Studenda Mira

They had to start the rounds early, because by midday, the locals' reserve of holiday cheer would be depleted. If yours was the first roving band of wren boys to come to a house, you'd do well, but if you were the third or fourth, they might not even answer the door, no matter how well you sang. After the novelty wore off, you were just another beggar, and this was a banner day for beggars. My father, the postman's son, would wear his Sunday best, save for some walking shoes and a bright green scarf around his neck. The latter was his lone concession to an ancient tradition that would have dressed their leader, an older boy with a strong baritone, in straw and blackface and festooned my father with every piece of colored ribbon from their mothers' dressers. In the town, some of the more established wren boys still bothered with the old trappings, often to the detriment of some poor wren. My father's wren boys were more pragmatic. The town was two miles away an

Bill & Ted used a time-traveling phone booth, but in a pinch, a tatty old Ford Taurus will also do. This funny series of history-themed ads for Snickers candy bars has recently begun airing in the U.S.: You can find episodes 2-8 (!) here .

Anyone planning on visiting Hadrian's Wall this Saturday may want to note this bizarre little news item so that they can plan their visit accordingly. I have no pretensions to being a travel consultant, but my humble advice to such folks would be to schedule a late lunch: Choirs, including Carlisle’s Margaret Frayne Singers, will be accompanied by loofahs, bath toys and shower caps. That said, if anyone reading this is in the vicinity, I'd love some photos or video.

Breaking the silence with a link: The Times has a tight, evocative travel piece on Rome. I don't know what's so "sinister," as the headline claims (I'm fortunate to be permitted to write my own headlines, most of the time), but Salley Vickers gets to a handful of places that might not otherwise be on the itinerary of a first-time visitor.

If I didn't think I would write Part I of this post, I certainly didn't expect to find myself writing Part II. However, my blogfriend Judith Weingarten stopped by to comment . I began responding in that thread, but it was getting so long that I decided to make it a new post. She writes, "OK, I know it's facile but one parallel with ancient Rome gives me nightmares: an over-mighty mercenary military. Think Septimius Severus, the 3rd century, and onwards." What an image! GHW Bush counseling GW and Jeb Bush with his dying breath, "Keep the army happy and ignore the rest." My money's on GW as the Caracalla of that scenario, but I may be underestimating Jeb. American military leaders might wish they held that kind of sway over the executive. Though I'll gladly defer to Judith's expertise, it seems to me that the Roman army and American military have less in common than some other analogous institutions. Aside from the American military's

The Irish Examiner has an item about the discovery of a 20-acre ring fort in County Cork, Ireland: Radiocarbon dating shows that the ringfort was constructed about 1200BC, confirming it as the oldest known prehistoric ringfort in Ireland, according to Prof William O’Brien of University College, Cork. This puts its importance on a par with prehistoric sites such as Dún Aengus on Inishmore and Mooghaun, Co Clare. Hat tip to Archaeoblog .

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are the new owners of a French vineyard that supplied ancient Rome. Château Val-joanis is located near the old Via Domitia , and the remains of the Roman villa are supposedly visible on "the lower part" of the property. I'm not sure whether that means "topographically lower" or "south." Here's the modern winery on Google Maps. I can't see anything that's obviously the villa site, but the image resolution varies over the area. Maybe a more discerning eye can spot it.

I decided some time ago that I wasn't going to write a post like this one, but the "U.S. as Rome" meme, which had recently begun to fade, has been given fresh legs by the imprimatur of David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States . Here's an excerpt from Walker's speech at an August 7 meeting of the Federal Midwest Human Resources Council and the Chicago Federal Executive Board: There are striking similarities between America’s current situation and that of another great power from the past: Rome. The Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years, but only about half that time as a republic. The Roman Republic fell for many reasons, but three reasons are worth remembering: declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. Sound familiar? I got tired of the steady stream of "U.S. as Rome" comparisons months ago, not only because the b

Seventh century Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor is the subject of today's featured article on Wikipedia.

Last week's discovery of a huge Hadrian statue in Turkey has filtered down to the mainstream news outlets. Here is National Geographic's take, and here's the Beeb. All the hubbub inspired Tony Keen to reflect upon our modern perceptions of Hadrian . Update : Yet more coverage at The Independent .

An overnight fire at Rome's Cinecitta Studios has destroyed the sets of the recently-completed HBO/BBC television series, "Rome." The older areas of the studio, where "Ben Hur" was filmed, were undamaged. On a mostly unrelated note, the show's storyline ended in 30 BC, but it wasn't until AD 6 that Augustus got around to establishing a fire brigade ... Update : The original link to the Times story has vanished, but here's ABC News to the rescue. Also, a clarification on the supposed destruction of the "Rome" sets: The main set of "Rome," which includes a mock Roman forum, wasn't destroyed, but other parts were heavily damaged, said HBO spokeswoman Mara Mikialian.

Today's New York Times has a piece by Ilan Greenberg ( accessible without registration via the IHT) on how the ancient social order of nomadic societies in central Asia weighs upon their present political realities: Scientists are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles. While reading this, I was reminded of Mark Whittow's observations about the Eurasian steppe peoples in his 1996 book, The Making of Byzantium . While noting that "the potential of steppe nomad states was enormous," Whittow writes that social underpinnings based on small tribes and familial connections didn't do much for the stability of those states: The closer to its roots a nomadic society was, the more likely it was to

Via rogueclassicism , this astonishing find from Turkey: fragments from a 5-meter statue of the emperor Hadrian . As the RC notes, there's no English coverage yet, but here is a brief item in French. Pardon my rough, paraphrased translation: A team of archaeologists from the KUL has discovered fragments of an exceptional statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian during an excavation in Sagalassos, Turkey , reports the VRT (Belgian state TV). Part of a leg was found with sandals, which indicate that the wearer is an emperor. Part of a thigh and a nearly intact, 70 cm head were also found. The complete statue would have measured 4-5 meters in height. It appears to date to the second century. According to professor Marc Waelkens , who leads the team, it is one of the most beautiful representations of the Emperor Hadrian. For comparison, here's a bust of Hadrian from the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Update : Archaeology Magazine now has an online feature on the find. Update #2 : L

Via Alun Salt's nifty Historyscape feed comes this LiveScience article about Rhakotis , a town on the site of what would later become Alexandria. Sediment cores from the harbor suggest that there was a "flourishing urban settlement" more than 700 years before Alexander marked out his city's limits. Archaeology is usually a grimy business, but the Smithsonian's Jean-Daniel Stanley says that getting these cores set a new standard in that regard: Collecting these samples underwater proved challenging. "Alexandria now is home to as many as 4 million people, and we were in the unfortunate position of having to deal with their discharge—human waste, municipal waste, industrial waste—which got released into the harbor," Stanley said. "It's not funny, but you have to sort of laugh." The Smithsonian's magazine ran a more extensive piece on this dig back in April. ETA: Apologies to David Meadows for inadvertently stealing the title of his ent

Eric at Campus Mawrtius tells us that the Indianapolis Museum of Art is the first of three stops for an exhibition of 184 selected Roman pieces from the Louvre. The show opens September 23 and runs until January 6, 2008. The American Federation for the Arts says that next year, the exhibit will go to Seattle (February 21 to May 11) and Oklahoma City (June 19 to October 12). I'm glad to see this going to some lesser-known museums, especially those in Indy and OKC. Can't let the coastal cities have all the fun!

Anyone considering applying to the AIRC's field school, as featured in the previous post, should know that working on a dig can be very physically demanding. The field school tuition does provide a daily meal to keep your constitution up, but it's unlikely that any actual artifacts are on the menu. Should you actually feel like chowing down on a piece of history, tonight's episode of Ace of Cakes featured a birthday cake in the shape of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship burial .

Popping up everywhere, as AP bulletins do, is this story about a bath complex once owned by Quintus Servilius Pudens, a buddy of the emperor Hadrian. It was unearthed at the big Parco degli Acquedotti dig site, in the suburbs south of the old city. The American Institute for Roman Culture , which runs the dig, has a page which suggests this was actually discovered last year (assuming this is the same "imperial" bath complex mentioned on that page). With a hat tip to Adrian Murdoch , here's a Google Maps link to the Parco degli Acquedotti. Many previously excavated areas are visible, and if you pan back, the American school's presence is betrayed by the baseball fields (!) to the south. So much for "when in Rome..."

Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians came out in 2005, but the paperback only hit U.S. shelves a few weeks ago. Heather summarizes his thesis—yes, it was barbarians, and Rome made them—in a new essay at HNN.

The summer solstice brings us new Prehistoric and Roman Britain galleries at The British Museum , and the Guardian celebrates same with a nice tie-in piece about the death and times of Lindow Man: A single brown fingernail lies on the leather bag of his chest, which tapers to nothing where the peat-cutting machine chopped him in two. His arm lies next to him, but these fragments of a body would mean nothing, were it not for the look on his face. A face that is 2,000 years old is not expected to have a "look". Death destroys individuality - but not his. When the remains came rising out of a Cheshire bog in 1984, that deflated torso would turn out to be packed with biological information, clues to a violent death, but it's all there for anyone to see, the full horror of it, in his face. It is the face of the eternal victim, bound and garrotted and thrown into the marsh. Full article is at the Guardian.

A quickie as I head out the door this morning... Archaeologists working on the medieval castle in Rochester, Kent—founded by the Romans as Durobrivae shortly after the invasion in 43—have stumbled upon the remains of a Roman-era city wall . Graham Keevill, an archaeologist on the dig, was enthusiastic about the condition of the accidental find: "We don't have many Roman city walls surviving in England. To get an unexpected one like this is fantastic. It is also a perfect example." He said the wall had "high-quality" facing stones on each side, and its rubble core, made up of stone, flint, sand, and gravel, would have been poured in "to set hard almost like concrete, to bind the whole wall together".

The Economist has a mixed review of William Rosen's Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe . Some highlights: Mr Rosen argues his position methodically and thoughtfully. He has a lot of ground to cover and he will not be rushed. So there are chapters not only on Justinian and the plague but also on the migration of the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Huns; on Byzantine architecture; on Roman law; on China and the silkworm; and on the emergence of Islam... At this point, thumbing the remaining 200 or so pages to come, one begins to wonder whether the whole thing might be somewhat overlong and overdone. There is no sense of its having been padded—just a slightly crushing abundance of riches, of multiple lines of inquiry, to every one of which Mr Rosen gives his close attention...“Justinian's Flea” reads like several books in one and the glut is, by the end, a little hard to digest.

Piazza San Silvestro, Rome By 799, they didn't observe the Robigalia in Rome anymore. Gods of mildew were a thing of the past, as were vile sacrifices of dog and sheep guts. But people still knew that a higher power had to be enlisted on April 25 to prevent the crops from succumbing to blight and mold. They turned to the bishop, as they had done for most things since the days when chunks of masonry first began falling off the empty buildings on the Palatine Hill. Just as his fifth-century namesake had interceded on Rome's behalf against other, more immediate (and better armed ) threats to the public interest, Pope Leo III stepped into the void. His service was not welcomed by all. Leo struggled to establish himself in the long shadow of his dynamic predecessor, Pope Hadrian, who had been dead for less than four years. Most of the awestruck pilgrims lining the papal procession route hadn't heard the rumors swirling around the new pope, which were scandalous. He

The World Monuments Fund has released its annual list of the world's 100 most endangered historic sites. Iraq's sites get top billing, as do Machu Picchu and Ireland's Hill of Tara , which is infamously threatened by a highway construction project. That Chicago Tribune article is mistaken about the Tara project, which would not actually go through the hill. Ireland may appear to be busily ignoring its heritage in favor of its economic boom, but they're not quite that far gone...yet. The highway would be about a mile from the site, but its reasonably supposed that many undiscovered Tara-era sites are imperiled by the construction. As it happens, the highway project was temporarily halted in April after preservationists discovered an Iron Age temple.

This is one of the more thorough news articles I've seen on the c. 400 Roman man under Trafalgar Square. Over at the Huffington Post, Byron Williams compares Jerry Falwell to Constantine . Smintheus at Unbossed.com opened a discussion on The Golden Ass , the only (if I'm not mistaken) surviving novel from the Roman imperial period. ...finally, a shout-out to Clioaudio for linking to the Serapeum entry. A needed jolt after an unplanned, six-week hiatus. Thank you!

Ruins of the Serapeum, Alexandria. Photo by Bernt Rostad . Serapis stood alone. The statue of Alexandria's patron god wore the same expression of divine detachment as it had for seven hundred years, with a grain measure balanced on his head to symbolize his blessings of plenty upon his city. But the people assembled before him now were not his followers. They were gone, fled or hidden after the imperial herald read a pronouncement from the Emperor Theodosius: The Hellenes, as the Christians called anyone who followed the old gods, would receive amnesty for their role in the bloody siege that had paralyzed "the crown of all cities" for weeks, but their cult was now illegal. Serapis had become deus non gratis in his own city, and this was his reckoning. As his followers scattered, the soldiers had marched confidently into the massive temple, but now they paused. Declaring a cult illegal and driving off its adherents was one thing. Raising arms against a god

Illyrian ships found under a swamp near Capljina, Bosnia-Herzegovina date to the 2nd century B.C. and were apparently shipping wine, according to a preliminary analysis of the remaining amphorae.

A few days after Egeria's mention here, the Reverend Chloe Breyer gives her a more thorough treatment in Slate: The ease with which she attained military escorts through far-flung and dangerous places suggests high connections in the imperial court. Indeed, one line of research makes her out to be the daughter of a Spanish member of the court of Theodosius the Great, emperor from 379 to 395, and possibly the leader of what St. Jerome rancorously described as a wealthy and ostentatiously behaved travel party heading to the East at about that time.

Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman-era tomb on the Greek island of Kefalonia. The AP report is vague, but there's a photo of seating in what looks like a theatre of some kind. The caption implies that this is in the same area as the tomb. More details in the coming days, hopefully.

The "Burning Bush" at St. Catherine's Monastery, Egypt. Photo by piddy77 . The NYT's Michael Slackman reports today on the doings of Egypt's chief archaeologist in the Sinai peninsula. His team has recently unearthed a military fort which dates to the period of the Exodus, but he doesn't think much of the Exodus itself: “Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom. Whatever the official position of the state, local tourism businesses remain happy to capitalize on eager believers: In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses. It's unclear whether Slackman is referring to the bush in Saint Catherine's Monastery , which has enclosed the purported site of Moses' vision since the third century. In any case, pointing out the bush to wide-eyed religious

The conventional wisdom is that Homer's Ithaca is the modern island of Ithaki, off the coast of Greece in the Ionian Sea. British archaeologist Robert Bittlestone is challenging that assumption, and modern science will be at his disposal .

Old City Sana'a Photo by eesti . On the heels of the last post, I was entranced by this lush travel article in the New York Times (free registration required) about the Yemeni island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa. It's not difficult to imagine traders on that Alexandria-India run porting here for one last pit stop before the big push across the Arabian Sea: Socotra is significantly inhabited, and has been for some 2,000 years. More than 40,000 people now live there: many in Hadibu, the island’s main town, the rest scattered in small stone villages, working as fishermen and semi-nomadic Bedouin herders. Nature and culture are longstanding neighbors. I especially liked this bit: Lying on the rocky ground, with the scent of frankincense fresh in memory, I felt as though I had stumbled into a chapter of the Old Testament. Well before dawn I woke to the sound of the family patriarch’s voice warbling a long, mournful prayer. He finished after a few minutes, and the ni

There is news from India today on continued archaeological efforts to identify the site of the ancient Indian city of Muziris, one of the most important ports for trade between India and Rome. Traders from Alexandria and the rest of Roman Egypt would wait until July to set out for India. Under typical conditions, it was a two month journey, but departing any sooner would place a ship off India's southwest coast during the most dangerous sailing conditions of the year—even modern maritime insurers are reluctant to offer summer coverage in the area. For the wealthy, high-powered Alexandrian merchants who could afford to underwrite such expensive voyages, the payoff was enormous. Arriving in India in September and leaving in December, the traders would ride home on the winds of the northeast monsoon, hulls packed with incense, myrrh, ivory, spices, silk, wild animals, pearls, and other luxuries of the Far East. After they docked at the Red Sea ports of Berenice or Myos Hormos, cara

Fordham University's Kimberly Bowes will explore the division between public and private expressions of Late Antique Christianity in her upcoming book , Possessing the Holy: Private Worship in Late Antiquity . From the article: In the fourth century, said Bowes, the concept of “church” was not yet defined—many people still worshipped in private home chapels or in estate churches which served both their owners and local peasantry. “There was no consensus on what the church was,” said Bowes. Once the Christian church became established, the bishops, who often called such worship heresy, condemned private gatherings. “You’ll find some really angry texts [written by bishops] from this period,” said Bowes.

Anthropologist Stefano Fait offers an essay on the 5th century invasions that nicely surveys the major events of the period while framing the "barbarians" within the modern debate on immigration, assimilation and ethnic identity.

Salarian Gate, Rome Buses, scooters and Smart Fortwos roll through a breach in Aurelian's wall as wide as any made by the 19th century artillery that ended the last vestige of the Papal States . Their drivers meet only a little less resistance than the Italian army did when they blasted through , a few hundred feet to the east. The Salarian Gate didn't survive the onslaught, and when they cleared the rubble, it revealed the tomb of an 11-year-old poet laureate. In 94, Sulpicius Maximus won a poetry contest held in honor of Jupiter Capitolinus, but the light of his fame burned too briefly to prevent him from being lost under a pylon two centuries later. His monument was whisked off to the Capitoline Museum, and a replacement for the old gate was erected soon after. It, in turn, gave way to the march of progress in 1921; room had to be made for bigger things than salt merchants' carts. Now there's an enormous gap that would have horrified the city's anc

6th C. tomb epigraph, S. Silvestro in Capite I'm back from my first visit to Rome, where I discovered that one can pack a lot of quality sightseeing into 60 hours if one picks their spots carefully. I also discovered how very, very little I really know and understand about the Roman world, despite all the reading and studying I've done. I was an armchair expert without my armchair. It was very humbling (in a good way). Just breaking the silence for the moment; there is more to come on my weekend in Urbs Aeterna. In the meantime, enjoy this 6th century tomb epigraph (I think? Anyone?) from San Silvestro in Capite . ETA : As Judith mentions in the comments, she wrote about San Silvestro in Capite just a few weeks ago.

Two rooms in the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill will be reopened to the public later this year, acccording to this tourism story . Of course, if you talk to the right people, you can get in right now . The Italy Magazine piece says the site is being "reopened" for the first time since 1961, but if that's accurate, the first opening must have been a very limited engagement. Time Magazine's online archive includes a 1961 story on the discovery and original excavations .

Artifacts from the recent find of Maxentius's treasure hoard went on display today at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

This is premiering on the History Channel next weekend. So much for the mostly-benign Christian metamorphoses of Late Antiquity, huh?

Ruins of Palmyra Photo courtesy of Hovic . Palmyra had never really wanted or needed to be part of anyone's empire. Located on the largest oasis in the Syrian desert, it had been inhabited by Bedouins and similar nomadic peoples since before 1000 B.C.. Its position near the western end of the Silk Road provided access to all the best trade routes to Persia, India and the Far East, and local families did a brisk business in outfitting caravans for the perilous journey. This specialization came in handy in 41 B.C., when Mark Antony, learning of Palmyra's wealth, tried to raid the city. The Palmyrans got wind of his approach, and easily spirited their treasure across the Euphrates until the danger passed. Palmyra improbably persisted as an quasi-independent state on the border between two mutually antagonistic superpowers. But the city's situation remained precarious. In A.D. 18, an envoy from the Emperor Tiberius arrived, probably to make the usual imperial offe

Mary Beard has some additional observations on the Chester amphitheatre buzz, and I found myself nodding to this excerpt: "But my main argument was that historians and archaeologists, as well as journalists, have wildly over-estimated the importance of gladiators in the ancient world. It’s us who is obsessed with the arena, not (so much) the Romans...The inhabitants of Roman Chester would have been lucky to see a handful of B team gladiators twice a year. The more interesting question for us is what went on in these amphitheatres on the other 360 or so days." I think this rings true, but on the other hand, we wouldn't make such a big deal of the Super Bowl (the annual American football championship game) if it were held on a monthly basis. Infrequency doesn't translate to a lack of interest, and it may have had the exact opposite effect, ensuring that the place was packed to the rafters with excited fans when those poor B-team gladiators filed in. ETA : Tony Keen co

By the final years of Justinian's reign, the heady era of Belisarius's western reconquests was only a memory. In 542, a devastating plague—very likely an earlier strain of Y. pestis , the bacterium behind the medieval Black Death—swept through the East and killed a third or more of the population. It took the economic and military stuffing out of the Empire, forcing it to buy an expensive peace from the Sassanid king Khosro I in 545 and leaving it unable to check the ravages of the nascent Slavs and Bulgars in the Balkans. Constantinople was on the defensive. The emperor himself hadn't been the same since his wife Theodora had died, probably from ovarian cancer, in 548. Without the counsel and support of the woman who had convinced him not to abandon his throne during the Nika riots in 532, Justinian showed little interest in governing his shrinking, increasingly destitute empire. He instead preoccupied himself with the theological disputes for which Byzantium would be

Late Rome's great nemesis, Sassanian Persia, tends to get overlooked in favor of its Achaemenid and Parthian predecessors. The Asia Society is giving them some time in the spotlight with their new exhibit, "Glass, Gilding, and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224–642)." The New York Sun has a review up. The New York Times review is better but, of course, requires a login. ETA : Additional coverage with pretty pictures over at PhDiva .

The Roman amphitheatre in Deva (modern Chester, England), constructed in the late first century, was the largest amphitheatre (that we know of) in Roman Britain. It may have been used for as little as 20 years before being converted into a municipal trash pit, then enjoyed a renovation and brief period of reuse in the late third century. Local amateur historians have entertained the idea that the site hosted gladiatorial combat, but this morning, the Telegraph reports official confirmation of that purpose from the archaeological team that's been digging up the site for the past couple of years. I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the site last summer, and I took the photos below. Please compare them with the artist's conception in the Telegraph story; it's a good study in the kind of imagination one needs to use when visiting some of these sites.

In 1955, Homer Dubs, a professor of Chinese at Oxford, posited the idea that in 36 BC, Han China installed about 145 Roman mercenaries—recaptured remnants of the forces defeated by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae in 53—at the frontier town of Liqian, in what is today China's Gansu province. For years, the only "evidence" for Dubs's theory was the continued persistence of oddly Western features in the local population. Then, in 2003, a 5' 11" male skeleton with straight teeth and long lower limbs—i.e., not a local—was found in a 2,000 year old tomb near ancient Liqian. Fox News reports that scientists have now taken blood samples from 93 people in an attempt to substantiate their Roman genetic heritage. Professor Xie Xiaodong, a Lanzhou University geneticist, was appropriately cautious about his description of the exercise when he was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Even if they are descendants of the Roman Empire, it doesn't mean they

Last weekend's Wall Street Journal had a piece about the recent truce between Rome's subway operator, Roma Metropolitane SpA, and the city's preservation office. Metro wants to provide subway service to the tourist-clogged old city, but in most of that district, you can't plant a sapling without hitting a piece of antiquity with your spade. In the past, city planners got things done by trying to hide projects from the archaeological community until it was too late to do anything about it. In the most egregious example, under Mussolini, builders of a canal alongside the ruins of the Forum trucked out their excavated dirt, artifacts and all, without pausing to examine any of it. Then they clipped a corner off the foundation of the Colosseum. Work continued uninterrupted. When city preservationists asserted themselves in the 1950s, the result was gridlock. When construction of the Metro A line began in 1962, it ran smack into the Baths of Diocletian (much of which we

Maxentius, the Roman usurper primarily known for his defeat at the hands of Constantine (another usurper) in 312, hid his treasure on the Palatine Hill before heading off to the fateful battle at the Milvian Bridge. This week, archaeologists announced that they've found it . *** Lars Brownworth's lectures on Byzantine history are free on iTunes, and are apparently quite good. So far, I've only listened to the introductory episode, but he has an appealing mixture of familiarity, enthusiasm and humility which I appreciate. *** The thousand-year-old library of the Abbey of St. Gall is being digitized and put online for free . I don't have the expertise to appreciate the full significance of the material available there, but the fact that it's now available for blokes like me to closely examine—no cotton gloves, academic credentials or letters of recommendation necessary—is really exciting. (Lifted from Gypsy Scholar )