THIS DAY IN ANCIENT HISTORY

ante diem vi idus novembres

• mundus patet -  the mundus was a ritual pit which had a sort of
  vaulted cover on it. Three times a year the Romans removed this
  cover (August 24, Oct. 5 and November 8) at which time the gates
  of the underworld were considered to be opened and the manes (spirits
  of the dead) were free to walk the streets of Rome.
• ludi Plebeii (day 5)
• 30 A.D. -- birth of the future emperor Nerva

::Saturday, November 08, 2003 6:41:51 AM::
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CHATTER: Classical Football

Amicus noster TP passes this one along (thanks!) ... It a piece on the past greats of  the Dundee Football (a.k.a. soccer) Club, but primarily Alan Cousin:

And then there was Alan Cousin, the Homer-devouring intellectual who hunted for goals alongside the great Alan Gilzean. Gillie later paid tribute to Cousin, mentioning him in the same breath as Jimmy Greaves, who later also partnered the Scot at Tottenham Hotspur and possessed the same adroitness around the box. Where Greaves and Cousin differed, however, was in the latter’s devotion to study.

More in the Scotsman ...

::Saturday, November 08, 2003 6:37:08 AM::
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REVIEW: Rubicon

There are plenty of reviews of Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic out there, but not many have been written by a professional in Classics or Ancient History. Today's Guardian, though, has one. Here's the customary tease:

The blurb on the inside jacket detailing the author's previous form is curiously selective. Tom Holland's past achievements have been reduced to a series of (albeit excellent) radio adaptations of Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil. But the cognoscenti of Gothic horror will know Holland as a prolific author in that genre. This unusual coyness can perhaps be put down to a fear that the disclosure that Holland is a man of eclectic interests would somehow detract from his new history of the late Roman republic.

As with most academics reviewing a "popular" book, I approached Rubicon with a certain amount of trepidation. The rather hammy sub-title seemed to suggest the worst. However what is inside the covers is a different matter altogether. This is a well-researched, well-written overview of the Roman republic. It should serve as a model of exactly how a popular history of the classical world should be written.

The rest ...

::Saturday, November 08, 2003 6:24:27 AM::
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REVIEW: Thomas Cahill's latest

Folks must be getting up early today because my box is already filling up with theis review from the New York Times of Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (thanks to all who have and/or will send it). Here's the first couple of 'graphs to get you going:

Books about the ancient Greeks have been written in America since the founding of the Republic, and throughout that time Americans have greeted them with as much suspicion as enthusiasm. For every devotee of antiquity, there is a skeptic asking: what do the Greeks matter to a country founded on the rejection of European authority and the hope of a state the likes of which the world had never seen? Why should a nation of immigrants, whose business is with colonization, commerce and technology, seek its roots in a society over two millenniums old? Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and a popular writer on education reform, privately condemned classical education as useless. Twisting Cato's famous call for the destruction of Carthage, he thundered, ''The Roman tongue must be destroyed!''
 
There are at least two obvious answers to why the Greeks mattered to the founders, but each poses as many problems as it solves. First, the new citizens were for the most part ethnically European, and they shared with contemporary Europeans tastes in clothes, music, art and literature, as well as traditions of history, philosophy, science and ways of war. But this shared culture was distinctively modern, and while it may be seen to be descending from the ancients, it certainly did not derive from them in any clear and simple sense. The issue is time. Upheavals of history cut the thread between Greece and the modern world, remaking beliefs and institutions in forms virtually unrecognizable to their supposed inventors. The process goes at least as far back as the Romans, when the reading preferences of their aristocracy began to create what we now call Greek culture, and when their conquering legions built the roads that spread this version of Greece to most of Europe and North Africa, to be reinvented a score of times more.

The rest ...

::Saturday, November 08, 2003 6:20:16 AM::
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AWOTV: On TV Today

5.30 p.m. |DCIVC| Archaeology IV: Death at Pompeii
dna

6.00 p.m. |DISCU| Antony & Cleopatra: Battle at Actium
"The Roman navy, led by Octavian, defeated the formidable fleet
of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, sealing their fate and creating
the Roman Empire. Some say the victory was merely the creation
of Octavian's propaganda."

DCIVC = Discovery Civilization (Canada)

DISCU = Discovery Channel (U.S.)

::Saturday, November 08, 2003 6:05:00 AM::
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