Roman History Books and More

review of ancient rome: the rise and fall of an empire

I've been watching the BBC's Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire on VCD. US Amazon has the book of the TV series, but the DVD is as yet only availabe from UK Amazon. With Mary Beard as one of its historical advisors, we can be reasonably certain that the programmes at least get the basic facts right.

The series is supposed to take us from the defeat of Carthage to Alaric's capture of Rome in 6 50-minute episodes but are not in chronological order. The order is: Nero, Julius Caesar, Tiberius Gracchus, the Jewish revolt and Vespasian and Titus, Constantine, and Alaric's siege and sack of Rome. Since the series does not assume much knowledge on the part of viewers, I can't help but wonder whether this chronological hopping about might not confuse them.

Continue reading my full review.

chat notice: juvenal continued on december 5

There was limited attendance at the Juvenal chat last night:  Irene could not get into the chat room, and some other members had to cancel.

So there has been a change:  We will continue to discuss Juvenal on December 5 and read only one Falco mystery, Venus in Copper, on December 12.

lupercal found?

As a follow up from our read earlier this year of Scullard's "History of The Roman World: 753-146 BC" and in anticipation of next year's read of T J Cornell's "The Beginnings of Rome", our regular readers may be interested to know of a report from the BBC that a cavity has been found near the remains of Augustus' palace in Rome.

The archaeologists who discovered it speculate that it may be the Lupercal, the cave the Romans thought was the place where the famous she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. In his note to the entry on the Lupercal in Platner's Topographical Dictionary, Bill Thayer of LacusCurtius seems to be sceptical, as does Mary Beard.

more on juvenal from about.com

Our friend N.S. Gill has another Juvenal page on her Ancient/Classical History site at About.com:

Juvenal - Roman Satirist: Juvenal Wrote Satires on the Vices of the Roman World

The page includes "Silver Age Roman Satire":

Rome and Roman Empire Maps
Review: Roman Verse Satire
Satire's Origins
E-text of J.W. Mackail's Latin Literature Part III. Chapter IV. Juvenal
Juvenal Net Links

chat preference for juvenal's satires so far

Since we can't discuss all of Juvenal's Satires in our chat next Wednesday, here are some preferences by regular chat members as of this writing:

Satire 1
Why Write Satire?
It is Hard not to Write Satire.
Programmatic satire in which Juvenal states that his purpose is to write satire in a world where sinners are men of power.

november at the dnb

The free online Oxford DNB currently has a special article on coin images, with four of the illustrations  (showing Carausius, Allectus, Constantine III, and Magnus Maximus) coming from our period. Click on the image of the coin to read the associated biographical article.

the silver age of latin literature

In the literature about Juvenal, it is almost always mentioned that he wrote in the "Silver Age."  This is a notch down from the "Golden Age" of the Augustan era.

N.S. Gill at About.com has a list of authors that reaches chronologically from Seneca to Apuleius. (There is also a link Satire's Roots, of interest to our current read. More here, which I missed.)

persona in roman satire

Googling for "persona", I found this definition of persona in Roman Satire in this JSTOR (limited access) article/review:

Review: Themes in Roman Satire
Author(s) of Review: S. H. Braund
Reviewed Work(s): Themes in Roman Satire by Niall Rudd
The Classical Review > New Ser., Vol. 37, No. 2 (1987), pp. 207-209

A fundamental aspect of the study of Roman verse satire [is] the concept of the persona. By persona I mean the mouthpiece created by the poet, whose voice is the voice we hear in the satires;  sometimes we are invited to identify the persona with the poet, as for example in the case of Horace; sometimes the persona is given a different identity. either named (e.g. Juvenal's Umbricius in Satire 3) or left anonymous.  The chief significance of the persona concept is that it frees us from the biographical fallacy of relating the satires - to the poet's own life and experiences on a crude. literal basis (for exposition of the persona approach to satire. see W. S. Anderson, Essays on Roman Satire. Princeton. 1982)

turbot

Juvenal's Satire IV describes the presentation of a turbot to Domitian, who calls a meeting of his council to discuss what to do with it. At a less exalted level, Marcus  Didius Falco had a similar problem when presented with a turbot by Titus, Domitian's elder brother, in Venus in Copper, one of our December reads.

Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) has a short article on turbot, with a not very helpful illustration. A rather better illustration, giving some idea of the size can be seen at the bottom of this angling page. 25lbs 12 oz works out at 11.68 kg.

So, should you be fortunate or unfortunate enough to be presented with a turbot, what do you do with it? The BBC gives us 17 recipes for turbot.

essays on juvenal, online and in print

There are plenty of essays around on Juvenal's satires, our current read, unfortunately, most of them on JSTOR.  A search "Juvenal AND satire" generates a lot of discussion about individual satires.

(If you live in the U.S. and are not affiliated with a university or college, you can ask your public library to subscribe to JSTOR.  It's not very expensive, and there is a subscription scale depending on the size of the library.  You then can download articles for your own use.)

An accessible online essay is Lessons from Juvenal by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 8, April 2003.

next book chat: the satires by juvenal

Our next chat will be on November 21, and we will discuss Juvenal's Satires (Oxford World's Classics). The Satires may also be read as Google Book, in an 1806 editions.  (Requires a free Google account).

Here is a nice Wikipedia site (as usual, handle with care).

Background:
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
(Bryn Mawr Review)

More to come . . .

shakespeare's julius caesar

Still slightly handicapped in writing and typing, I have attacked the to-be-read pile and am right now in the middle of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 by James Shapiro, currently available at Amazon.com Bargain Price.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University and a Shakespearean and Elizabethan culture scholar.

1599 was a pivotal year for Shakespeare.  He and his troupe built the Globe Theatre (Wikipedia, handle with care) and became independent of other theaters, and he was ready for new plays.  In this year, he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet, at the same time bringing his work to a new dramatic and intellectual level.

anthony and cleopatra

While drawing up your list of what to buy from our calendar for next year, you might be interested to know that Colleen McCullough has written another book in the Masters of Rome series. It's supposed to be the last one, but then that's what she said about the previous one, The October Horse.

Anyway, Antony and Cleopatra - I'm sure I've heard that title before somewhere ;-) - was published in September 2007. Our American readers, however, will have to wait till 4 December 2007 unless they want to pay for extra shipping costs as well.

calendar for 2008 book chats

The 2008 Reading Calendar has been agreed upon.

We will finish up Gibbon and also continue with McCullough's Masters of Rome series.  There will be several new novels, a recent Augustus biography, and some old standbys.