sylla

As a pre-scientific discipline, archaeology goes back at least to Nabonidus (VI century BC). Classical historians were well aware of the confirmatory value of physical evidence from the past; for example, Suetonius checked out the physical damage on Tiberius' sculptures and described Augustus' house in support of his biographical accounts; Seneca used Scipio's villa to describe the Africanus' personality; Plutarch physically depicted Sulla from his statues. The Pyramids were dug (presumably by tomb robbers) long before the Roman era.

Archaeology also shares that joy; it works with those same few disciplines and more. Both can't be imagined without the input of each other and many more disciplines. Both do the "whats" and the "whys" of their respective areas. Essentially, archaeology is more field survey than theoretical model, and history is the inverse. They overlap each other virtually 100%; all archeological findings have a history behind them, and the hard evidence of all histories is ultimately archeological..

It's a great avatar and a beautiful image. Too late for them? In all likelihood, that would be already the case. However, if we were still lucky enough to find this beauty in his natural habitat, the odds are at least 99.99% that any of us would be unable to spot him... unless the tiger has some taste for romanophile food. IMHO, London zoo is as good as any Indian zoo for your goal.

All that is perfectly plausible; however, in the absence of independent sources to confirm it, it seems we should be extremely cautious; it doesn't seem we can discard some defeats from the Roman army (unaccounted by our biased sources) that might help explain the delay in the expulsion of the Carthaginians from Spain as a more parsimonious explanation. Besides, Hasdrubal success in crossing the Alps with such a huge army was undisputedly a spectacular victory with immense obvious strategic implications, almost as amazing as the first Carthaginian expedition by his brother a decade before. It's hard to consider it as the natural outcome from an utterly defeated general, as depicted by our available sources; after all, the same sources stated that there were at least 56,000 soldiers with him, even after correcting for the unavoidable losses from the expedition itself.

The darts that you refer to - plumbatae - were not a part of legionary weaponry until the late third century AD long after any encounter with a phalanx based adversary. That's a nice trivia; however I would think S. was talking about the pila as a missile weapon as contrasted with the sarissa. The decimation of the Phalanx by missile weapons from more mobile units (specially cavalry) was the latter's best chance, even if the Phalanx line integrity was preserved, like Appian described for Magnesia, undoubtedly with the contemporary Imperial wars against the Persians in mind. Roman historians were well aware of the decisive role played by the hit-and-run tactics of their mostly auxiliary cavalry units against the Phalanx, notoriously: - the Aetolians in Cynoscephalae (Polybius' account); - Eumenes II and Domitius in Magnesia (Appian); and on their enemies' side against the legions: - Midon and Meno in Callicinus (Livy); - and even the Macedonian sacred cavalry (by default for its absence) in Pydna (Plutarch). When comparing Legions with Phalanges, it should be noted that the Roman tactics were not so great when they were used by non-Romans under non-Roman command; after all, the famous thirty cohorts of Galantians from Deiotarius were utterly decimated by Pharnaces (the vini, vidi, vici king). In any case, by the time of the Roman Civil Wars most of the Roman allies seem to have been using cohort and even legion formations, even the proud Egyptians. The Seleucids themselves (Antiochus IV) adopted some of their enemies' tactics; however, it seems it was hard for the Hellenistic soldiers to change pikes for swords. Unfortunately, it seems there is not much information on Mithridates Eupator and Archelaus tactics for routing the legions more than once; their army was probably a mixture of quite diverse units. If we should rely on the mostly absurd figures (even by Roman standards) given by Appian and Plutarch (undoubtedly coming down from Sulla's memoirs and similar sources) the Pontic victories were almost entirely based on sheer numbers.

There's a famous skeloton from Maiden Castle (Dorset) with the head of a ballista bolt embedded in its backbone; however, this finding comes from the Roman invasion; the bolt was presumably from Legio II Augusta. There are many reports of "bolts" in Anglo-Saxon burials, including the Wiltshire area; however it's clear most if not all of them are talking about other kind of iron devices and not ballista balls.

Raw experience has repeatedly shown us that no man or woman has all virtues: Scipio possessed all in our available sources because all what we have are unashamed panegyrics that tried to eclipse Hannibal's figure after the death of Marcellus. In fact, those same sources tried to eclipse any other Roman general, Scipio's own brother included (ie, Africanus would have defeated Antiochus almost alone as second-in-command). All that might have been true, but in the absence of any critical unbiased account we might rightly remain skeptical. Ancient sources regularly considered the commander's abilities as the main and almost only factor for the battle's outcome; ie, Varro in Cannae (the patrician Paulus was suspiciously forgotten); nowadays we are well aware that there are numerous factors involved. Hannibal didn't conquer Rome mainly because of the immense collective effort from the Roman Republic as a whole. Scipio might well have been the decisive factor for the ultimate victory, but it seems quite unlikely that Carthage had any real chance after Metaurus. A couple of unsettled questions: If Scipio was never defeated, why did he require five full years (210-206 BC) for expelling the Carthaginians from Hispania? If Hasdrubal Barca was so utterly defeated, how was he able to cross the Alps with so huge an Army in 207 BC? Why didn't Scipio attack Hannibal in Italy while he was a consul in 205 BC? And of course, Scipio died in exile after a rather dirty and turbulent political issue.

Being that the case, IMHO there are no boring topics, just boring posters. All that said, my 'least fave' topic should be Roman (cibernetic) games; just personal taste, I guess.

As the inclusion criterion is linguistic and not necessarily my personal taste, I must add Sebastiane (1976). There is a full-Latin version of STAR WARS (Bellum Stellae), at least for episodes IV and V.

By carefully quoting and critically analyzing the Annals, Ingsoc made a quite convincing case for Tacitus grossly exaggerating Germanicus' at best moderate deeds and virtues so he could abuse the supposedly jealous Tiberius; just judge by yourself.

A well known case is Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004); the script is mostly in ecclesiastical-like Latin plus some passages in reconstructed Aramaic and Hebrew, with English subtitles.

- National pride discussions from anyone that may consider his/her country (or group) as the true and only heir of ancient Rome. - Argumentations that try to prove or disprove the existence and/or divine nature of any deity (they are funny, but in other Fora). - Any self-conscious fallacy that pretends to survive forever on sheer force.

Actually, Cupidon is Cupid in French. The Latin Cupido is a participe form of the verb cupere (to desire); French adds a "-n" to many Latin nouns ending in "-o", mostly masculine (the feminine noun Cupidone is the name of a flower). The name of our Latin friends Fronto and Varro had a similar evolution in French (Fronton and Varron). As far as I know, the name for our winged friendly god in Greek is always Eros or a derivative.

It seems the revision of Zosimus and the whole textual record on the Roman departure from Britain (the Brittia/Bruttia alternative included) is a currently ongoing event. In any case, the available archaeological evidence (negative evidence, in fact) for the abrupt disappearance of the Roman civil and military administration from Britannia at the early V century (like the absence of new coins after 402 or the lack of references to the II, VI or XX Legions) seems to be already overwhelming and undeniable.

That's an easier question: Indo-European languages regularly add a familiar ending to imported loanwords for their naturalization, often deleting at the same time alien endings. Latin itself usually adds "-us" to alien masculine proper names, i.e. the regular inflection for the nominative case of the second declension. Eg "Plutarch-us" for the Greek "Plutarch" (and most dog-Latin wizard names in Harry Potter's saga, BTW). The nomen Antoni-us (itself of Etruscan origin) was naturalized in English in a most usual way, by the deletion of "-us" and the addition of a regular English ending, like "-y", actually fused with the "i" in this word. This is a rather common case in English, like "Pliny" for "Plinius" or "Livy" for "Livius. The "-th-" of Anthony is an English prosodic transcription, sometimes omitted. This name didn't necessarily come from the works of Plutarch; an ecclesiastical source is quite likely. Other IE languages add their respective endings; eg, "-o" for Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (Antonio).

BTW, Amor seems to be preferred name for this god in Swedish and other Nordic languages too (Klingan's expertise is required here). Thomas Hyde in The Poetic Theology of Love states that by the late Medieval ages a dichotomy had developed between Amor, the good virtuous divine love, and Cupid, the evil voluptuous lustful love. My educated guess would be that these words came into the non-romance Old German via the medieval minnesang predominantly from ecclesiastical Latin, which would have been naturally biased for Amor versus Cupido. The regular evolution for these words within the Romance languages was the divergence in their meaning; Amor was primarily reserved as the common name for the feeling, affection or passion (ie, love) while Cupido remained as the proper name for the God (ie, Eros). Western Germanic languages (English, Dutch and even Danish) would probably have taken the latter name (presumably via French) for the God; most if not all Germanic languages seem to have used original proto-Germanic cognates for expressing the feeling.

From Phillip Stadter's The Categories of Ancient Biography: "(1) Philosophical biography brought out the moral character of its subjects and the relation of their teachings to their lives. Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote on Pythagoras, Archytas, Socrates, and Plato. Hermippus in the third century wrote Lives of many philosophers, as well as lawgivers and other figures. Diogenes Laertius

And another lesson from Karl Popper: "You can prove a fake, but you can't prove originals. That's an epistemological problem," Stefan Simon told... A bit of wax was allegedly found in Nefertiti's right eye. When it was carbon-dated a few years back, scientists concluded that might be more than 3,300 years old... The sculpture is composed of the so-called Amarna-mix, a blend of gypsum anhydride plaster applied on top of a limestone base... "This special blend was unknown before 1912," said Simon ... READ MORE in Der Spiegel Online

A nice review indeed from what seems to have been an exhaustive search on the available ancient sources; maybe it's exactly for its thoroughness that I am a bit disappointed with its findings. Most of the examples of women at circus quoted here seem to have been closer to executed convicts; the kind of stuff you could try on your own slaves but was unthinkable for the Roman female elite, and was thus timely denounced by the pro-senatorial historians (especially Dio). A massive execution ad bestias must have been for the contemporary professional venatores what nowadays hanged criminals are for modern acrobats. I would have expected to find more evidence on the professional gladiatrices from the exotic-taste-prone Imperial plutocrats and mob.

Why all this eagerness for showing our defects to the World? Why should we deny the World the pleasure of discovering them by itself?

BTW, most of the books that I have been able to check out on this topic name the Seleucid Kingdom as "Syria". This may be misleading; for a long time (ie, under Seleucus I or Antiochus III) this dynasty ruled over an immense Empire (presumably the biggest of its time) equivalent to the Achaemenid Empire under Artaxerxes II and including the vast majority of Alexander's conquests, sometimes even holding a foot in either Europe, Africa or India; its maximum size was in the same order of magnitude of the Roman Empire at its acme.

This seems to be a fair veredict on this unfortunate ruler from RW Mathisen: "As for the feckless and timid Honorius, he generally took little part in public affairs. He was generally passive in nature, except when he was motivated to act by fear. He left military operations to his generals, but he did become involved in a controversy over the choice of a bishop of Rome in 418... He left no issue, which resulted in the proclamation of Johannes, the Chief Secretary, after his death. Not until 425 did his nephew Valentinian III... restore the legitimate dynasty. Even though the unity of the western empire was shakily maintained during Honorius' reign ... he left a legacy of fragmentation and feeble, lackluster leadership which eventually would result in the dissolution of the western empire."

Impressive For me too.

Both authors have remarkable lists of published works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giusto_Traina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averil_Cameron My error: Cameron in not the coauthor, merely wrote the introduction. Can anyone point me to a timeline online of the Roman Empire, one that can tell me about the events of 428 AD? Traina's book extract and contents seem to be a nice list for me. Traina explicitly selected a fifth century year with not too may ground-breaking events. Arguably the most relevant events for 428 AD itself would be: -The final demise and annexation of the centuries-long Armenian client kingdom by the Persians. - The beginning of Genseric's reign. - Nestorius becoming the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Cicero and many other contemporaries seem to have thought like you, and certainly so did Plutarch. BTW, Cassius was presumably as great or bad Roman as Brutus (with the additional merit of an outstanding performance against Pacorus and his Parthians after Carrhae); even so, he usually gets even worse rap than Brutus. Anyway, I would think great figures should be defined by their performance, not so much by their intentions. As it was, Cassius and Brutus transformed the relatively balanced peace under Caesar into an even worse Civil War than the last one. Arguably, they should probably have killed Anthony and even Lepidus; even so, there is no way to predict where the allegiance of the Legions would have fallen. If Brutus and Cassius had beaten Anthony and Octavius, they would all still be remembered as the men responsible for the greatest Roman citizen slaughter ever at Philippi. More important, we are again probably giving too much weight to individual performances for the Republican outcome; if the centuries-long Republic was eliminated at all, it must be concluded that it lacked the support of the Roman people as a whole. Had Brutus been executed after Pharsalus, that would have hardly been compatible with the purported contemporizing intentions of Caesar after his victory. Besides, Cassius and the other Liberatores would presumably had still been on their way to magnicide. Quite few people ever may be compared with the original Caesar on fame's magnitude. Just be aware the more and more we read on Scipio Africanus Major, the more we read panegyrics; virtually no critical analysis of his figure survived from Classical times; one can only guess if that was the case for the lost Plutarch's biography.