Citanda: Whatever happened to classics?

Charlotte Higgins writes an interesting piece in Varsity … here’s the concluding bit:

The value of the classics, like the value of the arts, is difficult to articulate, verging on the intangible. Their value is about their very remoteness from ordinary life – the fact that they can provide a place where the intellect can range freely over subjects taken more or less in the abstract, rather than snagging on the barbs and hooks of the everyday. Their value is that they offer a playground for the imagination, in which our very disconnectedness from ancient Greece and Rome invites the willing mind to elaborate the gaps and lacunae. Their value is that they are removed from our busy, relevant, modern society and from the forces that conspire to factory-make mini-consumers in the guise of educating our children.

via Whatever happened to classics? | Varsity Online.

Rome Gossip

Seen at Rotten Tomatoes:

When HBO pulled the plug on its expensive coproduction Rome, there was talk of the possibility of the series continuing on in movie form. Fans of the show who were also familiar with similar promises of Deadwood movies knew, however, to perhaps take such talk with a grain of salt. We may still never get a Swearengen movie, but a movie starring legionaries Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) and Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) may yet be in the stars, as the Romans would say. Series cocreator Bruno Heller has turned in the script for a Rome movie, which will continue the adventures of Pullo and Vorenus four years later in Germany, where Rome’s battles for conquest were still quite ongoing in the film’s setting of 27 BC (also the year Octavian became Caesar Augustus). A focus on Germany is a departure from the original series plans. Heller revealed a few years back that the second season (which focused on Octavian, Mark Antony, Cleopatra and Egypt) was actually a condensed version of what had originally been planned for seasons 2, 3 and 4. The hypothetical 5th season of Rome would have focused on the rise of the messiah in Palestine. The next step for Rome, which is now an independent production with no involvement from HBO, is to find a studio and a director.

via ROTTEN TOMATOES: Weekly Ketchup: A Rome movie and Honest Abe fighting vampires.

This Day in Ancient History: ante diem iii nonas martias

ante diem iii nonas martias

  • Festival of Mars (day 5)
  • 399 B.C. — death of Socrates (according to one reckoning)
  • 13 B.C. — death of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (the triumvir) (according to one reckoning)
  • 51 A.D. — the future emperor Nero is coopted into all the priestly colleges