Andrew Dalby

Yes and no. Yes they introduced aqueducts, but not for irrigation. Roman aqueducts were to provide water supplies to cities. So it's not agricultural technology. Meanwhile Cato asks for "evidence". Hmm. It's a long time ago that I learned this -- it's a matter of ploughs and maybe carts, both of them very important features of agricultural technology at the period we're talking about. And it's surely one of the things that Caesar doesn't mention. The evidence is archaeological. Now, where to track it down? I think I first read it in K. D. White, /Agricultural implements of the Roman world/. But I don't have the book. I'm visiting some libraries next week so I will try to track the evidence down again for you! It's serious information ... Well, no one's ever said that to me before! Certainly Mrs Dalby never has ...

I've argued before on this Forum -- so I don't want to repeat myself unduly -- we ought to be very glad we have Suetonius. Just as Greek historians of Athens in the Peloponnesian War period are very glad they have Aristophanes as well as Thucydides. A lot of it is gossip from the streets or from the Imperial household. A lot of it is highly unfair to those in command, because those are always the people who get gossiped about. But the gossip, too, is part of history. It happened. And sometimes it affected the future. Weren't the deaths of Caligula, Nero, Domitian, partly caused by gossip swelling into unpopularity swelling into revolt/assassination?

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly on this. When my review of the Matthew Roller book appears, any day now, you'll see that there could have been an innocuous explanation for the story in Suetonius that Caligula had incestuous relationships with his three sisters.

First of all, technology is not "public life". But in any case you're exaggerating, Phil. If by "Hellenistic" you mean "Greek in ethnic origin", what you say is quite impossible (there weren't enough Greeks for all those new cities, of which Alexandria was only one). If you mean "Greek in culture and language", you're a little closer to the truth, but still (in my opinion!) a long way from it. The reality was far more complicated. Your picture doesn't explain the Rosetta Stone (to take the example that everyone will know). If "native Egyptians were excluded from public life" why on earth would a Hellenistic monarch bother to put up a three-script, two-language public inscription like that? Your picture also doesn't explain the importance of Alexandria, both Ptolemaic and Roman, in Jewish culture, and conversely the importance of the Jewish community to Alexandria, an issue that mattered a lot to the early Roman emperors.

But Pantagathus has just cited a contemporary source for this. Since Tacitus and his readers lived through this period, it's not too likely that he would have confused Domitianic with Neronian persecution. His readers would have told him "you've got it wrong".

I'm leaping in here, not having studied the whole thread in depth. Ignore me if I talk rubbish, therefore. It's going further than we know to say "Ptolemaic technology was largely Greek-based". Greek philosophers/scientists/technologists (same thing at that period) had studied in Egypt before the Ptolemaic period, so in that sense Greek technology was partly Egyptian-based anyway. We're talking about mutual influences, and they go back centuries. As for the Celts of Gaul, their agricultural technology is often said to have been ahead of that of the Romans, but in most other matters they were learning from the Romans, from Caesar's conquests onwards. Would you notice the effect as early as Augustus? I'm not sure. By the later Empire, Gaul really was a centre of Imperial culture, and the location where a good deal of it was transmitted onwards to medieval Europe.

My younger daughter suffered from migraine as a child. It took us a while to work out why, but eventually we found that she never got it any more if she never ate cherries or anything containing cherry flavouring. Is that a known causal agent? I never came across it in ancient texts, I know that!

Yes, this is a very important question. According to Horace, it's no good leaving the stuff to your heirs; they will just waste it. (Nobody had told Horace about cognac, but he would still have said the same.) So the main thing, Octavius, is to plan your life carefully and make sure you get to taste it all yourself! Having decided that, no special hurry. Vintage port does improve in the bottle, but not beyond a certain point. What point? I have never stored vintage port myself, so my advice is not to be taken too seriously, but, if it were me, I would open the port soon, when some good convivial opportunity arises: I suspect 40/50 years is as much as you can reasonably expect. Decant it carefully and in good time! And you're encouraged to taste it as you do this, so if there's anything wrong with it (I don't think there will be) you have time to go out to the supermarket and get a replacement before your guests arrive. People say that spirits don't improve in the bottle. They certainly don't spoil, so no problem there. Actually, my experience contradicts what people say: to me, old bottles of spirits always smell and taste better than new ones, they seem to have more complexity (at least if they were good ones originally) and they will repay slow drinking. So long as you don't add Coke to any of these, GO, I am with you in spirit!

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who likes Islay malts and Lagavulin. Oban, yes indeed. Tobermory, why not? Some friends swear by Highland Park (from Orkney). It's a long way ahead but I am already looking forward to next Burns night, when a Scottish neighbour promises to provide bountifully; a haggis will fly in from Scotland specially for us (and certain other neighbours will have difficulty finding their way home afterwards).

Interesting point. Yes, so far as I can judge from literary texts (and this sort of thing does rather depend on Martial, who wrote about sex so often), any kind of sexual penetration was felt as degrading to the penetrated, but oral sex (I mean fellatio) was considered by far the most degrading of all. So the average Roman male (not a slave-owner: mathematically, you'd have to be above average to be a slave owner) would have to pay someone, e.g. visit a brothel, for oral sex. Necro?

Hold on, who are these carps? In English, that's the name of a fish. There were a lot of them in the Danube, admittedly, but I never heard of them attacking Dacia ... Oh, OK, I've found these fellows now. You had better call them Carpi in English.

Yes, they did play polo. Alexius II, for example, spent too much time playing polo and too little time learning to be an emperor. Andronicus then put an end to both pastimes (by killing him).

Yes, that's true, Phil! I don't see that the distinctions between Roman attitudes and ours, in this area of sexuality, are as clear-cut as you seem to be saying.

But there are times (I seem to remember) that you wonder why on earth you chose it and whether it will ever end ... successfully ... Good luck to all who are facing those questions right now!

Well, all right, but we've seen news footage of raids on brothels not that far from home in which young women from poor countries are being kept against their will. A modern form of slavery for prostitution, just like the Roman version except that slavery is now against the law. Those places don't look comfortable. The beds are longer, there are doors, but nobody bothers to put pictures on the walls. As for the question of "separate beds" (and separate bedrooms) it's a cultural thing. Look how it tends to vary in hotel rooms from one country to another and one star to two. Why, if you visited "Trimalchio's house" in some parts of England, you might have to face a guided tour including the bedrooms (unlike Encolpius), and the configuration of beds and bedrooms that you would see would depend on the class, aspirations and wealth of your hosts.

I'm not qualified by experience to comment on all those points, Phil. However, whatever can be done in the back seat of a car could probably be done in one of those alcoves. I know I originally commented on their hardness, but I should add that it's also true of the garden triclinia of Pompeii and Herculaneum -- they are also in stone or concrete -- and in all cases we just have to add to our mental image the cushions etc. that natives would have used to make themselves comfortable. As for your first sentence, you're quite right, obviously. The pictures were probably rather standard (like a good deal of the other wall painting at Pompeii). In my opinion you don't pay an original artist to invent designs for your brothel walls; your decorator gets the pictures out of a pattern book and copies them as best he can (not very well, usually).

OK, so WotWotius it appears the lecturer wasn't entirely pulling this concept out of the neither regions of his bowels... The Liddell-Scott dictionary gives the following definitions: Kandaules: dog-throttler, Lydian name for Hermes & name of a Lydian king (in Herodotus, the one who lost Sardis to the Gyges) & Kunagches:(sp?) dog-throttler, title of Hermes Judging by the abbreviation/name of the first source listed for these two epithets (Hippon?), it seems to be perhaps a Byzantine source? Maybe Andrew Dalby can help us out here... Sorry, I missed this thread till now. Yes, I know your "Hippon." He's an old friend. He's the scurrilous and obscene early Greek poet Hipponax. Only known in fragments unluckily, but some of the fragments are quite juicy ... He appears (according to this particular fragment) to have been engaged in burglary, or pretending he was (you can't always take poets literally) and sends off a short prayer to Hermes the dog-throttler to help him get over a wall, possibly before the guard-dog gets him. WW's visiting lecturer either wrote, or else had read, the following: C. H. Greenewalt, \Ritual dinners in early historic Sardis\. Berkeley, 1976. Yes, they were dog dinners, it seems. I understand there is archaeological evidence (the bones in sacrificial pots) as well as the scattered literary evidence.

Yup, A.D., you imply that I know something, anything, about Latin! Barely speak English! I suspect, GO, that you are being modest (British fashion) about your Latin. As for your English: on evidence available to me, a pure and classic dialect of our mother tongue is spoken in Brookfordshiresexingham ...

The beds look a bit hard. I hope there were cushions.

And not just in Finland, but also in cyberspace. Keep on reading the Latin Vicipaedia because it's growing all the time. Mind you, it needs editors as well as readers -- the Latin isn't always perfect. I added Petronius yesterday. Did I get anything wrong?

Yes, well, this is what the men might have thought. But it would be interesting to know what the women might have thought. If we just assume that what the men thought is the only thing that mattered, aren't we being a bit sexist? No not sexist, just pointing out that the roman world was male dominated and women were supposed to fulfill certain roles in society. It isn't unusual - we see the same attitudes today. Our modern western equality is unusual in human sociology. However, I do think - I have said it - that roman woman were able to extend themselves beyond their restrictions given certain circumstances. Many would have had no choice but to conform and many were perfectly happy to do so. Others would have chosen to strive against restraint. British culture used to be like that and I would be interested to know just how far roman women suceeded in obtaining equality. You're quite right, of course! But, in any society including ours, men as well as women are supposed to "fulfill certain roles in society". We're just trying the experiment of making the two almost coincide, and the result of the experiment will certainly be interesting if future generations happen to survive long enough to look back and judge our success. I suspect Roman society would have seemed "unusual in human sociology" as well. Take a fairly well known example. Livia "fulfill[ed] certain roles in society" -- and she addressed the women when Augustus addressed the men -- but I'm not sure whether an observer from another planet, having viewed Livia's biography from birth to death, would have concluded either that she "strove against restraint" or that she "had no choice but to conform". I think it's more complicated than that.

I hate spellchecks. I always avoid them or disable them. Does anyone else agree with me? When those little red lines come up I find myself saying either I knew that already! I was just going to change it! Don't interfere! or You're wrong! You don't understand. I really mean this! I suppose the answer is that I suffer from a severe form of hubris.

Thank goodness. I was afraid it encouraged mooning. There'll be none of that at York, I hope.

Or Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy. I liked the idea of the babelfish, though I wouldn't have wanted to put one in my ear. Remember, too, the dangers involved (I quote from memory): "By facilitating communication between races, the babelfish has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the galaxy." I hope those American scientists have read their Hitch-hiker's guide. We have enough wars already.

It's a long time ago that I looked into this and I haven't seen Cunliffe's book: I'm sure it'll be good. My understanding was that Pytheas really did get to Britain and possibly even sailed round it. His lost work is fairly frequently quoted by Strabo (who was a very suspicious reader and may well have expressed those doubts about Pytheas), so if you look at the index to Strabo you will find a good deal about Pytheas. But probably Cunliffe brings it all together even better.