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Viggen

Triumviri
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Posts posted by Viggen


  1. Let me ask you a question. Do you love Roman history? If so, how many of you secretly dream of being there, two thousand years ago, living a life far removed from the modern rat race? Who would you want be I wonder? Perhaps a crafty slave like Frankie Howerd's Lurcio. Maybe a man of action like Russell Crowe's Maximus. Or a sophisticated and sexually ambiguous patrician like Lawrence Olivier's Crassus. Or perhaps like the vast majority of ancient Romans in real life, take on the world and make a success of yourself in latin society. If so, this is exactly the place to be, for Marcus Sidonius Falx has written down his guide to getting somewhere in ancient life - Welcone to Release Your Inner Roman...

    ...continue to the full review of Release Your Inner Roman by Jerry Toner


  2. Interessting article;

    Anti-Roman sentiment may have run rampant through Asculum, a city on the Roman Empire’s Adriatic coast, but it was still no laughing matter. Politics in the first century B.C.E., when Asculum and other Italian tribes rebelled against the Empire in what would come to be known as the Social War were no joke. But that still didn’t stop comedians and actors from injecting politics into their performances, often at their own risk.

    Laughter was one way to challenge authority, but it could also mean risking your life...

    via Smithsonian


  3. The Djehuty Project, led by research professor, José Manuel Galán, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered a 4,000-year-old funerary garden- the first such garden ever to be found- on the Dra Abu el-Naga hill in Luxor, Egypt. The discovery comes during the 16th year of archaeological excavations which are sponsored this year by Técnicas Reunidas and Indra.  The discoveries made by this project shed light on a key epoch when, for the first time, Thebes (now Luxor) became the capital of the unified kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt about 4,000 years ago...

    ...via Popular Archaeology


  4. last i heard was at the smithonian website;

    “It is one of Rome’s most important monuments,” Claudio Parisi Presicce, a senior cultural heritage official tells Squires. “It hasn’t been accessible to the public for decades but now it’s going to be finally restored to the city.”

    According to Edwards, the first stage will be simply clearing out all the trash and weeds that have accumulated in and around the monument. Then masons will repair the crumbling brick and what marble remains. Archaeologists will also be commissioned to dig on parts of the site that have not yet been explored. Then, restorers will add lights and walkways and a multimedia interpretive resources. And of course there will be a gift shop worthy of an emperor.

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rome-finally-restoring-mausoleum-augustus-180963132/


  5. Between 2010 and 2014, archeologists digging in London’s financial district, on the site of a new British headquarters for Bloomberg, made an astonishing discovery—a collection of more than four hundred wooden tablets, preserved in the muck of an underground river. The tablets, postcard-sized sheets of fir, spruce, and larch, dated mainly from a couple of decades after the Roman conquest of Britain, in A.D. 43, straddling the period, in the reign of Nero, when Boudica’s rebellion very nearly got rid of the occupation altogether. Eighty of them carried legible texts—legible, that is, to Roger Tomlin, one of the world’s foremost experts in very old handwriting...

    ...via The New Yorker


  6. For nearly 2,000 years, the sunken remains of Caligula's pleasure ships tantalized divers, who launched expeditions to recover them, with little success.

    It wasn't until 1927, when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered Lake Nemi drained, that two of the ships began to be fully revealed. Measuring 230 and 240 feet long, the “Nemi ships” recovered over the next several years astounded researchers with their advanced technology.

    At the time, however, Lake Nemi was only partly drained — and in the decades since, rumors have persisted that the remains of a third, 400-foot-long pleasure ship lurk in the deepest part of the lake.

    ...via Washington Post

    p.s. that Video is amazing!

     

    • Like 1

  7. ...if you happen to be in Canberra, worthwile to visit it seems...

    The Roman navy's attempt to rescue people from one of history's most famous natural disasters is detailed in the exhibition Escape from Pompeii – the untold Roman rescue, at the Australian National Maritime Museum. The story of the rescue mission is often overshadowed by the scale of the disaster, which buried Pompeii and the neighbouring city of Herculaneum under metres of volcanic ash. Exhibition curator Will Mather says the decision by naval commander Pliny the Elder (uncle to Pliny the Younger) to turn warships into rescue boats reveals a different face of the notoriously powerful Roman Empire. "His first impulse is to use a military force to rescue civilians, which shows that more human side," he says.

    via Canberra Times


  8. Imagine yourself entering the public seats of a Roman arena. Would you expect a days entertainment? Displays of martial courage? Would you become excited and spellbound by the spill of blood? Or stare horrified at the sight of men mauled and mangled by wild animals? All these emotions are attested to in the Roman sources. Today we're alternately appalled and fascinated by the subject, noting parallels with modern attitudes and behaviour, wondering whether the love of violent competition is really so alien to us.

    Welcome to Gladiators & Beast Hunts, a book by Dr Christopher Epplett. The first impression is largely helped by the books cover, showing mosiac imagery many will be familiar with. Presentation maintains the standards we have come to expect of the publisher and the colour photographs in the centre section are both relevant and illuminating...

    ...continue to the review of Gladiators & Beasthunts by Christopher Epplett


  9. A remarkable archaeological investigation is shedding new light on the Roman conquest of Britain – and on the geopolitical background to one of the murkiest royal sex scandals of British history.

    The newly discovered Scotch Corner Roman artefacts represent the earliest known major archaeological evidence of Roman influence in northern Britain. A key discovery at the site is a large collection of late Iron Age metal pellet moulds, thought to have been used for native coin manufacture. Research at the University of Liverpool has revealed that they were probably used to produce gold/silver/copper alloy native British coins – perhaps needed for massively increased levels of trade with newly arrived Roman merchants. The alloys detected in them are consistent with native British coin production. Their discovery may well be the first archaeological evidence of Brigantian coin production – because so far no coins of that particularly important British tribal kingdom have ever been found.

    ...via Independent


  10. Describe Roman Italy. Go on, I dare you. Chances are you're hopelessly wrong. We have just left behind a century of global conflict and competition between powerful political idealism. Vast industrial empires and centralised control. With such an astonishing hold over a vast swathe of the Known World is it any wonder we so readily connect with the Romans? Or at least we think we do. Our preconceptions are incredibly distorted by recent history and contemporary politics. If you don't believe me, A Companion To Roman Italy is a book that will teach you just how little you know...

    ...continue to the review of A Companion to Roman Italy by Alison E. Cooley


  11. On 25.3.2017 at 4:37 PM, sonic said:

    "Ferocious Atilla and his ferocious Huns are often blamed for the fall of the Roman Empire"

    Says it all, really.  First there's the misspelling of 'Attila' plus a massive simplification.  Then a more balanced article which notes that the Fall was a complex evolution of events where people interacted in an attempt to survive.  A reason why I'm not a great fan of lazy journalists!  Or should I say, 'Headline Writers'?  ;)

    ...i guess a bit mor balanced article on the same subject

    https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-romans-may-have-been-cozier-huns-they-let?tgt=nr


  12. The remains of a huge Roman temple, the size of St Paul's Cathedral in London has been found by a Cambridge University archaeological team in central Italy. The sacred site was uncovered several feet below Falerii Novi, an abandoned town around 30 miles north of Rome. The Falerii temple had rows of columns on three sides and is believed to cover a site 120m long and 60m wide...

    ...via IBTimes


  13. 15 hours ago, indianasmith said:

    As a collector of Native American artifacts, this is hardly surprising.  Evidence for Pre-Clovis cultures has been building for decades now.  Of course, that shifts the question to:  Beringia or the Atlantic?  or both?

    I would assume both, didnt they find very old settlements (like 15.000 to 20.000 years old) in Chile? There would be no way that those settlers would have arrived via Beringia this early


  14. The Greek Ministry of Culture announced that the location where the Greek naval forces had gathered before the historic sea battle of Salamis against Persians in 480 BC has been discovered.   The battle of Salamis is one of the most important battles in the history of Ancient Greece. It was a naval battle fought between an alliance of Greek city-states under Themistocles and the Persian Empire under King Xerxes in 480 BC which resulted in a decisive victory for the outnumbered Greeks. The battle was fought in the straits between the Attica mainland and Salamis, an island in the Saronic Gulf near Athens, and is deemed as the climax of the second Persian invasion of Greece...

    ...via Tornos News


  15. Reference books do not often make for popular reading. Many are too thick and cumbersome, their dusty pages clogged with statistics and data, lengthy quotations and technical prose. Good for academics and universities, yes. Worthy of a glance or two in passing, certainly. But to buy? Usually I avoid it. After all, why buy an encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century Russian literature when one could read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? Why buy a compendium of ancient battles when one could read Tacitus or Xenophon or Thucydides, or any number of modern classicists?

    Such were my thoughts before reading Don Taylor’s Roman Empire at War: A Compendium of Battles from 31 BC to AD 565. Although my preconceptions found some basis in reality, I admit I was pleasantly surprised by this little book – and by little I mean little! Numbering only 215 pages, it surely must rank among the most concise compendiums ever written...

    ...continue to the review of Empire at War: A Compendium of Roman Battles by Don Taylor

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