Maty

In response to the original question, the Roman army certainly did use vinegar, though I have only come across it in the context of an antiseptic, in that it was used to clean wounds before stitching. In a different context, a few drops of vinegar in water does indeed work if you are very thirsty. The reason as it was explained to me is that if you drink just water, you can never get enough of the stuff, and end up with a full stomach but still thirsty. Add a couple of drops of vinegar, and something in the brain registers an impurity, and cuts down your urge to drink in case you get a large dose of something bad. It's the same reason that though technically a duiretic (needing more water to get out of the system than it puts in) a beer is better at quenching thirst than just water. I'd be interested to know if there is in fact any documented research on this.

Of these books, I know Susan Raven's one well - it has some excellent site plans, and I keep looking at the inside and back pages where there are some very good maps. I still think 'The long year 69 AD' is the best treatment of the year of the four emperors, but if there's another up for free, in terms of value for money that's hard to beat. Geoffrey Greatrex is immensely knowledgeable on the late imperial East, and I've on occasion been able to pick his brains for help and advice. Not just a top scholar, but a nice guy and a mean tennis player. The Jane Gardner is one of the best treatments around on the topic, though I still think that she tends to infer too much from modern society and assume that 'of course' it was so also in the ancient world. We've crossed swords over, for example, the power of the paterfamilias, which I think she greatly understates. Now if you will excuse me, I'll get back to online reading of The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 226-363 ... Excellent find Cato, though do excuse me for hoping that this free book idea doesn't become too prevalent!

I'd like to add the circumnavigation of Africa in around 500 BC. Herodotus reports it, in very credible terms (Histories 4.42), but no-one seems to know or care if it actually happened.

Romano-Britain can mean simply Roman Britain (in which case I'll assume you've considered Salway's work - either in the illustrated version or in the British history series), but many associate this name particularly with the period between the end of direct Roman rule and when the place went to hell in a handcart in the dark ages. If the latter, you will find a massive bibliography at http://www.fectio.org.uk/bibliogrromam.htm . It's well worth a look.

Thanks for the enquiry! I've asked the publishers about this, but am still awaiting a reply. When it comes, i'll let you know. In the meantime, I found this: Belisarius US?. Is that what you were looking for? Cheers! Cool. Thanks a lot. I'm definitely interested in it. Isn't the American edition called Belisari US? I'll get me coat. Thanks for the maps Ian!

There are some pics here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegal...rd%2C-Kent.html and a great mosaic.

I have never been further north than Leeds in winter, but would not deny that were I a legionary I would definitely feel there was a time and a place for socks. Mind you, I'd say that also applies to Milan in winter, and that was at one point the capital of the empire. Don't forget that even garrison troops have the ambulatoria once every ten days when the CO is meant to take his men of a jolly route march (with pack and dolabra) of 20+ miles. That's when I'd say its time to leave the socks under the bed ...

By the by, the "pants" were called Bracae or Feminalia. There seems to be some confusion over the distinction, one seems to have been knee length and the other full length trousers. In any case, the name feminalia is not endearing to a soldier's masculinity. they were not highly regarded They are depicted on legionaries in several places including Trajan's column, Constantine's Arch and monuments of Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus Pius. An aside on socks - in any weather - I and several of my fellow troopies found them problematical if you are doing serious marching with a full pack. (By which I mean carrying over 25kg more than 20 miles a day on a regular basis.) If you get blisters and they burst, the raw skin gets welded onto the woollen socks. Uncomfortable to march in, and agony to remove. You're better off with just leather, since except for really sub-zero weather, your feet stay warm anyway while you're marching. The last time I took my old boots on a serious walk was the three peaks in Yorkshire. That was a sleety day in late autumn, and (admittedly in a fully closed boot) my toes stayed toasty warm.

Maty will have a word with his publisher! However, we already have you marked for a review copy of 'Mithridates: Rome's Indomitable Enemy' which Pen & Sword are bringing out in October. It's about time Mithridates got a bit better known, and I wouldn't want to push my luck by asking for two reviews!

Actually I was going back further, to proto-Indo-European where words with sai- or se- roots are often to do with seeding, or scattering (which is why 'semen' and 'missile' have the same linguistic origin, apparently). When looking at the names of Goddesses and other mythological beings, we probably have to go back further than classical Greek for the same reason that many modern names date back to millenniums ago. So I'm looking here at languages such as Hittite (sai or siaj), Old Slavic (saja), Tokharian (saiwa), proto Germanic (seda) and yup, early Italic including Latin. Change the 's' to a 'z' amd you have most of the Afro-Asiatic languages covered as well. This may be reaching a bit, but then zarah (seed) and Sarah may have a common root as well. (Sarah =princess = of royal seed). However, I'm getting well out of my territory and into yours Nephele, so I'll back out now and await your corrections!

I see the Brit. Mus are doing an exhibition on Hadrian where 'Objects from 28 museums worldwide and finds from recent excavations will be shown together for the first time to reassess his legacy, which remains strikingly relevant today'. (I assume the 'relevant today' stuff relates to pulling troops out of Mesopotamia ...!) If anyone does get to see it, I'd love to get their thoughts and impressions ... Maty

I'll have a crack at this one, since I've been doing a bit of mythology lately. I can't give detailed answers to all the questions, but can add a few pointers at least! In the play, Dionysus is repeatedly referred to as a "new god". In fact, even though his mortal mother was a princess of Thebes (where the action of the play takes place, on Dionysus' return to the city of his birth), references are made to his being a "foreign" god because he has been away in "the East" for many years, building up his cult. Dionysus is credited with being the inventor of wine, so... Dionysus had a pretty weird birth, being taken from the womb of his dying mother (you spotted the link between 'Semele' and 'seed'?) and being 'born again' from the thigh of Zeus. Questions #1: Does all this imply that wine-making was an activity imported by the Greeks from what they perceived as the decadent East? That the Greeks had established agriculture for a long period before they discovered (or imported) the art of wine-making? Dionysus' 'exile' may reflect his importation as a foreign God - possibly Thracian. However, you are right that wine was cultivated in the east before in Greece, where the earliest record is from the mycaenean period, whilst it was already established in the east in the neolithic. Question #2: Dionysus is portrayed in Euripides' play (including this version I saw today with the aptly-cast Alan Cumming in the role), as being quite androgynous (or bisexual). Did the ancient Greeks perceive this androgyny (or bisexuality) of the wine-god as tying in with the recognized effects of wine as being a releaser of inhibitions? Since sex in the ancient world was somewhat less gender oriented - (roles being determined by giver and receiver) relaxation of inhibitions was perhaps not necessary for bisexual activities any more than for heterosexual ones, insofar as matters would have been less perceived in those terms. That said, D. certainly represents the presence and reconciliation of opposites, including male and femaleas his androgynous appearance indicates. Hesiod also refers to wine as the 'god's ambivalent gift'. hope this helps at least somewhat.

My various copies of the CAH have seen some hard use over the years - not least because they are solid clunking books which my wife constantly nicks as when she needs to weigh down a tablecloth at a picnic or something similar. sometimes I find that the CAH is the only book which gives a detailed coherent history of a period. Whist many of the opinions are out of date, the basic facts are solid, and need supplementing only with a check (I use JSTOR) to ensure that epigraphy and archaeology have not turned up something new. As for the opinons of the writer - I like to form my own anyway! As others have commented, getting up to date copies costs the earth - these days I only get a copy if I'm going to be working intensively on that period, and even then I sometimes settle for an older edition, and spend the savings on several supplementary books.

Road-building perhaps? The Via Egnatia was not in modern Greece, but did give access to Macedonia via Albania. And of course, it offered many Greeks the chance to learn Latin whilst serving as slaves after the Romans had flattened Corinth (Memmius) and Athens (Sulla) as well as a host of minor towns. I'm also less certain about the Romans preserving Greek culture - a lot of this was preserved by the Iranian peoples east of the Euphrates, which is why Aristotle (for example) was re-introduced to Europe by the Crusades.

The basic answer is that Roman politics were always pretty nasty - if you read Livy, it seems that the general mayhem at the end of the Republic was people taking off where they left off before they were distracted by a series of major wars. If you want a definitive discussion, then ask your local librarian to order Andrew Lintott's "Violence in Republican Rome" . The basic argument of the book is that political violence was inherent within Rome's legal and constitutional framework, and only a series of wars - starting with the Samnites and ending with Carthage - kept the Roman elite from killing each other earlier. In the Late Republic a number of other factors were already destabilizing the system and this allowed the violence to get completely out of hand, resulting in proscriptions and civil war.

As a matter of interest there's hardly a Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty who keeps the name he was known by to the Romans. Augustus was indeed Augustus, but Tiberius no more called himself that in his official nomenclature than Caligula called himself 'little boots'. Quick now - which emperor had the proper name of Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus? Was it Tiberius, Claudius or Nero? (It was Claudius.) Likewise we refer to Cato the elder and Cato the younger and ignore all the other Catos who were around between the pair. Kikeroo (Cicero, whatever) was actually Marcus Tullius officially speaking anyway, as officialdom of the day did not recognize cognomina unless they were several generations old. In a way modern usage is a sort of shorthand used to refer to particular people of historical significance - it's a useful convention, but you have to be careful when dealing with original sources - someone called 'Caesar' for example could be one of several dozen people, depending on context.

It was a topos (a sort of cliche) amongst the Romans that they were not the men that previous generations had been, and that there was some sort of Golden Age a few generations back when Romans were noble and incorruptible, unlike the romans of the present decadent era (whenever that is). If we are going to argue that the Romans of a particular era were corrupt, we have to define - corrupted how, and in what way, and how their behavior differs from what they (and not we by today's measure) would consider 'correct' behavior. Let us remember that bribery, nepotism and exchanges of favours (for example) which would be considered corrupt in modern society, did not corrupt the Roman system, because in many instances that WAS the system. In the same way, the Romans were passing laws against luxurious living (sumptuary legislation) and worrying about decadence almost from the start. Yet Suetonius remarks that Augustus' house was pretty miserable and cheap by the standards of his own day. So asking if luxury corrupted first century Romans begs the question whether they were corrupt, and if they were, how were they corrupt?

They're different people. A military tribune was a sort of general-purpose legion officer. Sometimes, depending on the general and the time and place, this was an ambitious young aristo out to make his mark, and at other times it was an experienced commander - often from the auxiliaries - who could nonchalantly throw a cohort or two around a battlefield. Caesar makes the comment that news of the arrival of a Gallic army put the wind up his military tribunes 'who had followed him from Rome in order to court his friendship'. A tribune of the plebs on the other hand was a pure politician. In fact his powers did not even extend beyond the borders of Rome. His duty was non-military and was originally intended to defend the poor people against overbearing aristocrats. He also had to be a plebeian, whilst a military tribune -for example Scipio - could be a patrician. Also, a tribune of the plebs could veto a consul, which would have been a right pain if military tribunes could do so to their general on the battlefield.

By the way, does 'Brutus Brittanicus Thrax (The Baby-Eating Barbarian of Britain)' begin his meals with a devout prayer along the lines of 'for what we are about to receive ....'?

Not sure Gladiatorial combat was exactly sacrifice ... though it was originally part of funeral rites. An offering to the dead, certainly, but remember sacrifice has the meaning of 'make sacred' and it is an offering to a God in a 'very' precise ritual. Romans had two issues with Christianity. Generally speaking you could worship whoever or whatever you liked, but you had to subscribe to the state religion as well. Roman Gods, unlike the Christian God did not require belief, but they did require that the people of a city did right by them, or they would go elsewhere. Not unexpectedly, being repudiated by a portion of the population (i.e. the Christians who called them 'demons') was expected to miff the Gods somewhat. The Romans argued not that you have to believe in the Gods, but you had to do your patriotic duty and sacrifice whether you believed or not. They you could go and worship whatever, as long as human sacrifice was not involved. That's why the Romans insisted Christians brought before them performed sacrifice. If they could do that whether they were 'really' Christians did not matter. If the Gods who made Rome great withdrew their protection, then what might happen? Barbarian invasions? Plague? If Rome became completely Christian, perhaps Rome's entire western empire would fall. We of course, know that this was a silly superstition that quite co-incidentally paralleled what happened, but the Romans didn't, which is why they got quite excited about it all. The second issue was that because the exclusivity of the Christians made them - by definition - anti Roman, they tended to worship secretly. This, as pointed out was illegal, and it led to all sorts of dark rumours of that they were up to. See the earlier suppression of the Bacchic cult to show that once this kind of suspicion took hold it was very bad for those suspected.

You are quite right, thanks. I had a quick look at my biographical notes for Tiberius. The process was known as destinatio, where the emperor proposed the candidates, the senate 'elected' them, and the comitia ratified it all. Not all candidates originally, and efforts were made to reverse the process under Caligula and Trajan, but failed. Here's my references Suetonius Caes 41 div Aug 40.56 Tac hist 1.77 and Dio 53.21 Appian BC 1.103 Can't look them up right now ... am dummy in a game of bridge!

Technically speaking it was very much a republic, although the reality had been well and truly subverted. The emperor, or properly speaking Princeps, was not a single office, but a number of different powers rolled into one person. The most important two were maius imperium which means that the holder could take precedence over the governor of a province (and therefore command of the armies) and tribunican power in Rome, which means that the holder was sacrosanct, and could propose and veto legislation. These powers were not heritable, but had to be conferred on the holder by a vote of the senate. The senators in turn received their places through being magistrates, and the magistrates were (still, I think) voted into office by the people. All very republican. Next you will be saying that England where 42 days imprisonment without charge or trial has just been voted for at the behest of our (unelected) Prime Minister, is not a democracy ...

Incidentally, on Rome not encouraging the spread of Christianity as a form of Romanization, is this not what Theodosius did with encouraging the mission of Saint Mesrob in Persian Armenia in the early 400s? (Leaving out his missions elsewhere). I understood that Theodosius was keen to encourage Christianity in Armenia precisely because it Romanized the place, and the Persians persecuted Christians for the same reason. But I await your further corrections.

The Samnites and the Etruscans. Re the post that started this thread "They fed captured enemy leaders to the beasts in the arena". They did? Name one. 1. Etruscans adopted roman culture. Really! Besides being totally wrong as being the other way around (early Rome was heavily influenced by etruscans) this is beside the point that I tried to make when I was talking about IMPERIAL borders. As I said above I was talking about the space beyond Roman borders after Augustus. 2. Ascaricus and Morogaisus, the leaders of the Franks, with some of their leading worriors, where thrown to the beasts in the arena during the celebrations of the return (adventus) of Constantine to Trier in the winter 306-307. This is from "Constantine and the Christian Empire" of Charles Matson Odahl. Rome was indeed heavily influenced by Etruscan culture during the regnal period. But I was following your criteria and looking for something later (talking about 'after Augustus' is rather moving the goalposts - your original post did not mention any period, and anyway, Rome was an empire before it had an emperor). But actually I was talking about 90 BC (about 30 years before Augustus was born) when large parts of Etruria and the Samnite country were not only eager to adopt Roman culture, laws etc wholesale, but they actually went to war with Rome to get it. I'm not sure why the fact that these cultures had much in common half a millenium beforehand affects this point. Ascaricus and Morogaisus are individuals I don't know much about, though if your first example of enemy leaders condemned to the beasts comes from the late Roman empire, this means it was hardly a habit. And, er, if we are talking about being nasty neighbours, didn't these two particular Franks invade Roman territory rather than vice-versa? Whilst Odahl is beyond doubt an excellent scholar, he probably was not about in Trier at the time, so could you have a peek in your book and give me his reference for his sources? (Eusibus perhaps?) It is certainly something I would like to know more about.

The Samnites and the Etruscans. Re the post that started this thread "They fed captured enemy leaders to the beasts in the arena". They did? Name one.