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Mr Diamond is evidently talking about not the "Maunder Minimum", but a more conventionally defined "Little Ice Age"; this is an example of why the use of the latter label might be misleading.

As your description is exact, I really find amazing that you still justify the use of the quotation marks; unsurprisingly, Romans from anywhere always viewed themselves as Romans. - The Romans profited from their Hellenic cultural heritage both in the West and in the East; you simply can't imagine a Seneca or a Cicero without their Greek background. The Roman culture was as Greco-Hellenistic in west as in the east; just think about the divinization of the Imperial family. - Most of the cultural production of the Roman Empire came always from the Eastern side; even more, most of the scholars of the principate that wrote in Greek (Strabo, Ptolemy, Plutarch, Josephus, Galen, Cassius Dio, Appian, even the Church fathers) has always been considered Roman and Greek at the same time; even by Gibbon. - The Romans wrote in Greek long before writing in Latin. And a lot of what the bona fide Italian Imperial ruling elite left us was in Greek. Maybe Fabius Pictor and Marcus Aurelius should be considered "Byzantines". - But the most important fact is that, by your own description, essentially nothing changed. The Eastern side was Greek before the Romans came, was Greek up to the Fall of the Western Empire, and was Greek for centuries afterwards. How could they have become even more "Greek"?

If military conquests are the Roman-defining criterion, the eunuch Narses was as Roman as Belisarius, while most Emperors between Trajan and Justinian would have been "Byzantines". In any case, the military deeds of the Macedonian dynasty were equiparable with any general of the Principate. The Empire has been run by Spaniards since Trajan, Africans since Severus and Greeks at least since Diocletian; the "Greeks" that ruled the Empire after the VI century came from any province: Armenia, Phrygia, Syria or Africa. The distancing from the pagan, classical heritage was inherent to the Christian rule from the very first moment. No one ever called "Byzantine" the Roman Empire; unsurprisingly, the Romans were identified as Romans by all of their neighbors, from China to the Franks themselves. Only occasionally some western chroniclers had any objection, when they futilely tried to support the incredibly absurd idea that the Pope was able to select not just the new "Roman Emperor", but even the new "Roman Empire". The bizarre schizophrenic idea of a "Byzantine Empire", not only different from but supposedly opposed to the Classical Roman Empire, was simply a cheap invention from XVIII and XIX centuries' historians; revisionism of the worst kind. In the context of the preceding post, "it is generally considered" means by those that considered that the I Reich, the so-called "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" had anything remotely Roman within its nature.

Illiteracy is (surprise!) the lack of literacy, currently defined by the UNESCO as "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use... written materials ... to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals... and to participate fully in the wider society"; under such definition (age 15 and over) the literacy rate for the World as a whole was 82% by 2007, and the worst score was for Burkina Faso (23,6 %). Even if the rural population was the vast majority, it wasn't always so silent. Written records are not restricted to the books; the thousands of amphorae recovered from all over the Empire (multiple rural areas included) have almost always at least some short inscription regarding its contents, producers and shippers. If no one was able to read, why were so many inscriptions required? Unsurprisingly, one of the most constant archaeological evidence of the barbarian conquest across the V and VI centuries was the abrupt decline on the written record.

I agree - to a point. I call him the last of the Roman generals because he is probably the last general that earlier generations, especially in the Principate, would acknowledge as being their descendant, and was probably the last natural Latin speaker that rose to high rank. After him, and especially with Narses, there is a distinct switch to a more Eastern culture, despite the fact that they thought of themselves as 'Romans'. I can't really believe that, for instance, Augustus, Caesar or Trajan would have been impressed with the idea of an eunuch at the head of the Imperial armies. They would probably have been as impressed as Scipio Africanus with Septimius Severus, Cicero with Maximinus Thrax, Cato Maior with Philip the Arab, even the pious Augustus with the fanatic Theodosius or Justinian himself ... or George Washington with Colin Powell. All societies and nations evolve; so? The main reason why the Roman population of the Roman state of any time considered themselves as Romans (without quotation marks) was that they were so: the same state, population and culture in constant evolution, from Romulus to Constatine XI. The weight of the proof rests on anyone who pretends that, at any arbitrary point, the Romans stopped being Romans just to support Montesquieu and Gibbon. If I'm not mistaken, we have here two main criteria of unromanliness: I'll leave aside the extraordinary idea of that Eastern trait (Parthian? Athenian? Armenian? Chinese?) of the (Roman) soldiers

"Little Ice Age" is a misnomer for the "Maunder Minimum", because the former term has been used to describe quite different periods and phenomena. 1645-1715 was an extremely dramatic and complex period not only for Scotland but for all Europe, the European colonies and the whole world (the reign of Louis XIV, to begin with); it's unclear how much of such complexity is attributed by the authors to the climate change. The ideas from Pollard and Fagan are indeed interesting, but Lamb's writings (at least as quoted here by Mr McKenzie) are simply too farfetched; for example (sic): - "1690-1728 - Reports of Inuit appearing in Scotland"; - "Between 1693 to 1700... two-thirds of the population died through cold and starvation" (In Scotland). This can't be serious.

The implicit premise of the Imperial characters and population suddenly and almost magically becoming non-Romans after Justinian and Belisarius is simply unhistorical and plainly absurd.

The Vindolanda tablets were written by and for legionaries from the middle and late Imperial eras; I'm not aware of any archeological evidence that might imply an even higher literacy level for the Roman soldiers of any previous period.

Why not simply one of the true Licinii?

There are so many tombstones of children. It is heartbreaking to read... Thanks Ingsoc for sending us to such a nice website; it couldn't be any more didactic. The inscription discussed on this thread is "A Traditional Roman Funerary Inscription: Aurelius Hermia & Aurelia Philematio", the eleventh link from the opening of this page.

The original Latin passage is "SEPTEM ME NAATAM ANNORVM GREMIO IPSE RECEPIT". According to the The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary Germium could be translated as lap, bosom; female genital parts; interior (btw the female genital parts doesn't appear in The Cassell's Latin Dictionary so it's probably wasn't common meaning) and Ipse is masculine it's has to refer to her husband hence the translation of "lap, bosom" would be the only logical translation (I also find it hard to believe that someone would choose to put such as explicit sexual references on their tomb stone...). My impression is the he took her under his wing when she was seven years old since she had no relatives or they couldn't look after her (see also the passage which say he was like a father to her) and only later this "father-daughter" relationship changed to one of husband-wife. "Genital" doesn't mean "*or*". I restricted the analysis to the final half of this sentence, because the first one (SEPTEM ME NAATAM ANNORVM) is undisputed; it's an adverbial phrase of time, the age at which the action happened (note the archaic double vowel). In the relevant phrase (GREMIO IPSE RECEPIT) the masculine reflexive pronoun "Ipse" is the subject (the husband Aurelius) who performed the reflexive action of receiving himself (Recepit) at the "Gremio" (dative/ablative object); this is a nice synechdoche, where a part is used to represent the whole (ie, the wife Aurelia). This kind of figure is quite common in poetry and anthropology. Then, Aurelius received himself at Aurelia when she was seven years old; within the context of this memorial, it clearly implied the beginning of this couple

It's hard for me to explain how much I enjoy watching all this cool educational material so nicely posted by you. Thx, K

A non-confusing prophecy sounds like an oxymoron to me.

This famous inscription is currently at the British Museum; please don't get mistaken by its euphemistic adaptation on Ms. Shelton book. The Latin relevant phrase is GREMIO IPSE RECEPIT, which is translated by the museum as "(He) took me to his bosom". "Bosom" is also an euphemism here, because GREMIO is in fact an explicit genital reference.

The law is quoted in the Institutiones of Gaius, 1, 22 pr.

Ward-Perkins performed a cautious analysis on the more than 11,000 inscriptions and graffiti recorded in Pompeii; I couldn't agree more with his conclusion: "Even though we cannot estimate the proportion of Pompeians who were literate (was it 30 per cent, or more; or perhaps only 10 per cent ?), we can say with confidence that writing was an essential, and a day-to-day part of the city

The lower age limit for marriage was explicitly established by the Roman law for puberty, meaning the beginning of reproductive capabilities (nubilis for women); for most of the Roman Era, the limit for women was 12 years, as it is described in the first book of Gaius' Institutiones (II century AD); by the time of Justinian, this limit has been upgraded to 14 years, no doubt because of the influence of the Christian Church. At least for the Roman elite, both textual and epitaph's evidence have consistently shown that most women married between the ages of 12 and 16 (Median age = 14).

Checking on this old thread, the uncritical acceptance of the figures from classical historians is always amazing. The 230,000 men of Boudica's army reported by Dio, assuming extremely high mobilization rates, would have required a base population (Iceni and client tribes) of at least two million subjects; some three million under most conventional rates. This is an optimistic hypothesis, which would require the unlikely assumption of 0% casualties from previous campaigns and 100% local recruitment (ie, no neutral or romanophile natives). The Iceni territory was little more than modern Norfolk, (which current population is BTW some 840,000); that was like 5% of Britannia's territory. The current average estimation for the whole Roman British population is around three millions, more or less like modern Panama or Costa Rica.

Everyday's Latin indeed. The last answer comes from Persian via Hindi (ie, the British Raj).

Some of this material is actually available on YouTube and similar sites; I haven't been able to check on the "Roman feast" yet. From what I saw, Mr. Blumenthal is clearly playing with his spectator's nausea; this may have begun with some hard history and science, but it quickly became into unpolluted showbusiness. BTW, I can't see any problem for eating ANY portion of porcine flesh; besides, both insects and bull's testicles are regular food in many countries. As most ingredients, they may be tasty (even delicious) in the right hands.

Archaeology without History is like sailing without a map. History without Archaeology is little more than fairy tales.

Deep History's philosophy in a nutshell for less than a denarius; V's post is a bomb. It's easy to forget that we're actually always living and watching historical events; their historical magnitude is only given by years (or centuries) of perspective. Playing the time tunnel would be incredibly boring for at least 99.9999.....% of the time; to begin with, Humanity has been sleeping for a third of History, not to mention other bodily functions. That's why the teaching of History has always required special effects, from rhetoric and footnotes to virtual perspectives and background music; Roman and Greek historians truly mastered this field. It's the Rashomon effect exponentially raised to infinity; well beyond the wildest fantasy. Obviously, it would depend on our expectations. Were we looking for breath-taking action & passion and profoundly didactic morals, the answer would most probably be

Barbarians (please read "foreigners") were almost universally despised, and the Romans were always paranoid about them. Alien or native, any unexplained activity was systematically considered hostile until proven otherwise. Freedom of movement was far from being considered a universal right; in fact, most free peasants were legally bounded to their land, especially by the late Empire. The distinction between wandering and brigandage was discretional, and the Roman state was proud of controlling both; ie, Augustus (Suetonius). The risk of enslavement for irregular foreigners was quite real; it was the regular punishment for brigandage and related conditions (servi poenae); in fact, eluding the census was enough. Besides, the hunters of fugitive slaves frequently kidnapped free-born citizens, as attested by the ergastuli under both Augustus and Tiberius (Suetonius again).

That's an excellent question; the juridical status that you would have been looking for was called peregrinus, meaning the citizens from any sovereign state defined as an ally by the Romans and who were then protected by a friendship convention (hospitium). Otherwise, you would have been an irregular allien without any legal right which might have protected you from enslavement or any other kind of abuse; in fact, you may very well have been considered an hostis (enemy).

Usus autem sum, ne in aliquo fallam carissimam mihi familiaritatem tuam, praecipue libris ex bibliotheca Ulpia, aetate mea thermis Diocletianis, et item ex domo Tiberiana, usus etiam [ex] regestis scribarum porticus porphyreticae, actis etiam senatus ac populi. 2 et quoniam me ad colligenda talis viri gesta ephemeris Turduli Gallicani plurimum invit, viri honestissimi ac sincerissimi, beneficium amici senis tacere non debui. 3 Cn. Pompeium, tribus fulgentem triumphis belli piratici, belli Sertoriani, belli Mithridatici multarumque rerum gestarum maiestate sublimem, quis tandem nosset, nisi eum Marcus Tullius et Titus Livius in litteras rettulissent? 4 Publ<i>um Scipionem Afric<an>um, immo Scipiones omnes, seu Lucios seu Nasicas, nonne tenebrae possiderent ac tegerent, nisi commendatores eorum historici nobiles atque ignobiles extitissent? 5 longum est omnia persequi, quae ad exemplum huiusce modi etiam nobis tacentibus usurpanda sunt. 6 illud tantum contestatum volo me et rem scripsisse, quam, si quis voluerit, honestius eloquio celsiore demonstret, et mihi quidem id animi fuit, 6 <ut> non Sallustios, Livios, Tacito<s>, Trogos atque omnes disertissimos imitarer viros in vita principum et temporibus disserendis, sed Marium Maximum, Suetonium Tranquillum, Fabium Marcellinum, Gargilium Martialem, Iulium Capitolinum, Aelium Lampridium ceterosque, qui haec et talia non tam diserte quam vere memoriae tradiderunt. 8 sum enim unus ex curiosis, quod infi[ni]t<i>as ire non possum, ince<n>dentibus vobis, qui, cum multa sciatis, scire multo plura cupitis. 9 et ne diutius ea, quae ad meum consilium pertinent, loquar, magnum et praeclarum principem et qualem historia nostra non novit, arripiam.