Andrew Dalby

Can't remember if it has already been said above: there was really no reliable anaesthetic. An analgesic helps instead, and the handiest analgesic for Roman doctors was opium. That's why poppies were a valuable resource. Cato (On Farming) recommends you to sow poppies where you had a bonfire.

Hi, DUCIT AMOR PATRIAE means "Patriotism leads me" here is the website i found it on and there is also a bookhttp://www.4crests.com/phcoofar.html I have been researching my family name for quite a while now and would be appreciated if you could tell me anything and could you tell me your name to help me with our family tree please Regards But why trust any website more than UNRV History? We did it better here, believe me. "Patriotism" has many connotations, certainly including "love of the fatherland". But "amor patriae" means, precisely, "love of the fatherland"; therefore the motto means, precisely, "love of the fatherland leads". You can say that it leads "me" or "us" depending on the context: Latin has no need to specify. Tell them this at www.4crests.com!

Just a couple of comments on QVS's proposal: "Peregrini should probably be plural Peregrinorum" But it can make sense as it is: "The Traveller's Forum". That's OK (though nothing wrong with QVS's alternative, which would mean "The Travellers' Forum"!) I would leave this one alone. "Humanitas and Romana should probably be switched" There's no real reason to do that. It is legitimate in Latin to place adjectives before nouns -- it gives a different emphasis, and in this case the rhythm is nice. I know we were told not to do it in Latin classes (a century ago!) but that was to get us out of the English habit of ALWAYS putting the adjective before the noun.

If they did reach the Americas, they obviously took one look and decided 'The less said about this the better'. Columbus, by contrast, couldn't keep his mouth shut. For better or worse.

Sorry, Ursus!

Ah, but why should they try and stop it? Eh? It's a great source of wealth for their country. The Afrcian families in Europe bring money to their country, to the remaining family members living africa. It is a significant source of wealth for their poor economies. Absolutely. I've moved to the country where I thought I could find the best balance between income and lifestyle. It happened to be legal for me to do it. But how could I possibly blame others for trying to do the same? -- especially since many of them, unlike me, are faced with poverty and even starvation if they stay put.

And did it clear the stomach? Or don't we want to know? I now have a mental picture of wealthy bon vivant Roman cocks (Gallus gallinaceus) in their luxury farmyards demanding a daily half pint of camel's milk before adjourning to the henhouse. But what they didn't see was the surgeon's knife approaching ...

I have a feeling you're talking about butchers' shops rather than residential neighbourhoods, but I thought I'd better verify that ... Well, yes. Calfs' brains (and some other parts) are therefore no longer such a good idea, since it seems highly probable (though I don't believe it was ever proved, and given the supposed incubation period I wonder whether it ever could be proved) that the agent causing v-CJD crossed the species barrier from cattle to human. Mind you, looking at it clinically and statistically, there's a certain number of risks that older people can reasonably take that younger ones shouldn't, unpopular though it may be to tell the younger ones so. This is one of those, I believe.

Should it perhaps be mentioned that the Latin word for barber is tonsor and the Greek is koureus or even xur

I agree with Kosmo that to take ethnic information from those maps is a complicated thing to do, and might not give the right answer. Forgive me if someone's made this clear already -- I haven't reread the whole thread -- but the ethnic shift that we see at the end of the Western Roman Empire (racial shift, if it technically was one, which I doubt) had been happening for at least 900 years from historical information (and probably a lot longer if archaeological and linguistic information is taken into account). Why 900? Because that's how old in 476 AD was the play by Aristophanes which seems to show that in Athens public order was maintained by Scythian 'policemen' (who were slaves), and, what's more, that Scythian policemen screwed Greek women when they had the chance. From all that time, throughout the Greek expansion, the rise of Rome, and the early Empire, slaves continued to be drawn from both north and south of the Mediterranean belt as well as from within it -- Africans from one side, northern Europeans/Eurasians from the other side. Very many of them died without contributing their genes to the Greek-and-then-Roman general pool: others, however, did contribute. The gradual shift from slave raiding, to employment of auxiliaries, to permission for warrior groups to settle in the Empire, was exactly that -- a gradual shift. Does anyone really know if the total volume of migration changed?

I second that.

True, but the Persian Empire before Alexander was quite a bit different from these. As DoL has heard, it extended all the way from the Greek cities of Asia Minor to the edge of the river Indus in western India -- also, sometimes, taking in Armenia to the north and Egypt to the south. In fact, practically the whole area that Alexander eventually ruled, plus a few other bits that Alexander never got around to dealing with. The best author on the Persian Empire is, definitely, Herodotus! Never yet beaten. He wrote about a hundred years before Alexander, but the Empire had already reached its full extent in his time and he travelled through quite a lot of it. A good recent writer on the Persian Empire is Pierre Briant, but I don't know if his book on the history of the Empire has been translated into English. But you'll be happy enough with the French, Docoflove?

That's right, I think. There are none. But, oddly enough, the Galicians (speaking the Portuguese-like language of the far northwest) get included as honorary Celts in some of the international Eisteddfods etc. I don't really know why.

Si vales, mi Octavi, valeo.

There's nothing idiotic about testing IQ. IQ tests allow one to diagnose developmental disorders and mental retardation, make predictions about who needs additional instruction in the schools, and evaluate other testing instruments for their discriminative power. If IQ tests did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them ... You're right of course. But they are among the statistical measures that can easily be misused or over-used. My mother was a village schoolmistress at a time when tests of that kind determined what kind of secondary school/high school children moved to at age 11. She gave an example from a test whose results were crucial in one of those years. Choose a word to fill the gap: The countryside is ____. (noisy / quiet) Now, what country child, surrounded by cows mooing, sheep bleating, donkeys braying and tractors doing whatever tractors do, is going to say that the countryside is quiet? But those who answered 'noisy' lost a mark.

Compare the Latin words for Hello and goodbye. When greeting people in Latin you said ave or have (apparently borrowed from Punic) or chaere (borrowed from Greek); but when saying goodbye you said vale, a native Latin word meaning

Compare the Latin words for Hello and goodbye. When greeting people in Latin you said ave or have (apparently borrowed from Punic) or chaere (borrowed from Greek); but when saying goodbye you said vale, a native Latin word meaning

Couldn't agree more. It was about that time if I recall correctly that the USA was frightened that waves of ignorant immigrants were destined to outbreed the 'native' Anglo-Saxons, thus reducing IQ and causing collapse of the nation. Gould's Mismeasure of Man was good on denouncing this sort of stuff (as well as the idiocy of IQ testing). Yes. Tenney Frank was not bad when he stuck to economic history. His mistake here was to rely on half-baked hypotheses about genetics. Down to the 1930s, many others did the same, with well-known results. I suppose the question to put to him, should one meet him in Purgatory, would be: can you, T.F., think of one state or empire in history that actually has collapsed as a result of racial mixture? And don't name the United States, because, in spite of predictions, it hasn't collapsed yet ...

I think that's an excellent example, Kosmo.

Yes, but I can't seem to do the accents. I'll give you another useful quote (at least to start an argument): as the Greek poet Pindar said, αριστον το υδωρ. Water is best. And it took me an age to find the omega on the keyboard. Which font did you use from this forum's menu? I know you can use 'symbol' for basic Greek but I don't see that as a menu option. I use SPIonic when writing in MSWord because I know the trick for accents in that font (and I like the look of it) I didn't take it from the menu. I changed from English keyboard to Greek keyboard on my Windows status bar (if that's what it is -- down at the bottom there). Or I can use the character table utility that came with Windows XP, and with that I can do modern Greek accentuation, thus άριστον το ύδωρ but I don't see the extra accents needed for classical Greek. When I type Greek in Word I use Silver Mountain fonts, SGreek or SGkClassic, because they go with the software I use for the TLG CD-ROM of Greek texts, but those fonts wouldn't work in this kind of environment I don't think. Goodness knows.

Will do...it'll happen later. I've got another couple of chapters left to write on the dissertation I would imagine that the 'standard' word for 'yes' is oc, being that it's called Languedoc 'the land of oc'...but I had heard that there is much use of si for 'yes', too...and being that Monsieur Dalby lives in yonder parts of the world, I wanted to know his observations. As to whether 'si' is more common in the south, I don't know. But the main difference between oui and si is a matter of standard French (and it's quite difficult for an English speaker to get accustomed to): you have to say si if the previous speaker had said or suggested or implied that the answer would be non. Si means 'No, the answer is Yes!' Does that make sense? As to whether 'oc' is the word for yes in the south, well ... It used to be, when Proven

30%. I hate these things. It was the wine-in-a-box that did it.

Surely the same. Dio wrote Greek: there is no 'v' in Greek, and evidently 'b' was already filling the role (as it does today).

Yes, but I can't seem to do the accents. I'll give you another useful quote (at least to start an argument): as the Greek poet Pindar said, αριστον το υδωρ. Water is best. And it took me an age to find the omega on the keyboard. On my recent trip to Greece I was bowled over by the range of Greek wines now available in the stores. The best wine shop on Paros (not a very big island) had 360 different Greek wines (plus 6 French, 2 Californian, 2 Italian, 1 Spanish). I took the time to count them (it gets the saliva flowing). One I brought back was a Vin Santo, a lovely, lovely raisin wine (passum in Latin) from Santorini. You have never tasted anything so rich. Another nice one that I haven't opened yet was from Crete, where (according to Martial) the best passum once came from.