The Chronos Cataloga register of films on the ancient Mediterranean

The first film

Roman concrete and seawater: why the harbours still stand

Roman harbour concrete has stood in seawater for two thousand years. This film follows the volcanic ash the Romans dug near Puteoli, and what Vitruvius and Pliny wrote about itn.1. n.1 Vitruvius wrote in the reign of Augustus, conventionally the 20s BC. Then the laboratory: a 2017 finding that seawater grows new minerals inside Roman harbour piers, and a 2023 experiment in which a crack in concrete made the Roman way sealed itself in two weeks.

Plate VI.Roman concrete in section, generated for the film: a large lump of lime cracked open, smaller lumps, and broken stone in the mortar.

For tonight

The First Punic War, narrated for sleep

A different series for the night: the whole war with Carthage, read slowly. 1:07:54.

What is contested

  • The film gives Pliny’s passage (35.166) as a close paraphrase built from a secondary quotation of the Bostock translation, not from a first-hand reading.

See also

The corvus and the Battle of Mylae: how Rome built a navy, 260 BC

Roman building at sea of another kind: the fleet of 260 BC.

Another series

27:43

Sources and chapters

Rests on

  1. Vitruvius, On Architecture 2.6, in the Morgan translation (1914), read from the Project Gutenberg text; both quotations copied word for word
  2. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.166, from the Bostock translation quoted at second hand
  3. Jackson et al., American Mineralogist, 2017: cores from Roman marine structures
  4. Seymour et al., Science Advances, 2023: concrete made the Roman way, cracked and tested

Chapters

  1. 0:00 The room where it rains indoors
  2. 1:35 What Rome actually mixed
  3. 4:20 The sea paradox
  4. 7:30 The flecks everyone called flaws
  5. 8:58 The experiment
  6. 10:25 Losing the recipe, finding it again

Every text these films use, with its translation.

Chapter times as published with the video; each opens it on YouTube at that point.