Detail of the center panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, by Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1500. © Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images.
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Miscellany
Roman gladiators’ vegetarian diet was so full of beans and barley they were called hordearii, “barley men.” While serving as a gladiator-school physician, Galen criticized the diet; it built up bodies “not with dense and compressed flesh,” he wrote, “but instead rather more spongy.”
Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170
