Studenda Mira

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 )

Prosper of Aquitaine was a contemporary, so I'll let him tell it: ""In the year 406, the Vandals and Alans, having crossed the Rhine, entered Gaul on the day before the kalends of January..." A few years ago, Michael Kulikowski published a paper which made a good argument that the invasion actually began on 12/31/405, but in recognition of the long acknowledged 406 date (and because I wasn't blogging about stuff like this last year), I'll call today the anniversary. Happy Barbarians Day! * For want of an approved term

A mixed lot of Roman coins arrived from an eBay seller today. Six of them are in terrible condition, with only the faintest remnants of a profile or text to suggest that they're Roman at all, but I think the other four have enough text to allow for some kind of identification. VCRC , here I come...

Last week, I went to the opening lecture of a conference on St. Augustine. My history professor, who suggested that my fellow students and I attend, leans over to me at one point, indicates a guy walking towards his seat, and says, "There's Peter Brown ." If you don't know who Peter Brown is, here's a very, very brief explanation: Up until our generation, give or take, the dominant view of the fall of Rome was that barbarian hordes descended upon the place in the 5th century and wiped out the Western empire, burying our civilization in the "Dark Ages" for the next several hundred years. In 1971, Peter Brown put out a book that focused on the Eastern empire, which fared much better during that period. He said, in essence, "yes, there were barbarians, but a lot of really cool and really important stuff (especially stuff involving the infusion of Christianity into society) happened during that time and it deserves to be studied." He referred to t...

As I wind down from my Roman summer (more on that later) and prepare for the first semester of my senior year, I felt it was high time to come up with a better name for this blog. Studendi Miri means, more or less, "These cool things which must be studied." At least, I think it does. Intensive as it was, I only studied Latin for six weeks. If anyone can correct me, please do so.

A team of archaeologists in Rome believe they've found the house where Gaius Octavius--later Caesar Augustus, Rome's first emperor--was born in 63 BC. Flaky story link here ; the big news agencies don't seem to have picked it up yet. ETA 2/23/07 : Original story link is dead. Here, instead, is PhDiva's abstract of some Italian press coverage of the find.

Open up GE and take a trip to Segedunum . I like writing these little placemark blurbs--they force me to be concise, which is one of my weak points. Walking some or all of Hadrian's Wall is on my life's to-do list. What made me think about it this week was a cool travel article in the Atlantic Monthly about doing just that. The tourism industry surrounding the wall's remains is pretty robust, but from what I've read it also seems to be low-key and tasteful. Even the big museum and guest center at Segedunum (visible to the right of the ruins in the link above) seems like a cool place to spend a rainy English afternoon.

I once had a medieval studies professor who required us to watch particular Hollywood movies as fodder for class discussion. We watched stuff like Ben-Hur and The Name of the Rose . He would open the class by asking us what we thought of the movie and would gradually segue into a lecture on the period in which the movie was set. As a teaching tool, it was genius; most people actually did watch the movies, and the resulting discussions--which the professor deftly managed to focus on the relevant historical topics as opposed to the fictional elements of the plot--were animated and interesting. Unfortunately, most other history profs I've met have turned their noses up at period movies when I've asked about them. The common complaints seem to be that the screenplays are rife with inaccuracies (certainly true) and that too many laypeople are content to consume them as documentaries (probably true). Fair enough. For my part, though, I'd rather see Jane or Dick watch King A...

One of things I like to do with Google Earth is look at places like London or Rome and try to make out the path of the old city walls. Often, with the help of a period map, you can see where a modern street shadows the old perimeter. Sometimes, though, you can see the "ghost" of an old building by the outline of the street or by the shape of the modern buildings on that spot. One of the better places to see what I'm talking about is the former site of Pompey's Theatre in Rome. Pompey's Theatre was, among other things, the site of Julius Caesar's assassination . Parts of the interior ruins have been excavated and are visible to the public, but most of the ruins are still underground. If you look a few blocks west of the excavated area, though, you'll see a narrow street (or maybe a pedestrian walkway) and modern buildings that follow the path of the theatre's great, round facade. After you launch GE, take a peek at this photo to get a sense of ...

I suppose I should explain what I'm doing here. I'll try to do it without writing my autobiography. About six years ago, I began studying the history of Ireland, from whence my parents came to the United States. It seemed like a culturally responsible undertaking, and there was a self-discovery angle in there, too. I bought and borrowed a lot of books on the subject. Most of them were monographs from academic presses. I discovered two things early on. The first one seems pretty obvious now. One can't really appreciate the history of Ireland without also studying a lot of the history of the rest of Europe, especially Britain. Properly studying Britain, in turn, requires one to study things like ancient Rome and medieval Europe. The second thing I discovered is that your typical Barnes & Noble doesn't carry very many popular histories of Ireland, and that the ones they do carry seem unnecessarily dry. So, a little more than two years ago, I set a long-term goal...