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!
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My interest in Astronomy
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