Bryaxis Hecatee
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Posts posted by Bryaxis Hecatee
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I must say that I smile reading some posts by our American friends especially when some of you say the research labs of US universities are better than those found in "Old Europe"'s ones. American seems to think that in order for something to be good it has to be big and cost a lot of money : be it the Hummer car of the JSF plane, they cost two to four time what any vehicle designed in the world cost and are twice as big, using twice as much fuel to go at the same speed and the same distance as a British Land Rover car or a French Rafale plane. Even at more basic level the Europeans scientists make as much discoveries as their American counterparts with less computer power, less material and much smaller budgets. Yet the US do not have anything that can compare to the latest CERN particle accelerator, have much less success with NASA than the Europeans with the Ariane space rockets program, and if the Europeans publish less they usually publish bigger papers and do not segment their publication in numerous small articles. This is due to differences in the teaching methods between the two continents and both systems have their advantages but finally they are as much Europeans universities in the world's top 50 of the best universities than American one's.
For example the budget of my university ( ULB, some 20 000 students ) is about one quarter to one half of the budget of the smaller ( 15 000 students ) Georgetown university in Washington DC ( and I dare not speak of the budget of Harvard, which is of a similar size to the ULB ) and yet we are recognized as a very good research center, leader in some reals of physics and electronics as well as in cancerology and medical machines design. Thus if the quality of the education given and of the research produced is the same for a lesser cost and with a much better accessibility for poorer peoples then I think the European model is probably a better system which could produce much more knowledge if it had the same money poured into it as has the US model.
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Here in the french speaking part of Belgium the inscription fee at the university is somewhere around 800 or 900
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From what I remember she describes at least in part the ritual. But the title is mainly about the sacrifice of the brightest political horse of the time, Caesar himself, on the ides...
About my latest readings well in the leisure realm they are the 4 first books of Asimov's Foundation serie and in the academic realm they are Lendon's Soldiers and Ghost and Morpeth's book on Thucydide's history
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Well law making in ancient Rome was at first done by the kings and the centuries which met on the field of Mars. Then came the troubles between the common people ( plebs ) and the patrician which led the plebs to create it's own assembly which indeed could make laws valid only for it's members. Laws valid for the whole roman population were made through the centuries after senatorial review. Usually a law which was not accepted by the Senate was not presented to the assembly.
When the plebiscitum became valid for all citizens it became the prefered way to pass a law for various reasons including the fact that it was a bit more "democratic" without giving all the power to the common people, especially since only magistrates could organize a session and they went to the Senate before putting a bill to the vote. It only changed with the Gracchian brothers who went ahead with their laws despite senatorial opposition, the first of a serie of radical tribunes of the plebs which threatened the normal power base of the senatorial elite. Thus the attempt by Sulla to curtail their powers.
Finally under Caesar laws were almost never voted anymore, Caesar ruling by decree, before Augustus slowly killed the public voting procedure altogether safe for senatorial advices ( which went the way the Emperor whished ) and elections which were also largely pre-determinated by the Emperor.
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Hadrian's villa, Tivoli, Italy, egyptian quarter ?
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You might want to try Brussel's Art and History' Museum's molding workshop who offers a large selection of casts of ancient pieces made from molds taken on some of the most famous pieces in the world.
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And everyone else!!!!!!!
Excellent soundtrack is Gladiator!! We should take a decent sound system on the Wall meet and have it blaring out in the background!!!!
Now that would be quite a sight ! Same would be true of having hit playing loudly in a real amphitheater ( Colonia Augusta Treverorum comes to my mind ) or on the Rhine Limes... You islanders should think to come on the mainland from time to time
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Well etruscan is a separate, currently untranslated, language very different from the latin ( and from all other known languages too, even if some have tried to link it with some semitics languages ). As for the other tribes south of Rome they mainly spoke oscian derivated languages of which little survives, most of it being short epigraphic inscriptions.
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It was most probably a form of rotating conscripts ( like it later was in Spain ) or a band of mercenaries, for the idea of a professional state corps of soldiers was not yet born in Rome at the time. From what we can see from the sources I think that only a few soldiers like the famous Spurius Longinus can be called professionals because their main activity is war and even these manage to father many childrens ( 5 in Longinus' case if I remember well ).
Also remember that outside of those small forces the main way for the romans to guarison an area was called a colony...
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We might misbehave a bit more!
Seriously though, the athletes of Rome haven't received much attention, I suppose because as lesser forms of life they don't warrant much attention. The flogging seems a bit harsh given the susceptibility of these men to injury, but then, as a deterrent and a motivational factor I guess it works!
You are very wrong saying that because many scholars have studied the athletes quite closely those last few years because of their professional organisation from the hellenistic times to the roman days, for they had built quite a powerfull guild with direct access to the Emperor for exemple. Unfortunately I don't have the references under hand but if I remember well Otto van Nees ( or something like that ) has just published a book on the subject and some of the conferences in the Brussel's 2007 seminary on the ancient professional associations were about the athletes.
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Massa d'Albe is a bit to the north of Alba Fucens which is midway between Massa d'Albe and Antrosano, on the hills that dominate the area. The access road, if i read google map correctly, is from north-east : the road to Alba Fucens begins were the road to Forme joins the SP 24
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Under the republic the minimal age was 17 as is given by Polybius in book 6 and Appian when, in his book on the civil wars, he speak of the gracchian legislation on the army.
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Yes, the italians have gone back to the field in the recent years under Daniela Liberatore and the Universit
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The first documents about espionage was about babylonians and egyptians, and soon the jews "come in game", when arrive in Caanan. But the first actions closest to modern spionage was done by Hannibal, who haved a spy network in Roman republic, long before the begining of war (even an agent in Rome ), who try to know all about peoples, agriculture, and roman military. Caesar as well, haved a kind of operative inteligence service, who bring him infos about the terrain where he move, and about enemy army, and, as well, try to infiltrate the enemies with a kind of "fifth column", a spy network much agressive than one of Hannibal. Chinese have as well a lot of spy activities ( even Sun Tzi spoke about ), but the most keept military secret was the "greek fire". Byzantines keep him for 4 centuries, until, in unknow circumstances, the arabs manage to stole him. If anyone know some spectaculous spy actions from that time, i will be glad to know about.
Hannibal came late in the spy game, we got spies in the western world as early as the 6th century BC and certainly in the 5th, during both the Persian wars and the Peloponnese's War, not even mentionning the spies and scoots of Philip II and Alexander the Great. Just take a look at the information network Alcibiade built in both the Egean, the Peloponnese, Sicily and southern Italy !
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Here I think Dubuisson's article on the roman vision of the foreigners ( availlable at http://www.class.ulg.ac.be/ressources/vision.pdf but in french only ) is a must read because it is to my knowledge on of the only real study on the subject. Most interesting is table on page 5 which gives the roman stereotyps people by people.
Of less interest but in english is the older book by N.K. Petrochilos "Roman attitudes to the greeks" and of course J.P.V.D. Baldson's Romans and aliens, less a formal study than a catalogue of annecdots.
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Too bad you don't read french for you could have worked with the Bude collection which is also a dual edition of a somewhat higher standard than the Loeb and with a bigger amount of comments, both philological and historical. But they have the same problem than the Loeb : cost. In fact they are even a bit more costly than Loeb : for 4 Loeb Xenophon books I paid 100
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Here is a professional review of the book by a Yale professor which I just got in my mail :
Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar, Life of a Colossus. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006. Pp. 519. ISBN 978-0-300-12048-6. $35.00.
Reviewed by Josh Levithan, Yale University (joshua.leviathan@yale.edu)
Word count: 1523 words
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To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-05-35.html
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Adrian Goldsworthy's recent biography of Caesar adds a large (519
pages) book to a formidable pile. Goldsworthy's extensive body of work
on the Roman army has greatly advanced our understanding of Roman
military behavior, particularly the interplay of physical and
psychological factors, and his The Roman Army at War remains the most
indispensable work on its subject. This biography, while animated by a
similar interest in studying human activity with a strong sense of
cultural immediacy, is a more traditional sort of work, sketching an
outline of Caesar, "a great man," against his many contexts -- Roman
society, the politics of the senate, Gaul, the army.
The book is friendly to both specialist and non-specialist, and those
Roman historians who are inclined to sit down in a comfortable chair
with a big book in their own field will find here a comprehensive and
very readable review of Caesar's life and times. But this is also to
say that there is not much here that seems to be new. Many questions
that have been subjects of recent scholarly debate are, of course,
touched upon, but this is a biography, and so the narrative structure
and pacing derive from Caesar's life -- from, that is, the most
detailed of the ancient sources. This leads, as the book proceeds, to
the sensation that one is on a long guided tour, uncertain precisely
where the guide will turn next, or why. In many ways this is a good
thing. Goldsworthy does well to shake the reader free of the casual
determinism that comes with reading about the most familiar and famous
historical figures, and to remind us of the many gambles, strange
turns, and unlikely incidents in Caesar's career. Besides, an
unpredictable succession of subjects is rather appropriate to a life of
an energetic Roman aristocrat, in that we must wander as Caesar's
career in fact did. Given its size and its generally useful endnotes,
this book would be a very good gateway for historians or classicists
seeking information about a variety of Caesar-related topics -- but for
that purpose it is rather too long to do other than dip in, here and
there, by means of the index and footnotes.
As a biography that, in following Caesar, covers many topics in Roman
history in considerable depth, this is an impressive achievement.
Goldsworthy, in the first cohort of academic prose stylists, is highly
readable, managing to be very informative without being in the least
overbearing. I recently purchased the book as a birthday gift for my
father-in-law, a history buff and an avid reader prone to cross-country
train journeys, as well as a fan of the "Rome" television series who
might profit from a more nutritious historical meal.
Still, the academic reader may be reminded why chronological
cross-sections and subject studies are generally more useful than
biography. The fundamental aim of the book seems to be to put the
"great man" (page 1) in a detailed Roman context, perhaps to bridge
non-specialist biography and academic Roman history. I do not consider
myself the sort of historian who is antagonistic, on principle, to
studies of powerful men, but I must confess to frustration with
Goldsworthy's attention to the question of "greatness," especially
inasmuch as it required recurring reference to Napoleon. It's a
slippery thing, and, if it is to be defined other than simply as
"extremely successful," I'm not sure I understand why Caesar was, in
particular, great.
Rather than taking away a new sense of Caesar's life, character, or
historical role, I experienced the book as a sequence of studies of
Roman history, centered on Caesar. The sections on his early life are,
necessarily, dependent on frustrating sources, and the repetition of
phrases such as "it is quite possible" and "on the balance it seems
likely" can make for heavy going. Yet the narrative momentum of
Caesar's life, once underway, is often interrupted by potted
biographies of other senators (that of Crassus is notably well-wrought)
and by long chapters on Roman politics that shade from "context" into
case study (I am not sure that any writer could make the dense
intrigues of the 60s into prose that I would find compelling, and
Goldsworthy does yeoman's work) and thus create a problem of scale --
they are too lumpy to be easily digested into Caesar's context and yet
still too small to leave the uninitiated reader with a good
understanding of, for example, Catulus, or Catiline and his crew. (To
that end, it bears mentioning that, while the black and white
photographs and occasional diagrams are helpful, some sort of graphic
representation of the senatorial interrelationships, both familial and
political, would have been welcome.) Another problem of the
relationship between history and biography is that certain fun little
bits of information turn up in odd places, but they read as
Goldsworthy's interjections into the breathing-pauses of Caesar's own
narration (e.g. Catullus' scandalous verses on Caesar, mentioned during
a winter lull in the narrative of the Gallic Wars). I find digressions
such as this to be quite pleasant, but they contribute to the
kitchen-sink exhaustion that may overtake some readers. Similarly, the
drumbeat of military-political events becomes so dominant in the middle
and latter stages of the book that even well-known events that must
have affected Caesar personally -- most important of all being the
death of Julia, in 54 -- read like speculative diversions from the
"real story." Both of these instances, these parenthetical events on
the route-march to greatness, lead to the sense that, as far as
narrative structure is concerned, the great man is still imposing his
will on his biographers.
Many sections of the book are very good, marked by lively prose and a
judicious sense of historical detail. In particular, Goldsworthy is
masterful on military matters and makes many useful observations on
Caesar's battles and campaigns. Goldsworthy's renderings of important
events, even much-discussed incidents (e.g. the shield-grab at the
Sambre), make for much better illustrations of Roman generalship in the
context of this book than they do in a chrestomathy of battlefield
incidents or a capsule description of Caesar's leadership. Goldsworthy
does very well indeed in describing the fascinating process of bonding,
of growing trust and mutual military enthusiasm, between the
amateur/aristocrat general, fresh from the forum, and his army.
However, the large central section on Caesar in Gaul (over a third of
the book) had the effect, for this reviewer, of replacing all memories
of Caesar the senator and Caesar the politician with Caesar the
general. Goldsworthy does well to emphasize the astonishing nature of
the transformation from upstart politician into brilliant military
leader, yet the transformation remains mysterious (as, given the
weakness of the sources, it may always be). Yet this middle section,
on Gaul, works so closely from the text of the de Bello Gallico, and at
such length, that I found myself wishing that Goldsworthy had written a
commentary on that work instead. As I'm sure Goldsworthy would agree,
the ambitious reader would do better to read Caesar's own description
of the battle than a reconstruction, however skillful. (Aninteresting, and very welcome, innovation is the use of numerals foreven the smallest of numbers: once one is accustomed to this usage, the
campaign-descriptions, shot through with repeated reference to the
mileage of military maneuvers, seem easier to manage.)
This review may do a disservice to Goldsworthy, since I have not read
many representatives of that genre of context-heavy biographies of
major historical figures, the books to which Goldsworthy's Caesar might
more fruitfully be compared. Given his deep knowledge of the subject
-- especially its military dimensions -- and his lively and effective
prose style, his book should measure up well against the better
biographies of Napoleon, Churchill, or Wellington -- whom he variously
invokes by way of comparison to Caesar -- with which many of its
intended readers may be familiar. An enjoyable epilogue on the
ramifications of Caesar's personality in modern popular culture nods to
these broad horizons, and to the extra-historical context that Caesar's
greatness would demand. But as a work of Roman history this book is at
once highly informative and somewhat ungainly, and it adds little to
our understanding of Caesar or his period. Goldsworthy's tome makes a
better case for the richness of Roman culture, politics, and warfare as
subjects of historical inquiry than it does for the peculiar greatness
of Caesar. There are many trenchant observations, many good chapters
(and perhaps there could have been several tight little books instead
of one rather sprawling one), and there is much that even an expert in
some of the areas covered by Goldsworthy could learn about other
subjects gathered up between the same set of covers. So, while seeking
to ignore those appraising, over-the-shoulder glances -- of Napoleon at
Caesar, Caesar at Alexander, Alexander at Achilles -- that disrupt
Caesar, Life of a Colossus from time to time, I will no doubt find
frequent use for this book in my work as a Roman historian, turning to
it for refreshment, and for introductions to many of the aspects and
incidents of Caesar's life and times.
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Well maybe some french or spanish place, but I've got no idea which city it is.
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It is rather rare that epigraphic inscription get translated, and I know of no book collecting such translations... At best should you have the CIL number of your inscription you could look for them in Annee Epigraphique review or something similar to see if it has been translated, but it would be a long shoot.
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It has been discussed there : http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6252
It should give you quite a lot of informations on the subject.
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Indeed, especially since they are more than one citadel of Herod. Thus I consider WotWotius as the rightfull winner in this question
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The citadel of Herod ?
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A pity this one did not come earlier since it was a subject I had to work on for most of this year... But if review is needed I presume I should be able to do it
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Apollo temple at Bassae ?
Not as excited about Ancient Greek history. Why?
in Historia in Universum
Posted
While my presence on this board for some months now shows that I do indeed like roman history very much I have chosen to become a specialist of the Greek world. Why ? Because Greece is an area which was ( and still is ) very poor agriculturally, did not support a very large population ( for example Athens never reached the million inhabitants before the 19th or even the 20th century ) and yet it produced so many innovations in the real of the art, of the mind, of the actions too. The Greeks were exceptional painters from the minoan time onward, marvelous sculptors since at least the archaic period if not before, wonderful metal workers be it during the mycenian period or later, incomparable thinkers exploring ways which had never been contemplated before in politics, ethics, general philosophy, theology or sciences. They built structures which survived for centuries, even millenniums, without loosing the power of their original design despite earthquakes, explosions, and the general degradations caused by the passing time. Names stand out of their history, be they Pisistrate or Pericl