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Post by parker on May 30, 2008 2:26:33 GMT -4
Ginnie points out; There are buildings in Britain that are still around today from Roman times.
Oh yes, lots of lovely Roman remains, the city wall in Exeter is a piece of 1st century work you can touch and walk the length of. The brother is an archaeologist, though he is more of a medievalist. His workplace are forever recording new Roman sites and artefacts. However, if you want to get real Roman chills, you must tour Europe, it is as if they had just left last year. I went to southern France as a yoof and stood on the Pont D'Arc ("sur le pont D'Avignon!") and saw amphitheatres in Orange and Nimes (I think? it was an age ago) Spain is littered with aqueducts just left there in the desert, quite awe inspiring.
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Post by tedward on May 30, 2008 7:46:28 GMT -4
Anyone in the UK, or visiting for that matter, Chedworth Roman Villa is worth a visit. Near Cheltenham. National trust site. Superb if hat floats your boat.
Of course, Bath.
And the roads, not forgetting them.
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Post by dinsmore on May 30, 2008 11:06:35 GMT -4
Oh yeah, I was born on Watling Street, Towcester. Although I would recommend one of the quieter ones, such as Sarn Helen near Dolwyddelan, for anyone wanting a walk.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on May 30, 2008 14:10:54 GMT -4
And the roads, not forgetting them. Well the roads go without saying... ;D ... but apart from the roads, the aqueducts, sanitation, public health, law & order ... ;D Hadrian's Wall is the big thing up here (the ancient inhabitants of Wallsend being somewhat literal-minded) but there are also a number of forts and settlements such as Arbeia and Segedunum forming the basis of new museums.
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Post by tedward on May 30, 2008 15:45:27 GMT -4
Yeah, the film sketch was running through my mind whilst putting weight on the keys.
Hadrian, his Mausoleum is quite interesting as is Trajans column. Sort of related.... OK, name dropping but the old nogging gets a thinking.
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Post by Ginnie on May 30, 2008 19:07:06 GMT -4
Yeah, the film sketch was running through my mind whilst putting weight on the keys. Hadrian, his Mausoleum is quite interesting as is Trajans column. Sort of related.... OK, name dropping but the old nogging gets a thinking. What sketch?
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Post by Halcyon Dayz, FCD on May 31, 2008 7:57:08 GMT -4
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Post by tedward on May 31, 2008 8:10:38 GMT -4
Aye, that is the one. Pity its 16:9 squished 4:3;)
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Post by Ginnie on Jun 10, 2008 19:56:37 GMT -4
So, I watched the last episode of ROME today. Now I'll have to rent Season One which I haven't seen... Been reading a bit about Roman society lately. Fascinating stuff. For the most part they were people like anyone, anywhere.
Can't wait to go to a coin show later this year and pick up some Roman Coins.
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Post by PeterB on Jun 13, 2008 11:15:42 GMT -4
Lately, I've been watching the great U.S./British/Italian TV series ROME. Pretty good series, that. I enjoyed watching the first season on TV, but there’s no word on whether they’ll screen the second season. I didn’t like it enough to feel like buying the DVD (if it’s out). In case you didn’t know, Pullo and Vorenus, the two guys at the centre of the action, are supposed to be the only two ordinary soldiers whose names were mentioned by Julius Caesar in his history of the Gallic Wars. For a higher level description of the last half century of the Roman Republic, I can highly recommend Tom Holland’s “Rubicon”. It shows just how wild a political system you can get when the only limit on people’s actions is their ambition. To my way of thinking, there has never been anything quite like it before or since, even in our more democratic times – there are usually too many checks and balances built into the systems. Yes, but it’s also worth remembering that in many ways they were quite different from us – their attitude to entertainment, for example, or their superstition. But you speak truly all the same, and it’s that combination of familiarity and strangeness which makes them so fascinating. I envy you. A wargaming friend of mine once showed me the small collection of silver and bronze coins he picked up on-line, and I had that same feeling – all those centuries ago, those coins were someone’s loose change, and you wonder what sort of transactions they were used for, where they were spent, what languages were spoken over them, and how they came to be lost. My interest in Roman history stems from my interest in wargaming – games with toy soldiers. As a result my interest spreads across the whole of the history of Rome. For example, one army I’ve painted up is a Roman army of the 4th-5th centuries, when Roman legionaries looked very different from the image most people have. The other fascination I have with Roman history is the variety of situations the Roman state encountered over time, and how it dealt with them: what allowed the young Republic to triumph over other Italian states in the 4th century BC; was Roman victory in the 2nd Punic War inevitable; how might the Roman state have developed if Augustus died 30 or more years earlier than he did; why did the Roman Empire change from a prosperous, stable state in the 2nd century to a near-anarchic state on the verge of collapse in the mid-3rd century; how did it recover from the crisis of the 3rd century; why did the Western Roman Empire collapse in the 5th century when the Eastern Roman Empire survived; could the Western Roman Empire have survived as one kingdom among many, and if not, at what point did its long term survival become impossible. I could belt on at great length about any one of those topics…but I won’t. On top of that, I’m also interested in the longer history of the Eastern Roman Empire, and how it evolved into the Byzantine Empire. I can’t think of any other examples of states which have changed so fundamentally over time without any break in their continuity – from a pagan, Latin-speaking, aggressive empire into a Christian, Greek-speaking, defensive-manipulative empire in the space of a few centuries, yet who never stopped calling themselves Roman. It’s stuff like this which makes me sad that so many people find history boring. Mind you, earlier this evening I was watching some show about Roman beauty. But the show was a disorganised hodge-podge without a well-developed theme, bouncing around from past to present, from Roman baths to clothing fashions, to the materials they used in make-up, and trying to spice it up with footage of naked women frolicking in baths and blokes from Roman army re-enactment societies marching, eating or making camp. But at least the re-enactment societies got their equipment right. One of the sillier things the show did was to also include footage from movies, where the soldiers were wearing all sorts of bizarre interpretations of Roman military equipment. *sigh* This sort of stuff is easy to get right with only a little effort – it’s like the difference between “Apollo 13” and “Armageddon”…
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Jun 13, 2008 11:46:38 GMT -4
Rubicon is good. Robert Harris' Pompeii is also an interesting retelling of the historical events with a murder mystery thrown in.
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Post by Ginnie on Jun 13, 2008 18:22:22 GMT -4
The Romans liked control and order. They legislated everything you could think of, from how much you could spend on dinner for your guests, to what you could serve at the dinner, intricate inheritance laws, and laws about what could and couldn't be done in the matter of slaves. Of course Roman history is about 900 years or so, and things changed in the empire over time. For instance Claudius passed an edict that if a sick slave was abandoned by his master, and recovered his health he was a freedman. That seems humanitarian. But if a master was murdered, his slaves (up to a certain percentage) could be all killed. Stoics stressed kindness to slaves but didn't practice what they preached. Everybody knew their place in society, and it was very difficult to 'move up' so to speak, but it was done sometimes A man was judged by his family background and by what he did for a living.
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Post by PeterB on Jun 20, 2008 23:23:14 GMT -4
Thinking about the series "Rome" reminded me of another miniseries which was on TV a few months before it. It was set around the same time, and was the story of the gladiator who was asked by Julius Caesar to guard Octavian (Augustus) in case Caesar died.
*sigh*
Some very good actors wasted in an absurd storyline which involved Octavian at one point being imprisoned in a slave mine called Arkham. Never mind that Arkham is a very English name, not Latin at all. Never mind that after Caesar's death, Octavian slid his way through Roman politics with the ease of an expert, even though he was only nineteen.
The worst thing about the series was that they could recreate the conflict between Antony and Octavian without Cleopatra playing a part!
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