Ludovicus

The distaste for the barbarians didn't stop the Roman craze for blonde and red hair... barbarian hair. I think you'll find several references to this on the writers of the Empire. Rather than distain the German tribes, at one level Rome eroticized them. Romans were of different social classes and religions. You might give some thought how each of theses social niches viewed the barbarians. There is evidence, I have it in one of my books on the later Empire, that when Alaric left after sacking Rome in 410, thousands of Roman slaves went with him, on their own accord.

I've just come from Viggen's very interesting list of June titles on Roman History. This one made me very happy to see. Rome (Oxford Archaeological Guides) (Paperback) ~ Amanda Claridge et al. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199546835/ I have the 1998 addition, which I keep on my night stand. If you want to buy a guide for your trip to Rome, actual or mental, this is the best one. While most focus on the Eternal City's ruins within the bounds of the Republican to Empire range, t Claridge's Oxford Archaeological Guide will give you the history of many ancient sites from their beginnings in Rome of the Kings through the Late Empire and often into more recent times. Want to see how the Forum was arranged toward the end of the Empire? What temple-to-church conversions were going on there in the 7th century? Interested in the City in Byzantine times? How was the Colosseum used through the Middle Ages? This is the book. I hope that the 2010 edition will devote some description of the latest finds, e.g. the 2007 discovery of the Lupercal, the cave where the Romans believed Romulus and Remus were suckled by the she wolf. Thanks, Viggen for your monthly list of titles!

Plunging into the waters off Alexandria Tuesday, divers explored the submerged ruins of a palace and temple complex from which Cleopatra ruled, swimming over heaps of limestone blocks hammered into the sea by earthquakes and tsunamis more than 1,600 years ago. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100525/ap_on_...ken_treasures_2

Ah I see. So they would stall for as long as possible because their target may have 'contacts'. Before you kill anyone you'd want to do some research first. OK, who's this guy connected to? What would be the repercussions? We need to think in the way of a Roman, not as a 21st century individual who may see himself/herself as a fully powered lone actor. It wasn't just a Roman thing to belong to a self-defense/self-promotion network. In fact, I think it's the way most of the world works today--outside of affluent societies. I lived in Mexico and know Italian culture. You're only as safe as the amount of influence that your network can muster.

In terms of individual defense, your best bet would be your network of friends and clients to prevent a home invasion by government. Roman culture was based on the patron/client relationship. The officials would be reluctant to invade the home of powerful or well connected individuals.

This thread makes me want to visit the walls of Rome during my next visit. I know that in the struggle for Italian unification in the mid-1800s battles were fought at the walls with the Pope relying on them to prevent the incorporation of Rome into a unified Italy.

By AD 311, the needs of the Empire take precedence over individual rights. Besides, the Senate has very little power in this period.

Fascinating article on a great discovery! What kind of workshop/machine shop could have produced such a marvel? If the shop that produced this computer, does it stand to reason that it produced other similarly machined products? For what purpose? Where would the workshop have been located? This discovery provokes so many tantalizing questions.

For me, in the realm of non-fiction, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard.

Thank you so much for this educational short video. I recommend it to all who would like to learn more about Panonnia.

I agree that most of the article was devoted not to Altinum but to innovations in infrared aerial photography. What was new for me was the existence of the ancient city on the Laguna Veneta. Here's another article with a bit more information on Altinum http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...-unearthed.html

http://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/feature/te...st-city-altinum "The lagoon city of Altinum was one of the richest in the Roman Empire

Are you being sarcastic here, Kosmo? The "democratic" Athenians of classical times may have introduced technological advances in silver mining built on the brutal exploitation of slaves, but this society could hardly be credited with innovation in regard to social relations. What were the Athenian mining innovations that you refer to?

Yes, not what I had imagined, Galba. I seem to remember reading that around the time of Christopher Columbus, a Roman lead sarcophagus was found. Opening it, the discoverers found a perfectly intact Roman girl preserved in oil. They removed her and put her on display. By the end of that first day her body began to decompose terribly. I don't think we have a similar find here from the 2009 discovery, given the condition of the coffin. Nonetheless, I'd be interested in knowing more info. on the 15th-century recovery of the young Roman girl entombed in oil.

This discovery is at least a year old, nonetheless it's quite interesting: Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said Nicola Terrenato, the University of Michigan professor of classical studies who leads the project

No one is making any claims about the effect of technology on slavery; the claim is that slavery has a negative effect on (some) technology. And let's be clear about what kind of technology-- labor-saving devices. The claim is that if you have cost-free labor (a questionable assumption about slaves to be sure), then it's easier to add another slave to get more work done than to purchase some kind of device that will do it for you. Given this, all this discussion about weaponry is completely beside the point. Thanks for clearing the air. I agree.

Very clear answer, thanks. I suppose that's a real difference between the scientific revolution and one of the reasons it didn't happen in ancient rome. In renessiance Europe, science was a prestidgious pursuit for nobility. Not so in ancient rome. I agree that there were several factors limiting the adoption of new technologies in the Roman period. Nonetheless, I find it compelling that the conservative Roman elites that failed to take technological advantage of Greek science were part of a slave aristocracy. This contrasts with the non-slave owning aristocracy of the Renaissance whose nobles delighted in gaining new scientific knowledge for their own and society

Can you cite a source for this opinion regarding sound similarity between spoken Spanish and the sounds of "ancient" Roman poetry? Speaking as a former teacher of both Spanish and Latin and a student of Italian I do not see how such a general statement can be made. In the long history of spoken Latin there was at least one major pronunciation shift that involved the quality the vowel accent and possibly more changes regarding consonant pronunciation and syllabication. In looking at the pronuciation of the Spanish of Spain I hear two varieties of the letter C, one in the Madrid area and the other from Sevilla, neither of which have produce the sound of the letter C in Republican times. Queen Victoria's name is a Latin word. Does that prove her native language was Latin?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100412/ap_on_.../ml_egypt_mummy From Yahoo: CAIRO

This is a new source for me of titles, among other items, of classical works whose texts are lost. With such a large number of entries, the work of translating and investigating these is still ongoing. From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suda The Suda or Souda (Greek: Σοῦδα) is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The derivation is probably[1] from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold," with the alternate name, Suidas, stemming from an error made by Eustathius, who mistook the title for the proper name of the author. From: Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography: http://www.stoa.org/sol/ The Suda is a massive 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, derived from the scholia to critical editions of canonical works and from compilations by yet earlier authors. The purpose of the Suda On Line is to open up this stronghold of information by means of a freely accessible, keyword-searchable, XML-encoded database with translations, annotations, bibliography, and automatically generated links to a number of other important electronic resources. To date over 170 scholars have contributed to the project from eighteen countries and four continents. Of the 30,000-odd entries in the lexicon, over 25,000 have been translated as of this date, and more translations are submitted every day. Although our work is not done, you can already browse and search our database of translated entries, and you can use the tools we offer to do things like search for Greek words in the entire text of the Suda. You are also welcome to apply to become a contributor yourself, either as a translator or as an editor (or both). More on that below. For more information about the project, you can read this article, originally published in Syllecta Classica 11 (2000) 178-190, as well as this article by Anne Mahoney. You can also read this brief history of the project. From: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Suda The Suda is somewhere between a grammatical dictionary and an encyclopedia in the modern sense. It explains the source, derivation, and meaning of words according to the philology Philology Philology considers both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies.Classical philology is the philology of the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages... of its period, using such earlier authorities as Harpocration Harpocration Valerius Harpocration was a Greek grammarian of Alexandria, probably working in the 2nd century CE. He is possibly the Harpocration mentioned by Julius Capitolinus as the Greek tutor of Lucius Verus ; some authorities place him much later, on the ground that he borrowed from Athenaeus... and Helladios. There is nothing especially important about this aspect of the work. It is the articles on literary history that are valuable. These entries supply details and quotations from authors whose works are otherwise lost. They use older scholia to the classics (Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, etc.), and for later writers, Polybius

That's a somewhat biased viewpoint which is prevalent among traditional Western Historians, and many modern scholars disagree with this viewpoint. The increase in Imperial authority was an unfortunate but necessary evil to deal with an ongoing crisis (loss of the West, barbarian incursions, Islam, religious controversies within Christianity.) The East never allowed the Church to become too powerful, whereas in the West, Roman catholicism was able to exert a lot of political influence over the various kingdoms. There is a great book that I am reading now which presents a refreshing view of Byzantine Civilization: http://www.amazon.com/Lost-West-Forgotten-...1252&sr=1-1 There were numerous great leaders that repeatedly pulled Eastern Empire out impending collapse. There were also some extremely inept rulers who lost all the ground that their predecessors had gained. There were numerous pressures on them from all sides, and they had to know what they were doing in order to survive as long as they did. Were there some scary Byzantines who used their religious views as club to control people? Yes e.g. the Iconoclasts, an unfortunate setback which alienated them from the west, but generally they were much more advanced intellectually, economically, and politically than the barbarian West. I agree that the Byzantines were more advanced than the West, particularly prior to the 1200's. Though Moorish Spain, with access to many classical works and technology based on these via Arab translations, was a near equal to the Roman East. My point is that Byzantines seem to have abandoned the study of philosophy in favor of theology. Remember that Justinian closed the Academy in Athens. Thanks for the link to Brownworth's "Lost to the West." It looks like a very interesting and worthwhile book. I plan to order it.

It is generally accepted that it was the Byzantines that preserved most of the works of Classical Antiquity. Yes, the Byzantines held on to the works of Classical Antiquity, but they don't seems to have had much interest in them. In the West, we rediscover these ancient sources of knowledge thanks to the Arabs in Spain and then, secondarily, from refugees fleeing Constantinople's fall. From Richard E. Rubenstein's very interesting "Aristotle's Children," pp. 76-77: Despite the survival of Roman authority in Constantinople, the same shift from this-worldly to otherworldly concerns that marked post-Roman thinking in the West occurred in the East as well, although it took place more sporadically and slowly...While scholars in Alexandria and Constantinople continued to read Plato and Aristotle, "they commented endlessly on the learning inherited from the past, but almost never doubted this learning or tried to move beyond it."1 To some extent, this petrifaction of philosophy can be attributed to the overcentralized administration of the Byzantine emperors, which destroyed the independent aristocratic elite. But it was also the result of people's passionate interest in matters of faith and their inclination to use philosophy,if at all, as a stick with wihich to beat their ideological opponents. 1 Ferdinand B. Artz, etc.

Upon their entrance into Western history in the fifth century, they were the most barbaric of barbarians, practitioners of human sacrifice, cattle rustlers, traders in human beings (the children they captured along the Atlantic edge of Europe), insane warriors who entered battle stark naked. And yet it was the Irish who were around to pick up the pieces when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West under the increasing assaults of Germanic tribes. It's one of the ironies of history. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/opinion/...dsredirect=true

Perhaps the other characters in your story will be found writing graffiti about your heroine.

Pliny was convinced (perhaps rightly so) that Roman character was suffering due to slaves doing all the hard agricultural work that the Romans themselves used to do in the time of the Republic. Rome would never see another Cincinnatus. -- Nephele Yes, and with the small famer unable to compete with the latifundia the city of Rome began to fill with the landless unemployed.