guidoLaMoto

Does this upend our established theory or just show that, as Sherlock always said, it's a mistake to form a theory before all the data is in?

Thanks for your enlightening dissertation (as opposed to my grafittus). I exaggerated the point for the sake of illustration.... The Romans of two millennia ago probably had more litterate among them than say, the peasants of the middle ages did-- Cf: all the graffitti in Pompeii, or the many letters, etc found at Vindolanda. Probably it wasn;t the senatorial class scribbling on the walls....The ancients didn't have People Magazine or The National Enquirer to read while sitting in the dentist's waiting room...:Like American frontier families who only had The Bible to read, the ancients mostly had works that today we consider the classics and more "high brow." Maybe we over-think the entertainment value of works of art & lit from the distant past. One can take advanced courses intellectually analyzing Verdi's operas or the silent films of Hal Roach- which, in their day merely held the place in society that rap videos on MTV hold today. Someday the nerds in Academia will intellectualize those too and take the fun out of it. I do have to wonder how many Romans recognized the acronyms of Vergil's lines on the coins? Maybe it's comparable to something like the pyramid and all-seeing-eye on the dollar bill-- deeper symbolic meaning to the cognoscenti, but lost on the proletariate?

You're certainly right about the effect of radio & TV homogenizing language across large nations. It's certainly true in the US and Italy....Italy still has remnants of the feudal age in its poitical organization, cuisine, and certainly language. Linguists actually consider Napolitan and Sicilian as separate languages from Italian. Both are now used mostly within the family at home, although they can be understood with some difficulty by speakers of Italian- kinda like following the speech of someone from the deep rural South, for instance. ...Ever notice how Oprah and Barack, both excellent public speakers of standard American, can slide so easily into "Ebonics" when addressing black audiences? My father, born in the US to his immigrant Volga Deutsch parents, didn't learn English until he started grammar school. His English was impeccable Chicago American vernacular, but he was subjected to a short special investigation when inducted into the Army in '43, after being "turned in" by a fellow inductee in basic training after he absent mindedly said "make the light out"- the way it would be said in German, rather than "put the light out" or "turn off the light," the usual form in English. As Oscar Wilde said- Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language. The Roman conquest of such a large area- from the Semitic speaking east thru Egypt and Greece, up thru the Germanic & Celtic areas brought that homogenizing aspect of a common language to unify the empire.

How 'bout this Latin quote from an unknown special ed teacher dealing with kids with ADD? "Tempus fidgets."

Excellent reply by Caldrail. When a levy of the troops was called, those inscripted swoar an oath (ius urandi) that apparently was taken with more sollemnity than we would have today...after all, the gods themselves were being invoked. There was also a big difference between the army of the republican days and that of the empire. I agree that our impressions of the Roman army are more influenced by Holywood than by the historical record. I don't recall Caesar in The Commentaires mentioning anything other than Primus Pilus, tribunus and Legatus. Imperator was a titled bestowed on a victorious leader (dux) by his troops, then later ratified by the Senate. Whether more fantasy or not, you may find this interesting-- The movie Imperator flimed in Latin & Teutonic (English subtitles) Whether fantasy or not, you may find this interesting

It was true then as now, a regional accent can bring on stereotypical images. I often joke that if Einstein had been from Alabama, there'd be no atom bomb today. Nobody in Academia would have taken him seriously. "...redire mulierem in patriam praecepit"...The use of "praecepit" instead of a simple "iussit" implies an urgency. Cf- praeceps-- head-long.

Languages are livng and evolve. They tend to dissapate from more highly rigorous, complicated grammar & pronunciation to simpler forms. Italian is to Latin as Ebonics is to English. The joke is that in black neighborhoods, "Toys R Us" becomes "We B Toys"... "Ap" is an abrieviation for "application" and now part of the vocabulary...etc etc. In biological evolution, a migrant group may retain as a common trait one that is more rare in the origiinal population if it was represetned in a high proportion of the original migrants-- Cf- retained epicanthal fold ("slanted eyes")- very common in orientals, but still observable in some members of modern central/east African populations...So it is with "Kaiser" (Caesar) in German while most members of the original population in Italy have dissiapated it to "Chez-ar-ay."....The more often a word/term is used, the more likely it will evolve to mutated forms-- That's the reason verbs like "to be" or "to have'' are usually irregular-- the "rules" have given way to dissapation.

-- brings to mind the movie "Idiocracy." Are we getting stupider? This vase was produced in the 2nd century AD, when few people could read, quoting fancy poetry written a century earlier.....Will a future archeologist dig up a coffee can made today with verses from Shelley or Whitman scribbled on the bottom? Translating ancient text is difficult. Besides often being fragmentary, vocabulary is often different than that learned in classical forms of the language-- loaded with slang and regional dialect. Abbreviations well known and commonly used by the authors but maybe obscure to us appear often. Cf- will a distant future reader know what "OTOH" or "IIRC" means to us?

Studying Latin gives a benefit to not only making the Romance languages somewhat easier, but also for the general knowledge of history, politics, sociology, geography, etc it provides.....I'm a retired physician. Knowing Latin maybe helped a little in learning anatomy- but not much...Was it Marlowe or Johnson who insulted Shakespeare by claiming "He knows little Latin and less Greek?" While knowing Latin has made it easy to decipher the Romance laguages, the way we were taught Latin is deleterious_- we never spoke Latin. Now when I read Latin, my eyes see Latin workds but then they are automatically translated to English in my brain...a bad habit when it comes to dealing with spoken languages. I stayed with that habit when learning Italian and German. I read both well, but was once accused of being "a retarded Sicilian" by a caribinieri in Italy trying to settle an argument with a shop keeper. I find it amazing that we can read the very words written by Livy, Caesar, Cicero, etc...It reminds me of my uncle objecting to the changes made by Vatican II--"I don't like the English mass..We should still be using the very Latin words spoken by Christ." 😏

Hiya, Folks...Searching for something about Rome, your excellent site popped up...I've been interested in Roman history since studying Latin in school, fascinated that our modern western society is not so much based on Roman, but really a direct extension of it. Being of Italian ancestry, I take a certain pride in that. About 50 y/a, I had the opprotunity to spend some time in Italy. Many of my friends back in Chicago were recent Italian Immigrants, and while over there, I met up with one of them visitng his family in Genzano- about 25 km SE of Rome on the Appian Way. I wanted him to take me in to see The Forum...Observing the ruins in silent amazement, we stopped about half way down the Sacra Via. "Sandro," I said, "Your ancestors built this place over two thousand years ago. We're walking on the very stones that Julius Caesar walked on...The oldest thing we have in Chicago is The Water Tower, and it's barely 100 years old."...Sandro looked around pensively, soaking it up as if he'd never seen it before...."Yea," he replied. "We work slow here, but we work good."

Sensationalism sells. "locked in?"- they don't mention a collapsed roof. Maybe they just haven't uncovered a door yet. There must have been a way to bring in food, fodder and to evacuate manure, not to mention the finished bread. How did they get the men & animals in there in the first place? How many modern bakeries have windows to provide a view for workers?... Did the skeletons have chains on the limbs? Were donkey skeltons found? Blindfolds or just blinders like modern working equines use? Hollywood has given us a false impression of the life of ancient slaves. Slaves were in all likelihood treated more like we today treat our working animals- horses, hunting or sled dogs, etc--- We may not let them sleep in our beds like Zza Zza and her lap dog, but we feed them well and don't mistreat them either. But the excavations at Pompeii give us such a fortuitous opportunity to gain insight into the daily life two millennia ago. With the exception of powered machinery, practically everything we have and do today had its counterpart in ancient Rome.

"Epilepsy" or Grand Mal Seizures, sometimes referred to as the falling sickness, are either primary (idiopathic) or secondary to some cerebral injury or disease (strokes, tumors, trauma, abcesses, etc)....Caesar appently never suffered generalized seizures until after visiting Egypt where pork was a more common food source than in Rome...He probably picked up cycsticercosis from the pork (tapeworms that can encyst in the brain). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysticercosis "Mini-strokes" (TIAs) are most often caused by severe carotid arteriosclerosis and CAD- very unusual in non-smokers, non-diabetics under the age of 70 or so and show only temporary, transitory neurological deficits. There is no mention of Caesar having any symptoms of paresis or aphasia, so seizures secondary to full strokes are unlikely. Primary seizure disorders usually appear early in life-- childhood- early adulthood. In regards the original question about Caesar- hero or villian?-- the only obviously correct answer is "maybe." We should never make the mistake of judging aother society by our own modern standards-- that might lead us to think Indigneous Americans were bad people because they ate their own pet dogs when the occasion arose. ....Whether you liked Caesar's influence in bringing "civilization" to western Europe would depend on whether you liked living dressed scantilly in animal furs, bathing in icy cold rivers and starving when game was scarce or not....One cannot read the Commentaries without seeing the obvious parallels in the way of life of the Germanic tribes and the indigenous Americans....If you want to make an omellette, you've got to break a few eggs