The Romance of the Romans

The Roman Empire in 117 A.D.

The Romance of the Romans

The Roman Empire took its time to disintegrate and we can argue about exactly when and exactly how, but let’s leave that for another day and place our vote for 476 A.D. , when Romulus, the last Roman Emperor, was overthrown by a Germanic leader, Odoacer.   After some 1500 years, the Roman Empire was no more, but of course that includes the time the Empire was split into east and west.  If you want to only consider the time it was what we think of as the united Roman Empire, then it lasted just over 500 years..

So, Rome is not worth thinking about, right?  Surprise, surprise!!  There are still vestiges of Roman life and Roman culture all around us.

Take the Romance languages for example that all emanated from Latin:  French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan. The widespread of Romance Languages means through the centuries, at least linguistically, Roman influence has stretched, not only around the Mediterranean region, but North and South and Central America, along with parts of Africa!  Wait, I forgot to mention the Philippines.   Yep, don’t forget Spain owned the Philippines for decades.  I met a Filipina/American in Japan and asked her if she spoke Tagalog or Filipino and she said, no. “On our island we spoke only Spanish.”

“Oh yeah?” you say, what about English?  Glad you mentioned that. Linguists say that English, although called a Germanic language, takes 65% of its words from French!  Just one example:  all the words ending in …ion are written the same in French and English, but pronounced differently.  As the French Prime Minister George Clemenceau  (1841-1929) famously said, “English is just badly pronounced French.”

But is there nothing more than language?  Nothing more???? Are you kidding?

We still use the Roman Gods.  Really?  Yep.  In the days of the week.

The Romans copied the Babylonians in naming some of the days of the week after heavenly bodies, which we still use today. 

Monday – Moon Day  (Luna)  

Sunday – Sun Day (Sol invictus)

And the Roman threw in one of their own for Saturday.  Saturn. 

As you know from the phrase, all roads lead to Rome, the Romans built a lot of roads all over the Empire.  Hundreds, if not thousands of them still exist and often are in use today, although you may not realize it.  Some have been paved over.  In all the Romans built over 250,000 miles of roads, with over 50,000 miles of them paved.

Roman Roads in only one small part of Germany

And not just the roads, but so much more.  Go to Segovia and see the huge aqueduct that was in service and still moving water to the city until the early 1970s. Take a look at Hadrian’s Wall in the north of Britain.

Aqueduct in Segovia, Spain

How about place names?  Rome, of course is still Rome, and Londinium we know as London, and look at the very name of Britain, from the Latin, Britannia.!

Parisiorm is now Paris.  In Spain, Segovia is still Segovia.  The list goes on and on.

Let’s not forget the foods and animals the Romans introduced wherever they went.  If you missed it on a previous blog, read through the Romans in Britain and you’ll spot fruits and vegetables galore.

https://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2018/03/a-bit-of-british-history-part-ii-romans.html

Did you know our own sense of the rule of law is based heavily on Roman law?

The rights of personal property.

The validity of contracts.

The right to vote.

The right to pay taxes.

The right to appeal and the legal status of corporations.

An accused person had the right to a defense and was innocent until proven guilty.

Here’s something dear to your hearts:  Wine!  Look along the Rhine and Mosel valleys in Germany, the notable vineyards in France (Bordeaux) and Italy and even Spain (Rioja).  I haven’t begun to name them all.  Romans believed wine was essential to life and everyone drank it, even the poor Romans and the slaves.

“There with the wine before you, you will tell of many things.”  Ovid, Roman Poet, 43 B.C. – 17 A.D.  Husbands and wives should remember this!

“The great evil of wine is that it first seizes the feet.  It is a crafty wrestler.” Titus Maccius, Roman playwright (254 -184 B.C.)

Something you might not know about Rome:

The Colosseum was not called the Colosseum when it was built (between 72-80 A.D.), but Amphitheatrium Flavium after the two emperors who build it.  Around 1000 A.D. the word Colosseum came into use, but even then it didn’t mean the building itself, but an enormous statue of possibly Emperor Nero.  The statue has since disappeared.

The city has grown taller.  If you visit some of Rome’s major sights of antiquity, you’ll notice you have to walk down. The Forum and the Pantheon are good examples.

Look around and you’ll soon find, the Roman Empire may have fallen, but many of the buildings, the language, and the Roman ideas live on.

 

Now I think it’s time to drink a little wine and think about that.

Holy $moke by Derek Robinson

Hungry for a book that snaps your eyes open and dares you to put it down?  Here’s a tip!  Holy $moke, by my favorite living writer, Derek Robinson.  Holy $moke is a smorgasbord of spies, intrigue, laugh out loud fun, and indelible and unlikely characters, all driven by a swiftly moving plot.

About time a book came along that is so startlingly original that I forgot about my afternoon nap and my before dinner cocktail.  All done without the clichés of murder, seduction and gunnery.  Wait a sec…no sex, blood, violence and still spellbinding???  Let me give you the whole picture.  My favorite writer doesn’t depend on weepy and psychologically damaged characters either.

Let’s set the stage.  As World War II ebbs toward its ragged conclusion. Allied forces are advancing by fits and starts through Italy. Southern Italy is liberated, but no one is quite sure what’s filling the vacuum. In the north, German forces are putting up a hell of a fight.  In Rome, the fascist government is deposed, leaving a political and commercial void in its wake.  Ordinary Romans try desperately to put food in the mouths of their families and gather together the shards of their war shattered lives. 

Meanwhile, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, the brainy, bellicose founder and leader of the Office of Strategic Services has his OSS agents scouring the city for leftover scraps of intelligence.  He’s not messing around and neither are his underlings, who haven’t produced viable information in ages.  The pressure is on.  The message is clear:  find new veins of intelligence gold, or find yourself banished to some backwater, where you’ll wait out the war filling out forms and filling filing cabinets, while your brain atrophies and your raw fingertips bleed.

Enter Virgilio del Pronto, an out of work writer, recently released from prison and looking to restart his so-so career.  With Rome’s newspapers and magazines in ruins, finding a writing job is damn near impossible. Plus, more than just an empty belly is pressuring him.  There’s Virgilio’s caustic wife, an unpleasant person in the best of times, who never lets him forget he’s unemployed.  “How lucky I was to marry a writer…Instead of a ditch digger who brought home a wage.”  Yes, I often identify with that.

But some things Virgilio has in abundance are acquaintances, all of whom are very aware of his fluid imagination and gift for the written word.  We’d call his approach ‘networking.’  He calls it survival.

Then, out of the blue, with persistence and a truckload of luck, Virgilio strikes gold.  A vein of it.  And it’s just what the American OSS agents need.

Robinson mines history and inserts vivid strands of humor into another of his seamlessly free flowing tales of the improbable. Reminiscent of his Eldorado series (The Eldorado Network, Operation Bamboozle, Artillery of Lies, and Red Rag Blues), Holy $moke leads you through a neatly constructed and mesmerizing sequence of events, all founded on equally improbable truth.  Along the way, he paints a clear picture of life under Allied occupation, while weaving a magnetic tale of Vatican intrigues, including oddities such as the German Ambassador playing tennis with the Japanese Ambassador.  Yes, even after Rome’s liberation, Axis Ambassadors to the papal enclave still played on.

All of this is preposterous, yet in large measure it happened.  You’ll be turning pages and chuckling as Derek Robinson leads you through this romp of a novel!  Pick up your copy early in the day; otherwise you’re going to lose sleep! 

I always read Derek Robinson’s books twice.  Once for enjoyment and again for even more enjoyment!

Check out his web site:  http://www.derekrobinson.info/ or order directly from the author at;   delrobster@gmail.com

Although Holy $moke is self-published, don’t forget to look for his other supremely entertaining books on Amazon.com or Amazon.uk.  There must be twenty, both novels and non-fiction. His series of flying novels, from both World War I and II are the best I’ve ever read.  But, I warn you, all his books are as addictive as potato chips at a cocktail party and while you’re laughing and eagerly flipping pages, you’re also getting sneaky glimpses into real, unvarnished history!

Roaming Rome

Trevi Fountain

One of the pleasures of living in Europe is travel.  I’m not talking about saving for years, planning for years, and finally throwing down a roll of green for a little bit of travel time.

Nope.  Take last weekend’s holidays, for example.  Rome popped into my mind. Grabbed some cheap airline tickets and reservations at a nice hotel.  Cheap tickets?  Sure. Only a two-hour flight.  They could have packed me in a suitcase and I would have been ok for two hours.  Total cost for my Thanksgiving Weekend, including airfare and three nights in a great hotel was about $400.

Fortunately, they did not pack me in a suitcase.  Instead, a kind flight attendant  offered me champagne, with a smile.  I almost mistakenly wrote Stewardess, which would have pissed off every woman who has ever had the slightest grudge against any man, dating back to kindergarten. 

Properly refreshed, I settled back to read the complimentary newspaper.

FCO (Leonardo de Vinci) International Airport is well organized.  Zip zip and you’ve got your bags. Then it’s a short walk to the train station or Metro Line.  Metro is dead simple to use and the cost for a one-way ticket is about $1.65.  But, if you’re going to be in Rome a few days, you can also buy an extended use ticket.

Another European invention is the Hop-On Hop-Off bus, available in most major European cities.  H-O-H-O takes you on a tour of the city and lets you jump off wherever you yearn to see the highlights up close, then jump back on.  With buses running every ten to fifteen minutes, you never have to wait long.  Cost is about $20 for a 24 hour ticket.

Part of Palatine Hill

Rome, you will quickly realize, is a city built on the ruins of a city that was also built on ruins, which was built on….ok, you get it.  From those rare lucid moments in European History Class, you may vaguely remember the ancient Roman civilization lasted for twelve centuries. It's broken down into three periods: Kingdom (753 BC – 509 BC), Republic (509 BC – 27 BC) and the one we know best, Empire (27 BC – 476 AD).  The Empire, of course, is best remembered for all the conquering and all the famous Caesars. (Julius, Augustus, Nero, Caligula, etc).

But, first things first.  Who established Rome?  One answer is the well established myth of Romulus and Remus.  Half god, half human, the brothers were raised by a she-wolf, but later argued on which part of Rome should actually be Rome and Romulus killed Remus, which set the stage for future bloody episodes in Roman history.

Please keep in mind, that what I’m offering here is a glimpse and ONLY a glimpse of Rome.  Hey, I was only there a weekend and according to this guide and that, a particular edifice could have had three or four different ‘famous’ architects over the centuries.  When the names I’ve never heard of spewed like water from the Trevi Fountain (yes, I recognized that one!) I became bewildered and sought quantities of wine.

So, many of the photos are just ‘life in the city’ photos, a peek into what the streets are like.  But, I do have a bit more to offer.

Had Gelato?  Not until you've had it here!!!

Cool sidewalk cafés abound

Parking Roman Style

Many orange trees in the heart of the city

Yes, it's a city of scooters!

Let’s chat about Fontana di Trevi for a sec.  Trevi is at the juncture of three roads (tre vie) and marks the end of one of the major aqueducts that supplied water to the city of Rome.  Legend has it a virgin helped the engineers find pure water about 13 miles from the city. They then built the aqueduct. No history about what happened to the virgin, but I’m guessing she made a good living as a pure water gal, but often lacked for male companionship.  It’s a give and take world.

How about the Colosseum or Coliseum?  Completed in 80 AD, it held 50-80,000 people and was used for entertainment on a grand scale, including reenactments of battles, both land and sea, plus lots of killing sports.  Unlike the Circus Maximus (150,000 people watched chariot racing), the Coliseum didn’t see much killing of Christians, or so I’ve heard.

The Coliseum

Then there’s the Palatine Hill (photos below), the centermost hill of Rome (remember, there are seven), which overlooks the Circus Maximus on one side and the Forum on the other.  This is supposedly the hill where Romulus and Remus founded the city.  Now it’s a vast collection of rubble, the ruins of multitudinous temples to every god imaginable.  I roamed this place for two hours and didn’t see it all.  Finding your way out is part of the frustrating game of “Let’s see the rest of Rome.”

The Arch of Titus commemorating the siege of Jerusalem, 81 AD

Gotta be careful when you drive your chariots on those Roman roads.  One small slip and you could bust your axle.

So much I didn’t see.  I don’t know how many lifetimes it would take to learn about Rome, street to street.  There’s the Vatican, just to name one.  Did you know Vatican City State is it’s own country?  Just 110 acres and with 842 inhabitants, it’s the smallest sovereign state in the world.

Ok. Ok.  Enough.  Time for more wine.  Just a quick question:  If a virgin helped the Romans find pure water, who helped them stomp the first grapes?  I know what you’re thinking, “Who gives a damn, just shut up and pour!”  Salute!