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Actually no, they aren't, because there were far more diverse and obscure cults in Syria than reached Rome. Some travelled - there was a cult popular among slaves in mainland Italy for instance, but others didn't get mentioned, including one with a very liberal attitude to sex. Incidentially, homosexuality is frowned upon by Islam. Are you sure all the Iraqi fish farmers were homosexual? That sounds a bit odd to me.

Horses were expensive, allocated to cavalry use by the wealthier or more important republican soldiery, and never used in bulk by the imperial legions until the late empire when increasing demands of strategy made cavalry all the more important. The legions used donkeys/mules/asses, and officially one such animal was supposed to be allocated to an eight man contubernium. However, that would depend on availabliity, and we know that Roman legionaries weren't shy of appropriating whatever animals they needed. The 'collar' is irrelevant - the Romans would have used the same shoulder yoke they applied to oxen, as did most peoples of the era. It's also important to note that Roman cavalry men were very wary of letting their horses tire during battle. Although their tactics relied on movement and speed (not a head on charge), they would only gallop for brief instances, and in the case of cataphractii/clibanarii, not at all, which meant the heavier cavalry were not as quick on the battlefield as later medieval riders, but then Roman horses were generally smaller than today.

Indian religions would have been known to Greek and Roman merchants who had begun making seasonal voyages to India, also we can't ignore the possibility of foreign merchants reaching Roman territory. In any case, Syria was a hotbed of religious activity, responsible for nurrturing some very odd cults, most of which are not well documented and largely forgotten. There is a tomb somewhere in India that claims to be the last resting place of Jesus.

Finding archaeological sites from scratch isn't easy - just recently in Britain the battlefields of Hastings and Bosworth have been effectively relocated from their traditional sites due to research and finds. The site of Mons Badonicus has been a source of debate since the middle ages and still no-one can make an absolute case for finding it. The thing is, even if you know more or less where to find it - and that in itself has spawned a tradition of treasure hunters claiming to know the site of one place or another - actually digging in the right spot can be good fortune as much as science.

Can't compare? Well perhaps not in overall size, though I should point out that the Great Western Railway based it's worshops here in Swindon and had become quite a spawling enterptise by 1950. Largest manufacturing facilty under one roof in Europe, or at least it was in its heyday. I watched the demolition of that roof back in the 80's too - it simply refused to give in, right to the very end. Geidi Prime, not Heidi. Although if you read the novels and in particular the prequels/sequels, you discover that even Frank Herbets evil planet had more to it than a simple industrial wasteland. In any event, the fate of Chernobyl is interesting. nature has begun the process of recapturing the area (experts believe that without human beings all evidence of their existence would vanish within two hundred years. Personally I think that's wrong - graffiti survives from Roman times after all). A radioated landscape in which nature appears to thrive.

Employment agencies are the bane of the jobseeker. Love them or loathe them, anyone on Jobseekers Allowance sooner or later must do business with them during their search for work.The problem is that these agencies aren't interested in finding you work - you're just not that important - but instead need to shove you into the first convenient role to fulfill their contractual obligations and profit margins. Unlike employers, agencies always do things at the last minute. There's always a sense that if you don't immediately agree to be enslaved then someone else will, the point being that they get paid for signing away their freedom and human rights whereas you get left with having to explain your failure to a claims advisor. Just today I struggled through the gale force winds to attend a work registration run by an agency, only to discover my on-going opportunity was merely two weeks casual labour. "It was in the email" He assured me. No, pal, it wasn't. This sort of thing happened to me a few days ago. I was at the ocal shopping mall, my mission to buy some frozen chips, when my mobile phone activated itself for the first time this year. Hello? The call was from a desperate recruitment agent. Can I start work early tomorrow morning? Errm.... You see, my world has pretty much ground to a halt. My day was planned to the last detail. Go to the mall. Buy frozen chips. Go home. Cook chips for dinner. Sorted. Then this frantic guy on the other end of the phone wants to meet me at the local library to sign me up for a job on the outskirts of the known world and suddenly my brain starts remembering all the things I ought to have done by now and hadn't planned for. Seriously, you get so used to very simple lifestyle decisions as an unemployed person that conversations involving decisions on whether to do the right thing and return to the workplace before sunrise tomorrow actually become stressful. Eventually I agreed. There was nothing in his sales patter that meant the job was not for me, so I accepted that my fate was sealed. That meant I would have to notify the support centre, the dole office, Swindon Council, or anyone else with a vested interest in knowing whether I work for a living. A busy afternoon then. Here goes... Then he suggested we meet for a registration interview at the local library. Huh? Why the library? Apparently his office was way out of the town centre. It was just easier for all concerned. Okay. So I ended the call, bought my frozen chips, went home, had some chips for dinner, and then waited at the library as agreed. He never showed up. All I got afterward was a text message telling me he couldn't make it and that he'd speak to me later. He didn't. Is it just me, or did I just get used in some way? Threat of the Week There was a time when you could walk the streets in Swindon without hassle. Now little children hurl dog poo for a laugh, and youths trty to enforce territorial rights on passers-by like petty gangsters. Just today some acne-ridden wretch busy trying to make his secondhand hatchback look 'hot' said "Don't come this way again" in a hideously immature tone. Look mate, if by some quirk of fate you learned how to read and happen to be reading this instead of Facebook, then I have to tell you I was walking along a public thoroughfare. Since I was only going about my lawful business, you mind yours, and by the way, where did you get the money for that car?

History is often unscientific. We're not dealing with rationality, or categorisation, but the actions of people, the individuals who inspire them, and the enviroment the lived in. As much as you might claim that climatology, cosmology, geography, psychology, archaeology, or any other scientific discipline is relevant, there is always going to be a part of history that is intuitive. In any case, anyone who claims that they know the answer and those who don't accept are less intelligent knows rather more about arrogance than history. In fact, it has the faint odour of the same sort of debating style used by religious cultists.

Logic? Snake oil more like. That's nothing to do with hatred or masochism by the way, just that the logic involved is distinctly dubious, reducinhg history to a 'Whre's Wally' book. Secret codes are very popular in the public sphere right now, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it's an exercise in imagination, or more insidiously, a con.

That depends. There's a former industrial site in Swansea (a copper foundry linked to the slave trade) which is now a green field site, or at at least in theory. The ground is very poisonous but foliage grows without problem. On the other hand, I've seen pictures of former welsh collieries that have now had their railway cuttings filled in and look like unspoiled countryside today. But then, there are sites in Britain with ROman metal working that remain very poisonous - these are invariably beneath farmland.

But not the same battlefield. Whilst some Romans probably suffered psychology, we can't know to what extent because no-one discusses it before WW1, during which the acentuated effect of artillery bombardment made such trauma all too obvious. However, my studies from the AWI reveal no attention to psychological effects of battle either, despite the presence of considerable risk (indeed, there's a lot of literature that stresses the courage under fire but none about those who were affected after the war). The young are always more resilient than the old, there are always those less prone to stress effects than others, and there are always those who enjoy the battlefield and its risks. The fact that modern armies are able to identify recruits at risk is neither here nor there. In fact, it merely highlights the attention to these problems that our modern warfare demands, problems made all too clear in WW2.

True, but the essential point is that fighting as such is a natrual activity for human beings, or at least, one they adapt to. The local high street on a staurday night will prove that. The battlefield is a more terrifying prospect for many people although clearly some people rather enjoy the experience. Melee battle is something people tend to recover from relatively easily. What causes the heightened psychological problems are sudden loud noises and the constant potential for unseen enemies in mordern warfare. Human beings haven't evolved to cope with the artifical enviroment of the modern battlefield - it's a noticeable problem that soldiers suffer the consequences of training and experience. basically, the Romans don't talk about shell shock because there were no shells on the ancient battlefield.

Woah there - where did you get that information from? Firstly that ignores the extremely strong Roman class system, secondly, the only source that even hints at gradual promotion is Vegetius in the late empire. Bear in mind that funerary inscriptions quite often give a summary of a mans military career, in which he is said to have served in various roles in no particular order. Those are jobs, not ranks, albeit with status and virtus attached. There were official positions within the legion that carried responbsibility and status, such as standard bearers, musician. centurions right hand man, etc, which are routinely interpreted as ranks for convenience, but as I've often stated, there is no table of ranks to apply these to, and for that matter, all these titles were essentially temprorary and men moved from one to the other according to circumstance rather than career promotion. To the offciers, the men were not expected to rise above their station, and please note how little the Romans talk about promotions for the common soldier - ie, not at all. In other words, men sought positions that made their life easier or more lucrative, which got easier with experience and service. As a letter from a soldier in Egypt tells us "nothing happens around here without money". The reality of a marching camp is that you're only there over night. The legion carries two stakes per man (ideally) for the purpose of encampmanrt but some quick estimates will almost certainly highlight the impossibility of carrying an entire palisade of any appreciable size with them. Whilst a ditch and rampart, of no great depth/height is known to be possible and a requirement of legion practice, it was not a formidable barrier, and the potential of finding enough suitable timer to create a solid wall is circumstantial. Permanent forts are another matter of course, and I would point out that your own modern experience would quickly show how armies camp in the open when on the march - the Romans actually did more than we do.

That is, in the context of a western superpower, astonishing news. I've always been fascinated by urban abandonment - my home town suffered a small measure of that after the railways ceased to be the major employer - I once flew over Swindon and looking down, I saw huge derelict spaces in between housing estates that weren't so obvious on the maps, but in Swindon's case, seeing as land comes at such a premium in Britain and given our stricter planning legislation, those aras have pretty much been developed since. Of course Swindon is an expanding town whereas Detroit isn't. I don't think there's a great trick to creating farmland from pre-existing conurbation - there are plenty of places in Britain that returned to farmland after the demise of heavy industry after WW2.

The soldiers would have requisitioned or appropriated any suitable animnals in the area, or contracted to merchants for transport (I believe Josephus mentions this in his account of the Jewish War). As with any military endeavour, needs must. The soldiers would have been ordered to undertake the tasks their commanders thought most important at the time. Also horses were not that common, requird by cavalry, needed expensive feeding to remain at full strength, were not cheap to purchase, and not entirely suitable for these duties. In any case, the Romans would have used a shoulder yolk as they did with other draught animals, so the choking aspect doesn't come into it. Roman legions preferred to carry goods by donkey/ass/mule than by cart. In theory one animal was allocated to each eight man contubernium, and anything the animal couldn't carry was left behind. However, there are also mentions of men going on the march leaving their weapons in a cart, so I imagine such transport was always according to the assets you had. of course the carriage of goods by animal or cart would reduce the rate of march - this was a decision for the commander - to march quickly with minimum load, or slower with everything you need. And yes - soldiers could own slaves. You left out building the perimeter wall. This was standard Roman practice which was often more a psychological weapon than any practical means of containing the enemy. I don't recall any anecdotes in Roman sources that mention rocks in connection with swamps. The Romans simply wouldn't look for rocks there - the terrain was too difficult. He obeys his orders or gets flogged, or even put to death if a serious breach of military discipline.

Ammunition for ballistae, the large and heavy bolts, would be transported by animal or cart along with the weapon itself - that's only common sense. Where larger siege artillery is built, the rocks aren't necessarily gathered from the immediate area, but locally where sources of rock can be found. Since these machines are built at the site of sieges, there is plenty of time to seek suitable rocks and the legionaries would necessarily have been given plenty of advice of what to look for, if not created specifically for their use on the spot. Since standing rocks and swamps aren't usually found together, this isn't a likely scenario, and whilst some legioanries may well have sufferd the attentions of cruel centurions, bear in mind that the centurion who wasted effort in gathering munitions is not going to do his reputation or career any favours if he's caught acting in that way. The antique items in good condition have had the fortune of being stored where they can be looked after. As for field blacksmithing, I'm sure there is, though I can't think of anything specific. There was however a work camp set up by legionaries in my own area for the purpose of building a road from Calleva Atrebatum to Corinium Dobinnorum. It was abandoned, presumabnly with everything useful carted away, when the road section was complete, and the local Britons took the site over as a settlement, later to develop a mansio and a small town.called Durocornovium. However I would point out that smithing requires a certain amount of equipment to be present and that mitiagtes against casual use.

According to the BBC, ten million of you watched the Dr Who special marking the 50th year of time travelling mayhem and alien invasions of Earth. I strongly suspect far fewer of you are going to be reading this, but who knows, perhaps one day this blog will survive the ravages of time and become an indispensible guide to how life in Swindon really was before Professor Cox was proved right. I do note however one aspect of Day Of The Doctor that most people might not have noticed. The good Doctor turns out to have been an utter cad. He sent Rose Tyler into exile in another dimension so he could snog Elizabeth 1st. Perhaps worse than that, children have learned that our foremost warrior queen married a nine hundred year old alien with really bad fashion sense. No wonder she kept that secret. Dr Cox A little while ago I spotted a news item on Yahoo in which Professor Brian Cox was quoted as saying that time travel was possible. I disagree with him vehemently and posted a somewhat sarky comment to that effect. You see, he says that einsteinian time dilation due to excessive speed allows a traveller to go into the future. I say it doesn't, because the traveller hasn't left his own present and cannot move independently of his own local time, thus he isn't time travelling at all. Physics is really easy when you don't listen to physics lecturers. Lo and behold within days a lecture by Professor Cox was aired on television in which he discussed whether time travel was possible. Actually he spent most of the lecture dazzling his audience with the inner mysteries of light cones, and only at the very end suggested a possible time travel paradigm. He said that if you could warp space so that the end met the beginning, then hurtling through space at near-light speed would get you into the past. He is of course wrong. If he was right, all it wouldl do is get you ten penalty points on your license and a three month ban on driving time machines. Not only are there speed cameras everywhere,to catch you flashing past at 186,000 miles per second, your arrival at your destination will very likely be in the history books and therefore you're guilty as charged. According to the history books I've read, no-one from the future ever turned up. He did confess that the energy required to warp space like that would be enormous but tried to inspire the television audience to try anyway. Clearly he hasn't dealt with energy companies. If he had, he would know that no-one in Britain could afford to power their time machine. Survival Without Central Heating Update Cold... So cold... Time Machine Of The Week So you want to follow the good professors advice and build a time machine? Well, you don't need to build a weird victorian chair with rotating umbrella, a 60's police box, or a huge underground complex in the American desert. Just follow my simple instructions and you can travel through time. Step 1 - Sit comfortably. Step 2 - Wait. Twiddle thumbs if necessary. Step 3 - Done. Finished. You have just travelled through time according to Professor Cox. Admittedly you won't be able to snog Elizabeth 1st, battle Daleks, or act the idiot with a sonic screwdriver, but there you go. You see, in order to travel into the past or future then the past or future has exist in order to visit it. That means that Time must be dimensional, which unfortunately for Professor Cox means the past is already defined, and since the future is merely a part of the Time dimension we haven't reached yet, it too is pre-determined , which means there's nothing you can do. The bank will foreclose on your mortgage, Schrodingers Cat will die of starvation, and the number 10 bus will squash your dog. There's nothing you can do because Time is already defined. As for me, I say time travel cannot possibly happen because there isn't any Time, only Now. A single existentent moment that changes on a quantum level incredibly fast like a stop-frame movie with a frame rate of billions upon trillions upon quadrillions of frames a second, varying locally according to such einsteinian things like speed and gravity. All the atoms that made Julius Caesar still exist, albeit seperated and changed. A vibrating universe that has no past or future, merely a present that experiences Change. Time is therefore not a seperate existence, dimension, or place you can visit, just our experience of Change. Sadly I can't compete with Professor Cox when it comes to inviting celebrity audiences to a television physics lecture, but I've taken your advice Brian. I've made a start. Trouble is, my time machine cannot possibly work.

It is true that the Romans wouldn't have stored much in the way of armour, mostly because the creation of it took so much effort so they made it to order, and if it wasn't needed, they weren't going to fill whole warehouses with unused metal armour that needed careful maintenance to prevent corrosion and so forth. Besides, you might need the expensive raw material for something else. In the field, there was little you could do except retrieve spares from the fallen where possible. A fort, if large enough, would have a smithy where basic repairs could be undertaken, or in the main bases, a fabricae where a new set could be manufactured if required. However, bear in mind the ability of the legion to reapir or replace often depended on how many artisans they had on strength. The legion did not have a armoury unit, nor were armourers recruited specifically, so note the priority such men received when they volunteered. It is remotely plausible that legion might not have the necessary skill set at all at any given time (though given the extent of tradesmanship this might be unlikely), especially on campaign, bearing in mind that soldiers were all duty bound to line and fight irrespective of trade. Calatpultae and ballistae were more or less standard in sizes, though you would expect some variety according to who made them and what they were intended for. Bear in mind that the larger artillery were oelty made and used at the scene, not carted around. Rocks would be obtained locally, transported by animals, wagons, sometimes with civilian contractors, and broken to size at the source. If time permitted, some shaping might have taken place before delivery. The Romans would have quickly sorted which rocks were suitable.

The senate died out because it became less and less relevant to the actual running of the empire. This was why the empire ultimately broke into cooperative halves, or why Diocletion instituted his Tetrarchy. Partly this has to laid at the feet of the senatorial class themselves - their self serving factiobalism allowed the chaos of the late republic and the rule of the Caesars to emerge - partly because there were Caesars who didn't want the Senate sharing what they regarded as their power - partly because senatorial competition for power had been diluted by changes to the cobnstitution - and partly because Rome was less and less the centre of the Roman world.

Chickens may not be the cleverest animals. but they do have a modest imntelligence along with any creature with any brain organ. For instance, I know of a chicken shed that was raided by a fox. The farmer found the carnage the fololowing morning and was devastated at the loss. However, the farmer discovered by sheer coincidence that his crafty rooster had played dead, and thus survived a little ruffled rather than mauled.

Shopping? Done. Interview at the job agency? Done. Gas account cancellation? Done. On my daily checklist I had only the obligatory online job search to do, so off to the library for another struggle with Microsoft's worst. Balloons? What's going on here? It's usually excessively warm in our local library but there seemed to be a much livelier atmosphere, and evidence of small scale partying. Worse still, as I ascended the stairs a jazz band started up, creating a very genteel background noise, like the sort of music you get in resteraunts. Years ago our band was driving through London along the embankment on our way home from a gig in early hours of the morning. We passed that odd resteraunt that stands on the riverside by itself between the trees, and our singer, Dave, commanded that the van be brought to a halt. Enough was enough. We'd all noticed the place every timne we went this way and finally his curiosity could bear no more. He had to find out what it was like in there. So I parked up for a while as a slightly inebriated folk-rock singer tried to gain access. The bouncers actually let him in to have a look. Apparently it was a very strange mystical experience with a rock band doing the impossible by playing at low volume as the clientelle ignored them in favour of expensive morsels and famous brand wines, and finally Dave re-emerged with the advice to bring a tie next time if he wanted to come in and eat. Sadly we were all struggling musicians without a penny between us, so that never happened, Okay, reminicense over, back to the library. I was expecting to be distracted by the music, but strangely, the easy listening tunes suited the mood and I got on - I strongly suspect I was typing in unison with the beat, but don't tell anyone. A guest singer was introduced who completely tortured 'Summertime' to death. Clearly not a finalist in X Factor then. Whether she was supposed to sing one song or not, that was it, and the band called everyone together before they found something interesting to do. A chorus of 'Happy Birthday' explained the change of pace. Oddly enough, when the band finished, the library started to empty. Maybe the guest singer was planning to sing again? Cold Facts I must be honest, now that my flat has no heating I am starting to notice the cold. Not for the first time, I have to say, just that now I can't do much about it except report my shivering on this blog. I notice that an MP has warned the gas companies not to use their customers as cash cows. Too late for me, I've already escaped the meadow, and worringly I quickly noticed newspaper headlines at the supermarket. A sharp freeze expected. Four inches of snow expected. Oh great. Well at least I live in Swindon. Thankfully our much maligned town doesn't seem to be greatly affected by weather - we never suffer the extremes you see on the evening news. One winter, the whole country was inundated with snow, drifts up to six feet deep, but Swindon? Not a flake. With luck the snow will pass us by this year too.

Right. And what about the actual knowledge (skills) of the architectural work? In what ways could these be distributed? Most of these skills were pretty basic to civilisations everywhere. Since the legions had a policy of recruiting tradesmen and had official patterns to worjk to, you would expect work of a fairly uniform nature. Having said that, the level of craftsmanship involved in Roman architecture depends on how long the settlement or fort is located there.

Ummmmm.... You never seen charity adverts on television showing how animals are actually treated, have you?

By our standards, perhaps, but please realise that Roman's did not have the same attachment to animals that we do today. Think of the third world, where animals are used as beasts of burden or usually in some practical capacity such as food, guards, whatever. In fact, the Roman's could be very callous about animals - the biblical quote in Genesis about humanity being given mastery over nature is pure Roman attitude, and even in the late empire, when a writer records that there were 'no more lions in Thessalay, no more Hippo's in the Nile", he laments the loss of opportunity for spectacle and the consequent demonstration of power, but at no time regrests what his ancestors had done. In any case, the Romans saw the outside world as a mysterious place, guided by vengeful and fickle divine beings, who needed placating. Even crossing a river was potentially trespassing on a gods domain and risked being swept away by an angry river god. Note how difficult it was to persuade Roman legions to cross the English Channel, even after Caesar had done it - both Caligukla and Claudius had minor mutinies to deal with. All in all, the loss of a dog meant little if life was bountiful and pleasant afterward.

Whether these individuals are warlords has a further qualification - are they acting for themselves or on behalf of the state? Washington was an army leader and elected president, Jackson an army general, and Eisenhower a national army general and allied commander. None of these acted without state consent or direction. Crassus was also a sneaky and successful investor, buying land in Rome at a very reduced offer when tenetments burned or collapsed, leaving their owners 'over a barrel' with no rent incomes.

Hadrian had ambitions to enclose the empire and r'omanise' it, to encourage Roman civilisation as he saw it. That resuklted in conflict with the Judaeans who wanted to retain their culture and religion. In particular, Hadrian had promised to rebuild Jerusalem after if had been destroyed in the Jewish War in 72ad. Unfortunately he decided instead to rebuild the city as a fresh new Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, which incensed the Judaeans because they regarded that as reneging on the promise, which then inspired a rebellion.