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.
Tag: romans
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.
Fishbourne Palace
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).