guidoLaMoto

Interesting old thread-- To summarize Plutarch- Sulla had a generalized skin condition that seemed to start as a severe red rash, became ulcerated and the open sores became infested with worms... Any skin ulcerstions, given the conditions of hygiene of an ancient military operation, would be susceptible to infestation by flies\maggots. It seemed to have started with a severe sunburn....probably that just meant a generalized red rash or a blistering skin condition that looked like a sunburn. Pemphigus (cleverly mentioned above) is a blistering condition that covers large areas of skin, but was fatal within a year in 90% of cases without modern treatment....."Red Man Syndrome," a form of lymphoma affecting the skin is very itchy leading to destructive scratching and then infestation, is another uncommon possibility, and has a longer course. Plutarch also mentions "ulcerstion of the bowels" Who knows what he means? Celiac disease is quite common and can show Dermatitis Herpetiformis, although pruritus severe enough to cause generalized ulcerstion is not typical. Any allergic dermatitis would cause redness, pruritis, scratching and open sores. A severe allergy to wool garments may be the most likely explanation. Secondary syphylis causes odd rashes, but not usually pruritic. It does not seem to be described in Europe prior to 1500AD...(Consorting with harpists and transvestites is bad enough, but MIMES? Sulla, how could you sink so low?)

--did some minor research: This site gives numerous examples from the lit (without giving reference info) for dictionary entries- https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-english-dictionary.php?parola=Imperium. As you can see, the vast majority for the word as I described above. A few refer to "sub imperio populi Romani"- under the command or domination of the roman people. The term Imperium Romanorum is listed, but according to Wiki- it's a term used in the Charlemagne era referring to plans to restore the Roman Empire-- Renovatio imperii Romanorum. Don't forget that we're walking about a millennium of language (not to mention, political) evolution.....I wonder if troubadors of the Dark Ages went thru a phase where "mala" meant "bona?"....Dona mihi alta cinque! ...Aliquis?

The author must have a lot of time on his hands. I can't comment on the Greek, but for Latin, he could have summarized his examples to make some sense to the article-- adjectives take case endings to match the noun they modify. Verbs take endings to match their subjects.....and whether the singular or plural is used may not follow rules of grammar but may be idiomatic.....and context may help solve the riddle. Cf- in English, we can wear a pair of pants, but who has ever put on a single pant?.....or "to re-iterate" is to repeat yourself once, but in math, "to iterate" is to repeat a calculation over and over again....WUWT?

The ancients were apparently big on the dative of possession-. We don't have that construction in English, so I have trouble dealing with it....Ecclesiastical Latin doesn't seem to use it, as I recall, so I would go with "meam "....If you use mihi it could also translate "light the way for me." I was joking about The Saints. I figure God must have a good sense of humor-- Have you ever watched people at Walmart?

Welcome, John,.....Thanks for bumping this old thread up and into our attention. You make some interesting points about the later years. I'm not sure the ancient Romans even referred to their empire by a name.....Many English words are obviously derived from Latin counterparts but have different meanings in the two languages (eg- in English, family refers to a group of blood relatives, but Latin familia is better translated as "household"- referring to not only blood relatives but also servants/employees living in the villa/domus/farm.)..... Our "empire" is derived from imperium, but imperium is better translated as "power." Eg- a dux assumes the power or command of an army and is called imperator by the soldiers.....or a consul takes office and assumes the imperium. The Romans had names for geographic entities (Italia, Britania, etc, but did they have a concept of "country" as we do today? I doubt they used the term Imperium Romanorum (empire of the Romans)....Maybe they used the term Imperium Romanum (Roman Empire)....As mentioned above, SPQR was more of a trademark used on public works and documents. BTW-- in regards the formality of the toga-- remember the episode when the delegation of senators crossed the Tiber to seek out Cincinnatus on his farm to recruit him as dictator. They found him in a dirty tunic digging ditches and told him to go into the house to put on his toga so they could conduct official business.... ...The toga was the business suit of its day and Suetonius says they were always wet and soiled from walking Rome's filthy streets ....Candidates for office wore the toga bleached white (toga candida) to signify their candidacy. (I work in the Dept. of The Office of Redundancy Dept )

Why a surprise? Estimates are that maybe up to 30% of the Roman population was foreign born slaves..... ...and why pander to the LBGTQ crowd?....We can deduce from authors such as Catullus that homosexuality was politely "accepted" with a nod and a wink just as it is by most today. ..Just because two people, one of whom is a male, happen to suddenly drop dead due to a poisoned air supply and fall in close proximity to each other doesn't make the odds very great that they were lovers--> the odds are 0.5 that the second guy is male and 0.005 that he is gay. That calculates to odds that this is a gay couple about 0.00025....25 out of 100,000.....With the population of Pompeii somewhere greater than 10,000 at the time, we would expect at least a handful of gay couples.

After further cogitation, I thought maybe it would be a tad presumptuous to make a demand (imperative mode) of a saint, so maybe the more supplicative mode (subjunctive) would be in order-- illumines viam meam (may you light my way)-- but then I recalled my youth-- "Ave Maria......ora pro nobis peccatoribus....." The imperative is used there. (I'm so old, we didn't have History Class in school, only Current Events.) So your translation is good. When begging a favor, I always pray to the lesser known saints. I figure they're not very busy and would appreciate the attention.

Optime!......Hoc verum est.....although an ancient Roman may have used the dative of possession- mihi- instead of meam.

I wonder if he refused to play on Jewish holidays like Sandy Koufax did 1900 yrs later? That helmet is remarkably well preserved snd so ornate- almost like it's intended for ceremonial, not utilitarian purposes.

One has to wonder how much the German air raids were intended not so much for strategic purposes to soften British air power, but for psychological pressure hoping to induce a surrender without need for a costly invasion? I have to second Guy's praise of The Greatest Generation. If he failed German class and they had won, they would be giving orders he couldn't understand......I like to point out that if we Yanks hadn't won our war for independence, we'd all still be mumbling British like Nigel Bruce. Pip pip and eh whot?

Interesting supplemental references. Thanks.....I only read the abstract of the pdf on psych factors involved in spectator sports. I had to laugh. It seems the author is over thinking a simple situation in order to show off his command of four cylinder words. "It's fun and they like the vicarious experience," would have sufficed. Augustus is known to have provided for the large naumachia mentioned on an artificial lake located across the river from the Campus Martius. IIRC, in Res Gestae he states that biremmes & triremmes were used. Given that the arena of the Colosseo is only about 80m x 50m (smaller than a football field) any naval battle staged there must have been with canoes. As far as the pollice verso thing goes, one can easily imagine it to mean "slice the throat," as the gesture still signifies today.

It's no secret that 95% of drugs available today were discovered in or derived from chemicals made by plants....but I wonder how much Yew tree bark a woman would have to chew to cure her breast cancer....or what the other 50,000 chemicals in the bark would be doing to her?

Amazing......There are rare examples of other ancient seeds able to have been germinated after thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed. Apparently it's an often repeated myth that grain seeds from the Pyramids have been germinated. Somewhat related, Moses' original Burning Bush is supposedly still alive and doing well at St Catherine's monastery in Sinai. The monastery is only 1700 y/o, so the bush was already 1600y/o when the place was built. I wonder if they have have to pay extra for fire insurance? https://madainproject.com/burning_bush_of_saint_catherine_monastery#google_vignette

-- brings to mind some American sports history.....In college (American) football, Harvard and Yale have their annual "big game,' a rivalry dating back a century (a long time here)....Around 1965, Yale had an unusually good, undefeated team and Harvard an unusually bad team. Harvard had little hope of making a good showing, but, miraculously achieved a tie score at the end of the game, ruining Yale's shot at a perfect season....The next morning, the head lines in the Harvard daily newspaper read "Harvard Wins 0 - 0!

Very interesting. We tend to underestimate the extent & sophistication of trade routes in those days. That lion isn't the only thing fishy at St Mark's......Maybe that isn't even St Mark in the cathedral, but someone else https://www.thecollector.com/alexander-saint-marks-tomb-venice/

Considering that Caesar's bridge over the Rhine was a much more sophisticated and complex design and the logistics of working over a limited area of access took only 10 days to complete 400m of structure, and the 25 km of double walls and trenches at Alesia took only a month, a shorter construction time at Masada is more likely.... Hadrian's claim that a legionnaire could build a cubic meter of wall in one day may be correct if we're talking about a masonry wall requiring one mason and several hod carriers to collect and transport the stone to the wall. But if we're talking about merely digging a fossa and piling the dirt as the vallum, then that is a gross under-estimation- a fox hole, approximately one cu m, can be dug in just a few minutes by a GI when the artillery shells are flying. Incidentally, my WWII vet father always said about religion--"You'll never find an atheist in a fox hole under bombardment."

Tullus Hostillius made Jupiter mad 2600 yrs ago, so he fried him with a lightning bolt....I wonder who made him mad now?

I've frequently seen that picture in reading on the history, but I never thought about it before-- the clients are wearing colored &/or dirty clothes (streets were filthy) while the "baker" is wearing a white (candida) toga- commonly worn by those standing for election....hence our word "candidate." Even today, each region of Italy has it's more or less characteristic style of bread. In Rome, it's still the round loaf. I haven't been to Italy in 50 years. Maybe things have changed, but back then it was common to see porcetta vendors on the streets, equivalent to American hot dog stands/carts. One could get a quick pork sandwich on bread sliced from those big, round loaves.

Amazing how new tech is making things easier for archeologists. In regards the weather, it was "The Roman Warm Period."...Caesar was quite attentive to including elements of the natural history of his meanderings thru Transalpine Gaul in his Commentaries.... and crossed back and forth to Cisalpine Gaul several times during those years, get never once mentioned snow or ice.....while 200 yrs earlier, Hannibal lost half his men and all but one of his elephants to the cold, snowy conditions as they crossed the Alps.....So much for "Global Warming." Maybe the Romans delayed in subduing the Helvetia area because it was so sparsely inhabited. Thirteen hundred years later, the Knights Templar may have retreated there to avoid persecution for that very reason.

No big mystery or amazing new discovery here.....Increased seismic activity is well known to accompany volcanic activity https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/stromboli-earthquakes.html. And pyroclastic flow produces winds over 80km/hr up to 300km/hr capable of throwing small boulders against walls and roofs to knock them down. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/pyroclastic-flows-move-fast-and-destroy-everything-their-path#:~:text=With rock fragments ranging in,and structures in their pat Note in the one article you reffed with a skeleton supposedly crushed-- the amphora right next to it has only one small hole but is otherwise intact and standing upright after 2000 years.......??? The only question is how much destruction & death was due to earthquake vs pyroclastic flow vs asphyxiation in those unable to find adequate shelter or to flee?

Sherlock was always deducing occupations by observing anatomical changes induced by repetitive actions. We call it Over-use Syndrome these days. There was an anthropological report published in the med lit 30y/a about the high number of vertebral compression fractures found in ancient skeletal remains of indigenous people of the Pacific NW, presumably from the stresses of driving dog sleds-- a rate comparable today of that seen only among rodeo riders.

This is actually old news, but it is fascinating to compare what was going on in different parts of the world while famous historical events were taking place. When Newton was inventing Calculus, most of the world was still living a Stone Age lifestyle. When the Chinese were wearing fancy silk robes, writing poetry and printing them with moveable type, our north European ancestors were still draped in animal skins and hunting with crude wooden spears, not much advanced from the Neandertals. I don't know how they came up with the "300 generations" figure, but that in itself would be amazing. The math of population dynamics suggests that a population of less than 500 for species with low litter size will go extinct in just a few generations. About 200 species of large animals have gone extinct during historical times-- almost all of them among island inhabitants.

-- doesn't seem to be a Reply tab on Guy's post and can't find the OP on this topic. ..BUT-- According to Suetonius-- as Caesar sat down before the assembled Senate, several conspirators approached him as if to pay respects. The lictors were probably behind or off to the side and not positioned to defend Caesar from the attack which began suddenly and unexpectedly. https://www.livius.org/sources/content/suetonius/suetonius-on-the-death-of-caesar/ (ch 82) Maybe the better question is what did they do in the immediate aftermath of the attack? Maybe they just scrammed realizing that they had just failed their mission?

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.-- Yogi Berra A couple problems with this article-- Almost nobody is truly left handed, ie- right brain dominant/right brain center of language processing-- proved by injection of drugs or MRI studies. ,..For a beast developing skills requiring dexterity, having one side dominant was more efficient. It just happened to be the right (left brain dominant) by chance- the same reason the L isomer of biochemicals are the biological norm. Once the pattern was established by chance, it was perpetuated by genetics......BTW-- there is also the problem of situs inversus-- all the organs are on the "wrong" side. Also very rare. Also a pattern established way back in evolution and continue because it was effective & efficient. Subclavian steal syndrome is very uncommon. The left aortic arch/carotid junction is more likely to develop obstructive placque than the right due to hemodynamic considerstions-- just like sand bars are formed at the far side of curves in the river, not the near side. The right side is a "straight shot" up the aorta and into the right carotid....This makes little difference in perfusion of the brain unless there is also extensive narrowing of arteries to obstruct flow thru the Circle of Willis.....Because this is a problem related to aging, it doesn't appear until well after the reproductive years, thus has virtually no nfluence on genetic selection or evolutionary trends. Another example of pseudoscientific tripe that never should have made it past the editor or peer review-- a huge problem in science over the past 2-3 decades. Caveat lector.

Welcome Hydro- I should think the period around The Founding thru the Early Republic would hold interest for you.....what with The Forum being located in a swamp with the central Lacus Curtius eventually drained by the Cloaca Maxima, and then Appius Claudius building the first aquaduct, the Tiber having been so fouled by the Cloaca.