Ludovicus

Not only a fiasco, but a tragedy any way you look at it. There are some lessons here. One being that you can't export democracy at the point of a gun, especially when the opposition within never asked you to invade it for that purpose. With this defeat, maybe the US will get back to being a republic.

I've seen these murals and they are quite beautiful. The company's showroom is in Philadelphia. Here's their website: http://www.souli.net/index.htm

Santa Maria degli Angeli Church, I don't think it's a cathedral, is one of the most interesting in Rome because it preserves the Diocletian Baths. It may be that the floor is a more recent renovation. Here's an image: http://www.romecity.it/santamariadegliangeli01c.jpg

I would like to see more Roman writing that preserved conversations a la Petronius's "Satyricon." I'm very interested in how Romans spoke when they weren't orating. What did neighbors shout to each other across the alleys of Subura? I know that writing served a different purpose in the days when parchment was scarce. Nonetheless, if Petronius was able to record a dinner party conversation, other writers must have, too. What would I trade? Maybe one of those imperial ass kissing panegyrics you find from the late empire.

The European Union doesn't have a stockpile of atomic weapons that it uses to threaten the world. The EU doesn't invade (at least not yet) other countries. It also doesn't seek to secretly destable unfriendly countries as the US has done in Latin America and elsewhere. The EU isn't constantly at war to maintain its power as the US has been since the end of World War II. The heart of the definition of empire is power over non-nationals, extra territorial power. The EU may evolve into an entity that fits the definitiion of imperial power. But without an army it doesn't seem to be there yet. While the US, sadly, has been there since 1898.

This US news outlet has been the loudest cheerleader for Bush and his invasion of Iraq. The results of the midterm elections show both Bush and his war to be very unpopular these days. Ergo, I expect the fortunes of Fox News will soon decline.

Fox News.

Ludovicus is a latinized barbarian name. My father is a Goth. My mother, a Roman. He complains that I speak Gothic with a Latin accent. She maintains my Latin is not classical. Could it be that I'm a transitional figure pointing to a post Roman society? The whole village thinks so. Justinian's forces passed through here the other day and what a mess they made of everything. Even the Latin speakers curse them.

I would be interested in knowing those Roman inventions wrongly ascribed to the Middle Ages. Can you provide a list? Thanks.

I seem to remember that the Romans floated mills on the Tiber and that these lasted until the 19th century. What would these have looked like?

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/27/06: "POMPEII, Italy - It was the jewel of Pompeii's libertines: a brothel, decorated with frescoes of erotic figures, believed to be the most popular in the ancient Roman city. The Lupanare - from the Latin lupa, or prostitute - was presented to the public again yesterday after a yearlong, $253,000 restoration to clean its frescoes and fix the structure." For the entire article: http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/nation/15858914.htm

Thanks for opening this forum. The HBO "Rome" series opens each episode with the same short film that includes shots of graffiti, often animated. Has anyone here in the UNRV forums transcribed and translated these scribblings for our erudition?

Exactly, which is why the costs of these downloads shouldn't be borne equally by all users. There's nothing "neutral" about the situation in which Mr. Horn Dog can clog the internet downloading Brittany Does Manhattan to his heart's content while I can't load a tiny page at www.unrv.com. That's not 'neutral'--it's the breakdown of the commons. Cato, do you trust your telephone company or your cable service to fairly assign Internet fees? It's my opinion that the film "Drusilla Does Dacia" is much more elevating and, perhaps, more pertinent to this forum.

If mammoth US communications giants get their way, will UNRV and other not-for-profit sites soon be relegated to a back road on the Internet? Here's a quick definition of the concept of "net neutrality," the way the Internet is now: From Newsweek Magazine: "Neutrality describes the way the Internet works now. All the digital bits that move on the Net, whether they are podcasts, SEC filings or articles in NEWSWEEK, are treated the same, with no fear or favor. This allows a level playing field that promotes innovation, as the humblest start-up or the most modest nonprofit organization can be assured that its content gets the same access to an audience as anyone else's does. But recently the big telcos and cable companies that basically hold a duopoly on Internet service in a given area indicated they'd like a new scheme. They would charge big companies like Google and Yahoo big fees to guarantee that their content got to customers at higher speeds. In other words, there'd be an elite toll road alongside a free but crowded interstate. This loss of neutrality is what upsets the Net community. Google might be able to afford to pay extra, but what about craigslist, which serves millions of people on minimal revenues? Nonprofits and government couldn't come up with the dough to get their content treated favorably. And an innovative start-up like YouTube would never have gotten its audience if its video clips ran in slow motion compared with those of its competitors." from Newsday. For a comparison with Imperial Rome from Bill Moyers and Scott Fogdall: "Like the Romans, we Americans have used our technology to build a sprawling infrastructure of ports, railroads and interstates which serves the strength of our economy and the mobility of our society. Yet as significant as these have been, they pale beside the potential of the Internet. Almost overnight, it has made sending and receiving information easier than ever. It has opened a vast new marketplace of ideas, and it is transforming commerce and culture. It may also revitalize democracy.

The Capitoline Hill is the area today called the Campidoglio.

Phonolgy/Phonetics: the closest is probably Sardinian and South-Central Italian, since the vowels are pretty much the same (albeit in Sardinian in reduced form) as well as the syllable structure...standard (Florentine) Italian can be thrown in here, too. What do you think about the lexical quality of South-Central Italian as regards to its closeness to Latin? In the Italian immigrant community of my childhood the Abruzzese would use "is" instead of "lui", "a logh" instead of "la". There are more examples which I could recall.

Very interesting. Did the Eastern Empire have a Senate in Constantinople? If so, that would be another continuation.

This argument never ceases to astonish me. Whether there were already people in the Americas and whether Columbus knew how far from India he was is completely irrelevant to Columbus' achievement--which was to discover a new population of people (an anthropological discovery), a new sea route (a navigational discovery), and the existence and relations among previously uncharted land masses (a cartographical discovery). Before Columbus, no one had ever tried an exploratory sea voyage of such audacity, nor was any previous exploration so far reaching in its consequences. And these consequences obtained because Columbus RECORDED where he was going. That's what made Columbus' discovery of the Americas different from all the previous landings in the Americas, and it's what made it more consequential than any of the previous ones. I don't disagree with any of these achievements on the part of Columbus. I just don't understand the why his day is put forward as a holiday for Italian Americans. I've read his diaries in the original Spanish. Did he ever write in Italian? Do you see my problem with him? He enriched the Spanish, Portuguese, and other European powers with new empires but what did he do for Italy?

Hmmm. Maybe we Italian Americans can come up with a better namesake for a holiday in our honor. Why not a day named for Garibaldi or another of the heroes of the Risorgimento, the struggle to unite Italy.

I checked the IMDB.com website which shows no video tape or DVD version...yet. If anyone locates one, please inform UNRV.

Classical Era vs Antiquity Here's my problem with using the two as synonymous. The term "classical" is often used to mean the best of Roman and Greek civilization. As in "Classical Latin": "The period of Classical Latin, when Latin literature is widely considered to have reached its peak, is divided into the Golden Age, which covers approximately the period from the start of the 1st century BC up to the mid-1st century AD, and the Silver Age, which extends into the 2nd century AD. Literature written after the mid-2nd century has often been disparaged and ignored;" from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_literature On the other hand, the term "antiquity" means ancient. I take "classsical era" to mean the best of Roman and Greek antiquity. The first being a subset of the second. I'm not really sure how to mark the end of antiquity but I'm open to listening to what others have to say about the question. I think that it's a difficult one to tackle beccause you have to take into account changes in cultural habits as well as a host of other changes such as language, building styles, learning, etc.

The classical era and antiquity are not really the same, in my opinion.

These could be markers for the end of Roman antiquity in the West: The loss of traditional schooling, rhetoric, the study of classical authors Burial within the walls of the cities. The end of the Senate in Rome. The conversion of civic buildings into churches. The change from a money economy to one based on barter.

"'De Reditu' takes place in 415 AD- five years after the devestating sack of Rome by the Visigoths- and tells the true story of Claudius Rutilius Namatianus, the last great pagan poet of a declining Roman Empire. A nobleman frustrated by the dominance of Christianity (which he blames for Rome's troubles) and a failed love affair, Claudius embarks on a sea journey to his native Gaul in order to raise an army and bring glory back to the Empire." I'll check this out. Never heard of this movie before. Does it talk about the sack of Rome? I would be more interested if it does, than after the sack. "De Reditu" takes place after the sack of Rome. The protagonist, Claudius, is on the move a lot. This is no "cast of thousands" film. It's mostly Claudius experiencing the collapse of Roman rule on the way to Gaul from Rome. No shots of the Rome's Forum or large cityscapes. In Rome there are just a number of interior scenes in a house where Claudius is staying. I remember another scene on the road when Claudius and his companions have a meal at a tavern where there are barbarians being served. There's tension between the two groups. I saw the film at the Philadelphia International Film Festival maybe 2 years ago. I felt the theme, the writing, direction, costumes, dialogue, and acting were very good.