One of the things I constantly wrestle with as a blogger is whether to post things as soon as they come out and risk having a better version/more detailed version come out later — as often happens — or hold onto things and let them sit in my 2blog file, where they often get forgotten. In this case, something just hit my email box that reminded me of the others. So, to begin our little excursus, way back in September, Kristina Killgrove was first to alert me (and several others followed) to the cover of Amanda Claridge’s Rome: An Archaeological Guide:

… apparently they’ve dealt with that leaking roof thing at the Pantheon. Then our longtime Classics list friend Yong-Ling Ow mentioned on Facebook the cover of Miriam Greenblatt’s Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic:

… which appears to be sporting the image of a ‘different’ Julius Caesar. Today’s offering is not as dramatic as the previous two, but displays one of my personal bugbears.  Natalie Haynes’ The Ancient Guide to Modern Life actually looks interesting from an initial review, but the cover looks like this:

… which does that thing of using Greek letters as if they were English … rotating omegas for ‘c’ and ‘u’ … sigmas for ‘e’ … something theta-like for ‘o’ … still, not as bad as a local hall called the “Olympia” which rendered its name in Greek letters and used a Psi for the ‘y’.

I don’t know if this is an unhealthy obsession or what, but over the years, one of the recurring things at rogueclassicism has been on the origin of ‘toasting’, in the sense of raising a glass at some festival/celebration and making some kind words. The usual tale is that there is some connection between the ancient Romans/Greeks or whoever putting a burnt piece of bread (toast!) in their wine to make it taste better. I think we first pondered it on the cusp of 2005/2006 and declared it officially silly on the cusp of 2008/2009.

This year, the story seems to come much in advance of its usual New Year’s Eve context and is somewhat modified … here’s the incipit of the piece that caught my eye:

Since ancient times, from the Greeks to the Romans, glasses of wine had been lifted in either celebration to their gods or to those recently fallen. This raising of the glass evolved through time in celebration of great accomplishments or an oath of loyalty.

Fast forward to 1643. The Middle Temple, who often used cooked bread (or obviously toast) to dip in their wine to improve the flavor, raised their glasses to then-Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, swearing their allegiance and lives to her. […]

• COLUMN: Why do we toast? | SC Now

… which I use by way of introduction to reponder the question and see if this takes off (heheheh, he said, rubbing his hands in evil glee between key strokes). The thought occurred to me in one of my pre-caffeinated states one a.m. that what we call ‘a toast’ might actually be a corruption of Latin ‘tuis’ (dative) or ‘ad tuos’ (accusative) which one could imagine being said in some sort of ‘toasting’ context. I’m too lazy to Google it, but it’s probably been suggested already.  Of course, the SMBC cartoon in the previous post most likely applies here …

Some interesting tidbits hit my emailbox over the past few days, and it seems that they might be best presented together. The first two are actually cartoons posted by James McGrath on facebook in regards to how ‘science reporting’ seems to work … seems to me, they work just as well for archaeological reporting. The first comes from Abstruse Goose and reminds me of that ‘gladiatrix’ story from a few months ago:

Next, from SMBC:

… which pretty much applies to the ‘Lost Legion in China’ stuff of late …

Coincidentally this week, rogueclassicism was mentioned in passing in the Times Higher Education thing in an article by Jay Kennedy (“My Dan Brown Moment”), whose work in what’s been dubbed ‘The Plato Code’, will fall into one or the other categories above for many of our readers, depending on which side of the fence they’re on.

This was the first one of these that I saw (courtesy of Paul Halsall):

… not quite classical, but a good one to follow up with: