indianasmith

In March I will be traveling, along with a group of grad students from the Austin Graduate School of Theology's Biblical Archeology program and some interested laymen, to Israel on a ten day archeological tour. We are scheduled to visit about 30 different sites and spend one entire day assisting on an excavation at a 3000 year old village mentioned by name in the Old Testament. I'll get to see Pilate's amphitheater in Caesarea, Herod's fortress, Masada, Qumran, and many other places! I am very excited about this opportunity and will share some pictures when the time comes, if you guys would like to see them!

Any further news on reading the scrolls from that library at Herculaneum?

I want some of them! LOL

I remember once reading a historical novel which attributed the destruction of the Library to the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. I thought it was an accurate reference until I did a bit of digging and found that there is no evidence that Justinian's armies had anything to do with it.

Man, that would be a cool find!

That's not exactly what was meant, I think. What I took from it was that, under Augustus, it took about two days' wages to satisfy the tax burden for the entire year (for citizens).

I will probably read this . . . but I'm afraid my sympathies have always tended more towards Caesar than the men who slew him.

True, but the tax farmers, as I understand it, worked in the provinces, where most of the folks were subjects, not citizens. I asked my friend where she heard this, and she said it was in a series of lectures by some Oxford professor about Rome that she listened to a couple of years back. She also commented that he said it more than once, as an example of how efficient Augustus' administration of Rome was.

One of my friends said this in an Email I got today, discussing Rome: In the time of Augustus, the average citizen of Rome worked two days a year to pay off his entire tax burden. Does that sound accurate?

Added to my list of "Things to see if I ever get to Italy!"

The toga is a fairly cheap costume I bought off of EBay a couple of years ago. An accurate version is way beyond my budget . . .

"Little short of criminal"? I think it's a bit more serious than that.

The magnificent Roman arch at Palmyra is now rubble, courtesy of ISIS. There are no words for how much this offends me. Twenty centuries of history destroyed by evil barbarians for no good reason whatsoever. May true justice find them all!

No, Viggen, the girl on yearbook staff was supposed to come in, but she got called to another part of the campus. Maybe next year.

I started the unit on Ancient Rome with my world history class. I ducked across the hall and changed into toga and sandals, waited for the tardy bell to ring, then strode straight into the room and delivered Mark Antony's funeral oration from Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR without a word of explanation to begin the new unit. They loved it!

That is TOTALLY cool!!

I think that our speed of communications across distance would be the greatest wonder to the time traveler from the Classical Era. But then, they might just shrug it off as "Magic" and accept it.

I know what I want for Christmas!!!!

Looks like this one will be added to my library!

I think governments in general tend to become corrupted over time, be they democracies, republics, or dictatorships. Money equals influence, and the common people are neglected. Let's see - powers of the Senate? They could craft legislation, although it had to be approved by the Assemblies. They could also issue the "Ultimate Decree" in times of emergency. And they could appoint a Dictator to reform the government or deal with a crisis.

Wasn't Brutus much younger than Caesar? Or is this the father of the famous assassin? At any rate, I'll check it out.

How about a link? Or at least the title?

I've always admired the separation of powers in the Roman Republic - it really was a remarkably advanced system for its day and time, and America's founders copies many of its institutions. The Consuls came and went annually, while the Senate was there for the long haul. That gave them a greater amount of power overall. But the Senate became corrupted by power and money, as all Republics tend to do. I'm not a huge fan of Cato, but I do think that he rightly called out many Senators for putting their love of profit ahead of their love of country. Caesar would not have been able to take over the Republic, no matter how just his grievances, if he had not had so many Senators and Tribunes of the Plebs in his pocket.

That is a very interesting article. I know that in the shipwreck of La Belle, a French ship that sunk off the Texas coast in 1684, archeologists discovered a Roman denarius from the reign of Tiberius Caesar.

An interesting story to be sure, although I do agree that RC dates, while providing a good general framework, are notoriously non-specific within that framework. BTW, a recent analysis of the Magdalene Papyri (several pages from a Codex of Matthew's Gospel) concluded that it may date much earlier than originally thought, somewhere around 70 AD instead of the mid-second century date earlier proposed. However, that interpretation is controversial to say the least.