quidquid bene dictum est ab ullo, meum est
A review of Iphigenia and Other Daughters in the Columbia City Paper suggests, inter alia:
Classicists hate to admit it, but Homer and all who proceeded him in the tradition of ancient Greek theater (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, etc.) were of a mind to entertain just as much to educate and elucidate.
… er, no … it’s probably the other way around if anything. Actually, it doesn’t really reflect what Classicists think at all …
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 on their crosses like trees of that peculiar climate. The Christian religion was founded against the empire that did such things. It incorporated into its central symbol the purest revulsion from torture.
Okay … let’s distinguish between ‘torture for information’ and ‘torture as part of the execution process … do we have evidence of the Romans ‘torturing for information’ in a military context?
Haven’t seen any more coverage of this other than from the Ma’an News Agency:
Roman-era catacombs were unearthed in Bethlehem Saturday during construction in an empty lot beside Bethlehem University.
The small underground cave system opens facing north, and held four stone coffins with engravings on each, housed in two separate dug out burial areas.
Head of Antiquates department in Jericho Wael Hamamrah estimated the artifacts, complete with skeletal remains and some pottery are between 1,800 and 1,900 years old.
Construction workers preparing to lay pipe in the yard called Palestinian tourism and antiquates police when they went to investigate the sudden collapse of earth in an area they had been digging in that morning.
The underground hall leads to two rooms, one 70×28 centimeters and the other 40×24 centimeters,
Head engineer at the site Mohammad Al-Quraji said the crew was very surprised when the earth collapsed, and stunned when they peered into the underground tombs. They left the scene untouched until antiquities experts arrived, and helped remove debris as experts investigated the site.
A not-very-useful photo accompanies the original article …
… or so it seemed when I read this headline a bit too quickly:
Alexander on undercard as Latimore faces Spinks
… could the wily translator match up to the inquisitive Egyptian beastie? The followup tells the tale:
Spinks edges Latimore for IBF belt!
… and in case you were wondering, Alexander enneagrammatically KOed Jesus in the ninth round …
rogueclassicism 