This is so beautiful! The pendant reminds the nerdy me of Navi from The Legend of Zelda. 😅

This reminds me of TV SHOW barbarians first episode using cgi to make the roman camp and yet... NO WALLS NO WALLS

The ring did the elite tour: from the tomb to the pope, to scholar Louis Dutens, then sold to the Earl of Beverley and into the Beverley gem collection at Alnwick. A sard Victory intaglio in gold. (4/5)

One of the burials was Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298 BCE and ancestor of Scipio Africanus. His bones and a gold ring were taken to the Vatican, then Pius VI gifted the bones to senator Angelo Quirini, who reburied them in his villa garden near Padua. This garden is gone. 😭(3/5)

The Scipio tomb was first noticed in 1614, then basically lost again. In 1780 two Sassi brothers were just expanding a wine cellar in their vineyard off the Via Appia, broke through a vault, and realised they'd hit the long‑forgotten Scipio family tomb. (2/5)

Now, rarely my place to do posts like this, but Mary Beard's videos sent me down a rabbit hole. I ended up obsessed with Scipio Barbatus, his tomb on the Via Appia, but most fascinating of it all a gold ring! With a pope involved, lol. (1/5) #AncientBlueSky #AncientRome #Classics #History

Legend.

my entire academic focus: everyone you love will die of dysentery. the barbarians are at the gate. the gods are angry. the harvest has failed.

me irl: eppy. must go lie down.

#AncientBlueSky #ClassicsBluesky #History