caesar novus
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Posts posted by caesar novus
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When I have been camping, there was not the slightest impulse to get up needlessly in wee hours... especially in the damp cold, the getting up is painful and not to be repeated. But even without lighting equipment, we would stay up well after sunset.
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I had downloaded 2 free kindle books (find them on amazon) that touch on this. One, called something like Private lives of the Romans has chapters on the typical roman day, and on the hours scheme. Another's title starts out with Ancient Rome (IIRC). I'm starting to forget which said which, and you had to cross reference stuff in different chapters (with a hotlink that your kindle app or hardware can follow).
Basically they suggested they ate the big meal of the day just before sunset, then immediately konked off to sleep. There weren't night events to speak of... you had to socialize during, not after the meal. But then you arose extremely early... breakfast could start at 4am, and by then lawyers and authors may have been working since 3. I'm sure there are a thousand counter examples, but this is what these hundred year old books said.
They said most work and public events (we are talking mid/upper class) was finished before noon lunch and then there was an hour siesta after. Afternoon for baths, theater, exercise, socializing, then supper. I fail to see the need for them to rest again after getting up in the wee hours and looking forward to siesta.
Some famous Roman author I read wrote to warn husbands from visiting slave quarters at night. He pointed out you would set an example for your wife to do the same during your frequent absences, with obvious consequences about not knowing the paternity of her future children among other things.
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I'm listening to Paul Theroux's "Dark Star" travels thru Egypt, etc. His (always) negative impressions echoed my own experience long ago. A big bank had only nonworking ink pens set out, and a teller very sneakily stole my own. Cold blooded gratuitous cruelty to coptic or gypsy trash pickers. Jewish American tourists stopping over on the way to Israel treating the sites with comtempt... we on group tours wasted half our time waiting for them to no-show, and eventually our guide abandoned all of us.
Oh, there was the nice time a felucca captain overheard me expounding on sailing and gave me the helm. Then he "fires" me due to not realizing you have to point absurdly high into the wind since they don't have daggerboards or whatever to reduce slippage.
Their economy is very unfair because they don't have the basic legal infrastructure for a free market system to function on. Unable to get land titles for their homes and biz for example, corruption, etc.
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An update on the chaotic fate of Egyptian antiquities also has some hopeful notes:
http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-39-antiquities-fall-victim-political-chaos-073640237.html
I'm glad to see they are trying to spread out the Cairo collection to an adjacent building as well as one across the Nile. Precious mementos of the past need dispersion to protect them from disasters, and also to make easier for educational exposure across the globe. Remember how the Cairo museum was damaged due to riots a few years ago.
I assume the museums of the world have halted their overeager repatriation activities of sending their Egyptian artifacts back to Egypt. More than just for clearly stolen articles, many curators of the west tried to fly their progressive flags by emptying out their collections to the shaky stewardship of Egypt, Greece, and Italy. I remember the Egyptian archeology official often on documentaries tended to bully foreign museums... was he the one fired in 2011?
The root cause of the recent chaos in Egypt isn't fairly covered in the west. As I understand it, it wasn't second thoughts about a fairly elected leader. Rather it was the hijacking of their constitution by a fringe element who had squeeked by an election. I recall being outraged by our president O. throwing his support to the Islamic extremist now overthrown... there was a centrist candidate at the time who actually quoted Thomas Jefferson, and originally had a lot of support, partly because he seemed a safe bet in keeping the $billions of US aid flowing.
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Just an observation of something that amazes me... an Italian biotech company stock has been rocketing up about 5 fold in the last few months http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=6m&s=GENT&l=off&z=l&q=l&c=efa&ql=1&c=^GSPC . Isn't the business environment hostile and crippled in Italy and Europe?
Isn't Europe dead set against meddling with DNA, GMO, etc? Apparently people become less purist and more hypocritical when they are sick and someone else is paying their bills http://www.gentium.it/ .
EDIT-> Ahh, I see their euro web page above doesn't highlight how their product is basically jamming pig DNA and human urine into patients (ok with me, if disclosed) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=GENT
.drug based on a mixture of single-and double-stranded DNA extracted from pig intestines for the treatment and prevention of veno-occlusive disease (VOD).
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The company also provides ... Urokinase, which is made from human urine to dissolve fibrin clots.
Actually I welcome their success, nestled just on the Milan side of Lake Como. But beware of investing in this ticker=GENT at such a high price because it can crash very suddenly.
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I'm missing an easy fix? Aren't you supposed to be blocking my posts? Anyway I am wary about conventional lcd screens, because:
IBM repairs quoted me $900 to replace a backlight on an old thinkpad. Then they agreed to do it free, but created other problems. A toshiba flickered out and I found an online fix instruction about microscopic resoldiering of a plug behind the screen. I extended the life by periodically opening up and just wiggling the plug until losing patience. My 2 17" apple pro laptops lost their screens and I use TV out instead. Well, one of them had a posted fix where apple kindly replaced some unreliable graphic chip out of warrantee. I described the other problem with the apple genius who kind of hinted it was a messy power supply problem to the screen.
As for tablets, I moderate a forum for a tablet brand with particularly troublesome screens. Folks occasionally describe how they replaced them, but it doesn't sound pretty. The problem is inherent with their frugal design anyway. Oh, I just got notified of my Kindle DX shipment, but found my local library mainly supports Kindle Fires (which just went off their cybermonday sale prices).
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.The Kindle DX does fine reading pdfs, the 9.7" screen is almost an inch larger than the ipad's & that really helps.
I need pretty big fonts and still may have to view pdfs by the half page if the DX sharpness doesn't make up for it. Amzn still haven't shipped or given me a DX delivery date after several days, yet they are now airmailing 3 gallons of something I hardly need at no extra cost!
I love big screens... you should see pdf on my 13" laptop folded into tablet mode and rotated to portrait... luxury! But all my laptops have died due to screen failures, and I don't want to burn extra hours e-reading on them. Same for an 11.5 inch android tablet I ordered from China... pdf looks marginally good, but all my bargain tablets develop touch problems in midlife, so I don't want to kill big, more expensive ones early just staring at books.
One solution is to convert pdf to epub or whatever (losing a bit in translation) then reading on a smaller device which is cheap enough to bear the earlier screen failure. I don't like it too small so I am paging every few seconds.
But the DX has a large-ish screen at a cheap, expendable price. Not only is it extra sharp but can work in bright outside light, which I want. My wifi router security setup is maxed out with device count, but the DX can use free 3G. Ahh, the anticipation is always greater than the reality.
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.I'd love it if they'd come out with a Paperwhite-like DX reader.
The Academia forum has tons of sources pinned, many are in epub (easy to convert to mobi) or pdf formats.
Maybe this sale indicates they are clearing out stock for an improved DX, although today they have extended the huge price cuts to some fire models. I can't find any academia forum, unless you mean the Brazilian one. Oh goodie, I have lots of .epub and .pdf available. Strange how amazon isn't giving me any delivery date on the DX after a full day, yet they are working on 30 minute deliveries by drone:.
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Ok, sort of a note to myself. I recalled manybooks.net having more free books out of copyright, and indeed it seems to offer .mobi and .azw which apparently is kindle compatible (send to it via usb cable rather than 3g). There are probably other sources too (gutenberg.whatever), all of which I need to experiment on before investing real bucks into newfangled "books in the cloud".
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I saw an extremely cheap deal on amazon for their almost 10" non-color kindle so that I can read e-books even in bright daylight. I guess it is cheap due to no touch screen and clunky outdated firmware... perfect for the frugal! Also it runs on free(ish) 3g only, so can still run if no wifi.
If I search on amazon for "Roman" kindle books and sort by low price, there is quite a number for free... any recommendations, since they aren't obviously winners? They do have a history->ancent->rome section with good looking mostly 99 cent books. I take it I can also load most any .pdf (or better yet .mobi?) such as from free archive.org and sometimes it will even convert it to spoken word.
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My main point is the newly released 3D project for Hadrian's Villa http://vwhl.clas.virginia.edu/villa/ where you can savor this really important Tivoli site in reality or recreated 3D. I hope it makes anyone skipped that sidetrip out of Rome feel BAD
:) I took the difficult public bus route there even when I was sick, hacking up blood everywhere.Here is a video on the project which is great for the first 15 minutes, then you may as well bail out of the self congratulating wrapup.
Well, I do admit the architecture is a bit Greek and spindly compared to classic Rome, such as in ROME REBORN http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/about-current.php . I lost track of that project so much discussed here, and wonder if this is a cut down version of it. Anyway here is the superset of such digital 3d Rome projects from Virginia http://vwhl.clas.virginia.edu/projects.html . It used to be Google earth had an ancient Rome 3d overlay too that you could fly around in, but I cannot find it.
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.and he immediately stopped talking to me.
There is wisdom to be found here.
In this environment of "lite" moderation, there is still a brute force approach (that I assume some folks have been applying to me). You can filter out people's posts by clicking your name (at top) and then on "manage ignore prefs". Just type in the first few letters of the names in question.
I tried it, and it's not as extreme as it appears. You still see the headers of everyone's posts, but the targeted ones simply are reduced to a single line that you can click if you wish to see them. Not censoring... it even piques your curiosity to click to see what you're missing.
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World Archeology magazine reports amusingly on the halted (out of money) but nice partial renovation of this enigmatic villa at http://www.world-archaeology.com/travel/richard-hodges-travels-to-villa-del-casale-at-piazza-armerina/#.UpfDcrB6fm4 Hmmm, is that a worthwhile mag to subscribe to just for the occasional Roman coverage like http://www.world-archaeology.com/travel/ostia/#.UpffpLB6fm4 ?
.The bikini girls, as a result, could not be clearer.
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One other aspect of this new project is obvious: guards are absent! The elevated walkways, monitored presumably by cameras, make the intrusion of bored and disgruntled attendants superfluous. This ancient country house is now simply filled with people quietly gazing at the floors as though it were an air-conditioned art gallery. The peer-visitor experience is deeply satisfying.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education opined:
http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Environmental-Panic/139733/
.All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet. Authors, journalists, politicians, scientists compete in announcing the abominable and lay claim to a hyperlucidity
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Gallic-Gadfly/139731/
The green movement is being hijacked by extremists ... Europe is "wallowing in shame and self-loathing," and France "embodies the illnesses of Europe to excess." As a general rule, the more virtuous-seeming the liberal belief
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.I don't recall this lecture but I will say Rufus Fears is really an enjoyable prof to listen to in the Teaching Company series.
Oh, too bad it looks like he died last fall. I guess I'm listening to his "Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life" and the order got scrambled so I don't know what book I was on among the jam packed digressions upon Rome and Greece.
Additionally, maybe in the St Mark Gospel he riffed about how Christianity was so much shaped by the Greek/Roman culture... more than just St. Paul making it a bit more Rome friendly, but the whole trinity crises was because Aristotle taught there must be hierarchy rather than joint rule. Graven images had to be allowed due to the Roman and Greek heritage of art. Stuff I never heard before, so wondered if his appealing ideas are accepted or eccentric.
What a relief to load his lectures on my mp3 player for long walks... I just endured 24 lectures on that kook Richard Wagner, and then bailed out of a series that demonized St. Paul. How can I learn about St. Paul from a lecturer that hates him him as practically a Franco type reactionary vs Christ as revolutionary Che Guevara role model...
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I'm trying to test the veracity of prof. Rufus Fears, a frequent and enjoyable lecturer on Roman history in the Teaching Company series http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/professors/professor_detail.aspx?pid=165 . He gave an implausible sounding method of how Nero had his rival Britannicus murdered (the natural son of Claudius.. how different and better the empire might have become under B.) that is at odds with what some googling brings up, such as from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannicus .
The conventional sources say B. was poisoned, although maybe actually died by an unrelated epileptic fit. He had survived poison before, but this time his food taster was subverted by serving too hot wine (safe), which was sent back for cooling water containing the poison. Some say Nero raped young B. beforehand to avoid the superstition against murder of virgins. Anyway I wonder if we know the type of poison and whether it would stand up to heat.
But I wonder most where Fears got the theory that the poison came from a split apple. The knife contained poison on one side, so the safe side of the apple passed muster with the food taster. This sounds made up, because it seems hard to avoid slimeing both sides of the apple. Even if the two halves don't clap together immediately following the knife, some poison would be pushed back on the trailing edge of knife and slime the other side unless you angled it carefully. It would be an interesting experiment to put molasses on one side of a knife, and play food taster by trying the supposedly safe side.
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On 11/16/2013 at 8:58 AM, GhostOfClayton said:
That thread (do post a URL if you stumble upon it) examined all the different things the Romans are reputed to have introduced, concluding that they didn't actually bring that much to the table. Mostly they just distributed existing technologies.
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I saw a long sentence about that recently. I think in an external article, but possibly linked to from here (maybe even by me). Anyway it listed a number of things not invented by Rome, like togas, and who originated them, like Etruscans. Maybe roman numerals... weren't they originated elsewhere?
Anyway, I wasn't terribly impressed by that theme, somewhat like how guns originate from China. Those early guns were highly ineffective except for making the best out of soldiers too clumsy to shoot arrows, and had to be reinvented in the west. Or take the example of the C-47 cargo airplane... it borrowed all it's innovations, but using them in combination and appropriate balance made it a revolutionary item in itself and perhaps the most long used aircraft.
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.Anyway, I don't know this Peter Jones and I never read anything of him.
His wikipedia link loses it's final ) when parsed in this forum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jones_(classicist) From that, I highlight in bold his mission as I see it... addressing the relevance of Rome to today's everyman rather than his old works that address Rome to the scholars.
.Peter V. Jones is a Cambridge graduate with a doctorate on Homer. He is a former senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and co-founded with Jeannie Cohen the Friends of Classics charity.[1] He was also once a teacher but is presently employed as a writer, journalist and broadcaster.
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He has recently published a book called "Vote For Caesar" about how ancient civilisations have solved the problems of today. Awarded the MBE in 1983, Jones has written numerous tomes and essays on Homer.
I have read his journalism for years, but that was before my interest in the Romans. I guess I can restart at http://www.spectator.co.uk/author/peter-jones/ for instance, although that said I hit my monthly quota after reading about Quaddafi as Caligula. That was a great magazine years ago when edited by today's mayor of London, but now perhaps not worth the subscription. I thought their review was poor and almost didn't post it, but thought the book itself might be good anyway.
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From Trieste you could also take a summer ferry or probably a train to quaint nearby Pula Croatia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pula#Sights
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.The city is best known for its many surviving ancient Roman buildings, the most famous of which is its 1st-century amphitheatre, which is among the six largest surviving Roman arenas in the world.[10] and locally known as the Arena. This is one of the best preserved amphitheatres from antiquity and is still in use today
I haven't been there, but this picture shows how the arena ring dominates the town which is probably not much touristed vs other parts of Croatia. You can take summer ferries back to Venice, which would be a shame to not visit. To avoid crowds, just avoid the crush along the mindlessly obvious spine route from train station to Piazza San Marco along the canal or Rialto bridge. Walk the more serene pathways that locals use like thru Campo Santa Margherita and Academia bridge.
A bit further down the coast is Split with it's magnificent Diocletian's Palace. Not well appreciated by tourists because it is entwined with the regular fabric of city shops and apartments, but I arrived on a quiet dawn and it was stunning. You can also visit the basements in near original state to get the gist of original floorplan.
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delightful and instructive book with the alluring subtitle
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Well, this is a stretch from the topic, but hard to know where it belongs. Just hitting the news recently is a billion euro art stash find in Munich, although it was found somewhat earlier. Various news sources call it Nazi loot, but it may be a category buster... in a way it seems to have been looted from Nazi museums by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildebrand_Gurlitt who was hired by them to sell it ("degenerate art"). His son has been found in possession of the art, which his (part jewish) father had claimed was burned in the Dresden raid. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/11/05/243221372/nazi-art-trove-includes-previously-unknown-matisse-chagall-works
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Tiberius took power 1999 years ago, and has a terrible reputation of depravity. But a restoral of a sculpture of him http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/rediscovering-tiberius/ has some rethinking whether he was unfairly maligned http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/has-history-got-roman-emperor-tiberius-all-wrong/
when he died, Rome was secure and solvent, no small achievement. He had also been highly respected as a military commander in his younger years, expanding and securing the boundaries of the Roman Empire. And throughout his life, he was fascinated by Greek art and culture, deeply immersed in philosophy and literature.
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For my part, I see in his face a tightness in the mouth that suggests a guarded shell attempting to look prim and respectable vs a clever and possibly ruthless core. His bone structure there is concave, which would lead mouthparts relaxing more outward unless tightened into a contrived pose. Why would a powerful person pose as nonthreatening... I guess he was afraid of Sejanus?
But you can't read too much into Roman sculpture, which has been altered thru the ages. In this case the right arm and a few other spots are fake as you can see at bottom of http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/tiberius/ . That arm looks way too expressive, undignified, and casual anyway. I saw an exhibit in Rome pointing out modifications to many ancient Roman sculptures during the Renaissance, just for the reason of changing fashions.
P.S. I read the memoirs by Axel Munthe who a century ago lived on Capri where Tiberius ruled from. He reported that local residents systematically destroyed artifacts of Tiberius for religious reasons as they dug them up to install foundations, etc. I guess some artifacts were quite lurid. Here is a picture from Axel's villa looking toward palace of T. on the distant prominentory (actually I hear there were multiple palaces around the island).
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I went to a cool lecture by Dr. Nicholas Hudson on Roman feasting styles. By a clever statistical analysis of physical dishes in dining rooms of various dates, he comes up with 2 social (festive) dining styles, neither of which equates to the hollywood version or even the versions on their frescos. He says the popular conception depicted was the exception.
In early Rome, they engaged in what I believe he called status dining. There were a mix of patron, clients, and folks of various ranks paying tribute to each other and firming up relationships with symbiotic deals. They used dishware very much like today where everyone had their own plateware (theirs a bit smaller than ours). This way you didn't have to share or compete with others with common plates. You all recline, with heads toward the center of a circle and feet outwards like spokes of a wheel.
In late Rome, the upper class still did the above a bit (using silver rather than pottery dishes), but most folks got more egalitarian with shared bigger dishes. "Convivial dining" was more of a communal thing, possibly with a christian influence. This isn't as great as it might sound, since there was no longer much striving for excellence, but rather a leveled "chain of contamination". Seated people paired up to eat from main dishes, then different pairings shared smaller dishes. So A and B shared, C and D shared... but then B and C shared another dish, so you were in a chain of spit potentially linking all together.
I asked him if Mary Beard was right in saying the snack shops labeled in Pompeii couldn't be so because their food serving pots were unglazed and thus unsanitary for repeated wet use. He agreed and said they may have been spice shops.
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Here is a great author presentation video about ultra productive but rude personality types in history, where Steve Jobs is called a cookie cutter example http://c-spanvideo.org/program/Obsessi . They have OCPD (compulsive obsessive personality disorder) he says, which differs from OCD in how the latter belongs in a mental ward, but the former drive family and co-workers to a mental ward!
"America
Italian stock rockets up
in Hora Postilla Thermae
Posted
Gentium stock rose over 12% just today. That about equals the entire last 12 months of London stock market return, which highly paid people try to beat by even just a bit.
So again Italian knowhow turns pig guts and human urine into gold... I am reminded of the ancient Roman urine collectors (for laundry cleaning ammonia?) and animal guts diviners.