Anyone else interested in the ancient world?

[Tiki Tom]

yikes. Forget Musk. Read about Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with Ancient Rome. His haircut is Roman and he has allegedly trained with Roman weapons…

https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...sed-roman-empire-explained-tiktok-1234826340/

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

yikes. Forget Musk. Read about Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with Ancient Rome. His haircut is Roman and he has allegedly trained with Roman weapons…

https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...sed-roman-empire-explained-tiktok-1234826340/

I've thought the Gladis-roman short sword had a far too thin handle given its purpose.
A similar sense for the Fairbairn Sykes dagger issued me in the British Army. The dagger, essentially a reduced Gladis
along similar line is a fighting knife with an entirely too slim handle topped by a pommel for head knocks.
An extraordinary blade but I preferred the American Marine KA-Bar knife with its far best leather wrap handle.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Heads up!
If antiquity is your cup of tea, please also read the September 22nd post on the mystery of the Herculaneum Papyri that can be found in the “Agents of F.L.A.S.K.” Thread.
Thanks.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Shame on Mary Beard!

https://time.com/6317735/men-roman-empire-mary-beard-history/

Don‘t get me wrong, I’ve read a book or two of hers, and I enjoyed her BBC series on the Roman Empire.

But in the article above, she disappointingly says men like to think about the Romans because it’s a space “where men can safely indulge their macho fantasies.”

WRONG. While Ms. Beard might understand Rome, I think her understanding of men is a bit wobbly.

I‘d say that men think about Rome so much because so much of today’s western world is based on the Roman model. And the Romans had skills and technology that —when lost— were not rediscovered for a thousand years. Todays political issues (war, border issues, taxes, inflation, political point scoring) would have been “nothing new” in the Roman senate. And our senate is doing it in a building that attempts to recapture the glory of Rome. Thinking men ponder the collapse of the Roman Empire, look around, and shudder.

Men should be pondering Rome. And so should women.

Ms Beard gets a D+ for her snarky comment that plays up to all-too-easy stereotypes.

(Of course, it doesn’t help my case that we immediately started discussing Mark Zuckerberg’s haircut and the pros and cons of short-swords. )

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Beard is indeed of narrow mind and condescending nature. Instead of her sophomorism the book
to read is Nicholas Ostler's AD INFINITUM, A Biography of Latin and The World It Created.

I am a life long Londoner and my house stands on land once trod Roman legionaires, and, ever mindful
of the distant accomplishment that was Rome, I sought Ostler and find his work literary splendour.
Imagine the moment when Imperial Rome was introduced Periclean Athens and the treasuries of mind
lay bare for taking. Surprisingly, Cicero was contemptuous of his graduate studies in Athens which I find
specious Roman patrician lard of little real merit.

 

[Tiki Tom]

General Patton and the battle of Carthage.
Ever feel like this? I do.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Shame on Mary Beard!

https://time.com/6317735/men-roman-empire-mary-beard-history/

Don‘t get me wrong, I’ve read a book or two of hers, and I enjoyed her BBC series on the Roman Empire.

But in the article above, she disappointingly says men like to think about the Romans because it’s a space “where men can safely indulge their macho fantasies.”

WRONG. While Ms. Beard might understand Rome, I think her understanding of men is a bit wobbly.

I‘d say that men think about Rome so much because so much of today’s western world is based on the Roman model. And the Romans had skills and technology that —when lost— were not rediscovered for a thousand years. Todays political issues (war, border issues, taxes, inflation, political point scoring) would have been “nothing new” in the Roman senate. And our senate is doing it in a building that attempts to recapture the glory of Rome. Thinking men ponder the collapse of the Roman Empire, look around, and shudder.

Men should be pondering Rome. And so should women.

Ms Beard gets a D+ for her snarky comment that plays up to all-too-easy stereotypes.

(Of course, it doesn’t help my case that we immediately started discussing Mark Zuckerberg’s haircut and the pros and cons of short-swords. )

James Hankins has an excellent Rome brief, The Roman custom in this September's The New Criterion.
Answers those fools at Princeton quite sufficient I say.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone.
or should I say “Happy Saturnalia”?

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Stonehenge Archdiocese pagans.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Ruined Monestary of Eldena near Greifswald by Caspar David Friedrich, 1824.
Hauntingly captures his contemporaries living among the ruins of the past.
I have a soft spot for the Romantic movement.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Ruined Monestary of Eldena near Greifswald by Caspar David Friedrich, 1824.
Hauntingly captures his contemporaries living among the ruins of the past.
I have a soft spot for the Romantic movement.

Wordsworth and Shelley, cousin Jane, Delacroix, Byron. The Brontes. I wander through verdurous glooms
and winding mossy ways amidst illumined shadow light felled by Heaven as writ Keats. Poe, Emily Dickinson,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Always led to Nantucket where the Pequod lays anchor waiting me.
Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the sea of fog illustrates my imagined arrival dockside.

The Romantic witnessed the French Revolution with its Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and Europe's devastation.
Wherein fell the flower of continental youth testified by acres of martial graves stretching from Switzerland
to the West Indies. The Enlightenment sowed seeds still alive within deep furrows and literature, music, art,
and philosophy all combine for a paradise as purgatorial as it is most certainly enchanted.

 

[GHT]

The effects of the British empire are the same phenomena which comprise the benefits of globalisation in the contemporary world, which British imperial rule helped to create and accelerate. For much of its imperial lifetime, Britain operated under a democratic parliamentary system of government, which was transmitted to and is largely retained, in now independent countries that once came under its control. Likewise the rule of law, and the usage of the English language. Had that happened two thousand years previously that language would have been Latin rather than English.

The more you learn about the Romans and what they achieved, the more you come to know them as the foundation for our modern world. Without them there would be no Cathedrals, no newspapers, no sewers or sanitation, they brought infrastructure to the UK in a way that changed the course of our history.

All across the UK, signs of the Romans’ occupation still remain to this day. From Bath’s legendary spas to amphitheatres, city walls and even roads. Their legacy is the foundations of civilisation in Europe.

It's fascinating that of all of Rome’s children, the red haired stepchild named Britannia, the last major imperial acquisition and first to be abandoned, would be the most successful at matching and exceeding it's parent in the great game of empire building.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Fascinating!
The Romans mastered the skill of making concrete. Then, after the fall of Rome, that technology was lost for 1,000 years. And it was only rediscovered in the fifteenth century when an old Roman document containing the formula was found…

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-fin...-concrete-was-able-to-last-thousands-of-years

https://www.nachi.org/history-of-co..., concrete,interest in building with concrete

Makes you want to give that old cracked sidewalk in front of your house a little respect..

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I live in St John's Wood where legionnaires walked, Vikings stalked, and rapine laid concrete DNA.
Ought to have an ancestral serologic drawn but the NHS appointment elective process would take years.

 

[Benny Holiday]

For all of Rome's much-lauded achievements, perhaps the most important was the concept of a fully-funded professional military. The success and expansion of the empire was owed to its practised tactics and refined weapons, pitted against warriors who were farmers, smiths, tradesmen etc most of the time, and only combatants part-time. As the victors, they had the luxury of being able to write their version of history, but archaeology is starting to catch up with some of their propaganda and it is appearing ever more that a lot of the 'uncivilised' peoples they conquered were not the primitives or dimwits the Romans so often portrayed them as.

For instance, in Roman law, a woman was considered the property of her husband. If she inherited property from her parents, that then became her husband's. Any crime committed against her, even rape, was considered an act against the husband, not the woman herself. In Celtic law, however, a woman retained her property and goods when she married, and had the right to seek recompense herself for any wrong done to her.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

In Celtic law, however, a woman retained her property and goods when she married, and had the right to seek recompense herself for any wrong done to her.

Whilst in my cups when a mere lad inside me favourite pub I would surely remark the civilization Irish wherein
culture and learning flourished, all the while me Anglican forebears ran around in bearskins and shat across
lice infested logs. So I done my bit for King and country now.

 

[Benny Holiday]

Whilst in my cups when a mere lad inside me favourite pub I would surely remark the civilization Irish wherein
culture and learning flourished, all the while me Anglican forebears ran around in bearskins and shat across
lice infested logs. So I done my bit for King and country now.

And the ancestors of the ancient irish - "Keltoi" to the Ancient Greeks - were the same Neolithic farmers who constructed monuments like Stonehenge across what we now call the British Isles., so archaeologists surmise. They displayed a monumental amount of mathematical and engineering knowledge and construction skill for s people supposedly 'primitive'.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

And the ancestors of the ancient irish - "Keltoi" to the Ancient Greeks - were the same Neolithic farmers who constructed monuments like Stonehenge across what we now call the British Isles., so archaeologists surmise. They displayed a monumental amount of mathematical and engineering knowledge and construction skill for s people supposedly 'primitive'.

The stone monuments supposedly poisitioned certain planets and constellation stars. When viewed by the
naked eye that is quite impressive.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Happy birthday (2,777th) to the eternal city!

https://civilek.info/en/2024/04/21/roma-are-celebrating-their-2777th-birthday/

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I’m a bit of an “Antiques Roadshow” fan. I always like it when someone brings in something from their attic, and then finds out that is a rare collectors item. But I’ve never seen anything like this; in Texas a woman found a 2,000 year old Roman bust at a Goodwill store. Asking price? $35.
Turns out the bust was likely looted from a German palace by a U.S. G.I. during WWII. All in all, a very interesting article.

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I've caught a few British episodes with Second World War artifacts brought back dear dad or grandad and unbeknownst to family a fortune resided hung wall or absent-mindedly laid desk drawer. Last week an American show erred and an Arizonan brought in an Apache rug worth estimated $300k by site appraisal.