Andrew Dalby

I look forward to your full reprot [sic]. I imagine everyone gets pretty thoroughly spattered with wine by the end of the game, WW?

I finally went with this one. It banner-prints out nicely onto 9 pages which, if carefully trimmed and assembled, makes a rather nice map that can be made to fit into a 22" x 28" standard poster frame, and is fairly easy to read. I'm still wondering about the vector map (see my earlier posts), and have set my daughter-in-law (a graphics designer) to work on the problem. Yes, your link goes to the most detailed map of ancient Rome that I have seen, except for the incredibly detailed but unwieldy series Carta archeologica di Roma, which divided the city into nine squares and apparently came out in nine two-part volumes (one part was the folded map of each square, the other part was the explanations) around 1964. I have two volumes of this, bought secondhand -- I have never seen any others. The problem with reading maps of ancient cities, Rome in particular, is that they are usually a "palimpsest" -- they show buildings and streets from different periods, overlaid. If you had a map of London that covered the buildings and streets of three or four centuries, all on one map, I guess that would be hard to read as well.

Yes, I learned about the durability of these materials when I was learning to be a librarian (quite a long time ago now!) Vellum and parchment are remarkable. A book with parchment pages, bound in vellum, is quite likely to be in working order 1000 years later without the need for repair. Moderate handling is good for such a book, because the oils from readers' hands help to keep the materials moist. Just two serious threats: fire, and the owner becoming bored with the book (in which case the pages can be used as wrappings for fish-and-chips).

I don't foresee any real difficulty in handling this one, Octavius. Let me deal with it.

Yes, HeathenPride must be right (even if movies are not always the best sources): it's pretty unlikely that Turkic peoples would have reached Rome before the time of the Huns, they simply lived too far away. This is an old quote by Rameses. As you may know now, Rameses, Turkic peoples did not reach Asia Minor till somewhere around 1000 AD -- they were thousands of miles away to the east in Roman times. As for India, I guess it is an exaggeration to say "No Roman had set foot in India till Marco Polo many centuries later" -- because Roman trading posts existed in India and ship captains and merchants went there, maybe even ambassadors once or twice -- but, you're right, no troops, no conquests.

Yes, well, this is what the men might have thought. But it would be interesting to know what the women might have thought. If we just assume that what the men thought is the only thing that mattered, aren't we being a bit sexist?

It seems obvious now, but we live after the great 18th and 19th century economic thinkers have made their pitch. And yet even in modern times there have been conquerors/mass murderers who haven't thought about the business from an economic point of view. I wonder whether, in ancient and medieval times, anyone consciously thought economically. Of course, some ancient rulers did actually do things that encouraged the growth of 'economies' and national prosperity, and therefore increased future tax income and land values, but was it more or less by chance? It's very hard to find anyone in ancient times who says he is following that kind of policy.

But this was rare, correct? I can somewhat recall that only the upper of the upper crust let the girls be educated with the boys...versus the boys were educated according to their family's means. I could be wrong in this. Yes, very rare but more than one case is known. In the case of the philosopher I was thinking of (it was Epicurus I think) people said that a sexual relationship developed ... Typical campus gossip, in fact. There is at least one recorded case where a woman took male dress in order to study with a philosopher. And you might (if you believe the story of Thecla) put her story into exactly the same category: she dressed as a man in order to follow St Paul, who was certainly a teacher, whether or not we call him a philosopher. Don't look for the Thecla story in the /Acts of the Apostles/, though.

or when pronounced as 'ay' as in nEIghbor and wEIgh.) or when it's like EITHER and NEITHER?

It was also common for young men to travel long distances for higher education. A full Roman education included Greek rhetoric and philosophy, and for this many students from Italy went to Athens. Students from Gaul often did their Greek at Massalia (Marseille), the ancient Greek colony. Young men who wanted to study medicine would choose different "university cities", including Pergamum in Asia Minor and Alexandria in Egypt. I'm talking about young men because so far as I know it was mainly men: probably very few women travelled for study purposes, although some Greek philosophers accepted women students.

So if we abide by this hypothesis, the Spanish population must have been decimated upon their initial contact with the Carthaginians. There's another point here: we can hardly manage to go back to a time when there was no contact around the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians (i.e. ancestral Carthaginians) had been trading with Spain for centuries at least before they began to make conquests; and the Greeks traded with both. Many now believe that the Iberians, regarded in classical times as 'autochthonous' in Spain, were migrants from North Africa some thousands of years back. If there was always some sort of contact at one level or another, there was much less chance of a loss of immunity to diseases. By contrast, the really bad epidemics usually talked about (incidentally I haven't read David Henige on this and he is a very good historian) were transmitted between peoples who had had no contact at all for tens of thousands of years. I don't see that kind of situation as very relevant to the classical Mediterranean world.

That's all true, and (for example) hunter-gatherer peoples have a lot to teach the rest of us if we listen, and we don't listen enough; but I still think history is worth doing and, as part of history, it can be useful to know where, when and by what processes complex civilizations developed. Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, is impressive but it's not as old as the earliest developments in the Fertile Crescent, Sumer, s.e. Turkey, etc. Early developments in China are even more recent (I mean, we're talking about 3500 years ago or more, but still ...). The oldest surviving Chinese literature is from around 600 to 500 BC (very similar date to Greek in fact). But very likely something existed earlier, because the earliest Chinese writing is from 1000 years earlier still, on "oracle bones" (on which short texts were written as a form of predicting the future). (About 1500 BC; again, very similar date to the first Linear B texts in Greek). I haven't heard that town life etc. has been found in China any earlier than that (others will correct me if I'm wrong) but of course it could depend on the materials used. If you built towns out of wood, as you well might in the lower Yangtze valley, very little might survive.

Especially since you are considering a range of indicators, you'll accept that there might be more than one answer. Humans invented 'civilisation' more than once. As others have already said, Sumer and Egypt are two very early focuses (about 3500 to 3000 BC); a little later, the Indus valley; later still, the Yangtse valley; later still, Mexico. But if 'living in towns' is an indicator, then you can go back several millennia earlier, with southern Turkey (about 6000 BC), Palestine, Syria and Iraq offering you evidence. If 'agriculture' is an indicator, then earlier still. This also has been invented more than once, but (as someone already said) the Fertile Crescent, around 9000 to 8000 BC, is the place to start looking. Finally, the swathe of territory from the lower Nile to the lower Tigris and Euphrates -- Egypt, Palestine, Syria, southeastern Anatolia, Iraq, southwestern Iran -- will be where most of the very early evidence is found.

I can only say 'Hear, Hear' to that, Phil! Has there yet been a thread for the discussion of this overblown, over-praised godling? Germanicus is depicted as practically perfect in Robert Graves's /I Claudius/. But Graves manages to distance himself as author slightly from this portrayal, because Claudius, the narrator, is shown as hero-worshipping Germanicus, his healthy, successful, good-looking brother, who protected poor Claudius from bullying etc.

Yes, this is certainly conceivable. Prosperous slave-owning states tend to steer economically dependent neighbours into slave-raiding and slave-trading, and we know that in just this way the Gauls did sell slaves to Romans in exchange for Italian wine. In addition, Romans thought northerners beautiful, so Britons (and Germans) could have fetched relatively high prices in this trade. Of course, looking at it more practically, it's necessary to commercial film-makers to meet various audiences' preferences half-way (or more). An identifiably British character would have helped the British market.

At our local market there's a small man with a moustache and a peaked cap who goes from stall to stall selling tickets which (I imagine) prove that you have paid your tax contribution to the town council for the week. He often gets into long discussions with the stallholders he likes best, and no doubt gets a tasting of the best goat's milk cheese, foie gras de canard, or whatever. Presumably Gaius must have appointed men with moustaches and peaked caps to do a similar job.

As regards tyrants I think it isn't as simple as that. In ancient Greek cities "tyrants" (the word has a different meaning now) were often populist leaders who gained power with a mission to get the old aristocrats out. And sometimes they served their purpose and laid the foundations for democracy.

I think it's Anno Domini Oops...it is. Bad typo on my part! I love that Anno Domani. I'm going to use it as an alternative to Ma

Interesting points, Pertinax. As regards context, it's easy to forget that ritual, myth and a bit of medicine account for most of the contexts in which anything turns up in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. All right, you can add 'historical annals' and 'business accounts'. But not much on 'leisure', 'evenings out' or 'binge drinking', so we may never know whether beer occurred in those contexts in Akkadian life! As regards sweetness, yes, I wholly agree with your suggestion that fermentation would have proceeded till most or all of the sugar was gone. In pre-modern conditions, unless you have spirits (which they didn't) you can't easily stop it, can you? If wine (and beer) are sometimes described as 'sweet' in translated sources, that may be because we have no good translation for the word involved.

The stone gates have swung open, and only Bill the donkey refuses to continue. Lead on! I'm with you all the way, Kosmo!

Well, actually from the land of the Pictavi or Pictones. Very close to Rauranum, if anyone can find that on a map of Gallia. Around here, all roads lead to Rom (which is its current name). The palanquin is currently a Renault Twingo.