaps there’s also a brackish water accord from the swamps of the water-rich rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Akkad carries...

...was perhaps the last of the great Roman emperors before the onset of late antiquity and the crisis of the 3rd century. He was reviled by his contemporaries, and (only partially) untrue legends from senatorial historiography have shaped our negative...