Why a piece of ancient pot and a scrap of Virgil’s poetry speak to us down the ages | Charlotte Higgins

Perhaps we don't need to know why someone inscribed an everyday pot as it dried in a workshop: it is enough to know they did it

There are moments when an ancient object emerges from the soil and seems, for a second, to close the gap between you and the deep and slumbering past. Then, almost as soon as a picture has shifted into bright focus, the illusion of connection passes: one is left with the same old sensation of puzzle, of seeing a long-distant world indistinctly and partially, as if through a misted-up pane of glass.

This week, one of those moments of brief and magical clarity arrived in the form of an unassuming shard of Roman terracotta, 6cm by 8cm, found in Andalucia's Guadalquivir valley.