Ludovicus

All too common. Sometimes you get vinegar when you didn't want it! Yes, pickling was the usual way -- sometimes in brine (salt water), sometimes in vinegar. "Muria" actually means brine, or a fishy sauce based on brine; so your muriaticum might taste salty rather than vinegary. Present-day Italians preserve meat in olive oil, too. My dad will dry sausage in the attic, in the winter, and then preserve the cut pieces in olive oil. It works. So in addition, salting, and pickling, we have "olive oiling."

Bacala` is/was an Italian staple, at least in the south of the country where my people are from. As far as I know, it's always salted cod. It's especially popular around the Xmas holidays. At my family store we would sell tons of it, both with the bone and without. It's a heavy and hard. Once it's gone thru many rinses it can be fried in a batter and even used to make a fish salad. The Puerto Ricans shred it in a batter dish called "bacalaito." Did the Romans use cod? Was it known to them?

A few days ago on a thread I can't locate someone posted that the former magnificent Christian Church of the Hagia Sophia in Istambul (formerly Constantinople) is now a mosque. This is not the case. Though quickly turned into one after the fall of Constantinople, under the Turkish Republic the old church is now a state museum (Ayasofya Museum) that displays the building's Islamic and Christian past. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia Here is a good rendering of the old church, from a Turkish website on the city of Constantinople in 1200. http://www.byzantium1200.com/hagia.html You'll want to take a look at all the old buildings on the same website.

More views of the beautiful bronze horse at the Musei Capitolini. Here you can see the sculpture from three sides. http://www.twincities.com/portlet/article/...mp;startImage=3

Very interesting! What do the Italians call this particular site? If I'm walking on the Via Appia, what sign would I look for to direct me to the ruins of this bath complex?

How important is Satyricon for the study of spoken Latin at the time of the work's publication?

You can find a trailer of Fellini's film here, in Italian. http://www.mymovies.it/dizionario/trailer.asp?id=8950

I find this all intriguing. And honestly amusing. The hand of Rome reaches out from the grave to conquer yet again. A Chilean in my family tells me that in regard to the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, the Spanish colonies were founded by men and the English colonies by families. That explains the mestizaje (racial mixing) that characterized all the lands settled by Spain in the Americas. There were no Spanish women at the beginning of the period with whom to create families. He goes on to say that the founding families of Chile almost all have indigenous blood in their lines. Later they married exclusively Spanish and European. Did the Romans use the same settlement pattern-send in the army veterans without their families so that Roman genes would spread thru the new colony and cement the relationship to Rome? Or did Roman families follow the veterans to the newly conquered lands, esp in the West, to set up life?

Ahh yes - I understand. Until fairly recently, it was trendy in some quarters to refer to 'Black' soldiers on Hadrian's Wall. Since the rise of Al - quaeda and militant Islam in the UK, once more it is now being stressed that these African and Levantine units were Arabs. It is a shame that bona-fide historians sometimes alter or invent information in order to aggrandise ethnic minorities in an attempt at inclusiveness or even appeasement. And I'm pretty sure that the minorities themselves, with a history of their own to be proud of, feel slightly patronised. At the Philadelphia site of the first White House what is being "altered or invented" by archaeologists about Washington's slaves?

I am puzzled, Primus - the political correctness part of this story eludes me. It's an American thing. The repeated mention of Washington's slaves carrying equal importance with the nation's first president and symbol of our fledgling Republic, yet no other workers, residents or ancillary characters receive a mention. It's also "an American thing" to notice the contradictions of democracy. It takes nothing away from the greatness of George Washington to investigate the lives of his slaves. The newly-signed Constitution proclaimed " all men are created equal" and here we have the highest office holder of the new republic a slave master. Many of us in Philadelphia look forward to what the archaeologist will tell us about Washington's enslaved chefs and cooks. We are almost 50% African American and it's high time our story be told, especially when it took place within the walls our first president's Philadelphia White House.

"limes" Think: limits, borders, frontiers

Here's a view of the site of the Villa dei Quintilli from above. http://wikimapia.org/45809/

"Castellar is an all-capital display typeface designed by John Peters in 1957. Castellar is based on the inscriptions on a Roman column dedicated to Emperor Augustus. The incised quality of Castellar is recreated in the shading on the thick strokes. Castellar is a worthy font choice for titling and headlines." You can find it here: http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=202342 The cost is $24-29.

You can't stop people from murdering. There will always be murders. But what if yesterday's killer hadn't been able to buy that gun, had he been a stabber and not a shooter. Do you think 32 people would be dead today? Go after me with "a rope, a knife, or a candlestick" and I've got a lot better chance of not being your victim. Guns increase the damage and that's the reason they should be controlled.

Hmm... "Armed society is polite society." So forget about stepping on someone's shoe on the bus, forget about cutting someone off on the freeway, forget about your dog peeing on your neighbor's lawn--the guy who's wife just left him, forget about giving students the grades they deserve because one of their daddies is packing heat, forget about saying something wrong to a fellow worker who's forgotten to take his anti-psychotic medications, forget about going to any large gathering where there may be two or more factions, etc. An "armed society" would be a descent into hell. We saw some of that hell yesterday on the the campus of Virginia Tech.

"...the Latin for Chinese is Seres" How interesting! The Spanish for silk is "seda" and in Italian "seta."

From the Ward-Perkins book "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" in his chapter "The disappearance of Comfort" : "All over Britain the art of making pottery on a wheel disappeared in the early 5th century, and was not reintroduced for almost 300 years.", pg 117. I recommend this book for its detailed analysis of the disappearance of the material culture after Rome's fall. The work is replete with graphs and other representations of archaeological evidence.

There is a work of fiction, "The Dream of Scipio" told in three time periods, one of which relates the trials and tribulations of a 5th Romano-Gallic aristocrat trying to hold the local Roman society together. It's a fascinating and well-reviewed novel by Iain Pears. Here's the critique from Publishers Weekly "Critic Harold Bloom once opined that literature is a series of misprisions, or misreadings, by writers of their predecessors. Although Pears might not have had Bloom in mind in his latest novel, the premise is an unlikely embodiment of Bloom's thesis. The story unfolds in three time frames, in each of which a man and a woman are in love, civilization itself is crumbling and Jews become the scapegoats for larger cultural anxieties. In the first scenario, Manlius is a wealthy Roman living in Provence in the empire's crepuscular 5th century. Although he has received the last echo of Hellenic wisdom, he is surrounded by believers in a nasty sect he despises Christianity but must find some means to protect Provence from the barbarians. In fighting for "civilization," he becomes a bishop and the promoter, almost accidentally, of one of the West's first pogroms. In the next narrative time period, a manuscript of Manlius's poem, "The Dream of Scipio," a neo-Platonic allegory, is discovered by Olivier de Noyen, a Provencal poet of the 14th century. As his 20th-century interpreter, Julien Barneuve, discovers in investigating his violent death, de Noyen was attacked because he got caught up in a political intrigue in Avignon while trying to save his love, Rebecca, from a pogrom unleashed by the Black Death. Barneuve, Pears's third protagonist, has a Jewish lover, too, but is enmeshed in the racist policies of Vichy France. Pears has a nice sense of what it means to live in a time when things fall apart, and not only the center but even the peripheries will not hold. But the readers who flocked to An Instance of the Fingerpost might not find the pages turning so fast in this less mystery-driven outing."

I just ran across this book at Amazon.com. Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (Paperback) by Dr Joanne Berry (Author) "Cultural identity has become a prominent topic of discussion for both archaeologists and ancient historians (Webster and Cooper 1996; Graves-Brown et al. 1995; Dench 1995;..." (more) Key Phrases: abusive governors, seviri augustales, funerary memorials, Roman Britain, Iron Age, Riu Mannu (more...) docoflove1974, Hope you find this helpful.

I know most of us are fascinated by Rome's history and rich legacy. But it would also be fair to discuss here how the Romans employed terrorism as a tactic in empire building. Mass execution and enslavement of defeated populations, a tactic to inspire fear, were also Roman tools. Witness crucifixion. The thousands of crosses with rotting bodies erected along the Via Appia after the defeat of Sparticus's slave rebellion were surely designed to terrorize all Roman slaves.

Although I tried not to think and just take in the cinematics... Cogito ergo sum

Spring is here and the sap is rising!

"Experiencing Rome," edited by Huskinson has a section on Romanization in the chapter on Roman religion, pages 269-271.

Is there a an image available of the box that contained the silk and scepter? What would silk look like after 1700 years?

From reading the news articles on this tremendous find I learned that the scepter is attributed to Maxentius because of the strata in which the treasure was found. Can anyone explain a little more about the dating of the find? I don't understand how certain one can be just on the evidence of strata. Is there a written record that also pinpointed the identify of the scepter's owner? What did the box look like? What was the condition of the silk that enveloped the scepter. Was there any inscription in the box, on the lid?