Pertinax

Spittle: I tidied up your post, it seemed to have doubled up in size! Correct the "salting" would now seem to have been a symbolic gesture, not a wholesale destruction of land. Secondly this was not a genocidal episode , thought the fight was bloody enough, Carthage as a province continued to function. Yes there two brothers-was it too difficult to write a second part?

Your Magnificence has been misinformed as regards the extent of the Known World: http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?act=mo...si&img=1413 Here we see that Brittania is a land on the edge of the known world!

The Imperator makes Perigrination beyond Ocean! http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?act=mo...=si&img=272

Thank you, and oddly enough this was the site where the "Corbridge Hoard" was found: http://www.legionxxiv.org/lrgcorbrghoard.htm

I would be honoured. Can you give me a link back to that site please?

My suggestion would be "sun dogs" also: http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/halo/parhelia.htm

Two very good points , the "Saving Tiberius Graccus" was very noticeable, did you see the reference (inadvertent im sure ) to "Alexander" last week? The soldiers gear was good, someone really does care about physical authenticity. Where they get the principal actors from is another matter. Caesar was so bad it must have set a benchmark for uselesness.I wouldnt be so scathing normally but the BBC holds itself up as a paragon of excellence, frankly this is lousy given the resources they have.

The Gracchi-what did you make of that then? Two top notch actors, Geraldine James and David Warner looking like the real thing , trying to stop a lightweight script evaporating. I noticed that when the camera lingered on James (without dialogue) she looked perfect as the epitome of the Roman Matron, when she was speaking to her son early in the film the realisation was excellent. Warner had gravitas and skill with frugal dialogue, once again though the lead was lightweight with a lot of emotional "acting" and the story was told too fast.Why does the BBC not have the courage to dig deep and present a full blooded realisation like "The Caesars? "That was short on battles and epic scale but delivered consistently on proper characterisation.

I offer Chateau Buisson De Flogny as libation!

Hence the reason for never picking dropped food up from the floor of the Triclinium, it belonged to the Lemures, so a wealthy person would seek appeasment by the artifice of a mosaic of food scraps thus: http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?act=mo...=si&img=114

im glad you think im sane. Do you think you could recommend a source on traditional or 'alternative' remedies such as the ones you have described, either an Internet site or book (cheapish). I find that Googling it turns up unrelated or brief sites. Go to my Blog entry and scroll down to the "Herbalism Ancient and Modern " entry , there is a select bibilography. Note that I strongly recommend understanding the chemical matrix of the plant , too few persons extracting the active principles to produce "modern chemical medicines" seem to understand the plant as a dynamic resource in harmony/conflict with animals.The Pagan attitude of respect to the animus of growing things should not be ignored , it is crucial to ethnobotany. You will be very surprised to find how many "modern " drugs are isolated and synthesised plant materials , and how many are straight survivals from antiquity.If you have had a pre-med prior to surgery, Titus Pullo and yourself, have both had Henbane. Notice please that I also suggest Ibn Sinna (Avicenna) the Moslem scholar who saved (and commented upon) many ancient Greek texts as an essential read. ps I think we should hop over to the "medicine thread" with these last posts.

and Rue! Here is Pliny (The Elder) again: "The ancients held rue in peculiar esteem; for I find that honied wine flavoured with rue was distributed to the people, in his consulship, by Cornelius Cethegus" He then cites eighty four remedies for its use, I think this is the one ive alluded to previously though "It is good more particularly in cases of poisoning by wolf's bane and mistletoe, as well as by fungi, whether administered in the drink or the food.The most efficacious, however, of all, is the root of wild rue, taken with wine; this too, it is said, is more beneficial still, if drunk in the open air". An excellent bitter as a herb, now neglected.

Blasphemy! Did you hear him?.. I can assure you that you will also have seen off any intestinal parasites as well if you used the pennyroyal/honey combination. Pliny gives a long list of disorders for which Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) was a remedy, and especially recommends it for hanging in sleeping rooms, it being considered by physicians as more conducive to health even than roses. It was likewise thought to communicate its purifying qualities to water, and Gerard tells us: 'If you have Pennyroyale in great quantity dry and cast it into corrupt water, it helpeth it much, neither will it hurt them that drink thereof.' As a purifier of the blood, it was highly spoken of: 'Penny-royale taken with honey cleanseth the lungs and cleareth the breast from all gross and thick humours.' The pulegone (thujone) content is the key here, the Ancients were aware that a number of related plants/plant oils had purgative and anthelmintic (worm/parasite killing) properties (camphor heartwood, arbor vitae, wormwood (absinthe) and many of the various sage species) . The herb is contra-indicated in pregnancy as it is a strong emmenagogue (ie: purges the endometrium), indeed it is a well known fok abortifactant. Be brave and try some nam pla next time-the conflicting tastes on the palate are most stimulating, but the mix must be chilled.If the Pennyroyal scares you then any good , strong tasting , related member of the mint family will suffice. If sweetness is an issue , to counterbalance the bitter and savoury tastes, then try some agave syrup . Sanity rating :drunk:

I suggest that man is impelled to communicate ,( in the present or by leaving the written word ) , indeed almost by compulsion-look at all of us here, we have hardly any real awareness of each other's daily lives - but we have formed a community, by desire to discuss ideas of and from history. Men write history because they must . Certainly we discuss because we must, if someone retrieves our words in a hundred years and analyses them (just as we now pore over fragmented texts and broken stones) how would we justify our disquisitions?

I agree DC , if you read George Orwell's "How the Poor Die" , from only seventy years ago, its like peering into some ghastly, arctic , vision of misery unknown today. The portrayal of Rome in popular media , and the role and subjugation of slaves does not look so harsh in the light of the work I mention or , say , Gustav Dore's drawings of 19th C Manchester and London.

Would anyone suggest that an industrial society (with mass urbanisation and factory production) is now "ancient" ? I mean this in the context of , a divorce of life as now experienced , from the life of a prole in early Victorian society.The time frame is short but the actuallity of life is utterly foreign and remote in terms of drudgery and social abasement. So is the nature of the "common experience" (outside of time, ie: the history of ideas, the evolution of justice ) more relevant than mere time elapsed? By this I mean common experience between those living and those who are dead but have written and expressed themselves in writing, surely many of us are struck by the apparent immediacy and lucidity of "ancient" authors ?

DC , very good point about urbanisation/de-urbanisation. The dissolution of the Roman urbs in Britain is certainly a critical event. Indeed the arrest of urban life in Europe as a whole and the rise of sub-infeudation is a critical point here , as is the effect of the Black Death in a similar context.

So does "Ancient" mean merely the passage of time or the "quality/timelesness " of ideas? I presume my education betrays itself.Surely time alone is not a factor? Discuss

I suppose I must reply "Dark Ages"-trite , but I am arraigned by my own suggestion of "modernity " as regards Greece and Rome.

What becomes antiquity? That time from which there is no living generational memory? Or that time from which we have no conceptual understanding of the reality of life as experienced by the populus? I (personaly) feel that the Roman society we discuss is just out of touching distance in terms of a breathing reality, far closer than many later societies.This is probably just an emotional attachment to the idea of "culture", or rather the idea of "my" cultural identity as a European. We all know that there are plenty of "modern" people with no cultural knowledge or historical awareness (even of 20 years ago), From being on this forum my idea of antiquity has been pushed backwards ,I would now say the "ancient" is Sumer or Akkad , and that Greece and Macedonia are "early modern" in terms of the emergence of thought and ideas of justice.