rogueclassicism Review: Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer
Editor’s note: you might want to read our previous thoughts on this program/claim/issue (made prior to viewing, obviously): Cleopatra, Arsinoe, and the Implications As a sort of followup to all the hype about this program, I thought it might be useful to provide a reviewish sort of thing of this program since it has appeared [...]
Babbling About Biscotti
Okay … this is a claim I’ve come across several times over the past few years, most recently in the Morning Call: ‘Biscotti are cheap to make and last a long time,” Anselmo says of the cookies, which were staples of the Roman legions and moved Pliny to remark that he thought they lasted forever.” [...]
Tomb of Cicero’s Daughter?
In light of all the Cleo hype (about which I’ll probably have more to add later), it’s interesting perhaps to direct the readers of rogueclassicism to an interesting section of Lanciani in which he describes an amazing discovery in Rome from 1485 (hat tip to Man of Roma for this) … here’s a useful excerpt [...]
Roman Torture?
David Bromwich in the Huffington Post writing about US torture etc. mentions, inter alia: Romans of the imperial age practiced torture against enemy combatants on an imposing scale of unrestraint. The gloves were really off. Any viewer of the final montage of Kubrick’s film of Spartacus will remember the captives of the slave rebellion nailed [...]
Romans in China Redux
Folks who follow me on Twitter (for whatever reason) know that I spent much of yesterday returning to using Thunderbird as my email program of choice, during the course of which I came across assorted things which I had put aside to check out later, etc.. Among those items was the oft-repeated story about people [...]
Cleo’s ‘Tomb’ ~ Further Thoughts
This one’s starting to bother me, even though I’ve now seen the ‘mask’ being identified with varying degrees of certainty as ‘possibly’ Marcus Antonius. A correspondent sends in a nice video from the site (from a German version of Reuters; the video is in English), which I can’t embed, so here’s the link. What I [...]
Eggs
I was wondering if there’d be a claim trying to connect Easter eggs to the Romans … the closest seems to be a piece on the mystery of Easter eggs which mentions (but doesn’t make a specific connection): pregnant young Roman women carried an egg on their persons to foretell the sex of their unborn [...]
A Couple of Claims
I’ve seen this first one (from USA Today this time) a couple of times now: Alexander the Great is also said to have had one blue and one brown eye. I’ve never managed to find any more details on that one … This second one — from something called Dream Dogs — strikes me as [...]
Training Legions
Another claim about the ancient world, this time from something called Total Health Breakthroughs: Rocky Marciano did it. Muhammad Ali did it. And many, many other old-time boxers(and old time wrestlers for that matter) did it too. But maybe the most unique and unusual group to use this exercise — that you never heard of [...]
April Fool’s Origins
Well, you know that if there’s a holiday of sorts, there will be some attempt by some journalist to tie it to the ancient Romans or Greeks, and of course, April Fool’s Day is no exception. An item at MSNBC, e.g., claims, inter alia: Some trace April Fools’ Day back to Roman mythology, particularly the [...]
Persian Treasures in the Black Sea?
This is another one of those weird claims … according to a brief item in Standart: The countless treasures of Persia seized by Alexander the Great, are buried at the bottom of the Black Sea at Kaliakra Cape, said oceanographer from the city of Varna Trayan Trayanov yesterday. Recently the Space Research Institute in Moscow confirmed [...]
Whining about Wine
As I clean up my mail backlog, I find I am risking a serious injury from all the mind boggling claims of the past few days … an excerpt from a piece about the history of wine from the Jefferson Post: Engel shared with wine aficionados that the ancient Egyptians were the first to reserve [...]
Alexander the Great’s Tomb … In Australia?
When I first read this I had to double check the calendar and make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day … it wasn’t, but apparently it was a very slow news day for the ABC folks … or perhaps it was a very busy day for something so freakin’ bizarre to make it past the [...]
Classical Doggy Massage?
An item about dog grooming in something called Medill Reports mentions, inter alia: Canine myotherapy, or muscle therapy for dogs, has been around since for “as long as people have been petting their dogs,” said Sue Olmos, a certified myotherapist at Midstates Myotherapy and Sanchez’s former teacher. While massaging athlete dogs can date back to [...]
Roman Taxation in Judaea?
Some sort of conservative publication called Gather claims, inter alia: In Jesus’ time, the Roman Empire taxed the Israelites at a rate of 65 percent of gross wages or gross agricultural production.Yes, you read that correctly. The Romans got 65 percent. The Israelites kept 35 percent. This was designed to keep the laborers struggling to [...]
Whence Boys? Whence Girls
The Today Show (Australian version), commenting on Tom Cruise’s and Katie Holmes’ desire for a baby boy lists assorted myths associated with choosing the sex of the child, inter alia: The ancient Greeks used to believe that girls were created from sperm from the left testicle so in order to get a boy, they used [...]
