Six on Ancient Rome: Why Did 16,000 Romans Die at Kalkriese?; Africa's Roman Ghost City; Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of...
panaritisp
And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
"Faced with the force of the Roman legions, the rebel Arminius handpicked a battlefield in which their strategy was useless. (1:55)"
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"Goodman demonstrates that before revolt broke out in Jerusalem in 66 the position of Jews in the Roman Empire was relatively comfortable, even privileged. They were exempt from celebrating Roman cults, including the cult of the emperor. Caligula’s insane decision to have his statue installed in the Jewish Temple only underscores the general acceptance of Jewish exceptionalism within the empire. Romans took note of the oddities of the Jewish diet, especially the avoidance of pork, and made jokes about cut penises and Jewish credulity. In the teeming capital the large population of Jewish aliens was relatively visible. When Cicero linked Syrians and Jews together as ‘nations born to slavery’ he was doubtless reflecting his experience of the slaves brought back to Rome after Pompey’s conquests. Horace also probably conveyed Italian prejudice about immigrants when he said laughingly of a patent absurdity: ‘Let the Jew Apella believe it, not me.’
Occasional expulsions from the city, as under Tiberius in 19 and Claudius in 49, were restricted in scope. Tiberius had been concerned, at a time of instability after the death of Germanicus, to rid the capital of potentially subversive Jews who practised Egyptian rites, and Claudius was responding to disturbances from a group of Jews associated with a provocateur called Chrestus. Goodman is right to emphasise that this urban rabble-rouser, with a common name, could have had nothing to do with Christ, an obscure figure long since dead. Generally, as Goodman observes, ‘Roman comments about Jews were rarely hostile before the outbreak of war in 66. Far more common were amusement, indifference, acceptance, admiration and emulation.’
In 43 B.C., Mark Antony murdered Cicero, famous for his unparalleled powers of speech, and ushered in the beginnings of the Roman Empire.
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"Marcus Aurelius, the father of the new emperor, was a man who, in the noblest traditions of the Roman people, had combined the attributes of a warrior, a statesman, and a philosopher; Commodus was none of these.
“The influence of a polite age, and the labour of an attentive education,” Gibbon wrote sternly, “had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind, the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding.” Instead, Commodus delighted in trampling on the standards by which the Roman political class had traditionally comported themselves. Most shockingly of all—as everyone who has seen Gladiator will remember—he appeared in the arena. His reward for this spectacular breach of etiquette was the cheers of the plebs and the pursed-lipped horror of the senatorial elite. To fight before the gaze of the stinking masses was regarded by all decent upholders of Roman morality as the most scandalous thing that a citizen could possibly do—but Commodus reveled in it. So it was, as Gibbon put it, that he “attained the summit of vice and infamy.”
Today, when conservatives contemplate a leader who, far from being merely an enthusiast for World Wrestling Entertainment, has long been an active and flamboyant participant in it, they may experience” a similar shudder. Donald Trump, the only president of the United States ever to have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, boasted that he had won “the highest ratings, the highest pay-per-view in the history of wrestling of any kind.” The Battle of the Billionaires—a proxy wrestling match fought in 2007 between Trump and Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE—had culminated in a victorious Trump strapping McMahon to a barber’s chair and shaving him bald. A decade later, Trump made clear just how much of an influence the theatrical violence of WWE had had on his approach to politics when he tweeted a video of himself body-slamming and repeatedly punching McMahon."
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Archaeologists know that Neapolis used to be a major trading hub for the ancient Roman empire—but what did they trade? (3:45)
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