In 1953, US Customs seized a two-thousand-year-old silver cup at the American border and refused to let it into the country because of what was carved on the sides. The carvings show two men together, twice, on a wine cup made for a rich Roman's table somewhere between 5 and 15 AD. An American collector named Edward Perry Warren bought it in Rome in 1911 and kept it quietly at his house in Sussex, where he lived with his partner John Marshall. Customs held it for twenty months and sent it back to Europe. The British Museum had already been offered the cup and turned it down. So had the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. The asking price then was a small fraction of what it would eventually cost them. It was not put in front of the public anywhere until the 1980s. In 1999 the British Museum paid 1.8 million pounds for it, the most it had ever spent on a single object. It sits in an open case now, and anyone who walks in can look at it.