Why is Cato the younger always portrayed in popular culture as a really old man he was younger than Caesar and much younger than Cicero and Pompey yet is frequently portrayed as older than all the above yet he may not have reached 50. In the HBO series Rome the actor playing him is clearly much older than either Pompey, Caesar or Cicero or indeed any other important Roman political figure shown...
Undergraduate Capstone Thesis: Roman politics, literary archetypes and perceptions of Publius Licinius Crassus son of Marcus Crassus the triumvir
Capstone thesis (very slightly revised….I added some full stops, I’m sure any of you who’ve read much of this blog will appreciate the importance of that….): Roman politics, literary archetypes and perceptions of Publius Licinius Crassus son of Marcus Crassus the triumvir So Yeah, this was an essay I submitted for a compulsary unit of my major for my Bachelors degree where...
newsflash: states aren’t people
Read an article a while back that referred to states having “natural life cycles” yes all political institutions have a beginning, middle and end and I’m sure there’s an average length of time for a state to exist but then when dealing with any finite duration there is always a begining, middle and end but this talk of life cycles or natural cycles usually implies some...
Ladies and gentlemen, we got him: Sulla, Sallust and the capture of Jugurtha
A long time ago (in my second post) I talked about/compared the various layers of historical bias in favour of the Roman political figures Marius and Sulla and at one point I mentioned how Sulla’s writing of his own memoirs (even though they haven’t survived) lead to bias in his favour as other ancient writers (whose writings have survived, at least in part) used said memoirs as a...
Marius vs Sulla- The many layers of historical bias
Hello all, I hope my last first post wasn’t too long, confusing, repetitive or just plain bad for you, I should probably clarify what I’m aiming to do with this post, I’m not planning to compare the two men to decide who was better in anyway (at least not directly) or who would have defeated the other in battle, be it hypothetically with both at their prime or if Marius had...
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