caldrail

Officers of the 11th Corps discuss plans for the advance into Eastasia territory. Their Glorious Leader, Big Brother, demands a victory, and the proud soldiers of Oceania must achieve it. Ingsoc Commissars will be waiting... A scene from the colossal global conflict of the world of George Orwell's 1984. (AI artwork generated from text)

Enjoy your Saturnalia!

Suprising results from archeologists who found a thriving town from a period of crisis.... Archaeological discovery upends what we thought we knew about fall of Roman empire (msn.com)

She can say whatever she wants. Varus believed what Aminius told him and dismissed the warnings of Segestes, then led his troops into a very long defile and ambush. Unlucky about the storm but his troops were going to be slaughtered, and since Varus decided to commit suicide rather than attempt a rally and breakout, it's hard to see him as a competent commander. Experienced, yes, but a poor judge of character and actually a little self-deluded about the value of Roman law.

The biggest shock is that there's something left there. Many Roman sites have been looted illegally long before academic study.

This seems to be contentious. There's two main camps, one favouring suffocation by whatever means, the other favouring a sudden temperature increase and the various effects of that. I have a sneaky feeling that both camps are correct according to circumstance. Pompeii was hit by a series of pyroclastic flows, hot turbulent clouds of ash that carry significant energy and flow down the sides of a volcano and out across surrounding terrain due to gravity when the eruption fails to lift the weight. The first nine flows simply deposited ash against the town walls, but the tenth went over the top and into the town. Those in peripheral areas would have been more at risk of suffocation. Those hit by the cloud mass would experience the heat within it. My two cents.

No, no factions. In fact the ownership of specific gladiators wasn't important to the public, they were only interested in a thrilling fight and a pile of coins from their betting. As for the gladiators themselves, they were generally intensely loyal to their owners and part of his familia, the brotherhood of gladiators that he owned. Owners varied. Cicero for instance praises the fighters owned by his friend Atticus in a letter and tells him that if he had rented them out, he would have easily recovered his expenses in the last two events. For Atticus, it was a hobby. There were two centres of gladiator schooling. The four major ones in Rome probably held as many as two thousand gladiators, and there were other large schools in Capua, Campania, not far from Pompeii. Smaller schools might exist in any Roman city or its environs. Pompeii for instance had a gladiator barracks Recently another was found in Austria and the artists impression shows the training arena that the large schools always used...

However please notice that Caesar was not an academic personality. He was however an able self-publicist.

Bearing in mind the extent of the empire and the ethnic diversity, your descriptions of 'a typical Roman' might only apply to a subset of them especially with relation to earlier periods. I would also be careful of drawing too many conclusions from Roman statues, which were often reworked from originals and even then to be viewed from certain angles - they were not photographs.

Despite the disasters I don't really think the end of the western empire was a military thing. Certainly didn't help, no dispute there, but there had been a long economic decline and a weakening of 'roman-ness'. Rome had been prone to insurrections and civil wars but remember that Rome always lost battles from time to time, the idea of the unstoppable military machine is just hype - and very old hype at that. After all, we talk about the end of the Roman occupation in Britannia as taking place in 409 with the withdrawal of the last legions posted there, but it's forgotten that the Roman administration was still place and remained functioning until around 440, when the exasperated Romano-Britons threw them out when Rome failed to respond to the 'Groan of the Britons'. We seceded from the empire, we weren't just abandoned because the troops were sent to Gaul to support a usurper. This military image is very pervasive when dealing with Rome but it's not always the the only context to events.

It cannot be denied that our current westernised world inherited much from Rome, but don't concentrate on the similarities. Rome was a very different beast to modern democracies, though sometimes you have to wonder, and understanding those differences is very important to see Rome in the context of its own time instead of a modern world in togas. Great that you're interested in Roman history.

Syria was a hotbed of religious diversity, with varied cults that sometimes became fashionable elsewhere in the empire. There was one that was popular among slaves, and another with a very dubious immoral character. I seem to recall that Christian cults (themselves very diverse back then) reached Rome via Syria, though don't quote me on that.

A river wharf more likely but the location of a trade post was not contested. Water transport was the most preferred means of getting goods around in the Roman Empire, which indicates that the much vaunted road system wasn't what we expect in todays thinking.

The existence of a ship is not necessarily what it appears to be. Certainly it points to navigable waterways which can change considerably over time, but a similar wreck uncovered by Time Team was found to have been moored merely to stop erosion