caldrail

Regarding the gladiatorial contests, they were staged for various reasons.... 1 - Religion. The contests between slaves was a 'civilised' alternative to human sacrifice and intended to honour your ancestors with the shedding of blood, though the fights were usually staged until one or the other contestant could not continue due to wounds or exhaustion. 2 - Politics - Contests were staged to entertain the public and win votes for office by popularity. It was fairly blatant, because games were often staged when individuals were running for office rather than part of the funeral celebrations which the games were supposed to be about. 3 - Glory - Games, especially the larger ones, were staged to celebrate Roman victories and glory in their success and mastery over Nature. It was also a convenient way to be rid of prisoners in large numbers. 4 - Civil order - panem et circuses (bread and horse races) was a known method for keeping the people content via free entertainment. Commercial success? For who? The individual staging games was going to fork out vast sums of money to organise and run the event, from the import of wild exotic animals to the fees for renting gladiators from their owners, and worse, the compensation paid to owners at fifty times the rental price if any of them are killed or freed. Those earning profits were mostly the suppliers of animals, though it was a risky trade as you couldn't guarantee the animal would survive the journey, or those supplying goods and services for the event. Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus remarking how good his gladiators were and that if he'd rented them out, he would have cleared his debts easily.

Bear in mind it was a secure border to control and tax travel, not to prevent it, nor was the parapet wide enough for defence in full. That's why it had seventy odd gates in it, one every mile, though I accept one opened onto a precipice. The Wall was fairly formidable as such but as modern experience tells us, people can get very imaginative when they're motivated to get past an obstacle.

A video here about Hadrian's Wall, who actually built it, and who made this known to us.

No suprise to this at all. It's isn't generally realised how many of Roman Britain's well to do families were native, not European. The lesser families used wooden built villas that don't exist any more, so Chedworth represents the legacy of Britain's wealthiest landowners in the late empire and Sub-Roman Britain. However, many former villas were turned into farmhouses or industrial sites rather than elegant dwellings for rich people.

Latin words were used in a literal context. This helps to 'reverse engineer' Roman culture, but there are bound to be meanings that change over time as there are in English. That said, I'm fascinated by your derivations and whilst I may not agree yet, please carry on looking into this, I'm sure you won't get a universal answer but you will eventually find some insight,

Officers of the 11th Corps discuss plans for the advance into Eastasia territory. Their Glorious Leader, Big Brother, demands a victory, and the proud soldiers of Oceania must achieve it. Ingsoc Commissars will be waiting... A scene from the colossal global conflict of the world of George Orwell's 1984. (AI artwork generated from text)

Enjoy your Saturnalia!

Suprising results from archeologists who found a thriving town from a period of crisis.... Archaeological discovery upends what we thought we knew about fall of Roman empire (msn.com)

She can say whatever she wants. Varus believed what Aminius told him and dismissed the warnings of Segestes, then led his troops into a very long defile and ambush. Unlucky about the storm but his troops were going to be slaughtered, and since Varus decided to commit suicide rather than attempt a rally and breakout, it's hard to see him as a competent commander. Experienced, yes, but a poor judge of character and actually a little self-deluded about the value of Roman law.

The biggest shock is that there's something left there. Many Roman sites have been looted illegally long before academic study.

This seems to be contentious. There's two main camps, one favouring suffocation by whatever means, the other favouring a sudden temperature increase and the various effects of that. I have a sneaky feeling that both camps are correct according to circumstance. Pompeii was hit by a series of pyroclastic flows, hot turbulent clouds of ash that carry significant energy and flow down the sides of a volcano and out across surrounding terrain due to gravity when the eruption fails to lift the weight. The first nine flows simply deposited ash against the town walls, but the tenth went over the top and into the town. Those in peripheral areas would have been more at risk of suffocation. Those hit by the cloud mass would experience the heat within it. My two cents.

No, no factions. In fact the ownership of specific gladiators wasn't important to the public, they were only interested in a thrilling fight and a pile of coins from their betting. As for the gladiators themselves, they were generally intensely loyal to their owners and part of his familia, the brotherhood of gladiators that he owned. Owners varied. Cicero for instance praises the fighters owned by his friend Atticus in a letter and tells him that if he had rented them out, he would have easily recovered his expenses in the last two events. For Atticus, it was a hobby. There were two centres of gladiator schooling. The four major ones in Rome probably held as many as two thousand gladiators, and there were other large schools in Capua, Campania, not far from Pompeii. Smaller schools might exist in any Roman city or its environs. Pompeii for instance had a gladiator barracks Recently another was found in Austria and the artists impression shows the training arena that the large schools always used...

However please notice that Caesar was not an academic personality. He was however an able self-publicist.

Bearing in mind the extent of the empire and the ethnic diversity, your descriptions of 'a typical Roman' might only apply to a subset of them especially with relation to earlier periods. I would also be careful of drawing too many conclusions from Roman statues, which were often reworked from originals and even then to be viewed from certain angles - they were not photographs.

Despite the disasters I don't really think the end of the western empire was a military thing. Certainly didn't help, no dispute there, but there had been a long economic decline and a weakening of 'roman-ness'. Rome had been prone to insurrections and civil wars but remember that Rome always lost battles from time to time, the idea of the unstoppable military machine is just hype - and very old hype at that. After all, we talk about the end of the Roman occupation in Britannia as taking place in 409 with the withdrawal of the last legions posted there, but it's forgotten that the Roman administration was still place and remained functioning until around 440, when the exasperated Romano-Britons threw them out when Rome failed to respond to the 'Groan of the Britons'. We seceded from the empire, we weren't just abandoned because the troops were sent to Gaul to support a usurper. This military image is very pervasive when dealing with Rome but it's not always the the only context to events.

It cannot be denied that our current westernised world inherited much from Rome, but don't concentrate on the similarities. Rome was a very different beast to modern democracies, though sometimes you have to wonder, and understanding those differences is very important to see Rome in the context of its own time instead of a modern world in togas. Great that you're interested in Roman history.

Syria was a hotbed of religious diversity, with varied cults that sometimes became fashionable elsewhere in the empire. There was one that was popular among slaves, and another with a very dubious immoral character. I seem to recall that Christian cults (themselves very diverse back then) reached Rome via Syria, though don't quote me on that.

A river wharf more likely but the location of a trade post was not contested. Water transport was the most preferred means of getting goods around in the Roman Empire, which indicates that the much vaunted road system wasn't what we expect in todays thinking.

The existence of a ship is not necessarily what it appears to be. Certainly it points to navigable waterways which can change considerably over time, but a similar wreck uncovered by Time Team was found to have been moored merely to stop erosion

Because if you move or disturb the find you lose the context and vital historical information can be lost.

This one's an oddity. A series of clips from footage recorded for the original 1937 film version of I Claudius that was never finished. Alex Korda was taking on Hollywood with some success and wanted a Roman epic, so he approached Robert Graves, but the film was very expensive and personality conflicts doomed the production.

The other day I sat down to watch a YouTube video about how Constantine the Great impacted history. Might be interesting. The academic started with a broad description of the Roman Empire, basically claiming that Augustus was an undeclared emperor and pretended that Rome was still a Republic. This is the foundation of the 'Standard Model' of Roman imperial government. I have never heard anything sound so false in all my life. Does that academic seriously expect anyone to believe that Augustus was able to fool the Romans into thinking the Republic was still in place for fifty years? In a society based on tradition and obsessed with politics and debate? Is he seriously suggesting nobody noticed? It may seem suprising that in spite of their vigilant Republicanism many members of the Italian governing class were satisfied by what seems to us a fiction. Yet the Romans, although their intense anxiety to preserve everything good in the past made them instinctively averse to open changes, had a fairly impressive record for modifying their institutions when this was necessary. The World Of Rome (Michael Grant) Okay, so why does the Republic seem like a fiction? There was no actual 'fall of the Republic', it doesn't exist in the Roman sources. It's because people like the idea Rome was ruled by emperors. It's been imposed on education since the Middle Ages based on the revisionist later writings of Roman authors and the experience of dealing with the Graeco-Roman Byzantines. Take Augustus himself. Paterculus gushes in praise and reminds us that Augusts was the saviour of the Republic. Yet five hundred years later Zosimus dismisses Augustus as an absolute monarch who abolished the aristocracy. This reflects changes in Roman culture during the imperial era, not the career of Augustus. But not everyone is so blinded by the Standard Model. The overwhelming importance of tradition in Roman society is a warning for the historian tempted to consider Roman history in terms of turning points and separate periods. Persistent obsession with tradition fosters continuity even within a broad framework of change. In other words, while the terms 'Republic' and 'Principate' suggest separation and change, we should expect continuity, mitigating and to an extent denying this change. It is not only that the Republic conditioned the Principate: it also continued into the Principate - The Legacy of the Republic (David C Braund) from The Roman World (Ed. John Wacher) Also, rather than using the word 'birth', we should perhaps speak of emergence, since the features of the Augustan monarchy that were adopted by its successors took shape gradually, bit by bit, within the Republican institutional edifice. For the Principate was not created ex nihilo, but put slowly into position using existing forms, and following no preconceived plan but, rather, added to and modified according to circumstance... - A History of Rome (Le Glay, Voisin, & Le Bohec) I actually go further. It hasn't escaped my attention that the Romans still referred to their state as SPQR, Senatus Populous Que Romans (Senate and People of Rome) right to the end in the west in 476, which is an arbitrary date based on the takeover launched by Odoacer as he became King of Italy. The Senate may have been functionally powerless in the Dominate (the later Roman imperial period) but they still represented traditional authority, and rather than the imperatores (Victorious Generals) simply admit they had become monarchs, they required senatorial acceptance, awards of privilege, and legitimisation. Why would they need to if Rome was the Empire rather than the Republic? Exactly who were they trying to kid? The facts are startlingly obvious if you set aside the much loved but medieval 'Emperor of Rome'. Rome remained a Republic with evolving leadership. The Polybian hybrid government of aristocratic Senate, democratic people, and executive Magistracy had changed to Dominatal Magistracy with Senatorial acceptance - but it was the same nation state. When Augustus stated in his Res Gestae that he was Princeps Senatus he meant it. That was his day job. Yes, he was particularly powerful, but never absolute, and in any case power alone does not make you a monarch. His powers were based on a series of privileges, titles, and honours, not any existing position in Roman society, these powers given him by the Senate, and as an ambitious man of course he used them. However if you notice young Octavian had been invited into the Senate on the promise he would protect the Republic. He did exactly that. Yes, he profitted personally from doing so - he was an elite Roman, of course he did. Augustus even refers to this success as a statesman as the 'fruit of his labours'. If power wasn't his primary objective, as indeed Aurelius Victor claimed it was, then what was it? A prosperous Republic. There is no other answer that fits.

They're filming it now. There was an accident on set and people got hurt in some kind of fireball.

Found this by accident. Nice atmosphere, and for this site, a lot more topical than most songs