Emperor Goblinus

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11736311/

That's pretty interesting. I've never really given much thought to the coin that Jesus used. I have known for a while that the "Caesar" referred to was Tiberius. However, I always picture the coin being gold or copper, not silver.

I've read in certain places that Charlemagne was completely unaware that he was going to be made Emperor of the West, and didn't exactly like it because he did not want to be "beholden" to the Roman people, only to the Franks. In other places, I've read that he and the pope knew about it ahead of time, and he only feigned unwillingness. He didn't gain any new territory from his coronation, he succeeded in pissing off the Byzantines, and he merely continued with basically the same agenda that he had in place when he was just King of the Franks. So did Charlemagne really not want to be emperor initially, or was it all just for show?

They would undoubtedly admired America's military prowess, and republicans like Cicero would probably admire American democratice processes. Also, the Roman Empire was almost just as ethnically diverse as the US is today. So I think that the Romans might be very much at home in the US.

A full mobilization of the large western army could have secured all of the borders, and if he had been bold enough, he could have shaken off the German influence at the imperial court, like the eastern emperors managed to do. The western empire could have fully rejoined the empire, and it might have been able to do things that the eastern empire alone couldn't have, like stemmed the tide of the spread of Islam.

Thank you. As far as Shakespeare goes, I am aware that there are some rather deep messages in it, that do take some time to figure out. However, the original plays were not meant for generally high brow audiences. I don't mind thinking through their deeper meanings, it's just that the dissection and extremely careful analyzation that come teachers require seems to betray the original purpose of the plays. Then again, some people like doing that, so it's really all in the eye of the beholder. I mean, someone could come to this forum and find the analyzation of ancient Roman history soul-crushingly boring, while we find it interesting.

There was an excellent book on Aurelian at my college library, but which has disappeared before I could read it in depth. Though I don't know the full details, his suppression of the two seccessionist governments was nothng short of amazing, though he failed to stop the bloody, self-dectructive cycle of rapid imperial succession. I'm not sure how he was in terms of his relationship to the Senate, though I did read one place that he wore a golden crown which would normally have pissed off most people, but due to the chaos of the times, no one really cared. I've heard mixed things about the walls that he erected around Rome. Some places I heard that they were tall and imposing. Other places, I read that they weren't that strong, and could only stop a poorly organized barbarian raiding party. His religious policy of promoting Sol Invictus was extremely significant in that it pushed the empire towards monotheism, which eventually led to the official adoption of Christianity a few decades later. All in all, I think that he was a good emperor, and it's a shame that he has largely been forgotten.

Salve! Welcome to the court of the Maximus Augustus Caesar Imperator Goblinus, who rules the vast Roman Empire by the will of the gods (or God). Enter, lowly citizen, for you have been allowed an audience with the Autocrat of the Romans, and the voice of the SPQR. Anyway, this is my first blog entry. As my blog profile says, I am currently a freshman (or firstyear, as they are called at UVA), who is probably going to major in History and minor in Astronomy. My area of expertise I think will be the late Roman and Byzantine period. I've been somewhat interested in Roman history for some time, but I've never really fostered that interest until just recently. Back in middle school, and part of high school, I took Latin as my required language. Naturally, we learned alot about Roman history, and classical mythology. Most of the history we learned about, however, focused mainly on the republican and early imperial periods. Granted, those were very interesting periods. My seventh and eighth grade Latin teacher told us many interesting stories about the "four crazy emperors" as he called them; Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, and my ninth grade teacher told us much interesting things about the great turmoil and intrigue of the late imperial period. But never much about the late Roman period. My middle school teacher told us a little about Constantine, but that was about it. In my ninth grade history class, we naturally learned about Roman history, but still, I didn't know much about the late empire. We did spend a whole unit on the Byzantine Empire, but we never got much beyond Justinian, and a few mentions of the 1054 schism. That year, while doing some research, I did some reading on the Emperor Diocletian. It wetted my interest in his reign, but I never really got a chance to explore this fascinating character until recently. I took Latin up through eleventh grade. I did well on the National Latin Exams, and got good grades. The Certamens (local Latin competitions) were fund, but we were never all that good at them. In eleventh grade, most of our time was dedicated to translating and dissecting the poems of Catullus. Catullus' poems were in fact lost for many centuries, before being found in the Renaissance. Why couldn't they have stayed lost? They all had basically the same theme: Catullus pines after Lesbia, his current love interest, she sleeps with him, dumps him, comes back to him, dumps him again, comes back to him again, and finally dumps him for good. While reading the poems, you can sometimes feel sorry for this guy who's so obviously being used by this trashy woman, yet never takes a hint. But it does get tedious after a while. And we did not just have to translate them. Oh no, the course layout required us to dissect the poems line by line, stanza by stanza for their different literary techniques and uses. These are poems people. They are meant to be read for enjoyment, not picked apart like Pinocchio thrown into a nest of carpenter ants. I never saw the point. Poems are supposed to be fun, not work. Though I've never taken a serious Shakespeare course, I hear his work is treated in the same way. He wrote those plays as entertainment for uneducated English masses who wanted a rather cheap thrill. They were raudy, and often quite licentious. But no, we've got to pick them apart for all their literary hoohah and make them all sophisticated. It just seems so pointless and ruins the entire original intention of the works. Back to Catullus and eleventh grade, our teacher was nice and helped us along, but my interest in Latin was shot dead. I dropped it and took French, which is now the language I am studying to fulfill my college language requirement. Thus, it looked like my interest in classical studies was like the Persian Empire after Emperor Heraclius had beaten it; dead and irrelevant. But it was not to be. In my first semester in college, I took Western Civilization. Although Roman and Byzantine history was only part of a course which covered all the way from the times of homo habilis to the Renaissance, it was taught in considerable more depth. And the readings in the textbook of the late Roman and Byzantine Empires sparked my interest once again. My college has one of the best libraries in the nation, and soon I was rummaging through its stacks, reading all of the interesting books on Roman history I could find. Currently, I'm doing a report for an Astronomy class where I will be discussing the Byzantine Empire, how it developed as a civlization, why it was successful at times, and why it eventually failed. And if I'm going to be studying Roman history, I may take a crash course in Latin again. Who knows? So again, I welcome you to the court of the almight Caesar. On your way out, be sure to pay your respects to the Senate and the People of Rome. Vale! Next: My interest in Astronomy

Just a comment, but if Honorius had really wanted to, he could have martialled the western armies and saved the empire. Things were still not beyond the point of no return then.

Just to make totally sure before I sign up, does the UNRV newsletter cost anything?

Readings in Late Antiquity by Michael Maas is a great book of first had sources from the time of Diocletian to Heraclius. Though it doesn't all deal with Rome, probable two-thirds of it does in some way. From Rome to Byzantium by Michael Grant is a great book about the transitions in the late empire. Diocletian and the Roman Recovery by Stephen Williams is a good book focusing on the reign of Diocletian, but tells about the whole situation of the late empire. The Emperor Constantine by Hans A. Pohlsander is a small but good book about Constantine and his times. The Last Pagan by Adrain Murdoch is a new, lively book about Julian the Apostate. Justinian: The Last Roman Emperor by G.P. Baker is a good book about the life and times of Justinian. First Crusader: Byzantium's Holy Wars by Goeffrey Regan is a good book about the holy wars of the Roman/Byzantine Empire up to the times of the First Crusade. 1453 by Roger Crowley is an excellent recent book about the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. I list these and several others in the Book Recommendation thread.

Ah yes, crazy Robertson. When I see or hear him speak, I don't no whether to laugh or cry.

I personally find the late Roman period fascinating. I could recommend to you a whole slew of books, if you would like.

Romulus. Without him, well, there would be Roman history.

Eugenius Splatidus Nerdus Goblinus "Eugene Squished Nerd Goblin"

I agree. Heraclius brought the empire back from the brink of utter destruction and completely neutralized Persia as a threat. Other emperors I think are good (I can't exactly say which one was "the best") wwould be Augustus for the order and stability he created, Diocletian (except for the horrible Great Persecution) who put an end to the vicious third century cycle and brough about a good measure of order, Constantine for the foundation of Constantinople and ending the Christian persecution, and Justinian for creating the extremely influential Corpus Juris Civilis, and bringing back Roman rule for some time to parts of the West. I'll also add Julian. Though I don't agree with his religious programs, I do think that that he would have been a great emperor in other areas if he would have lived longer.

He did, and I don't think the West disproved this (or could really do anything about it), but at first, he was careful not to step on the toes of the old aristocracy at Rome. For example, the senators at Constantinople only had the rank of clari, not clarissimi like the senators in Rome. But as time went on, the power shift from East to West became natural and accepted by all.

I don't think so. One hallmark of Augustus' career was to try to appear not to be a tyrant, and to look as constitutional as possible. Arresting and killing people simply for their religious beliefs would not have helped his case in trying to just be the "First Citizen."

I would have to say Adrianople. Though it wasn't as cataclysmic as some ancient writers make it out to be, it was a big event that signalled the end of Roman dominance. As well as the obvious manpower losses and the loss of an emperor, it forced Theodosius to recognize the Goths as almost equal to the Romans on the Romans' home territor. Though they technically had to serve the emperor, they could serve in their own units under their own leaders. It was a humiliating compromise that just led to things going even further downhill. For the other battles mentioned, the empire recovered (unless you take Cato's excellent point, that the Romans' loss of freedom because of Pharsalus was greater than any military calamity), but militarily, the empire as a whole did not recover from Adrianople, and the East could do little as the West became little more than a playground for ambitious Germanic officers pulling the strings of a puppet emperor.

If Christians had been around in the time of Augustus, do you think that he would have supported the persecution of them?

On this site is a good animated map of the Roman territory from 301 BC to 1453 AD. It doesn't give the names of provinces (but it does give some cities) but it does give you the general shape of the empire and its evolution. This might help you with your map. http://www.friesian.com/romania.htm

Three more books that I would like to recommend: Neos Dionysos mentioned in another thread an excellent book that I had read a while ago, but had forgotten. Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD by Noel Emmanuel Lenski is an excellent book about the times of the emperor Valens and Valentinian I, focusing on Valens. Theodosius: The Empire at Bay by Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell is a good book about the reign of Theodosius I and the ramifications of his actions, particularly on the western empire The Emperor Maurice and His Historian by Michael Whitby is about the reign of Emperor Maurice in the sixth century, and his chief historian, Theophylact.

I actually read that book, and it was quite a good read. I may in fact use it for an upcoming research paper. It was quite clear, but as you said, it focused more on the East and Valens, rahter than the western empire, so I didn't get a full picture of the West. I do know that when Julian was the Caesar in the West, despite his impressive successes, there were serious border problems, like when he had to beat off a horde of tens of thousands of Alemanni and alliances of other tribes. When I read the Valens book, they did talk alot about the military restructuring, including how more and more Germanics were entering the Roman military, and how that was not all the bad thing that it has been made out to be. Thanks for clearing some things up. Thanks for reminding me about that book. I think that I'll add it on the Book Recommendation thread.

When he split the empire between he and his brother, Valens, Valentinian I took for himself the western provinces, and made sure that he ruled the greater number of provinces. Not too many years after Valentinian, the West began to crumble. Now Valentinian wouldn't have purposefully taken on the mantle of the crappier half of the empire (unless he felt that it was better off in his hands than his brother's). During the reign of Valentinian, was the West already in worst shape than the East, or was it fairly stable under Valentinian?

Well you could always write about a dynasty like the Flavians: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/flav/hd_flav.htm Constantine dynasty: http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl...nstdyntable.htm or the House of Theodosius: http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/391.html