The Upper German-Raetian Limes covers a length of 550 km and runs between Rheinbrohl on the Rhine and Eining on the Danube, built in stages during the 2nd century. With its forts, fortlets, physical barriers, linked infrastructure and civilian architecture it exhibits an important interchange of human values through the development of Roman military architecture in previously largely undeveloped areas thereby giving an authentic insight into the world of antiquity of the late 1st to the mid-3rd century AD. It was not solely a military bulwark, but also defined economic and cultural limits. Although cultural influences extended across the frontier, it did represent a cultural divide between the Romanised world and the non-Romanised Germanic peoples.
I came across this excellently produced animated illustration of a Roman castra, or fort, today as I was researching fortress layouts. This imagery represents the Roman fort at Templeborough, which, according to Wikipedia, was first built in timber between 43 and 68 AD and later upgraded to stone construction.
It appears to have been home base for a Gallic cohort, Cohors IV Gallorum, during the late 1st or early 2nd centuries. Its use for a cohort would make it a smaller scale fort, presumably less than 6 hectares. I am not personally familiar with the site, so comments and additional information from readers in the know is welcomed.
‘White Queen’ died of plague, claims letter found in National Archives
Researcher says this could explain the unusually austere funeral for Elizabeth Woodville, the grandmother of Henry VIII A 500-year-old letter discovered in the National Archives has revealed that the “White Queen” Elizabeth Woodville, the grandmother of Henry VIII, may have died of the plague.
The great split between science and philosophy must be repaired. Only then can we answer the urgent, fundamental problems By Nicholas Maxwell Read at Aeon
Go beyond Earth and deeper into the solar system, past the craggy terrain of Mars and the shapeshifting storm of Jupiter, through the delicate rings of Saturn, beyond the silky clouds of Uranus and Neptune, and you will find a mysterious zone of small, icy objects.
This video by Data Visualisation Designer Pedro M. Cruze shows an animated view of the rise and fall of rival maritime Empires during the 19th and 20th centuries. The virus like expansions and contractions are, perhaps, appropriate for an age of rampant colonialism. One concern, however, is where are the great land powers? Shouldn’t China, Germany, and Russia be represented as well? At least Japan represented a significant maritime empire during the period between the Russo-Japanese war and the Second World War.
Monteverdi’s 1642 Venetian Opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea or The Coronation of Poppea. Stellar early Modern music, this Opera tells the story of the ascension of Nero’s beloved concubine Poppea Sabina to the role of Augusta at the expense of his first wife the Empress Octavia. The romanticly focused opera apparently doesn’t include Nero’s eventual ‘accidental’ murder of his new empress by a later repented kick to her pregnant womb, nor he posthumous apotheosis to divinity by his decree.
While it may seem obvious to many in the contemporary world that human history is a story of progressive and cumulative change, moving civilization and its citizens towards ever greater material, technological, and social advancement, such ideas are rather uncommon in the history of history. To modern social theorists, growth is everything. Technocrats and economists continually refine their measurements of per capita GDP and capital stockpiles in order to verify that we are, in fact, still growing materially. Such growth, according to theory, will result in the increased well being of individuals and the improvement of quality of life for each. Though scholars and academics often decry the so-called myth of progress, in practical terms it seems to have embedded itself in the socio-political matrix of the current age.
Traditionally, however, such linear and progressive views of history were unusual or even aberrant. Ancient myths often saw human history in terms of a decline through successively more brutal and decadent stages. What had once been a Golden Age of gods and god-like-men, was now, for the ancients, a corrupted Age of Iron and bloody warfare. Christian and Hebrew histories, too, saw civilization in terms of a fall, both material and spiritual. And, while Plato, in his Republic, envisioned a Utopia ruled by a philosopher king, even this perfected city-state was subject to decline and a reversion to anarchic type. The moral arc of history was unreliable at best, at worst perverse, and it appeared to bend in the wrong direction.
In the Early Modern Period (c.1500–c.1800), theorists such as Giambattista Vico, writing in his 1725 study of political philosophy, the New Science, could still see, in the rise and fall of civilizations, a cyclical and recursive process. Even more recently, public figures such as Steve Bannon have notably adhered to theories of cyclical history, such as the so called 4th Turning, which hypothesizes regularly predictable crises appearing in world history.
In light of this background, then, perhaps 19th and 20th century positivism may itself seem the deviation rather than the rule. But if it is the exception, then it is one that has ensconced itself within the societal control room, and Oz-like, has had its hand upon all the levers of politics and commerce for many decades.
The 18th century… saw the greatest flowering of belief in progress, with belief that a benevolent providence had secured for us perfectibility of knowledge and reason. In the 19th century belief in progress continued to flourish, with Comte and Marx equally enamoured of it.”
Simon Blackburn. “Progress,” Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.
In its progressive and political modes, positivism envisions society, properly managed, as susceptible to impelled growth by interventionist policy. Such theories have been linked with paternalistic colonialism, classical liberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism by their critics. They have also provided a concrete framework and systematic approach to governmental concerns by modern technocrats and economists since such positions began to move away from the control of political patrons and into the domain of professional careerists. But the base assumption is that the movement of history is in a positive direction; that happiness, if not goodness, increases; and that things are better, or at least grander, than they once were.
History came to be seen as a single linear progression encompassing every region of the globe. The future came to stand for improvement, rather than degeneration from a previous golden age or simply a product of inevitable cycles of rise and fall.
Lynn Hunt. History: Why It Matters. Polity Press: 2018. 93.
As far as we know, Thucydides is the first historian to take an analytical approach to history, and in the Archaeology in particular, he attempts to provide a progressive account of Greek history. Thucydides purpose is not merely to describe what happened or relate popular stories about events, but to understand the causal reason behind events. Thucydides knew what had happened, he wanted to know why.
The Archaeology is normally considered to be comprised of the next twenty chapters following the first—by some accounts twenty-two—of the first book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In the Jones and Powell’s Oxford critical edition, the standard scholarly version of this work, the Archaeology consists of fewer than 150 lines of Greek text. The text is so named, not because it deals with archaeology in the modern sense of the word, but rather because it is an account, a logia, of ‘the earliest events’ (archaia) (Hornblower, A Commentary On Thucydides, 1991:3).
The purpose of the Archaeology is to defend Thucydides’ initial supposition that the war was the greatest (megista) of any such events up until that time, and that it was necessarily greater due to the relative weakness of the Hellenes and their states in prior eras.
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it…. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world—I had almost said mankind. Thucydides: I.1.1-2
Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides. Robert Strassler editor. Free Press: 2008. 3.
In order to demonstrate this, Thucydides provides the reader with a broad overview of the development of Greek power from the earliest times known to him: through the Minoan period, the Trojan war as related by Homer, and finally down to his own present, the 5th Century BC.
To show that this war was the greatest conflict ever engaged, Thucydides needed to illustrate how an expansion of power and organization could build up a civilization out of the rough building blocks of brigandage and raw subsistence. Thucydides invents the idea of progress in order to justify his history. What Thucydides constructs with this new model of thinking is the history of a Greece, and especially an Athens, that possesses an ever widening circle of influence and power. From this it must follow that only in his own time were the Greek powers able to undertake such an all-encompassing endeavor as the Peloponnesian war, since in prior ages they lacked both the political unity and the resources to do so.
So powerful is Thucydides’ belief in his thesis that he is willing to directly challenge received tradition, even when that tradition is the semi-sacred Homeric account of the Trojan War. Thucydides represents the powers of Mycenaean antiquity in their invasion of Illium, not as a massive overweening power gone abroad to project its power, but as a pathetic ragtag force of would be pirates, barely able to sustain itself in the field.
So that if we strike the average of the largest and smallest ships, the number of those who sailed will appear inconsiderable, representing as they did, the whole force of Hellas. And this was due not so much to scarcity of men as of money. Difficulty of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of the war. Even on the victory they obtained on their arrival… there is no indication of their whole force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation of the Cheronese [a nearby peninsula] and to piracy for want of supplies. Thucydides: I.1.10,5 ff.
Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides. Robert Strassler editor. Free Press: 2008. 9.
This great new modern power of Athens, now active as an empire in Thucydides’ own time, is shown to be possible because of three factors: economic growth leading to surplus resources, the spread of Greek culture and language across the Aegean and onto the Ionian shores of Asia Minor, and the political unification of diverse island and coastal populations under the umbrella of the Delian League.
The Olympias: A modern reconstruction of an ancient Athenian Trireme, workhorse of 5th century navies.
While Sparta, though a land power, leads the Peloponnesian League, all of Athens’ power lies in her ability to project force and the threat of force through her navy, and the revenue which that produces. What the Archaeology’s analysis attempts to demonstrate is that all of this power and growth has been due primarily to sea power, and as such directly favors the Athenian camp. The Archaeology is not merely a statement of historical fact, but rather, since it attributes expansion as belonging to a particular kind of power, namely naval, it is also a kind of political manifesto.
That Athens was eventually defeated does nothing to lessen the impact of Thucydides’ hypothesis, since defeat only happened after Spartan forces themselves had acquired a sophisticated modern navy and could challenge the Athenian empire both on land as well as at sea. For Thucydides, naval power must ultimately be triumphant, since it was the best and swiftest vehicle for the spread of commerce and culture. It was his view that whosoever controlled shipping controlled the ancient Aegean, and who every controlled that controlled the world in which he lived. It was this insight, that the progression from rude exchange and clumsy piracy into expansive trade networks and sophisticated armadas, could be driven by the adoption of new technologies, openness to commerce, and the willingness to risk failure for the sake of expansion, that changed forever how power was viewed by history, historians, and the rulers who read them.
Greece in the 4th century is less well known and was, in many ways, less glamorous than the age of Perikles, opening as it did with the death of Socrates, colored by the fall of Athenian hegemony in the Aegean, and marred by political strife and violence in Athens in the wake of defeat in the Peloponnesian War of the previous century. Moreover, historical sources on the 4th Century Hellenes do not rise to the same level of excellence as that achieved by Thucydides, and the period is noted for a decline in both quantity and quality of literary output, though that same sort of qualitative judgement in antiquity may have in itself lead to the paucity of surviving texts.
For all of that, however, the 4th century features numerous characters and historical turns of great interest: the renewal of Athenian democracy under Thrasybulus; the crushing defeat of the Spartans by the Theban Epaminondas at Leuctra; and of course the legendary campaigns of Alexander the Great in Persia and beyond. Despite its general obscurity, the 4th century offers much of interest to the student or reader in history.
To the curious, some of the following secondary sources may be worth checking out:
Buck, Robert J., Boiotia and the Boiotian League: 423-371 B. C. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. 1994.
Buckler, John. The Theban Hegemony, 371-362 B.C. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1980.
Hanson, Victor Davis. The Soul of Battle. New York: the Free Press. 1999.
Tritle, Lawrence A. ed. The Greek World in the Fourth Century. New York: Routledge. 1997.
For those wanting primary sources, the foremost for following up and completing Thucydides is Xenophon. For Alexander and his campaigns see Arrian as well as Plutarch. While for the bird’s eye view Diodorus Siculus may prove useful and informative, though beware of dating issues.
Arrian, The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, New York: Anchor Books. 2012.
Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica. English & Greek. Vol. 7. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1933.
Plutarch. “Alexander.” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Vols. 1 & 2. New York: The Modern Library. 1992.
Plutarch. ” Pelopidas .” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Vols. 1 & 2. New York: The Modern Library. 1992.
Xenophon. The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika. New York: Anchor Books. 2010.
Gwent Police UK are investigating a number of incidents of Heritage Crime at Caerleon’s Roman remains (‘Heritage Crime, Caerleon’, 9th May 2019), following reports of vandalism at and damage to these ancient monuments.
ROME, ITALY—ANSA reports that a rectangular room decorated with paintings of panthers, centaurs, and a sphinx has been discovered at the Domus Aurea, or Golden House, the emperor Nero’s 150-room palace on Rome’s Palatine Hill.
Toward the end of the Renaissance period, a radical epistemological and metaphysical shift overcame the Western psyche. The advances of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon posed a serious problem for Christian dogma and its dominion over the natural world.
Detail, illustration in the Shahnamah. Printed in India, circa 1600. “The Shahnamah,” (translated as “The Persian Book of Kings”) is the majestic narrative that recounts the history of pre-Islamic Persia, a staggering work of literature first published about 1,000 years ago.
Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a “commonplace book” was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one’s literary wanderings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations.
NORTHUMBERLAND, ENGLAND—Chronicle Live reports that a rectangular stone board for the game Ludus latrunculorum has been uncovered at Vindolanda, the site of a Roman fort located just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.
As a long time avid reader and someone who has always prided himself on vocabulary, the study of ancient history and culture has been a humbling experience. The number of words that I didn’t know I didn’t know is staggering, and since I have begun to read as much in Greek or in Latin as in English, I now have a whole new set of languages to be surprised by.
Dictionaries proliferate.
Nowadays, I find that I am never very far from some sort of dictionary when curiosity and or ignorance strikes. This slows down my reading in terms of words per minute considerably, but also increases comprehension and interest as I let myself be swept along by the history of the words themselves. Philology; no wonder!
So, in acknowledgement of my new slower reading methods, this feature, Note Bene, is going to be about unusual or interesting words that I come across in my reading. It may be about words in other languages or words in English or words that cross over between languages. I cannot promise you will find them interesting, only that I have.
To start with I would like to use the title of this feature itself as subject: Nota Bene, or NB for short. Now, I have seen this quite a lot in academic writing, especially that of the more old fashioned variety, my special interest, but knew only that it meant ‘to note’ before looking it up properly. As some of you likely know, NB is an abbreviation for the Latin, ‘Nota Bene‘, which simply means, in English, to ‘note well,’ or as the Shorter Oxford puts it: “Mark well, observe particularly.”[1] It is also marked as “alien, or not naturalized,” [2] so perhaps more clarity might come from looking at the Latin.
The question that occurs to me is one with regard to nota itself: is it a verb, a noun, or what, exactly? Ending with an a suggests that it is a common 1st declension Latin noun—indeed nota is a Latin noun defined by Lewis & Short as, in its first definition, as “a mark, sign, note“[3]—but the English seems to be being used as if it were an imperative verb, or perhaps, as a participle. At the very least ‘good note’ seems pedantic or artificial compared to ‘(I am) noting well,’ a participle; or ‘(you) note well,’ as if an imperative verb. This supposition on my part would seem to be borne out by the fact that bene is not an adjective for good or well—that is bonus—but is, rather, an adverb.[4]
In Latin, the imperative is one of the three moods of Latin verbs, the other two being subjunctive and indicative. Looking at the Lewis and Short entry for the noun nota I found that its etymological root was from the verb nosco which, given its antique form of GNOSCO, appears itself ro be related to or cognate with the Greek γνῶσις or gnosis: knowing, knowledge.[5]
Following the verb nosco, however, proved to be a red herring when looking for the imperative form. Nosco, it turns out, is a 3rd form conjugation verb, so the imperatives would work out to be either nosce or noscite, neither of which looks much like nota. Another possibility, of course, was always the participle, which can work out to nota in either the feminine or the plural neuter form, but then either the gender or the number of the form is ill-explained. What is needed, it seems, is a 1st conjugation verb, not nosco.[6]
Fortunately I am stubborn enough to keep looking ahead for what must be, I surmise, a verb of the form noto. And sure enough, there it is. Noto itself is derived from nota which in turn had originated in nosco. Noto, the 1st conjugation verb, works out perfectly to nota in the imperative, and means appropriately “to mark, or designate with a mark.” [7] So mark it well, this is the origin of the designation NB or N.B. in antique academic books.
Now, what was it about 1721 that led to this notation being used in English?…
[1] Little, Fowler, and Coulson.”Nota bene.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: On Historical Principles, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press: 1968. [2] Ibid. [3] Charleton Lewis. “nota.” A Latin Dictionary: Lewis and Short, 1st ed. Oxford University Press: 1879; 1993. [4] Ibid., “bene.” [5] Franco Montanari. “γνῶσις.” The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, 1st ed. Brill: 2015. [6] Robert Henle. Latin: Grammar. Layola Press: 1958. [7] Lewis. “noto”.
It seems that I can’t begin to look at anything these days without being terminally distracted and blithely following impeccably dressed albos rodentes down into their labyrinthine warrens. Take the example of today’s unexpected find, Atalanta Fugiens. To make a long story short, I started out looking for ancient and medieval hunting techniques and ended up looking at an antique alchemical text from the early decades of the 17th century.
No really, this is fascinating, but could keep me away from my actual project goals for some time. So, for now, I’m not going to bite. Instead, I will offer up the link and a brief description to you, or, perhaps, to my future self, and leave it at that.
One of the more interesting features of this book, beyond its antiquity and the fact that the Science History Institutehas provided us with such a terrific scan, is its multi media approach to its message. What that message is, exactly, I am unsure, but the text consists of fascinating engravings, songs, poetry and more. It is a pre-modern multimedia extravaganza!
The wind carries him in his belly.
It is also in Latin, so a project for another time, perhaps. I am sure I have seen these engravings before and assume this is a well known tome among medievalists early modernists, but it was news to me and so I share for your enjoyment and our mutual distraction. It is worth a browse! It is downloadable in both large image formats as well as in pdf for reading.
Mundus Patet 
