Northern Neil

I know its a while since this thread went cold, but I have just finished reading all of Simon's Eagle novels, cover to cover, in the run - up to christmas. No superlative I can give can excel those already given. Excellent! One point I find intriguing - I can't help but think that perhaps Cato and Macro are actually an earlier incarnation of Hornblower and Bush. Anyone agree...?

A house built on the course of Hadrian's Wall, perhaps in Carlisle, Gilsland or Newcastle. I could then dig up the garden, and restore my very own piece of it.

I got myself (I'm currently single, so I CAN buy myself presents!) 'Fall of Rome' by Ward Perkins. And a new rear tyre for my BSA Motorbike.

Oh dear... who might 'that lot' be, my dear Octavius? Coming as I do from the North of England, I see rather a lot of them, and count some among my friends - but they are not the Veil - wearing, gun-toting turban-wearing fanatics one sees on nasty news reports on Fox news. Far from it. Come to think of it, none of the Americans I know are NRA members, fundamentalist Christians or KKK either. What a disservice the world's journalists do us! I do concede Augusta's point, though; here in old Blighty there is a feeling that 'that lot' get more concessions off us than we do them. It has to be said, however, that none of the Christian mosaics in Santa Sophia have been removed, despite Islam's distaste for icons. To keep it that way, maybe the Spanish Cathedral proposal should be reconsidered. I would hate the Haghia Sophia mosaics go the same way as the Bamiyan Buddhas (Afghanistan) and the Byzantine Empire itself due to lack of accommodation and stereotyping on both sides. (Addendum) On looking up Haghia Sofia on Wikipedia, it turns out it is neither a mosque or a church now - or maybe it is both, given that Christians and Musims are not barred from praying in it. It is a museum, called by the Turks Ayasofya. The Christian mosaics were covered up, but not destroyed, and the various sultans periodically uncovered them to repair them, prior to then plastering over them again. In the 1930's Ataturk decreed that the mosaics be uncovered and the Church/Mosque become a museum showing aspects of both faiths. Now, about that Cathedral in Cordoba...

I think it became more worth while as time went on. By the late fourth century the level of civilisation in Britain was at the highest level it would reach (until the tudor period). The Army, on the other hand, had been drastically reduced in numbers and quality. Therefore, if one looks at things from a wider perspective than that of the immediate post-Claudian and high empire periods, the tax benefits to the state must have been immense in later centuries.

Best I can do is a French emigre from the 1790's called Henri Courbet. He hailed from Lille in Northern France. My mother's family have his surname still.

JP did say his legionary was from the first half of the first century - I think the term 'Marius Mule' was probably still in use at this time, much as the word 'Bobby' for police in England still is, and refers to the professional soldiery brought into being by Marius' reforms. This image is great - will there be any future paintings of later Roman troops?

If you know your paganism, you probably know most of whats in the Bible anyway!

Django Reinhardt, the best guitarist who ever lived. Every guitar riff in popular music goes right back to him, and he was Jimi Hendrix - and thus rock's - greatest influence. Closely followed by Brian Setzer. What a genius he is! Every riff he plays reminds me of days of outrunning mods at Brighton seafront on my BSA A65 Spitfire, Lancashire rose cheerfully emblazoned on my black, studded leather, Brylcreem melting and running down my Mark 8 RAF issue goggles. And that was only this summer...!

Many of the stories associated with Jesus were first attributed to Pagan gods like Bacchus and Dionysus. Visit the following website for more information. http://www.vexen.co.uk/books/jesusmysteries.html

I would be an engineer or builder. For me the best thing about Rome is its buildings.

Earlier this year I posted a Google Earth image of the promontory fort at Drumanagh, 20 miles North of Dublin. It is there still, on page 3 of the gallery section, entitled 'Celtic and 'Roman' forts.' Alas, I see nothing whatsoever in this image to suggest even the most vague Roman influence.

No, just the industrialised, affluent half...

I don't think that the 'end is nigh' - I do believe, however, that the bubble of prosperity (western) and population (global) growth evident since the industrial revolution will burst soon, with a commensurate economical decline and sharp downturn in population. The near certainty of sea levels rising plus poor countries becoming unviable as areas to live will see to that, as well as a multiplicity of political factors. I do not regard the current trends in immigration to be part of this - indeed, the Eastern European influx is merely a shift from a slightly poorer part of our world to a slightly richer one. I am on about the build up of peoples fleeing countries which are becoming less and less viable to live in as the world heats. This will intensify in the next few decades. If - and when - this happens, old political structures will alter and change, and societies with less investment in our global economy will survive and provide the new order. This will be seen, in successive centuries, as a 'decline' with a following 'Dark Age'. We should not be complacent and believe that our society and culture will do what every other one in history has failed to do - survive indefinitely. As Voltaire said, 'The Roman Empire fell because empires fall'. When that happens, assuming I am not either dead, drooling in a wingback chair or our country has become Islamic, I will claim my pint from WotWotius!!

'Dark Ages' are characterised by dramatic and sudden economic and population collapse, accompanied by the loss or transformation of political structures many hundreds of years old. They often occur when a society is supposedly flourishing, and often take the people involved utterly by surprise. They are also characterised by several concurrent factors, political and environmental, which if addressed even partially could have prevented collapse. In hindsight there are often blatant signs that these things are about to happen, which are ignored by the vast majority of society, and acknowledged but swept under the carpet by others, who care only about short term gain. I believe we are about to enter such a phase again, brought about by a combination of global warming, cold war 2 (with the islamic world), dramatic overpopulation and an insistance on the part of us westerners to live lives of blatant waste and luxury. The migrating 'hordes' are already there, knocking at the door of our 'frontiers', wanting to share in the prosperity of the west, whilst simultaneously regarding us with envy and sometimes hatred. And who can blame them? Coastal cities are already starting to experience the combination of adverse weather and rising sealevels. We know these things already. What are we going to do about it? Limit our motor vehicles to one per household? get rid of gas guzzling vehicles? Dramatically reduce the luxuriousness of our consumer lifestyles? Enable third world countries to flourish instead of exploiting them? I think not. I give it between thirty and seventy years.

In Bathhouses the CALIDARIVM or hotroom was indeed heated by a furnace, the run - off from this (in terms of water and heat) providing lesser heating for the TEPIDARIVM. The Frigidarium of course required no heating, although that, in turn, was probably warmed to a degree by the continual run off from the other rooms. After all, in winter there's no point in having a plunge bath with a layer of ice on top! The Lancaster excavations produced a furnace about the size of a large open fire. Often it has been remarked that hypocausts have been found, but with no accompanying furnace. It has also been remarked, quite correctly, that heating all the hypocausts in some buildings would be prohibitively expensive and impractical. I believe that most of them probably weren't heated. After all, a hypocaust without heating is an excellent way of preventing rising damp. In Northern provinces, the atrium with the hole in the roof (IMPLVVIVM) was a relative rarity, as there was no need to conserve rainwater in the summer. One finds these mainly in the meditterranean provinces.

I utterly agree with Cadrail's points here. Simon Scarrow's excellent (IMHO) 'Eagle' novels illustrate these points very well. In a footnote he points out that, although in a pitched battle against a less disciplined foe the legion had an advantage, this advantage was not nearly as significant as that enjoyed by europeans in colonial wars of the 19th century. He takes pains to point out, through the narrative and in footnotes, that the main advantage was due to discipline, organised supply and enginering. Just like the british at Islandwhana, the legions, when deprived of this backup, were very vulnerable and had to fight the enemy on a much more equal footing. As an aside, has anyone noticed the similarity of Simons characters to those in some of C.S. Forester's books? Cato and Macro are definitely Hornblower and Bush in Roman uniform!

I remember seeing a BBC programme some years ago which featured a valley in Chinese Turkestan (Western China). Its inhabitants were perfectly european in appearance, and some of them had blue eyes. Their clothing consisted of very evocative plaids and tartan - type patterns. These people are thought to be analogous to those who left us the mummies mentioned in earlier posts. The language these people spoke was closely related to Turkish, and these people had a tradition of coming from the west. Their remains have been found further east on China, and from even earlier times. The current Chinese government does not particularly like research into this, as it confirms that not only have the Chinese been grabbing land off other people way earlier than they did in Tibet, but also that they may have originally colonised the Asian mainland from Japan!

As far as I am aware, there are still members of the Kantakazenous and Paleologous families kicking around in south eastern Europe. These people can, of course, still trace their origins to the later Byzantine empire. Some Italian christian names are directly related to Roman counterparts: Massimo Ottaviano Valerio, etc. As far as dilution of the Roman 'race' by incomers is concerned, I am not so sure that ancient immigration had nearly as profound an effect on populations as people assume, and as mass immigration such as we witness today does. Most Italians today appear to be the same, morphologically, as their ancestors are on mosaics and wall paintings, and many of the visigoths who descended into Italy in the 5th century were themselves descended from Roman provincials captured from Asia Minor a century and a half earlier. The only Italians who appear to conform to the German 'Racial type' live mostly in the North, where you would expect. But then, are they in fact ethnic Germans, or descended from the earlier Cisalpine Gauls? Again, in Southern Italy one finds people using body language and non verbal gestures which are used also by the Greeks, although it has to be said that most Neapolitans and Sicilians are probably unaware of their Greek ancestry. It is increasingly being found that in ancient and early mediaeval times, populations stayed put rather than being displaced or eradicated. In Britain, the only places where people have significant genetic correlation with people living in Jutland and Northern Germany are East anglia and the home counties, although most of Britain eventually 'bacame' Anglo-Saxon. In western Turkey, there are a lot of fair skinned, blue-eyed people, although many would deny that they had Greek genes. Closer to home (for us Brits) there was the example of the chap living in the west country whose DNA profile exactly matched that of an 8'000 year old skeleton, thus making him the only person in the world who can definitely trace his family back through 300 generations. I have shot off on a bit of a tangent here, but basically what I am saying is that, although no individuals can claim to trace their families to individuals in the Roman era, most Europeans can say that they almost certainly have Roman Ancestors, given that migration of peoples and mixing of cultures is viewed in some quarters as having less impact than previously thought.

Julian. His successes at Strasbourg against the Allemanni were outstanding, as were his successes against the Persians. Pity that a disgruntled Christian contravened one of his own commandments and stabbed him in the back.

Getting back to this original point, I regret that I do not have the linguistic credentials of some of my friends here. I am, however, a French speaker. Whilst acknowledging that there is a strong Latin heritage with respect to French (words such as 'Fenetre' for instance) I would agree with the above comment - if it had been made with respect to French. A sound heritage yes, but somewhat evolved from the original. I must however disagree with the above comment with respect to Italian. Having ditched France as a holiday venue for the time being and travelled recently in Italy, I must say that I find that, far from being 'very different' to Latin, I am amazed how little modern Italian has actually evolved from the original Latin. Regarding Modern Italians versus methodical Romans, this is a purely subjective view based on nothing more than trends arising from historical political situations. A hundred years ago, the British had an empire which covered much of the globe. Now it doesn't, and its government is prepared to render it a protectorate of the US - however, its people remain the same.