This priceless piece of Caligula's mosaic floor was unknowingly used for 50 years as a coffee table in a NYC apartment

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Originally published at: This priceless piece of Caligula's mosaic floor was unknowingly used for 50 years as a coffee table in a NYC apartment | Boing Boing

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In other words a lot of people probably did the nasty on that particular table.

image

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Tell me more about the strange hat.

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There have long been rumors in the NYC art scene about a dealer and her…stables, let’s say…in Westchester. The particulars always changed (sort of like the Richard Gere gerbil story) and I’ve even heard people ascribe it to Andy Warhol, as one of his pettier media/performance/whatever things.

All that said: setting your afternoon espresso down on a 2,000-year-old piece of a demented emperor’s orgy boat floor for 50 years sounds like the setup for an unexpectedly raunchy Warehouse 13 episode…

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Seriously the strange hat is all I care about now. Why can’t reporters ask follow up questions anymore?

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“If you like, we can remove the psychic imprint that’s been causing these … incidents.”
“Hell. No.”

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these ships the mosaic came from were off the chain. there’s a third one in the lake which should be recovered soon-ish, although they were stripped of the precious materials before they were scuttled by the romans as a posthumous “fuck you” to Caligula.

Suetonius describes two ships built by Caligula; “…ten banks of oars…the poops of which blazed with jewels…they were filled with ample baths, galleries and saloons, and supplied with a great variety of vines and fruit trees.” It is reasonable to speculate that the Nemi ships were equipped to a comparable standard.

Piston pumps (ctesibica machina: Vitruvius X.4?7) supplied the two ships with hot and cold running water via lead pipes. The hot water supplied baths while the cold operated fountains and supplied drinking water. This plumbing technology was later lost and only re-discovered in the Middle Ages.

Each ship contained a rotating statue platform. One platform was mounted on caged bronze balls and is the earliest example of the thrust ball bearing previously believed to have been first envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci but only developed much later

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