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".