guidoLaMoto

Ancient Rome had a remarkably dense population.- 1 M people with less than 14 km² within the Aurelian Wall- compare to modern Boston with 600,000 on 41 km². Most apartments had no kitchens or comodes. Bed pans (matellio) were in common usage and often emptied by indiscriminate pouring out the window. Urine could also be donated at the many laundries (fullones). There were many public toilets with constantly flowing water, and the public baths were open to all. Like modern apartment buildings on main streets, the first floor of the insulae often contained shop spaces (taberna), many of which were occupied by restaurants (thermopolium), where, having no kitchens in most apartments, most Romans ate all their meals.

Put the Flavian Amph. (Colosseum) on the list of public edifices that had secondary uses, shall we say. The Latin word for arch is fornix, fornicis m...Use your imagination to see what English word is derived to describe what regularly took place under those arches

There were many circi in Rome. The Maximus was first built by Tarquinius Priscus, fifth king of Rome. It was originally used as a venue for the ludi (funeral games) and later for gladiatorial matches (no funerals needed), races & religious rites. Triumphal parades wound thru there too. Today's stylish Piazza Navonna is built on the foundation of the Circus Agonalis, also called the circus of Domitian. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/49192 This is a nice synopsis. Ahttps://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/49192

I must be descended from the Romans ..I freely transfer from religion to religion depending on who has a holiday going on today....And when I have a special request, I pray to the lesser known saints. I figure they're not busy and would appreciate the business. It's also my understanding that, at least in the 1st century AD, Rome didn't differentiate the Chrisitians from the rest of the Jews, considering them merely a small sect of Judaism. The religion of choice among the Legionaries was the Cult of Mithras, which involved sacrificial death and re-birth, predating the concept in Christianity.

Contrary to that summary, I was always under the impression that the Romans were remarkably tolerant of exotic religions. There was, for instance, a large temple complex dedicated to Isis in Rome itself. The Romans only took exception when the religion took on political positions. Eg- John the Baptist & Christ preaching about The Kingdom of Heaven. By coincidence, my attention has recently been drawn to the Pilate Cycle, the apochryphal letters supposedly written by Pontius Pilatus to Tiberius Caesar and Suetonius. With the earliest known copies dating to the 6th century AD, most experts today hold them to be forgeries & fictitious. Reading the English translations (I can't seem to find the original Greek online), I find the one thing the letters to Suetonius have going for them is that they are fairly voluminous and only mention John & Christ in a couple paragraphs as potential trouble makers preaching about The K of G. Most of the chit chat is about more pressing matters of governing Judea- raising money for aquaducts & such, convincing the Sadducees & Phagocytes to co-operate with the Romans, etc....Very clever for a forger to go to such lengths to distract us.

I wonder if Cheech- arrow had flood insurance? Is this another case of a false conclusion being drawn by researchers hungry for fame?....Cicero had a villa there, and this is a luxurious villa, ergo- it must be Cicero's.

Ancients, the Egyptians and Sumerians, for example, knew about the cyclic nature of weather, and they planned for it, the general rule was to store seven yr's worth of grain for the inevitable dry yrs. When a society is accustomed to a certain level of ag yield each year, it's population grows to match that food supply (it reaches its carrying capacity)...If that yield suddenly falls &/or it remains lower for an extended stretch, the population will fall to match the new carrying capacity.....That population collapse can get ugly. Remember the bjg, round Aztec calendar that predicted the End of the World in 2012?....There was a cartoon that pictured that calender sitting before the king on his throne and a guy with a hammer & chisel behind the stone saying "It only goes up to 2012 because I ran out of stone."

So true about activity (or rather, lack thereof) around here.... .The word "propaganda" is Latin for "things to be propagated." We usually use the term when we want to emphasize it's negative connotation.......Did we build the Boulder Dam because we wanted to gloify President Hoover, or was it built to conserve water and provide power to the SW states, and naming it Hoover Dam was an afterthought to honor the contributions of the president to the project? I submit that most Roman building projects were accomplished for utilitarian purposes- with the possible exception of Caesar's bridge across the Rhine--and not to glorify the Romans or their leaders. The projects did have psychological effects on viewers, but how many ancients ever got to Rome to see them?....As I said, coins & statues are ubiquitous honorifics across all times & places. Etc etc.

https://www.verycoolfacts.com/facts/the-vatican's-unique-atms- The ATMs in Vatican City can be accessed multilingually including Latin. Here's a discussion of the Latin Instructions. https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/15786/atm-in-vatican-city-inserito-scidulam-quaeso-ut-faciundam-cognoscas- ..rationem#15789. In classical Latin, that "faciunda" would be "facienda." Maybe Ecclesiastical Latin is different?

Beware of unabashedly biased "AI" editorialized summaries of info entered in the internet. Note that in the treatment above, none of the things attributed to the Romans were original to them, the Sumerians having beat them to the punch by 4000 yrs (and who knows where they got them from)......and later usage of those concepts is by no means limited to Fascists. All govts mint coins honoring important people, build monuments and large public buildings, etc etc. All kings have traditionally derived legitimacy by invoking the support of the devine.

According to Wiki- SPQR first appeared on monuments & coins around 80 BC. Cicero used the words "....ut a senatu populoque romano ...perspici possent." having ordered a statue of Jove moved so that "...it could be better seen by the Senate and Roman people." (3rd oration against Catiline, paragraph 20, 63 BC)-- the phrase not used as a title per se in this case....and I know (but don't have the exact references at my fingertips) that Livy, writing Ab Urbe Condita in the last few decades of the BC era used the phrase similarly, referring to the people themselves and not as a political entity.

Watching the film clips of the recent riots in LA this week, seeing the rebellious demonstrators "fundant et fugunt" from a charging mounted police, I was reminded of this thread. One could also see in that clip how vulnerable a mounted warrior would be to attack by swords, spears or projectiles from the rear once surrounded by a mob..... ...and then there's the erratic behavior of an excited horse, described by Livy in his description of the episode in the first Sabine War that resulted in the naming of the Lacus Curtius in the Forum when Mettius Curtius' unmanageable horse plunged him into the middle of the swamp. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Liv.+1+12&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0151

165 little birdie carcasses accumulated over what period of time? Particularly since this example is on an island, high volume sales of thrush as a fast food would quickly lead to extirpation of the local thrush population. One has to question the circumstances that produced this cache of remains-- a common menu item, an occasional "special" or one big, special feast? I don't know about more rustic locations, but most people in Rome itself lived in "insulae," 3-6 story apartment buildings, with each apartment (conclavium) only one room or, less often, a shared common room with two bedrooms (cubiculum) to accommodate two families. Neither had a kitchen (culina), so meals were taken at the tabernae or popinae. "Eating out" was the norm.

Interesting. There is evidence (bone lesions) that TB (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) existed as far back as the Neandertals, so it's reasonable to assume that other species of Mycobacterium are that old too.... Speciation doesn't occur because one indvidual developed a novel genome and then passed it along to a subsequent population, but rather, because the same novel genome developed spontaneously and contemporaneously in a significant portion of individuals in a population, and then selection &/or random drift increases that gene frequency in the population. ... M. lepromatosis may have evolved in multiple locations simultaneously (on a time scale of centuries or even millennia) rather than sequential "spreading" of the bug over geography. ...Compare it to the invention of, say, the bow & arrow at multiple locations around the world at roughly the same time in human history.

That's all Greek to me, but in Rome the general public was not allowed into the interior (cella) of temples where the large statue of the pertinent god stood. The priests performed sacrifices on the ara, a raised platform just outside the columns out front. The sacrificed animal then became the main course for a public feast. Temples were usually ostentatious displays of public thanks for services rendered by the god to win some battle and used mainly for major public holidays....The "day to day" religious activities of Romans was private and resolved around the family household gods, the Lares & Penates.

https://www.physics.purdue.edu/demos/display_page.php?item=2B-03#:~:text=Four glass tubes of varying,dependent upon vertical height only. "Water seeks its own level." No particularly clever application of physics here. The question becomes why did they bother building aquaducts when a simple pipe or channel at ground level or slightly buried would have sufficed?... I bet they didn't actually know the physics and thought they needed a more gradual, continuous grade to keep the flow going....and when they encountered a terrain too rugged to build an aquaducts, they went with the more expediant "inverted siphon," but when it worked, they didn't extrapolate the principle to the more general case. Maybe they weren't as smart as we think.

-not sure "inverted siphon" is a good term.....A siphon requires a bit of energy input (Eg- actively sucking fluid up a tube to empty a higher reservoir over the lip of it's container into a lower basin, or powering a roller coaster train up that first big hill....once accomplished, gravity takes over). .....As long as the source reservoir is higher than the destination reservoir and there are no higher points along the way, the water will flow......For gravity powered systems, PE + KE = a constant. The Romans could have avoided building the elevated, arched aquaducts if they had adequate piping to contain the very rapid, high pressure flow along the low points of the course. (You'd think stone & cement joints would have done it.)...Maybe they used the elevated sections to avoid tedious tunneling or to avoid blocking traffic with extensive solid walls and save on materials. The engineering physics of aquaducts is pretty simple. The amazing part is the sheer audacity of the first guys (Appius Claudius Caecus & Caius Plautius 312 BC) to think they could bring water from 10 miles away to Rome.

Very interesting. They claim hollow logs were used, but it's a good bet that trees less than a foot or so in diamater are rarely found to be hollowed by natural forces, and any hollowing is usually only a few feet in length, not involving six foot runs as stated in the article...and they'd need to find about 18 such examples to complete a run of piping 100 ft long.....OTOH, that would be quite a trick to manually core out six inch tree stems without an iron of steel auger..... Then again, the aeronautical engineers tell us bumble bees shouldn't be able to fly....??? Space aliens must have done this for the Romans.

Excellent example, Guy...a brilliant tactic, but decidedly unusual. Livy frequently describes the common result of a cavalry charge with the words "fundunt et fugiunt"-- literally "they poured out and fled."

I bet that's gunna leave a mark. Dumb move. Pollice verso. -- got me thinking....American football players "spike the ball" after scoring a touchdown. Roman gladiators spiked each other.

This is surprising that they took the time (let alone the space) to bury horses instead of simply immolating them as we still do today. The Romans became the greatest civilization with the aid of their invention cement....Imagine what they could have accomplished had they also discovered glue?

A few thoughts-- An ancient horse was smaller, generally, than a modern one, but still went 8-900 lb, and could go 30 mph....An ancient foot soldier went <150 lb. Wearing clumsy helmet, grieves and lugging a 20 .lb shield, he probably couldn't run 10 mph.....No way could a wall of shields withstand a cavalry change. If bowling pins could run away from an approaching bowling ball, they certainly would ..but then they'd just be running into and trampling each other.....Now complicate that picture by having 10 bowling balls coming down the lane at time. As I read thru Livy, Caesar, etc,it seems to me that most cavalry charges vs foot soldiers were done from the flanks, not as frontal charges.

A couple of pertinent points-- -Copper is the element with symbol Cu- for Cuprum in Latin....in classical Latin, "y" is actually pronounced "o-o-o" as in "you," so "Cyprus" would have been pronounced "Koo-prus.' -It's been calculated that Old Worls coper mines couldn't have produced enough Cu to account for all the bronze in use in The Bronze Age, and that the huge amount of Cu mined during that time in the Lake Superior area of NA can not be accounted for among the NA artifacts..... ...and furthermore, certain genetic markers found in the Minoan population are also found among modern Ojibwa (or do you say Chippewa?) tribe members today (!)...Coincidentally, copper mining and copper usage in NA fell off just when the Minoan civilization collapsed. Go figure. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42185-y https://chapelboro.com/town-square/columns/common-science/bronze-age-part-ii-the-case-of-the-missing-copper

While most of us who've ever had 2 of 3 y/o kids to care for know the strong temptation to rub out the over-active, little nuisances, most us resist the urge. Apparently neither the Mayans nor the Cartiginians had such good self control. Long thought to be anti-Carthage propaganda, Roman and Greek reports of child sacrifice there now have been confirmed by archeological evidence. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children

Colder temps & prolonged droughts are well known to probably be important factors in the fall of civilizations, from ancient Sumeria to the Anasazi to the Aztecs to Rome itself....but in this case, the very short drought was from 364-366, so why did the rebellion wait to start until 367?...Maybe the starving barbarians were too weak from starvation to wield their swords in the three drought years? In applying this concept to more modern events, recall that the "Arab Spring" uprising a decade ago (remember Bengazi/Hilary/destroyed phones?) was precipitated by a sudden rise in food prices in Tunisia (those @#*+ Cartiginians causing problems again)...and that the trade negotiations going on now between the US and China has a lot to do with China's limited food supply. (I'm assuming that's a typo in the title above....If it isn't, then it's easy to see how a shortage of beer could cause a rebellion in Britain.)