orichalcum

It is the 1925th anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius and the burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum and, surprisingly, probably only about 3000 deaths. (As with most natural disasters, it seems like a lot of people were smart enough to flee at the first signs of smoke.) My favorite random tidbit about the eruption of Vesuvius is that Pliny the Elder, the 56-year-old natural scientist, encyclopedist, military hero, and Admiral of the Western Mediterranean Fleet decided to go and rescue his friends and observe the eruption, while his nephew Pliny the Younger, future Imperial friend, governor, and letter-writer, stayed home to do his summer homework. What a Hufflepuff...

Pliny the Elder's Natural History was the dominant source of science and natural knowledge for the entire classical and medieval period, despite such gems as: ( Funny Pliny excerpts: )
People can ignore this, but as a GM/Roman historian I think it's way cool:
mundus patet -- the mundus was a ritual pit which had a sort of vaulted cover on it. Three times a year the Romans removed this cover (August 24, Oct. 5 and November 8) at which time the gates of the underworld were considered to be opened and the manes (spirits of the dead) were free to walk the streets of Rome.

    This is, of course, so getting used in Alea, where it's currently early August. Kinda like Halloween, but thrice-yearly, and with somewhat more negative consequences in the context of a D&D campaign...

Sometimes I feel like my current work involves tracking down the society gossip columns from 2 millennia ago. I'm working on this woman Volumnia Cytheris, said to have had affairs with Mark Antony, Brutus the assassin, and Cornelius Gallus the poet. I've got pretty good contemporary evidence from Cicero's letters that she was, at least, "special friends" with Antony. Gallus is confirmed by his own poetry and relatively contemporary sources, although he uses a pseudonym for her. But all these historians assert her relationship with Brutus, and so I went to track it down. As it turns out, the one source that tells us about the relationship with Brutus dates from a writer of epitomes from 410 CE, one Sextus Aurelius Victor. In other words, this is roughly the equivalent of people today claiming that Queen Elizabeth hooked up with Shakespeare. I mean, they were both famous, right, and they lived in the same city?

Wow...this secondary source is looking worse and worse. To wit: "Cato had committed suicide in 46 B.C. to protest the new political groups who used luxuria, represented by the mime's shameless display in the theater, as a means of propaganda."
And here _I_ had always thought he committed suicide because he'd just been finally and conclusively beaten by Caesar in the Civil Wars and, as he saw it, the Roman Republic was dead. I guess I didn't realize where the man's priorities were.

Sorry to fill up your journals with Roman trivia, but, well, this is what I'm doing with my life for the next year. Expect to hear more. I'll try and keep it interesting.

The Olympics are using the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack as a theme for the wrestling Tragic Story. These people do not look like pirates!