Pertinax

I hope we gat a "director's cut " version so the first and last pairs of episodes arent truncated, as they were on actual showing here.

24 th July suggested European release date, Amazon ( Europe) now quoting

I wasnt quite sure where to place this post. British members ,of a certain age, will remember the very long running rural life series "Out of Town" which flourished from 1959 till the early 80s. It was presented by one man alone throughout its rustic and deeply laid-back existence , Jack Hargreaves , everybodys pipe smoking country uncle. I thought the whole thing had been lost but quite a number of later episodes have been saved, I have just watched an item (vol 8, episode 23, Trammel nets/coachbuilder) which showed the continuity in construction technique of wooden wheels from Roman chariot to the very first Rolls Royce motor vehicles. Certainly the sequence of woods used in each wheel (oak, ash , elm) has a long historical pedigree but I didnt realise the technique was two millenia old. Amazon have the dvd in the UK but I am not aware of an American release. I suppose Industrial Archaeology applies to some of the items, nostalgia to others. AD note -an excellent item on farmyard cider making same volume, episode 22-which is only 25 years old but looks like a century ago. Lost Warrior note -some wonderful horsemanship (vol 4 episodes 11 and 12) . Pantagathus-iron working ,belgic ponds in the Kentish weald built by continental colonists (vol 3 episode 8) to spark the clearence of the great woodlands by production of axes,and push the Britons back into their hilltop forts . http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B...2221771-4444724

and I should have said....if you dont cook it quite thoroughly! Same as the Arum Maculatum. Try harder with more lupins. http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?act=mo...&cmd=si&img=409

Welcome back indeed ! Glad to see the Popular Front of Judea didnt get you . Or the People's Front of Judea for that matter...

the link wasnt functioning Silentium-can you retry/repost please? I have to agree with Aphrodite as regards the British stuff, it all sounds very similar, with just a tinge of true accent.

I pmd Germanicus to praise his review and let him know I had ordered this work on his recommendation. I am not dissapointed , what a good book. Please note that the flyleaf illustration is, spookily, once again , the view from milecastle 37 looking toward Vircovicium (Housesteads) as posted by yours truly in the gallery Well done Germanicus.

Brown is most perceptive , his understanding of the original ceremony and the twelvefold division of the animals on the double altars to the original pantheon of gods is the heart of the thing, (in my opinion) . Im surprised that we have not had a marxist reduction of this particular scenario. His writing is quite convincing that Athens is the identifiable , physical seat of the cult, as he says its the only place that could have had such an interconnection. (Anyone dipping into the work see Chapter 6)

A note on barley as a dietary item: those who have kept and fed horses will be aware that "shortness of wind" arises from using a barley based feed, and that if activity is required the animal should have less barley in its diet. In human consumers of the grain the high gluten content tends to retard the digestion ie: you have to work at it! Oxygen gets diverted to the gut to do the hefty work -you know the feeling after a big meal as oxygen is not as freely available at the extremities and you feel sleepy. My suggestion is therefore that first you fatten up your Gladiator with a barley gruel but, if he needs to be fleet of foot , you will then perhaps need to wean towards a high protein/brassica diet. Hopefully the gladiators didnt sleep too close together therefore

Not in my hometown they wont.

A little on the possible origin of substances identified in the forensic exploration of human remains. Andrew Pengelly's " Constituents of Medicinal Plants" is a highly specialised organic chemistry /herbal materia medica crossover work, it backs up the basic (but by no means simple) Potters Cyclopedia of Botanical Preparations (Wren) . If in doubt I start with these two volumes to pin down elusive chemical relationships within and between plants. Tropane Alkoloids are very complex molecular structures, containing pyrrolidine and piperdine (benzene) ring structures from the precursors ornithine and phenylalanine (these latter two names may be familiar).Isolleucine and acetates play a role in the biosynthesis of tropane structures. Medicinal alkaloids tend to be from the Solanaceae family , apart from cocaine from the Erythroxylaceae . The major alkoloids are hyoscamine and hyoscine (scopolamine). These alkoloids occur in 22 genera of Solonaceae including Atropa belladonna, Datura strammonium , Hyoscyamus niger, Mandragora officianarum and Dubiosa myoporides. The list I have just given is of course a medicine chest for the Egyptian/Greek/ Roman physician -any patient undergoing surgery, pain alleviation, sedation would be exposed to these items. Cocaine is a methyl ester of benzoylegonine and as such is a very unstable as a chemical residue. The Roman foodstuff ,the humble Lupin, is also a major potential source of alkaloids. so residues of cocaine? possible but statistically tremendously unlikely, nicotine -plausible but from degradation of the alkaloids listed above, given the universal use of these substances as ancient (and modern) medicines. I am not saying narcotics were not used , what I am saying is -some things look narcotic like (and are but not recreationally ) and leave a trace that appears to be another narcotic. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but evidence of a chemical is only evidence of a series of possible causations.

I will regale everyone with chapter and verse on the nicotine/cocaine traces -suffice to say,for now, tropane alkaloids decay and appear nicotine and cocaine like-why? From same plant families on different continents, solanaceae ie: spuds for example or far more likely here, hycosine from my old friend henbane ! The Egyptian /Roman painkiller and still the basis for modern pre-med.

Do I not recall an early American Liberal (Whig) not "liberal" calling for the death penalty as a humane way to stop a prisoners suffering in long incarceration?

Check Pantagathus' site for an excellent blog , by him,on Celtiberian use of Borage . It cross refers to an earlier entry in my blog on this site. http://www.thenectarofgods.com/index.asp He has been too modest to mention it.

What I failed to say was-I know what was generally available to the "enquiring mind" but would your Optio or Decurion let you get away with taking it? :fish:

Datura Stramonum (thorn apple ) was well known in N Africa asnd as an Arabian hallucogen above and beyond its use for asthmatic complaints, the Opium Poppy would conceivably be a source of the likeliest recreational use ( American experience of narcotics after the Civil War produced a rash of addicted soldiers whoo had been treated with the opium derivates ). My blog points to several hullucogens as being well known and available as painkillers , a skilled person would appreciate the different strengths of herb between the fertile, febrile growths of Egypt and the rather lukewarm variants from further north ( the Papavero (poppy) is again the best example -and I cite this in the blog) , especially Brittania where the narcotic latex of the poppy has been reduced in potency to a mild painkiller (all poppies are escapee progeny of Rman introductions). The real narcotics would be psychotropic beers of Celtiberian and Pictish provenance (Buhner entry in my blog) if accessible to the average soldier. I am intrigued by LEG X Qs remarks on fungii and would be pleased to see a cited source on this , I have forborne to post any fungii in the '"Roman Herbal" gallery as I have no direct or indirect information on usage, similarly Cruse (Roman Medicine) and Jashemski (Pompeian Herbal ) cite no hallucogenic fungii in either autopsy or usage.Galen is silent on fungii also. Any links and factual evidence greatly appreciated. The use of wines with herbal reinforcement would be my favoured suggestion, Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) perhaps , but any number of potentially psycoactive combos could be put together by an intelligent (or unscrupulous) vendor. I am in a rush today -so thats it for now :please check blog a-z for herbs and gallery for hints on potency!

I was pondering the Civil War angle-in that internicine conflicts in fully "developed " nations (America was still expanding at a rate of knots) are usually particularly vile affairs, setting aside outside interests the Spanish Civil War for example had a plethora of ugly events and long dark echoes.I was also considering the ries of War between enfranchised democracies (or partly so) -the !st WW was the first true , full machine age war between allegedly democratic countries, some say the vast slaughter was actually an expression of the fact that the protaganists insisted they were morally correct-no tactical/strategic experience of such conditions existed( on such a scale) so the lessons were bloody and prolonged, particularly due to the "correctness" of the cause. The supression of the Pretender at Culloden, was in reality a very small scale affair but particularly bloody and one sided-though Charles had panicked the whole country by getting to Derby without much opposition! Perhaps that hints at what happens in "rebellions". Shaka Zulu had little difficulty in mobilising men to a full killing potential, but I rather feel terror and an unrequited personal desire for revenge motivated his meteoric rise. As an aside how did you personally feel about "Gangs of New York" vis a vis the Draft riots and the Commen Man?

I have mentioned elsewhere, in pms and personal discussion , about some interesting work undertaken in the analysis of American Civil war battlefields. The reference is "On Killing" Col. D Grossman. The point of greatest interest to me was this -though its not a "hidden" piece of knowledge - a minority of combatants kill opponents, many people may be on the battlefield and exposed to fire and may comport themselves bravely-but they wont kill. This of course has implications if you require a combat unit to cause fatalities or maim and discommode an enemy. The essence of the American analysis was this-dozens upon dozens of muskets were retrieved from major battlefield sites, many having been filled and refilled several times, 4 times was not uncommon , some isolated examples had 15 shot loads ! Now, large numbers of men were in close proximity for lengthy periods of time on a relativley small(in modern terms) battlefield ( you only need see the remains of the First WW trenches to understand why machine guns were so deadly-they were across the street/field! My blood ran cold the first time I saw the Somme battlefield, id expected a great "theatre" of conflict ,not an intimate murderous struggle) . The American infantryman therefore was heroically active on the Civil War battlefield, exposed to fire , reloading his arms, but apparently not wishing to kill-this is not cowardice, far from it, its moral bravery, you risk your life but will not take anothers. Dave Grossman points to repetitive use of human shaped targets as the key neuro reinforcment method for making someone with a gun kill with reflexive/unreflective skill and suggests Vietnam as the era that radicalised this ability.His theory goes further to suggest kids using video games that feature killing are subconsciously "training" to kill by reinforcement. We know combat fatalities inflicted by the pilum/gladius combo wre not surpassed till machine guns came of age , what was exercising my mind was surely other cultures (eg:Assyria perhaps?) of any period must have had this problem of troops "not killing" and I assume therefore had professional responses to this moral dilemma.Or do we take this as a counter symptom of machine age "democratic" armies?