Sunday 21 September 2014
it happened on the way to the forum: rebel alliance
Decebalus, the last king of independent Dacia led three campaigns against the Romans as they tried to stabilise their borderlands to the north of Greece and on towards the banks of the Danube, no longer content to let some non-assimilated client kingdom to guard the frontier. There were those pesky Christians, led by the missionary Paul, Apostle to the Roman. Mithridates IV was a fearsome prince and general of Armenia and Anatolia who very nearly succeeded in keeping Rome out of Asia Minor altogether.
There is of course the old nemesis Hannibal, the Carthaginian military commander that seemed virtually unbeatable, and who in defeat cursed Rome with its visions of manifest destiny. And there is, among my favourites but certainly not an exhaustive list of personalities or portrayals, since the majority of source material—even for patriotic artists, come from victorious Roman accounts—the Welsh king Togodumnus who refused to pay tribute to Rome and had successfully driven them out until ambushed by his own men. Who else ought to be included? It could be a whole universe of players.
Saturday 20 September 2014
it happened on the way to the forum: post meridiem
Though it is still several weeks until Europe turns it clocks back to standard time, the days are already growing shorter and darkness comes earlier and earlier.
The time adjustment always just seems to exacerbate an already dwindling amount of daylight but it is far less complicated, I think, than the method the Ancient Romans. The day consisted of twenty-four hours (horรฆ), divided into two twelve hour periods each for night and day, but as the Romans were mostly unconcerned with the o'clock and really only observed the important transitions of dawn, noon and dusk (aurora, meridies—the sun being directly overhead and a bit different than the ninth hour of nona hora—and crepusculum), they managed the change of the seasons in a different fashion, adjusting the length of the hour, until achieving a maximum of a seventy-five minute long one on the Summer Solstice and the gradually drawing it down to the other tropic with a forty-five minute hour on the Winter Solstice, from the perspective of Rome.