We have Commodus killing animals (classical serial killer behaviour), and then getting himself strangled by a wrestler in a bath. We have Caracalla who allegedly enjoyed incest with his mother and certainly had his brother killed at a meeting arranged by this quondam lover: worst of all he wore a hood and a blonde wig and he gave Maximus several jobs. Macrinus got Caracalla’s mother to starve herself to death and then got himself killed in a temple. Then, best of all, what fun Suetonius would have had, there was Elagabalus ,,,, more Eurovision performer than Roman emperor. He divorced five women in his short life, married two men, worshipped a meteorite and used to hold competitions to see who could pimp themselves for the most money in the Imperial palace. He naturally took part.
Tag Archives: rome
Notes on the ancient Roman world
Especially about slavery.
Giordano Bruno and Lucretius
Roman Emperors, Up To AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, …
… In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were
Not surprisingly, the Five Good Emperors all died of natural causes. But they are definitely in the minority.
From
The drink that powered the Roman Empire
Posca, the Roman vinegar-based wonder-drink, is a bit of a mystery, because as much as people keep mentioning it, it is oddly absent from ancient literature. Posca appears in books and articles, being sipped by soldiers and passed around by pals, yet we don’t even have a recipe for it!
Ancient Rome’s best invention …
Imperium sine fine
I sometimes see this license plate on a sports car in the parking lot at my bus stop.
SF Quote
I first read L. Sprague de Camp’s SF classic Lest Darkness Fall (written in 1939) more than 40 years ago. It still has not grown old. Tonight I ran across this passage:
How Gaul-ing!
Celebrating France’s First Resistance Fighter
Of course, they are celebrating him now in a Romance rather than a Celtic language.
From Explorator
Dinner with Attila the Hun – A contemporary account
While for the other barbarians and for us there were lavishly prepared dishes served on silver platters, for Attila there was only meat on a wooden plate . . . Gold and silver goblets were handed to the men at the feast, whereas his cup was of wood. His clothing was plain and differed not at all from that of the rest, except that it was clean. Neither the sword that hung at his side nor the fastenings of his barbarian boots nor his horse’s bridle was adorned, like those of the other Scythians, with gold or precious stones.
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Oxford University Press, p. 320