Tip o’ the pileus to Richard Campbell for sending along a nice little feature on the Alexandrian ‘engineer’ at io9: The Greek engineer who invented the steam engine 2,000 years ago.

… with a salutary warning: 10 Roman Beauty Tips! (Girls, DON'T try these at home) http://bit.ly/eW8zT9— Caroline Lawrence (@CarolineLawrenc) January 25, 2011

Not sure why there is such apparent surprise at this sort of thing any more … via the BBC: A 1,700-year-old skeleton shows that people of African descent have lived in Warwickshire for far longer than was previously thought, experts say. The skeleton of an African man was discovered buried in Tiddington Road, Stratford-upon-Avon, in [...]

Not a bad analysis from Foreign Policy … This week on Thucydides Abuse Watch | Daniel W. Drezner. … it’s worth clicking on the internal links in the piece as well …  

Tip o’ the pileus to Mata Kimasitayo on the Classics list for alerting us to Hadrian’s turn in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Oxford DNB: Lives of the week – Hadrian. If you visit rogueclassicism after January 24, you probably have to access it via here (for a week … then it will disappear) [...]

Adrian Murdoch’s podcast series continues: Emperors of Rome: Claudius.  

ante diem xi kalendas februarias Ludi Palatini (day 4) Sementivae or Paganalia (day 1) — Sementivae was a festival of sowing which was actually a moveable feast (although I’m not sure of the moveability criteria; I’m guessing that the first day falls between January 24 and 26). By Ovid’s time it appears to have been [...]

via Chuck Jones: AWOL News: Schliemann Diaries Online at ASCSA http://bit.ly/ejPys2— Charles Jones (@chuckjones2000) January 21, 2011

I’ve been sort of thinking aloud on Twitter and/or Facebook on this one and am thinking this whole Caligula tomb thing needs some sort of followup post. At some point yesterday I tweeted it is becoming increasingly apparent that journalism (esp as regards archaeology) is often just a grownup version of the telephone game—   [...]

Robert Eisenman says “I told you so” in the Huffington Post: Robert Eisenman: ‘The James Ossuary’ and Its Authenticity.

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism): SYMPOTIC POETRY. A COLLOQUIUM Christ Church, Oxford Thursday March 31st – Saturday April 2nd 2011 http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/sympoticpoetry/ The symposiast’s couch is a key vantage-point from which to survey Greek poetry. Poetry was performed at the symposium [...]

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism): Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient drama from late antiquity to 1550 The University of Melbourne: 13th to 15th July 2011 Convenors: Andrew Turner, Giulia Torello Hill In 2011 the University of Melbourne, in association with the [...]

Image via Wikipedia This one’s kind of interesting, given our knowledge of Classicists among the spying set. SkyNews had a very interesting little post on one of its blogs with the headline: Official – James Bond Speaks Latin … which reports on a closed session from the Chilcot Inquiry which (I had to look it [...]

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed further evidence of a Roman “shanty town” in Teesdale. Two years ago, experts carried out a major dig in Bowes. They found significant remains of a large unplanned settlement, called a vicus, on the outskirts of the Roman fort. Dubbed a “shanty town”, historians said the settlement was significant because it was [...]

Image via Wikipedia T’other day we were criticizing the Guardian for its credulity in buying into a claim about the purported discovery of Caligula’s tomb. While that story was breaking, simmering on the backburner was a story that’s still making the rounds claiming some sort of correlation between the rise and fall of empires and [...]

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism): Call for Papers Re-creation: Musical Reception of Classical Antiquity A conference at the University of Iowa, October 27-29, 2011 Conference organizers: Robert Ketterer (University of Iowa), Andrew Simpson (Catholic University), Greg Hand (University of Iowa) [...]

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism): University of Reading Department of Classics Research Seminar Spring Term 2011 Wednesdays at 4 pm, Ure Museum Jan 19 Andrew Laird (Warwick), “Classical humanism and ethnohistory in early colonial Mexico. A Latin letter from the [...]

Seen on the Classicists list (please direct any queries to the folks mentioned in the item and not to rogueclassicism): Classical & Archaeological Studies Research Seminars 2010–2011, Spring term Thursday 27 January, 5.15 p.m., Cornwallis NW SR8 Professor Jun’ichiro Tsujita, Kyushu University, Japan ‘Romanization and State Formation: A Comparative Approach to Cultural Change in World [...]

Image via Wikipedia Interesting item from the Times of India: Coins are not only used as a mode of exchange but they also reflect heritage. Indian-Roman relations was one such area where coins played a major role in establishing and strengthening ties between two countries. At a special exhibition on Roman coins and other Roman [...]

Hot on the heels of Adrian Murdoch’s podcast on the nutty emperor, and just a few weeks before we mark the anniversary of the nutty emperor’s assassination,  comes nutty news from the Guardian (tip o’ the pileus to Tim Parkin, who first ‘broke’ the story on Facebook last night): The lost tomb of Caligula has [...]