Caecili­us est in Horto

If you study Latin in the UK, there’s a very good chance you will use the Cambridge Latin books from the 1970s. Although they’re forty years old, they’re still in print (and also on the Apple Store), and have a special place in people’s hearts. 

60s slides of Hercu­laneum

When clear­ing out my grand­par­ents’ house a couple of years ago I found seven pack­ets of these 60s tour­ist slides of vari­ous places around the Medi­ter­ranean. I’ve been scan­ning and restor­ing them. First up, these from Hercu­laneum.

Hercu­laneum is a smal­ler coastal town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the volcano. It’s not as well known, but there are some magni­fi­cent villas there in a simil­ar but smal­ler archae­olo­gic­al park to the one you can visit at Pompeii.

Chel­lah, Morocco

Here’s an inter­est­ing place just outside Rabat in Morocco. Chel­lah was a Roman city, which later became a necro­pol­is for the tombs of mara­bouts, wander­ing Sufi holy men, who often take on the role of saints after death. I took these pictures over a decade ago, when digit­al camer­as weren’t as good as today, so apolo­gies for any burnt out high­lights or other optic­al issues- the rest of the photos can be seen here.

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Fish­bourne Palace

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A while back I went to Fish­bourne Palace. In the 1960s engin­eers digging a new drain in a village just outside Chichester discovered some Roman mosa­ics. When they were excav­ated, they turned out to belong to the one of the largest Roman palaces outside Italy. My thing I wrote for Story­board this month is based on it (and yes, the build­ing really does look like a swim­ming pool). No one is one hundred percent sure who it belonged to, the most common guess is Tiberi­us Claudi­us Cogidub­nus, the local chief­tain /​ Roman ally /​ client king, but there are no inscrip­tions or histor­ic­al records either back­ing it up or prov­ing other­wise.

Et tu, pipio?

Last March, I drew these fat pigeons for Moogie Wonderland’s Ides of March event. I did a silhou­ette projec­tion about Juli­us Caesar, and made some fortune telling games based on the Roman prac­tices of divin­ing by watch­ing birds or inspect­ing livers. The birds read “turn me over for your fortune”, and were hung up with strings around the room (you can see that version here).

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