guidoLaMoto

YT AI 20 minute presentation of Frontinus' water supply report with emphasis on the routine maintenance aspect. https://youtu.be/pcxljTZcFQ4?si=RANsZcEHE5Wb9cBl

The Romans took their water supply seriously. A guy by the name of Frontinus was appointed curator of the water department by Emperor Nerva at the end of the 1st century AD, and he wrote a detailed account of the history of the supply, the location and size of the aqueducts, how much water they delivered, etc.....I was surprised to read his account of how accurately pipes were measured and how he tracked down "waste, fraud & abuse" in delivering the water.....He details that a standing work crew of 700 workers were employed for maintenance, and describes the common causes of need for repairs. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/De_Aquis/home.html

Italians still celebrate the Ferragosto, a two week vacation for all in the middle of August each year. The tradition dates back to the beginning of The Empire when Octavian declared a holiday (Feriae Augusti) for everybody, including the beasts of burden, at the end of the harvest season. https://www.savoringitaly.com/buon-ferragosto-italys-august-holiday/

Just as every situation in life is covered by an episode of Seinfeld, everything Roman is covered by an episode of Magister Craft. Not all roads were built to the enduring specs of the Via Appia. Omnes viae Romae ducunt.-- All roads lead to Rome. The milliareum aureum (the golden milestone) stood in The Forum and was the origin (caput viarum) from which all milestones were measured. BTW- a passum was actually two steps- a soldier's left, right, left, right etc.. With the average Roman about 5'6", a passum was 5-5.5 feet, so a Roman mile was pretty close to a modern mile. Was the 4850 feet claimed in the figure above actually measured from existing milestones or an estimate?

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Suet.+Tib.+34.2&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0061 The line in the original Latin is "Cotidiana oscula edicto prohibit...." = "He prohibited by edict everyday kisses..." ....(Maybe Tiberius had the same aversion to the custom of casual kisses of greetings among relative strangers that Jerry Seinfeld had in the episode about the physical therapist with the bad hairdo?) The full chapter in Suetonius (34) is more about frugality & conservatism with no mention of health matters. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Tiberius*.html#ref53 In regards Pliny's mention of "lichen," it doesn't sound like the tinea barbis of today. He describes it as usually starting on the chin and spreading rapidly to the whole face, sparing only the eyes, and on down the neck, chest and hands, and being very nasty. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D26%3Achapter%3D2 He mentions this in the section about new diseases being encountered in Rome and Europe in general.....As the footnote mentions, someone named Littre (Chu fu?*) suggests they're talking about leprosy. (The English translation given in the Perseus ref here says it spreads inside the mouth, but there's no basis for that in the Latin version.) I'm always reluctant to attribute diseases described in ancient times to a modern viral disease, given that viruses generally mutate so quickly. It would be remarkable for a virus to persist unchanged for even 200 years, let alone 2000. * Chu fu-- Sicilian for "Who dat?"

Interesting coin-- they seem to be wearing ear protectors much like modern wrestlers wear. The inscription seems to be in Greek letters. Latin luctari = to wrestle. I don't know Greek, but using an Italian to Greek dictionary, the word for wrestle is apparently transliterated to "agonisw".....the inscription seems to be in Greek letters and a mix of caps and lower case.....I suspect they used abbreviations extensively like Romans or modern Millennials texting in their mysterious code.

Re: baked bread vs allotment of grain-- the overwhelming portion of Romans lived in insulae- apartments without kitchens & ovens, so they couldn't bake their own bread.....My mother remembers that as kid growing up in the 1930s in Chicago's "Little Sicily," all the casalinge (housewives) in the neighborhood would take flour and make up loaves of dough each day or so and then take the loaves to the local bakery where, for a small fee, they would have them baked in the large ovens-- much more efficient from the energy usage POV than cranking up small ovens in each home. The involvement of the govt in procuring, subsidizing or providing grain for the plebs of Rome goes back as far as the kingdom days, and in the early republic, the war hero Coriolinus (the ultimate hard-@$$ed conservative) was sent into exile because he wanted to end the grain subsidy (494BC) Livy, Ab Uber Condita 2:34-40. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_2#33

Magister Craft describes the different types of boats and ships used by the Romans. The merchant ships/cargo ships (navis mercatoria/oneraria) that moved goods around the Mare Nostrum were too large to navigate the Tiber River to get to Rome proper. They docked at Ostia and the cargo was transferred to barges capable of the journey up the river.

Magister Craft gives us a short history of the Tiber Island and how it became associated with Asclepius, god of medicine when envoys were sent from Rome to Greece to bring him back during pestilence there. The Greeks didn't want to give up a good thing and refused to let him go, so he turned himself into a snake for the Romans to sneak out of the country. Arriving at Rome, he slithered onto the Tiber Island and made it his home. The good Magister also has an interesting piece about Roman theaters.

https://vintage.tn/how-literate-was-the-average-roman-citizen-did/ It's estimated that the literacy rate among the Romans was in the 10-15% range, but, given the high volume of graffiti found in Pompeii and the copious examples of letters from the outposts of the armies, I bet that rate was much higher among those living in cities and larger towns. ..(Cf- compare literacy rates among urban vs rural Americans even as late as the first half of the 20th century. Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of baseball's greats, was famously illiterate.)...That's not to say "literacy" necessarily involved the ability to follow a Ciceronian sentence, but maybe only competence to read the headlines, so to speak. Without movies, TV or radio to provide entertainment, reading became a favorite past time among those with time to pass. A large publishing industry developed at Rome, with the Argiletum, the street starting between the Senate House and the Basilica Aemilia in The Forum and running east thru the Subura neighborhood and up the Esquiline Hill was the Printers' Row of the city, lined with book shops and the scriptoria where scribes copied the works. Cicero's close friend Atticus was among the first to establish a publishing house. https://popular-archaeology.com/article/publishing-ancient-roman-style/

Magister Craft has a piece on this, too. The fad is to claim that the Romans "copied" much of their culture from the Etruscan, ignoring the fact that the Roman Kingdom was inhabited by a mixture of Etruscans. Sabines and Latins. Among the seven kings of Rome, the last three were Etruscans. Only Romulus was a Latin, while the remaining three were Sabine. The Romans no more borrowed culture than the neighboring Potowatomi, Sauk and Ojibwa bands of Native Americans borrowed from each other. There is probably an indistinguishable continuum from one end of the region to the other.

Magister Craft's take on aqueducts....fewer details, but better practice for your Latin comprehension.

Mention of the Book of Acts of the Apostles reminds me of one of my favorite biblical stories- that of Eutychus- Acts 20:9 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts 20:9&version=NIV I know how he must have felt.

Civis Romanus sum-- I am a Roman citizen- proudly (or maybe desperately) declared by a citizen in ancient times as a plea to avoid corporal punishment, forbidden for citizens under Roman law. Cicero prosecuted Verres, who, among other crimes, subjected a citizen to flogging. Slaves were freed by the legal process of manumission. Vindication is one form of that- a reward for some good deed, The word may well have been coined to honor the slave Vindicius who blew the whistle on the conspirators planning to bring the exiled king Tarquinius Superbus back into power. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0169%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D5 Freed slaves wore a felt, cone shaped hat (pileus) as an identifying symbol. Roman citizens registered their newborn children with the government. Soldiers were issued dog tags, and their discharge documents were also used to verify citizenship. https://youtu.be/LTt0qwncDXI?si=51Y5JAhX_eL8aPqD

I'm a "homesteader." I produce about 75% of my own food, from beef to eggs, potatoes, corn, peas, carrots et cetera. (Dairy & wheat/flour/ bakery is way too time consuming & labor intensive to be efficient on a small scale if the Piggley Wiggley is at all conveniently located.)....We heat with wood with a system using gassification- virtually no soot produced....I burn all flammable trash. Kitchen scraps get recycled thru the chickens.The county gives us each a 50 gal trash can to be picked up up once a week-- but it takes us 4 weeks to fill that can up.....We should be burning spent plastic (essentially a petroleum product) at power plants instead wringing our hands and moaning about the plastics fouling our oceans or ineptly recycling it......Wood ash is all the K, P and trace minerals that were extracted from the soil growing the plant, and it makes an excellent fertilizer. Burning green (wet) wood produces no more soot than burning dry wood. The extra "smoke"is just water vapor. Those ancient Europeans were able to leave still fertile fields to their descendents despite continuous cultivation for 2000 years because they recycled those minerals by annual burns...but Davey Crocket & Daniel Boone had to move farther west every few years because they didn't burn/recycle and played the land out.

Here in WI the air is finally clearing after a morning rain. For the past four days it's been smokier than the back room at the Chicago Democrat Convention. Yesterday the sun appeared as a dull red ball easily stared at without scorching your retina from about 5 PM until sunset. The air reminds me of southern Italy in the fall-- the farmers there have traditionally burned their terraced fields each year. There is so little organic matter to burn because they do it annually, the fires remain confined to a small, slowly advancing front that never reaches temps high enough to get out of control...(Verbum sapienti.. to the Californian & Canadian Smokey Bear advocates). When I saw that in Italy fifty years ago, I understood how Dante got his inspiration- smoke & fires burning in all directions as far as you could see. Impressive and memorable.

Funny how history repeats itself....Makes me wonder if Trump is channeling Maximus and Honorius in regards his warnings to NATO?....We could already draw a parallel between Trump, elected, dismissed and then re-elected to Marcus Furius Camillus, made dictator, exiled, then summoned again to save Rome from Brennus and the Gauls. Everything reminds me of something else.

The energy efficiency POV is one way of looking at it, but there's two problems with the logic: Hannibal had little advanced scouting intelligence for him to decide on a "most energy efficient" route, and the intelligence he did rely on from the indigenous tribesmen may have been deceitful disinformation advanced by those who weren't happy with his intrusion into their territory-- Note that they seemed to have deliberately led him into a very tight passage and ambushed his entourage. What do you get when you cross a parrot with a gorilla? ...I dunno, but when it talks, you better listen....What did Hannibal get when he crossed The Alps with his elephants?...Anyone?..Buehler?

Well, if you're going to be a copo (proprietor of a caupona or deversorium) maybe you ought to hang on to that "Fugas carcerem liber" card.--> I never came across the concept of "hotel" in reading Latin texts before. We have mentioned here a few months ago about way stations along the roads-- "stations" (from stare- to stand), temporary stop to change horses and to eat vs "mansion" (from manere- to remain) for an over night stop. Here's an interesting treatment of accomodations in the ancient world https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0062:entry=caupona-harpers&highlight=deversorium

They draw a false conclusion....The only thing they can correctly say is that they were infected with Plasmodium sp when they died. The fact that they found two or more sp points toward chronic &/or recurrent infections, very common in that region at that time. A fulminant course of malaria leading to rapid death within days of exposure is less common than a more indolent course resulting in anemia and eventual organ failure. (Cf- Quartan Fever) https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/hcp/clinical-features/index.html

It does sound a lot like checkers....but then, how do they explain the little tablet they found with it that reads "I recte Carcerem...Non passare Ire...Non colligere CC Sisterces"..??

Roman legionnaires whiled away their free time after all that marching, digging and tree felling each day after the day's new castra was built by playing what seems to be a form of rugby. The ball (harpastrum) was made of leather filled with feathers or wool. No details of rules or scoring is known, but it apparently was a violent process of advancing the ball across a goal line, probably much like modern rugby. (I recently saw a bumper sticker that read "Be kind to animals-- Take a hockey player to lunch." https://youtu.be/j-YK-SPsUe4?si=xPF4f8vHmsk7edGi. Roberto Trizio calls it "Roman Soccer."

Magister Craft's take on the baths M

Microbes don't grow on and spoil honey for the same reason that old bag of sugar in your pantry doesn't go bad-- no protein or vitamins and an osmotically unfavorable environment for microbial growth. Vergil advocated for beekeeping in his Georgics. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilGeorgicsIV.php https://www.apiaristsadvocate.com/post/keeping-bees-in-ancient-rome-a-glimpse-from-virgil-the-poet ...and even Sherlock Holmes retired to the relaxing, rustic life of bee keeping. Partially educated American Treehuggers have had their shorts in a bunch for the past thirty years over Colony Collapse Disease, not realizing that honey bee populations follow the usual, natural cyclic changes in numbers, in dynamic equilibrium with their environment, and they completely ignore the fact that honey bees are non-native invasives in N Am that squeeze out their native pollinator competition.

There's several examples in the lit. of observations of those "wild boys" supposedly raised by wolves in 19th century France (why is it always France?) Presented with various substances, they would inquisitively sniff them and not react with aversion as a "civilized" person would be expected to.....Apparently we are taught in childhood that certain odors are to be considered repulsive. Note that dogs & cats will sniff at droppings and not exhibit any emotional response. Before storm sewers and plumbing, particularly in the larger towns & cities, the air must have been ripe with aromas, and probably no one thought much about it. As George Burns once said about his lousy Vaudeville act- "if I didn't hear booing. I thought something was wrong." https://youtu.be/R3RRk-a0wLM?si=IfzsAWCWTLstM5fV. Roma Sordida-- Filthy Rome