Department of Classics

Pompeii, the city covered by lava after the Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE, keeps revealing its treasures. Here, an archaeologist in 2018 brings to light an extraordinary fresco painted on a wall of a villa near the city center that depicts the myth of Leda and the Swan.

The Codex Aesinas is a 15th-century composite manuscript that contains one of the most important surviving witnesses to Tacitus’s Germania, an ancient Roman account of the peoples and customs of northern Europe.

This hand-colored print shows the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal building in the Roman Agora in Athens, built in 50 BCE. The Tower is decorated around its top by sculptures representing eight winds in human form. By the mid eighteenth-century it was half-buried by the passage of time; here, the British architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett show the Tower as they saw it around that time, amidst a lively street scene, with people exiting the Tower through a surviving opening. Men, women and children (with a dog and horses) are engaged in conversations in the foreground, while the street walls of Athens preserve antiquities–bits of statues and columns–used in their construction.

The Pantheon in Rome was built in the second century under the emperor Hadrian. It combines Greek and Roman traditions: the front recalls a Greek temple, while the main structure, a feat of Roman engineers, is the largest unsupported dome in the world. This painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini from the early eighteenth-century shows it filled with devotees and visitors, some of whom admire the oculus, which filters the outside light just as it does today. The Pantheon survives splendidly because of its continued use since late antiquity as a church.