Andrew Dalby

I believe cac! is Welsh. Very good at advanced Celtic, those HBO people. There is a Latin verb cacare 'to *****'. It was vulgar but so far as I know it wasn't used as a swear word. There was also a word 'cacula' meaning "a soldier's servant or slave", which might have been impolite, you would think, though none of the authors who mention it suggest that it was a slang or rude term. Edit: Wow! this site is well protected against germs! For 'to ****', which I wasn't allowed to say, you may substitute 'to defecate'. I bet the software doesn't know that word.

No, it's not bad. It means "By Castor" and "By Pollux", the twin heroes from Greek mythology who appeared as visions to fight for Rome in some battle (can someone remind me which?) But if anyone said "e ... pollux" in the films Carry on Cleo or Monty Python's Life of Brian, something different would have been meant.

Yes, Adams is an excellent source. There is a not bad Wikipedia article on bad words Latin profanity which I noticed by chance the other day.

In what countries/languages are the most Roman imperial names in use today? Jules/Julius/Giulio etc. quite widespread C

All we will ever have is contemporary suspicions, unless we can exhume a body (I seem to remember suspicious substances were found when Napoleon was exhumed, having died in British "care"). No certainty. And when Suetonius, or Tacitus, or Dio asserts or implies murder, we have to ask, each time, "Who would have known?" "When, and to whom, would they have spoken about it?" I'm agreeing with you, Phil, in most details. On the other hand, you can't just say "does one really see the princeps-to-be committing murder with his own hands?" and dismiss it -- because, at other times and places, such things really have happened. Sons, and adoptive sons, have killed fathers.

The Carthaginians were skilled and innovative farmers, traders from end to end of the Mediterranean, and not averse to luxury. But what did their food taste like? I love the Carthaginian menu invented by Flaubert for his novel Salammbo in the 19th century (here is a link to the French text and two English translations on my website), and I really admire the research that Flaubert did, but can his dream Carthaginian banquet be anywhere near historical reality? So, what can we discover about Carthaginian food? A potential source was the native farming writer Mago. His book (originally in Punic) was translated into Latin by Decimus Silanus, and into Greek by Cassius Dionysius of Utica, whose work was then abridged by Diophanes of Nicaea: but all these works are lost. A few fragments survive, but, frustratingly, only one of them is actually a "recipe". It's fairly elaborate one, too -- how to make passum (raisin wine). Here it is. You can find an alternative translation on a website on Carthage and its culture but I have made my own: Mago gives the following instructions for excellent passum, and I have made it this way myself. Harvest well-ripened very early bunches of grapes; reject any mildewed or damaged grapes. Fix in the ground forked branches or stakes not over four feet apart, linking them with poles. Lay reeds across them and spread the grapes on these in the sun, covering them at night to keep dew off. When they have dried, pick the grapes, put them in a fermenting vat or jar and add the best possible must (grape juice) so that they are just covered. When the grapes have absorbed it all and have swelled, after six days, put them in a basket, press them and collect the "passum". Then tread the pressed grapes, adding very fresh must made from other grapes that have been sun-dried for three days. Mix all this and put the mixed mass through the press. Put this "passum secundarium" into sealed vessels immediately so that it will not become too "austerum". After twenty or thirty days, when fermentation has ceased, rack into other vessels, seal the lids with gypsum and cover them with skins. Columella, On Farming 12.39. Question 1: has anyone tried this? Question 2: does the last sentence apply to the "passum", or to the "passum secundarium", or are they mixed at this stage? Question 2: what other clues are there to Carthaginian wine and food flavours?

It is neither unusual nor particularly Byzantine that a foreign unit would gain such access and prestige. Augustus himself had a personal guard of Germans, the Collegium Custodum Corporis or Germani Corporis Custodes, to protect himself from the native Praetorians. This guard was revived by Tiberius and continued until Nero. And the Persians used Greek mercenaries. And the Pope has a Swiss Guard. And the British Army, and the Indian Army, both have Nepalese (Gurkha) regiments. And the French have (or had) the Foreign Legion. But still off topic, I fear. Sorry.

And there's good scrumpy around Exeter. Excellent idea for the future, WW. Count me in. Andrew

Domitianus reminds me of two literary mentions of Corinth. Here's the first, a poem by Pindar (about 475 BC) addressed to the temple prostitutes: Young girls who welcome many strangers, handmaids of Persuasion in rich Corinth, who burn the yellow tears of the green incense tree as often as you fly in your thoughts to heavenly Aphrodite, mother of the Erotes: she has privileged you, children, far above all reproach, to pick the ripe fruits of youth in your beds of desire. When Need compels, all is beautiful. And here, by Dio of Prusa (about 100 AD) is a picture of goings-on on the fringes of the Isthmian Games: evidently it was a fair, not just an athletic contest: Bad-tempered professors could be heard shouting and reviling each other round the temple of Poseidon while their so-called students fought with their fists. Writers were reading their nonsense aloud. Poets were reciting their verses to the applause of other poets, conjurors and fortune-tellers were showing off their tricks. There were countless lawyers perverting the law and not a few pedlars hawking everything and anything. St Paul's Letters to the Corinthians are interesting too. I think I might vote the same way Domitianus has.

When I was busy writing /The story of Venus/ (originally Aphrodite), and the publisher insisted I change the major names from Greek into more familiar Latin forms, I possessed -- for several hours -- a draft in which I had changed Eros to Amor. Then I remembered that the form everyone knows in English is Cupid, so I changed again. In telling the story that we know as "Cupid and Psyche", Apuleius usually uses the name "Cupido", but sometimes he shifts to "Amor". I don't know which name is commoner in Latin literature generally.

Yes, a very thoughtless way of speaking. You've taken on the job of fatherhood, he's taken on the job of "son-hood", and I'd say you both deserve 100% credit! I think Claudius had Messalina executed, didn't he? With good reason, by most accounts ...

Yes, exactly. You've got a chimera. Or a mirage. Forgive me, but I don't believe in the links you're making. Especially since we're talking about stone building, which survives so well archaeologically. If some far-off people, ancestral to all the ones you mention, made stone buildings on this pattern, where are they?

By adopting him, for one thing. That meant that Octavian would inherit Caesar's patronage -- hundreds of thousands of people, all the client rulers, all the army veterans and all the civilians who had to be grateful to Caesar for their prosperity. It's hard work being a patron on that scale, as each successive emperor discovered.

Oh, sure, I would agree with you that that is a large part of it. In saying that the Greeks made Greek marble fashionable, I was just looking for an added explanation for the fact that a large quantity of marble was shipped from Greece to Italy -- a fairly expensive item to transport -- when there's a lot of good building stone, marble and other, in Italy already. In Europe generally, the great majority of pre-modern building uses local materials. It's only for the really showy places that people went in for long distance transport of big blocks of stone. And, of course, that particular fashion was first set not by the Greeks but by the makers of Stonehenge!

What's more, we'll be travelling north of Watford (I wonder if Viggen will catch the implications of that?)

Yes, adoption among aristocratic Romans for familial alliances, issues of estate heredity etc was commonplace. In this case, Nero's blood father Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus was dead by AD 40 when Nero was only about 3 years old. However, Nero was already about 13 years old when Agrippina married Claudius. In general I suppose one problem is the translation from Latin to English of the word pater. We view the term quite strictly and differentiate between biological, adoptive and step parentage. The Latin word pater had far more connotations to it than the English word father and the Romans themselves were less strict regarding such familial connections. Yes, we (in Britain) make that difference if we're being precise. But, in the recent past, that wasn't true at all. Rather the other way round. Romans were always open about adoption. Until recently, British people often used to conceal the fact of adoption, so that some children grew up not knowing that they were adopted.

You're right -- not only acceptable but compulsory -- but, let's face it, if you look for slips like that on the Internet you'll never stop finding them ... Getting hard words slightly wrong is sadly a common human failing in this imperfect world. You could try Googling supercede for another example. It isn't in printed dictionaries, but there it is on an apparently authoritative online dictionary. How will a mere pedant manage to supersede that? The problem with written English now is that students (and their teachers) often can't write correctly the words that seem easy and obvious to people who were taught to spell. A lot of people write alot, for example ... And if you can't spell, you can't argue effectively in writing and you can't get the best out of search engines. It can be a real hindrance. hehe, oh yeah i defenitely did not want to be "difficult" this time, just was happy to have a live example to show what I`ve learned!

Absolutely agreed -- Greek art in Bactria, via Gandhara, influenced India in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, and thence the influence was transmitted to southeast Asia, e.g. Angkor Wat and Burubudur. It seems likely also that Indian classic drama, e.g. by Kalidasa, was influenced by the plays of Menander and his contemporaries. And finally, among the dialogues of the Buddha, as eventually written down in Pali by the Theravada Buddhists, include the long philosophical dialogue between Menander (the other Menander, the Indo-Greek king) and a Buddhist philosopher whose name I can't remember. Someone else will fill this in or I will. You might argue that in this way the genre of philosophical dialogue (as in Plato and Xenophon) passed from Greek to Indian literature. I bet someone has argued that somewhere.

My answer is, because it might help us to understand the way people behave. If we're really lucky, it might therefore help us to solve problems more effectively and make a better future.

How's this for a historical parallel? After Salamis, the Persians decided that trying to control Greece and the Balkans was a waste of effort. Those little states were not very rich anyway, so there would not be much tax income; and the Persians already had power over the Greek cities of Asia Minor, which were richer and very civilized. So they left Europe alone. After the Teutoburger Wald, the Romans decided that trying to control Germany was a waste of effort. Those little tribes were not very rich anyway, so there would not be much tax income; and the Romans already had power over the Celts, southwest of the Rhine, who were richer and more civilized. So they left Germany alone. What happened later? The Greeks and Macedonians took over the Persian Empire; the Germanic tribes took over the Western Roman Empire.

Correct. Khmer is one of the Southeast Asian languages that are somewhat 'mid-family': not quite Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese), not quite Austronesian. It's related to Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese, Thai, and others in that area. Not Thai or Laotian, if you'll forgive me, Doc! But, yes, the others you list belong, like Khmer, to the Austroasiatic family. So does Munda, in the hills of eastern India. The Khmer script, like nearly all the south/southeast Asian scripts, can be used equally well for writing Sanskrit and Pali (the classical languages of India) and for writing local languages e.g. Khmer. And these scripts are all related: they derive from the Brahmi script of early India, which is conjectured to have been borrowed from some early Near Eastern alphabet But Khmer is one of the most beautiful. As you are rightly emphasising, related scripts don't mean related languages. Just think of all the language families in which our familiar Latin alphabet is now used!

The name in the Hittite records is Alaksandu, which is really fascinating because it corresponds to Paris's "other name" in the Iliad, Alexandros. But Alaksandu was a king of Wilusa=Troy (Paris never was king according to the Iliad story) and adopted his successor (whereas Paris, according to Greek legend, was himself a foundling, but later "adopted" back into the royal family). In /Rediscovering Homer/ I use this as one example of many to show how the legends resulting in the Iliad must have come out of various historical events at different periods. Alexander, as a name in the Macedonian royal family of later times, was borrowed from the Troy story and the "other name" of Paris. So the Hittite record is actually the earliest evidence of anyone bearing this name, which became so much more famous later!

We read Livy book 21, which covers this episode, at school when I was 15, and I think this question was what really got me interested in ancient history. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I got Gavin de Beer's book from the library (it must have been fairly new then) and the Loeb text of Livy; I bought the Oxford text of Livy (and one of those texts is deceptive because at a crucial point it fails to record the manuscript reading) and the Loeb of Polybius, and struggled through Polybius's difficult Greek. But it's a long time ago now ... My remaining impression is that the easy passes have to be eliminated because the conditions described by Polybius are too difficult to apply to any of them. Favonius's point is valid, but it's a fact that the Romans later built stone roads across all the easy passes, so they can't have been as difficult as Polybius describes. However, I feel uncertain and there is one point that I would now think about differently. The sources say that the men and elephants were breaking through the new snow and sliding on last year's snow. If that is true it must have been a very high pass indeed. But they had dropped their local guides, hadn't they? -- so how can anyone have known that it was last year's snow? It might have been a heavy snowfall slightly earlier in the season. Apologies if there are mistakes here -- I'm writing from (distant!) memory.

I don't know if you intend this, Viggen, but this is one of those expressions (there are many in English, and maybe in other highly-civilised [ ] languages) that you use when you actually mean the opposite. I don't want to hurt you, but ... I don't want to speak out of turn, but ... Listeners know perfectly well that the honest end to the sentence would be ... but I'm going to do it anyway! In the same way, I don't want to be difficult, but ... is likely to precede some waspish little remark which actually makes finding a solution or a compromise more difficult than before. Alternatives, then. I don't want to be awkward, but ... is maybe better than "difficult" because it doesn't have the ambiguity pointed out by Favonius. More choices: I don't want to throw a spanner in the works, but ...; You're going to hate me for saying this, but ...; It isn't as easy as that, because ... There are some thoughts from me. Others may disagree.

I see what you mean, Favonius. There aren't many people around to appreciate one's Latin-speaking ability