Category: Everything Latin
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Roman fort discovered – complete with wooden spikes
By Leman Altuntaş 23rd February 2023 Archaeologists have discovered wooden defenses surrounding an ancient Roman military base for the first time in Bad Ems, western Germany. The fence, which is topped with sharpened wooden stakes similar to barbed wire, is the type of fortification mentioned in ancient writings, including by Caesar, but no surviving examples had…
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Ovid
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) Ancient Italy — Ovid Banished From RomeExhibited 1838 Oil on canvas © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY This work treats the ancient poet Ovid’s purported exile from Rome, reconstructed here as a panoply of temples, triumphal arches, and statuary from different periods of the city’s…
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Pericles’s Funeral Oration: The Influential Speech of 431 BC
Pericles’s Funeral Oration by Philipp Foltz (1852) In 431 BCE the Athenian statesman Pericles (495 – 429 BC) delivered one of the most influential speeches of all time, his Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The occasion was at the funeral of the first Athenian soldiers to lose their lives in the Peloponnesian War. The speech was recorded by…
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Roman Basilica discovered beneath London
Reported by Jill Lawless – published in The Independent newspaper on the 13th February 2025 Developers have agreed to incorporate the remains into its plans and put them on display Beneath the foundations of a planned 32-story skyscraper in London, archaeologists have unearthed a remarkable vestige of the city’s Roman past: the remains of a…
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A Walk With The Dead
In ancient Rome, especially during the Republic, it was of great importance to show the fame and greatness of one’s ancestors, which served to strengthen the family’s standing in society, and serve as a prompt to its younger members that they must strive for a similar renown. One way of expressing the distinguished ancestral line…
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Erisychthon
Adam Cvijanovic (American citizen, born 1959) Erysichthon, oil on Masonite Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their…
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Antony and Cleopatra
O Cleopatra, I am not distressed to have lost you, for I shall straightaway join you; but I am grieved that a commander as great as I should be found to be inferior to a woman in courage – as recorded by Plutarch, when Antony was told of Cleopatra’s (supposed) death The Roman politician and…
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Sulla’s Proscriptions: Terror and Power in Ancient Rome
Lucius Cornelius Sulla 138 BC-78 BC ‘…the gleam of his gray eyes, which was terribly sharp and powerful, was rendered even more fearful by the complexion of his face. This was covered with coarse blotches of red, interspersed with white. For this reason, they say, his surname was given him because of his complexion, and it…
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Prometheus – The Titan who created Mankind
Prometheus, possibly meaning “forethought” is a god of fire and his adaptability in the face of brutality has become legendary. He is known across the world for defying the Zeus by stealing fire from him and giving it to humanity in the form of technology and civilization. His story inspired the famous Greek play Prometheus Bound. In the time before…
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2,000 year old book about Roman Emperors enters bestseller charts
by Ella Creamer published on Monday 24 February 2025 in The Guardian The Lives of the Caesars, translated from the Latin by Tom Holland, details everything from ancient policy failures to sex scandals, and is a gossipy account of the lives of Roman emperors that has entered the bestseller charts – 2,000 years after it…