it happened on the way to the forum: rebel alliance

Of course, there was no broad historical force opposing Rome but it make a pretty cool assembly of action figures of underdogs. Most saw their resistance ultimately crushed after being provoked into battle but a few did define the furthest reaches of the Empire and remained unconquered. One could collect the heroines—like Cleopatra who was the first Ptolemy to show more than passing regard for the Egyptians and tried to preserve the Republic in her own way, and Boudica, the warrior queen of the Britons, whose only transgression was in believing that the treaty with the Romans would remain in effect after her husband the king died and she assumed the throne—however, as the chauvinistic Romans did not recognise female inheritance, they merely annexed her kingdom. One could collect the Germans, like Arminius of Cherusci tribe (Hermann der Cherusker), who was held as a hostage during his youth and even received a Roman military education, and graduating with hounors never succumbed to the Stockholm Syndrome and returned to led his people against their occupiers and after orchestrating several demorialising defeat, the Romans never tried to advance beyond the Rhein again.

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.

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 (horæ), 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.

This sort of timekeeping seems very complex and would not due for international timetables and coordination, but our modern ways, too focused on an artificial punctuality and being ruled by all these bells and chimes, would probably seem hopelessly vain to the Romans. As strange as the idea of longer and shorter hours might seem, this way of telling the time is preserved in many medieval clocktowers, including famously the Orloj, the Astronomical Clock of Prague, whose outer dial of Roman numerals shows the time in the conventional way but the golden lines radiating inward each represent one-twelfth of the day and these unequal hours wax or wane with the help of the cog of the second face to reflect the changes that come with the seasons.

signal drift

The ever-excellent BLDGBLOG has brilliant featured called Celestial Chiaroscuro about the precision and the slippage of Global Positioning triangulation. There is a poetic installation of street lamps programmed to dip in brightness whenever their true position drifts away from their reported satellite telemetry, but this effect can also be demonstrated with one's personal gadgets by leaving a stride-counter exercise application running overnight one's nightstand. It will report a crazy somnambulist's path that shows the gadget trying to find itself again after the signal drifted, as if it had some sort of out-of-body experience or was scooted around the bedroom by a poltergeist. This is a strange parallel world of mapping and plotting whose overlays need continual recalibration.

defrag oder kleinstaaterei

Scotland’s choice to remain part of the United Kingdom certainly does not summarily conclude the secessionists’ movements among the countries of Europe, nor even for the UK itself. The rampant territorial fragmentation that characterised Europe, and Germany especially, during the Holy Roman Empire will not be returning, I think, but the drive for independence based on cultural heritage could prove to be an affront to the coherency that the EU is trying to project—especially should freedom efforts gain momentum for the County of Flanders, the location of Brussels, the EU capital. There are other curious plans for shifting alliances and redrawing borders, including Scotland leapfrogging independence toward a personal-union with Norway and the suggestion of Italian Sardinia that the Mediterranean island be sold to the Swiss, touting the proposal as a win-win situation.

it happened on the way to the forum: honey-badger or non-plus-ultra

Regarded as one of the Five Good Emperors for his civic-planning and long reign of peace and prosperity—only with the hallmark bookends that of violence and paranoia that attend most transitions of power, it is a regrettable commentary on the history books that Hadrian is nearly exclusively remembered only for his eponymous wall that separated the province of Britannia from the untamable wilds of Scotland.
The travelling emperor and Grecophile visited nearly every part of his realms, and on his grand-tour, left many public institutions improved and was a real bread-and-circuses kind of leader.  Other borderlands were fortified as well, and inasmuch has the Limes afforded a measure of protection from the barbarians, they also served an important propaganda purpose, white-washed and gleaming when new, the walls and towers were visible from great distances as a hearty deterrent and reminder that Rome ruled these lands. Though currying favour again with a Senate that was formerly reduced in esteem through the refusal of recent regimes to submit to protocols (despite their emptiness and the fact that the Senate’s role was almost purely ceremonial), Hadrian managed to chafe their elite sensibilities by being an unrepentant individual. 

Against the style at the time, Hadrian wore a beard, was an open homosexual, when most had the decency to stay in the closet, valued Greek culture and mannerisms over copy-cat Roman ones—which were usual poor and prudish imitators, was a big-game hunter (the Romans thought safaris were unseemly for nobility, though they had few qualms with being spectators for brutal gladiatorial bouts)—and to top it all off, he was a provincial hailing from Hispania, the first non-native emperor Rome had seen, and probably would have been its last had  not Hadrian’s tenure not been on-balance a successful one and the broader pool of talented and skilled leadership from beyond Italy would have been hence excluded from the highest echelons.  While those walls did much to help quell insurrections in much of the Empire, Judea with these radically un-Roman Christians still posed a problem, and Hadrian, towards the final years of his reign took a more tyrannical turn on the province—merging it with another entity, outlawing monotheistic worship—the Romans not yet really recognising the distinction between Christian and Jew yet, and reflagging the combined provinces as Syria-Palaestina, hoping to incorporate the Middle East into Hadrian’s envisioned Pan-Hellenic state.
The naming-convention endured through modern times and was a serious matter as the colony was renamed for an adversarial tribe. The peaceful years were surely ones hard fought for and Hadrian was no pacifist, with revolutions being staunched in many lands; the emperor’s detractors merely said that his lashing out—Rome did not care about the suffering and suppression in Jerusalem but the attendant crimes of political purges in the forum were—and that Hadrian was showing his true colours and held the Senate in contempt all along and his efforts at maintaining stability within the Empire were derided.  Though Hadrian had always demonstrated a nature that was pre-emptive rather than reactive, his change in character could have been attributed to the sudden and mysterious death of his long-time companion and lover, a Greek youth from Asia Minor called Antinous.  Antinous was accompanying the Emperor on a cruise down the Nile when his lifeless body was discovered in the water.  Theories about, including that Hadrian was growing weary with the boy—or that Antinous was off bears or even that emperor’s astrologer advised Hadrian that he would be rejuvenated and attain an advanced age—which he did—by sacrificing a youth.   I don’t know whether it was foul-play or not but I am sure that the two really did love one another. Hadrian never recovered from this tragedy, it seems, and dedicated many honours to the memory of Antinous. Somewhat outside imperial purview (the Senate conferred Godhead and although usually granted, they would have like to have been consulted first), he had his lover deified as a god and included among the Caesar family pantheon. A city in Egypt near the site where his body was recovered was demolished and rebuilt in Hellenistic style and named after Antinous, as was a constellation of stars. And as in life, Hadrian commissioned hundreds of statues of Antinous had them distributed to all corners of the Empire. Their story may not be familiar but you, gentle reader, have most likely seen his likeness already, the youth's image being the most reproduced one of the first century and the most widespread.
For a time the cult of Antinous (being conflated with Osiris who embodied similar graces) was bigger than Jesus, with more adherents than this new Christianity. The reign of Hadrian continued for several more years, and ever the architect and civil-engineering, the travelling emperor returned home and his ashes were enshrined in the mausoleum he designed, now known as Castel Sant'Angelo (the one-time home of the papacy and their jail, acquired after the Arch-Angel Michael appeared atop this tallest building in Rome and delivered the city from a medieval plague outbreak), across the Tiber from Vatican City.

colossus oder klaipėda

H and I had the chance years ago to explore the German Baltic coast (Ostsee) and camped in the shadow of the massive former sea-resort of Prora, constructed originally as an affordable and accessible destination for rest-and-recuperation for any German citizen by the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) programme. Kept off of the maps during the Cold War and being gradually remembered and re-discovered, East Germany employed the colossal structure as an army barracks, never recognising its past as a shell that represented Nazi ideals and coordinated equality with a summer-camp atmosphere, though capable of lodging some twenty-thousand adults with maybe a subtle (or less so) agenda that one can only speculate about.
The character of the installation was transformed during the regime, hosting elite schools of military specialties for paratroopers and a Warsaw-Pact version of the institutes of higher-learning for the armies of partner nations like Cuba, Sierra Leone and Jordan that were established in the Allgau of West Germany, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Oberammergau for NATO pedagogy, and then as housing for contentious-objectors who wanted no part of East German soldiering. As conscription was not something that one could easily test- or opt-out of, unwilling draftees were quartered in Prora and put to work on a neighbouring project that was East Germany's organically largest building projects, the train-ferry—I had no idea that such conveyances existed, that afforded East Germany a direct rail-link with the Soviet Union.
Undoubtedly, the region was strategically significant, with an ensemble that included the rocket facilities at Peenemünde, a naval submarine yard already and this harbour and gigantic boats that could accommodate several trains is an impressive site. The waterway formerly linked Saßnitz, a burrough known as Mukran, and itself a classic resort before becoming a garrison town and working its way back to courting tourism, much like Prora too, hosting a youth hostel, an eclectic museum and is seeing redevelopment as luxury apartments. This port that folded the separating sea away connected the railways with Klaipėda, today in Lithuania, and presently with the havens of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

anni di piombo or cloak and dagger

Prompted by the events and outcome of the Korea War, the US Central Intelligence Agency operating under the aegis of NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) coordinated with Western European intelligence agencies to raise a secret “stay-behind” paramilitary force, whose sleeper cells were to be activated in the event of a Soviet invasion to bolster a resistance movement.
The existence and scope of these units remained unknown until October of 1990, just weeks after the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the revelation of the prime minister of Italy and admission of a project under the codename Operation Gladio (from the Latin gladius, a short double-edged sword and standard issue for Legionnaires). Although involvement in the political turmoil and terrorism that characterized Italy’s civic landscape from the 1960s through the mid-1980s (called the Years of Lead for the bombings) was quickly downplayed and then ruled-out completely, as the international reach and collusion of the organizations became known—it went by different handles in each country where it was based but the Italian guise, Operation Gladio, became convenient short-hand for similarly vetted groups, and particularly because the social unrest and left-wing violence was especially tumultuous in Italy—attention turned back to the potential for governmental manipulation and intimidation. Other alleged undertakings seemed only for engendering chaos, a pact of panic to justify those security measures, suspicions and misgivings long since become a habit. Never deployed in response to an invasion nor ever the subject of deep political scrutiny even after the disclosure, there was of course the incentive to turn a defensive stance into an offensive posture and keep certain elements, socialist or left-leaning, out of European politics. Such Machiavellian mission drift is a common occurrence, and the US has remained evasive on the clandestine ventures that went on for decades. The fact that the tactics that the operatives reputedly employed comes from a playbook, a field manual, that was a supposed hoax leaked by the Soviets to members of the press willing to bite that outlines the strategic tensors of propaganda and terror is a just a rehashing of previous disinformation campaigns, the US maintains, does not mean that there is not something beneath this recursiveness and divestment. The legacy of Operation Gladio is poorly defined and often forgotten—indeed most referenced as an analogy—but does appear in reporting from time to time.