caldrail

Both. The Romans were ambivalent in ploitics as much as anything else. Cicero did mention that civic duty demanded more courage than military service thus ambitions were somewhat dangerous, and it is noticeable that the vast majority of senators sought safety in numbers besides their privileged place. Even during the imperial period the Senate continued to do business and more than once came within a hairs breath of resuming control of Rome, but of course, the easiest way to get rid of a powerful individual is replace him with another, especially once the legions had made their choice. The problem that the Senate encountered in the late Republic was that they were becoming used to the very same prosperity that conquest brought them. That's why many of them tacitly supported one powerful warlord or another, in that booty would eventually swell their own coffers, and also because it was easier to let prominent men take the blame when things went wrong.

Drumanagh you mean? Some historians believ it was a Roman fort. More likely it was either a trading post or a settlement of refugees from the empire. At any rate there is not enough evidence to assert the fort was entirely Roman.

I assume he was making that claim on the basis of intelligence available to him which we don't have, but then, any invasion of Ireland was no simple matter regardless of the numbers involved. Much would hinge on the usual Roman habit of playing one tribe off against another, seeking allies, and so forth. There's no mention of another Roman haboit of preparing for Imperial annexation by trading in luxuries to soften the irish population though I am assuming they already traded with the British provinces anyway. I also note that Agricola is saying these things to stir up support for such a venture, thus he probably is being optimnistic Some of those irish iron age forts were in difficult places to assault (yes, I do know about Masada) and the weather conditions in Ireland would have been difficult too. Could he really? I really wouldn't know. I'm not sure anyone else does either.

Sea trade wpuild have been a matter of commercial expediency. Because Carthage was a large city state with the largest local market, it follows it was a trade nexus with a lot of the traffic passing through. That would not stop Captains landing elsewhere to gain profit. Carthage did in fact control a number of significant ports around the mediterranean as well. This idea of control - I see this quite a lot in discussion of ancient empires and it seems to revolve a concept of monolithic state control which was never the case in ancient empires however centralised. It's amost as if human beings have this psychological need to se things in that way, but maybe that's an effect of modern culture with the benefits of contemporary media, communications, and political structures? I doubt the Carthagiian senate 'controlled' trade in the manner you infer. Trade was after all an entrepeneurial activity and one that brought them into conflict with the emerging Roman state rather than a state sponsored activity (the same applies to Rome incidentially, perhaps more pointedly given Rome's rapacious commercial mindset) What was happening was that individual merchants/captains were making profits and facilities were built by Carthage to allow trade to prosper and be taxed. As for thje siting of the military docks, I don't know thr rationale, but I suspect they built it after the main basin and thus it simply easier to put it there. Interesting point about obstructions and so forth, hadn't really thought about it, but I'm not aware that Carthage experienced any particular problem with that.

There is an element of doubt but there always would be when dealing with Roman emperors and their celebrity lifestyles. At least one senior archeologist now believes that judaean zealots were esentially committing terrorist outrages in Rome. I wondered about this for a long time but the evidence does point to a fire starting accidentially, dying out, then restarted to suit malignant purposes, mostly to do with land speculation and other dodgy deals, though clearly suspicion was levelled at Nero#s crowd of cronies and the observation that the Palatine was hit badly, the very same area of Rome in which political business was done behinbd closed doors - and out of Nero's sight.

Disagree all you want. The psychological conditioning is part of modern training and a known problem for veterans. that's not my invention - it's been written about, and for that matter, television documentaries aired with plenty more experience of this sort of thing than I, and further, some of that testimony was American. I'm sorry you don't feel happy about the way your society treated you after the battle was done, but you're hardly unique in that. The same situation is common to human behaviour. Civilians don't mind a victory parade and a quiet slap on the back, but asked to treat veterans as special from that point wears very thin with them after a while. It's always been like that.

On the contrary. It's the root cause. In order to make soldiers more efficient on the battlefield they are now dehumanised in a more subtle manner than simple bullying and shouting as was sufficient in prior ages. The problem is that modern western soldiers are not de-conditioned on release. As it happens earlier this year I was chatting to a younger veteran and mentioned this aspect. He agreed. He also pointed out that the instincts he had learned via training were in his words "difficult to turn off". You will find that historically veterans tended to get ignored when the war was done. Some Romans got quite up tight when arguments started. One story has a senator ripping open his toga when giving a speech to dramatically point at his war wounds, telling his audience that he had fought for Rome, since they obviously needed reminding that his war record made huim a valuable member of society.

Your assurances are outweighed by the available information. The inability of raw troops to exercise incisive shooting was a phenomenon noticed by combatants in World War Two, who relied on large numbers of low quality troops in many cases poorly trained. The British and Americans sought to counter this by teaching their soldiers to 'hate' the enemy, with no great result. Modern techniques for achieving the right mental condition to commit to battle evolved from the mid war onward and these days are so well well practised that many have expressed concerns about the inability of trained soldiers to adapt to civilian life.

Nero did not try to kill the christians off. A number were rounded up and set alight as punishment for their alleged involvement in the Great Fire. The story that he played the fiddle while Rome burned is also false. What is true that during his efforts to organise the rescue of Rome's population (he had rushed back from Antium), he asked to access a vantage point (The Tower of Maecanas) to see what was going on. Struck by the scene of devastation before him, he was moved to sing about the "Sack of Ilium". Suetonius reports that he donned stage costume to do that but somehow that doesn't ring true. I doubt Nero was much of musician but yes, the lyre was likely to be within his repertoire. Having gained some knowledge of music in addition to the rest of his early education, as soon as he became emperor he sent for Terpnus, the greatest master of the lyre in those days, and after listening to him sing after dinner for many successive days until late at night, he little by little began to practise himself..., ...So without delay he had his name added to the list of the lyre-players who entered the contest, and casting his own lot into the urn with the rest, he came forward in his turn, attended by the prefects of the Guard carrying his lyre, and followed by the tribunes of the soldiers and his intimate friends. Having taken his place and finished his preliminary speech, he announced through the ex-consul Cluvius Rufus that "he would sing Niobe"; and he kept at it until late in the afternoon, putting off the award of the prize for that event and postponing the rest of the contest to the next year, to have an excuse for singing oftener. But since even that seemed too long to wait, he did not cease to appear in public from time to time. He even thought of taking part in private performances among the professional actors, when one of the praetors offered him a million sesterces. He also put on the mask and sang tragedies representing gods and heroes and even heroines and goddesses, having the masks fashioned in the likeness of his own Life of Nero (Suetonius) The fire started by accident, not far from the Circus Maximus, and was driven by a warm wind along two streets that caused the initial conflagaration. This was reported to have been re-started and spread further by unknown agents, but since the fire then destroyed the homes of the wealthy on the Palatine, there is suspicion that Nero or his allies had deliberately fanned the flames to achieve the political end of weakening senatorial influence - since much of their business was interfering with Nero's rule and was conducted from their atriums. Sueonius accuses him of being fed up with narrow streets and so forth, and it is true that Nero wanted to reinvent the city as Neroplois, but his supposed city clearance and rebuilding was going to cost him dearly both in hard cash and the lives of important men he effectively stole it from.

I've searched but can't find any source on this. Apparently though Constantine banned sausages because of connections to pagan rites, or at least the informal information suggests. I will continue to look for something on this.

Not recently. Climate has been used as the villain in a number of dicumentaries, with some justification, but over-exaggerated in others, since the biggest problem with television history is the tendency to sensationalise. Watching Mike Loads fall over in Roman legionary kit in the face of a wind machine was amusing - and intended to be - but the Romans did mention this particular problem with regard to the event. A problem, or a cause of failure? It's easy to get carried away, especially since the production of such programmes often look for alternative explanations purely to arouse interest.

Gladiator. Note the style of sword, the stance, and the protection of the forward leg, the face guard on the helmet.

There's no set size. It's more of a progression. As the group gets larger, less individualism oprevails, because instinctively the group, formal or other casual, willingly falls in line with a charismatic dominant figure very easily. That's why large gigs work - the crowd tend to lose themselves in ther experience of it even though the intimacy of a smaller performance is lost. It depends on whether a leader with sufficient presence and leadership is present. If not, the group fragments, but then it might anyway. Read how Spartacus failed to keep his rabble together. After arguments with two other prominent rebels, Crixus and Oenamus, the three went their seperate ways (all got mauled decisively by Roman forces). No, of course not. All you have is a large crowd milling around. A community requires some structure and leadership, however it is formed. I don't really have any interest in this sort of psychobabble. If you want a feel for it, stop linking words together randonmly and look out the window at the world at play.

All we know of prehistoric Britons within certain time periods is that as part of their dealing with the deceased they deliberately defleshed the dead and interred their bones in barrows. No-one knows what became of the flesh they so stripped - was it spread out to allow nature to reclaim it? Was it buried or burned? Was it consumed either for practical reasons or in soe kind of recycling of the spirit? We just don't know.. Aztec sacrifice was something different. In that, the living heart was pulled from the victim as an offering to the Gods, sometimes specifically, and recent debate has focused upon the idea of a sort of end-timer cult in which the sacrifice was required to appease the Gods and stop them destroying the world. Ahem... Well I'm not concerned with polarity on this issue - whatever that's supposed to mean - but group behaviour in human beings is easy to understand if not always easy to predict. As groups become larger, so the individual becomes less self determinining, dependent more and more on the decisions of dominant members of the group. That's our social instinct and the reason why society functions at all. Most of simply obey because we don't dominate. Of course there are variable attitudes within society since like most things behavioural the 'bell-curve' of responses is always present. The majority more or less comply., the extreme minority might not, but then they tend to suffer for their variance as history and current affairs illustrates regularly.

Human beings have always had a strong tendency toward symbolism where death is concerned. Our memorials often proclaim something important about the deceased, be it restrained or very overt, sometimes by the family or perhaps the sentiment of a community. In more feral civilisations, these tendencies dwell more on an animist level, thus cannibals believe that in some way the consumption of an enemy confers a part of his courage or strength, or some similar property. This should not be confused with trophy taking, which is a more direct behaviour pattern, such as a woman in the middle ages who showed the head of her dead husband to her son so he would grow up to wreak revenge, and certainly the lad became a very cruel adult. Roman stroies oten show jubilant mobs parading around with body parts of a fallen leader - there's one instance of an arm where the tendons were pulled to make the hand 'grasp' as some comment on the deceased. Many of us would not ordinarily think about such practises, partially because we are part of a civilisation that eschews such behaviour, but it's never far away - witness the recent plot to dismember the singer Joss Stone, or the treatment of dead US servicemen in Somalia, for instance. Most of us have psychological brakes that stop us short of murders and atrocities, but at the same time, our mob behaviour can overule that very quickly. Thus an entire crowd of irish wellwishers turn on an army landrover that accidentially approached too closely and beat the hapless soldiers to death. Individually, few of those people would torture or murder howver they hated the victims - together, they feel safe, and when aroused, lose those inhibitions. But this is purely a mechanically social response. If we look at funeral practises of our distant briotish stone age ancestors, it seems peculiar to us. We see evidence of deliberate defleshing - suggesting cannibalism at first - but something that is designed to speed up mortal decay although we don't know what they did with the perishable leftovers. The bones however were interred without regard to individual unity. They could be mixed up completely, which to us is difficult to understand, so clearly the mindset, religious beliefs, and social structures of any society ccan impact of death rituals quite widely. When dealing with the Iron Age, we encounter a very brutal civilisation. Warfare iwas endemic, particularly in the earlier part, human sacrifice a required part of prophecy and appeasement, one that was so widespread that a religion almost existed to restrain and control it. Religion had gone from worship of ancestors or the connection between the land and sky, to a more physical desire to control destiny or seek justice for the disasters of fate. It was hugely cruel but on the other hand, the sifting out of people who just didn't fit in by these means, however unfair, meant that socieities were more homogenous. So it seems to me that the relationship between society and death is a variable one. Human beings are capable of some extreme acts, and we do seem secretly to enjoy hurting others if society says it's acceptable, but our judegment of these acts is usually based on the principles of the modern semi-christian west rather than those of the time and place.

The celtic practice of taking heads home as trophies is well known, and the subsequent treatment of them is the source of the 'grail' legends of King Arthur (the christian aspect was added in 1200).

The Navy remained Royal because it had been raised by the Crown, not Parliament. Some of these 'Princes OPwn' regiments are actually quite modern, formed as a resut of amalgamations, and entitled because a Prince of the Realm had been nominated as a commander-in-chief, or something similar. Don't wknow where Cornhole is. There is a Duke of Cornwall, our very own Prince of Wales. Beefeaters...

Concerning Jesus and moneylenders.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple So it seems the Bible misinterpreted the story too. Yet toilet facilities and public baths were commonplace in Roman society. The Romans made a great deal of cleanliness (despite the poor condition of umch of society, but that hasn't changed a great deal today overall - you only have to inspect a works toilet to understand how filthy some human beings are prepared to get). There are other examples of the ancient world where cleanliness was encouraged. But it is worth pointing out that the ancients did not have modern cleaning materials or anti-biotics, which tended to reduce human population to a average level via infections and so forth (please the current concern about resistance to anti-biotics which is threatening to reverse the effectiveness of modern medecine and reduce population levels to Victorian standards and numbers). Also, like many third world areas today, sewage was not cleared by networks of drains, mostly left to rot in the street and thus attracting pests and disease, as often happens when human beings congregate for communal life. It is true that the Romans were proud of their main drainin Rome ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima), but such works were quite rare. Navigating the oceans in ancient times was an extremely difficult and hazardous enterpise, particularly with vessels only designed for short coastal journeys across the Mediterranean, and the landings in Britain by Caesar show how vulnerable and unseaworthy such ships could be. Yet the Red Sea port of Berenice was a very succesful port dealing with maritime trade with India, known to have had a Graeco-Roman trade mission present for some time, based on the seasonal trade winds.

The issue with auxillaries is that the Romans used such formations as allies, second class forces, based primarily on the frontier, whereas the later feoderatii were part and parcel of the Roman defense system, largely because they needed the manpower in arms and finding enough recruits had become all but impossible (they had been experiencing difficultuires since the reign of Augustus and quite probably earlier than that). The rsurgences you mention are not those of the Roman state, but of initiatives led by individuals. Skilled leadership had declined along with everything else in the empire thus when someone came along who genuinely had talent, they usually made a big difference. As a case in pojnt, note how Sebastianus, when summoned from Italy to lead the eastern armies, realises that the bulk of the legions were pretty well too far gone to be any use. He deliberately handpicks younger, keener men who were more easily trained and willing to fight. Without his initiative, the Goths would not have been been on their back foot prior to Adrianoplke, and notice that the petty intrigue and lack of ability in senior command made certain that Valens army would not capitalise on their advantage.

Whilst agree that immigration was gradually diluting the latin-ness of Rome, so the same process had been underway via slavery. As it happens Rome was a very cosmopolitan society anyway and all this 'romanisation' stuff you read about is often miodrn invention. True, the Romans did encourage people to adopt latin ways, and gave them preference if they did, but there was never any compulsion and large sections of the population were essentially maintaining their cultural roots. That these people interacted daily with the empire in which they lived does not infer they adopted a complete cultural packakage to go with it - as I've said before, owning a roman pot does not make you roman. As for attitudes toward authority, there was a drift away from loyalty toward the city stateafter about two hundred years of prosperous empire. After that, the economy of the Roman world began to shrink (though in some repects it occaisionally did well). Bishops were only directly affecting a proportion of society anyway, and many of them only paid lip service to their preferred faith. In fact, bishops were lamenting the state of Roman morality. Where now is the ancient wealth and dignity of the Romans? The Romans of old were the most powerful, now we are without strength. They were feared, now it is us who are fearful. The barbarians peoples paid them tribute, now we are the tributaries of the barbarians. Our enemies make make us pay for the very light of day, and our right to life has to be bought. Oh what miseries are ours! To what state have we descended? We even have to thank our the barbarians for the right to buy ourselves off them! What could be more humiliating andand miserable. Salvian it would seem that the decline of the west had less to do with immigration and more to do with political will. Cicero had said that civic duty required more courage and dedication than military careers (he was almost certainly right), whereas the bulging and anonymous civil service of the later empire encouraged apathy and corruption. In the end, though, all the countless pages of speculation about why the border collapsed, paticularly in the west, amount to one simple fact: the empire grew old. Adapt though it might, its mechanisms for dealing with with change gradually became set and atrophied, its military 'immune system' needed more and more help from outside, and finally - faced with new generations of vigorous neighbours, who had borrowed from the empire what they needed to give their political system and their cultures strength and coherence - it died of old age. The Empire Stops Here (Philipp Parker

Christianity isn't a mndset at al. Not even close. Even today there's no complete agreement on how christianity should be worshipped and cultural variations dominate. African christianity, for instance, only resembles that found in England at face value - note the behaviour/expectations of many african priests is simply transposed and watered down from their witch doctor predecessors (that was not intended as an insult - it's merely an observation of differnces in style and content). If christianity conferred a middle eastern mindset on its worshippers, then you're asserting that religion changed the personality of its worshippers. It doesn't, and never has. Modern research has shown, rather interestingly, that moral standards between christians and non-christians are on average pretty well identical. But look more closely at the historical context and the legacy of the Roman world. Firstly, our marriage customs. According to your hypothesis, they would be more or less Judaean in form. They aren't. They remain essentially pagan Roman. Exchanging rings, cutting the cake, confetti, carrying a bride across a threshold - these are all pagan Roman customs continued by christian Romans and passed down to us. Secondly, the issue of gender. Under Judaean practices female christian priests were as acceptable as male. It's taken us around sixteen hundred years to return to that level of equality, and even then, with some controversy. Roman chauvanism has persisted for a very long time. Thirdly, when the Romans wished to honour the departed, they sometimes made them gods. Under christian rules, there can only be one God. Therefore, the cultural desire to elevate the honoured to divine status inspired the establishment of the 'Saint'. The Roman Catholic church still raises chosen people to that status to this very day - two women were recently declared saints. But it remains a substitute for Roman deification, a practice the Judaeans would not have agreed with. People maintain the same personalities whaever religion they worship, despite adopting a set of rules and practises. Christianity promulgates an image of conformity even though there are often specific differences in teachings vbetween various churches. These differences in teachings have caused conflicts since the Romans fostered the christian systems, not only because of what is taught and expected, but the interpretations of the people who declare themselves christian. One dark age writer described the Saxons as "a race hateful to God". Not just because he considered them a barbarian people - it was also because they worshipped christianity differently, itself because a Roman missionary decided it was easier to convert Saxons if he didn't have to change their ways too much.

Christianity is often credited with the 'fall of Rome' (I had a lengthy debate with someone on this sort of subject elsewhere) but that really doesn't cut it. Non christian faiths were still commonplace even after the adoption of christianity by the Roman state, which signified a preference rather than any legal requirement, and Rome was always tolerant of local faiths, though as religions became more organised and more inclusive of the common people in ritual obligations, so the bitterness increased among them. However, Rome was changing due to a number of factors and singling out christianity for all the causes is basically a tad too convenient (Bear in mind I'm a pagan, I don't like christianity, so I'm only defending it on historical contexts).. In fact, it might be realistically argued that the increasing popularity of christianity was because Rome was failing, in that the promise of salvation, an integral part of christian belief, offered something to look forward too as opposed to the distance and apparent fickleness of pagan belief. As for mindset, the idea it was middle eastern is nonsense, even though the faith originated there. The mindset of christians deopends on the culture that adopts it, not the other way around.

Sorry, I was being vague. Yes, the soldiers of the British Army swear an oath of allegiance "I (your name), swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies and will observe and obey all orders of Her Majesty, her heirs and successors and of the generals and officers set over me." Non-christians may swear 'solemnly' and omit the reference to God. The reason the Army is not called 'Royal' as the air force and navy do is because of the English Civil War and its legacy. However, the regiment has an abstract virtue that a battalion does not, again, for historical reasons, seeing as senior officers - noblemen more often than not - were recruited to serve the regiment, and as these things follow a natural order, so ordinary soldiers were recruited tp serve them via the same formation (though the situation is of course more to do with the service these days, but of course, legacy customs continue).

The difference between pagan ceremonbies and christian worship is one of involvement. Many pagan ceremonies were duties toward the community that did not involve the community directly, and people generally got involved via festivals - of which there were a considerable number. As long as the priests saw to their religious duties, the gods were happy, and life could go on. However, for the common person, the temple was akin to an atrium in which the worshipper sought favour by sacrifice and request. Christianity demanded civic duty at a klevel that the pagan did not, and also had the advantage of strengthening communal ties in this manner. It is wise to avoid too many modern parallels - christian Romans weres till Roman and lived in the same culture with more or less the same mindset.

Although these definitions are not strictly promulgated, I understand the battalion is a fighting formation, whereas the regiment has a social aspect as well. British soldiers were (I'm not sure about today) loyal to a regiment rather than the battalion they fought with.