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All Things Roman (History)
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Wile E. Coyote


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Dionysius is best known as the inventor of the Anno Domini era, which is used to number the years of both the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar. He used it to identify the several Easters in his Easter table, but did not use it to date any historical event. When he devised his table, Julian calendar years were identified by naming the consuls who held office that year; he himself stated that the "present year" was "the consulship of Probus Junior", which he also stated was 525 years "since the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ". How he arrived at that number is unknown, but there is evidence of the system he applied. He invented a new system of numbering years to replace the Diocletian years that had been used in an old Easter table because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians.[6] It has been suggested that he arranged the numbers so that leap years would be exactly divisible by four, and that his new table would begin one "Victorian cycle" (see below), i.e. 532 years, after his new epoch. The Anno Domini era became dominant in western Europe only after it was used by the Venerable Bede to date the events in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731.

Evidence exists that Dionysius' desire to replace Diocletian years with a calendar based on the incarnation of Christ was to prevent people from believing the imminent end of the world. At the time, some believed that the Second Coming and end of the world would occur 500 years after the birth of Jesus. The current Anno Mundi calendar commenced with the creation of the world based on information in the Greek Septuagint. It was believed that, based on the Anno Mundi calendar, Jesus was born in the year 5500 (or 5500 years after the world was created) with the year 6000 of the Anno Mundi calendar marking the end of the world.[7][8] Anno Mundi 6000 (approximately AD 500) was thus equated with the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.[9]


I reread this and it does lead me to question at what point history became linear, as this is still thinking in cycles.

I had rather lazily assumed that the current chronology was computed by Dionysus adopted by the church, and then adopted by various converted christian kings starting about 9th century. I sort of left it at that.

But that misses out the Second Coming. It's the second coming that actually sets up a new Linear era, where you don't have to put up with the old cycles of both Dark years (sic) and Light.

Maybe these Kings are best understood as the second coming, so need to provide a post facto invented lineage?
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Wile E. Coyote wrote:
Wiley has discovered what he was up to. he can fill those missing 40 years


Amazing!
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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A man named "Dionysius" was the adoptive father of Guy Faux.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Ishmael wrote:
A man named "Dionysius" was the adoptive father of Guy Faux.


Hmm some think that Guy got his Catholic sympathies from his stepdad (false dad?).

St Denis is linked to beheading. He carries his head. This might be linked to Halo


Denis' headless walk has led to his being depicted in art decapitated and dressed as a bishop, holding his own (often mitred) head in his hands.[8] Handling the halo in this circumstance poses a unique challenge for the artist. Some put the halo where the head used to be; others have Saint Denis carrying the halo along with the head. Even more problematic than the halo was the issue of how much of his head Denis should be shown carrying. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, the Abbey of St Denis and the canons of Notre-Dame Cathedral were in dispute over ownership of the saint's head. The Abbey claimed that they had the entire body, whilst the Cathedral claimed to possess the top of his head which, they claimed, had been severed by the executioner's first blow.[16] Thus while most depictions of St Denis show him holding his entire head, in others, the patrons have shown their support for the Cathedral's claim by depicting him carrying just the crown of his skull, as, for example in the mid 13th century window showing the story at Le Mans Cathedral (Bay 111).[17]

A 1317 illustrated manuscript depicting The Life of Saint Denis, once owned by King Philip V of France is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It was given to the king by his chaplain Gilles, the abbot of Saint Denis, having been commissioned by Jean de Pontoise, the previous Abbot of Saint Denis. The manuscript contains seventy-seven miniatures illustrating the life and martyrdom of Saint Denis.[18]


The plot is based on dark cellars below and the head of state above.

Lot of inferences. Interesting though.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Guy Fawkes' real name was John Johnson, the name of my literary agents. I'd like to put a bomb under...
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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This is quite interesting for our Augustus=Jesus

The last Western Roman Emperor is (until another one comes along) Romulus Augustulus. Wiki gives a account of Ortho thinking.


Romulus' father Orestes was a Roman citizen, originally from Pannonia, who had served as a secretary and diplomat for Attila the Hun and later rose through the ranks of the Roman army.[7] The future emperor was named Romulus after his maternal grandfather, a nobleman from Poetovio in Noricum. Many historians have noted the coincidence that the last western emperor bore the names of both Romulus, the legendary founder and first king of Rome, and Augustus, the first emperor.


Wiley also noticed this extraordinary coincidence.

"Well that's a coincidence who would have thought it?" Said Wiley

"It must be a coincidence as it's in Wiki", he added.


Orestes was appointed Magister militum by Julius Nepos in 475. Shortly after his appointment, Orestes launched a rebellion and captured Ravenna, the capital of the Western Roman Empire since 402, on 28 August 475. Nepos fled to Dalmatia, where his uncle had ruled a semi-autonomous state in the 460s.[9] Orestes, however, refused to become emperor, "from some secret motive", said historian Edward Gibbon.[10] Instead, he installed his son on the throne on 31 October 475.[citation needed]


It's a shame that Orestes never shared his reasoning as Romulus was little more than a child.


The empire Augustus ruled was a shadow of its former self and had shrunk significantly over the previous 80 years. Imperial authority had retreated to the Italian borders and parts of southern Gaul: Italia and Gallia Narbonensis, respectively.[11] The Eastern Roman Empire treated its western counterpart as a client state. The Eastern Emperor Leo, who died in 474, had appointed the western emperors Anthemius and Julius Nepos, and Constantinople never recognized the new government. Neither Zeno nor Basiliscus, the two generals fighting for the eastern throne at the time of Romulus' accession, accepted him as ruler.


It was a big job.


As a proxy for his father, Romulus made no decisions and left no monuments, although coins bearing his name were minted in Rome, Milan, Ravenna, and Gaul.[5] Several months after Orestes took power, a coalition of Heruli, Scirian, and Turcilingi mercenaries demanded that he give them a third of the land in Italy.[10] When Orestes refused, the tribes revolted under the leadership of the Scirian chieftain Odoacer. Orestes was captured near Piacenza on 28 August 476 and swiftly executed.[citation needed]


He was minted, but left no monuments. Strange that.


Odoacer advanced on Ravenna, capturing the city and the young emperor after the short and decisive Battle of Ravenna. Romulus was compelled to abdicate the throne on 4 September 476. This act has been cited as the end of the Western Roman Empire, although Romulus' deposition did not cause any significant disruption at the time. Rome had already lost its hegemony over the provinces, Germanic peoples dominated the Roman army, and Germanic generals like Odoacer had long been the real powers behind the throne.[12] Italy would suffer far greater devastation in the next century when Emperor Justinian I reconquered it in the Gothic War.[citation needed]


Fortunately folks carry on as normal.


After the abdication of Romulus, the Roman Senate, on behalf of Odoacer, sent representatives to the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno, whom it asked to formally reunite the two halves of the Empire, with Odoacer as the "protector of the state": "The West, they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own: one monarch sufficed for the world..."[13] Zeno was asked to make Odoacer a patrician, and administrator of Italy in Zeno's name. Zeno pointed out that the Senate should rightfully have first requested that Julius Nepos take the throne once more, but he nonetheless agreed to their requests as a fait accompli. Odoacer, already the de facto ruler of Italy, now ostensibly ruled de jure in Zeno's name.


So what happens to Romulus Augustulus?

The ultimate fate of Romulus is a mystery. The Anonymus Valesianus wrote that Odoacer, "taking pity on his youth" (he was about 16), spared Romulus' life and granted him an annual pension of 6,000 solidi before sending him to live with relatives in Campania.[5][15] Jordanes and Marcellinus Comes say Odoacer exiled Romulus to Campania but do not mention any financial support from the Germanic king.[5][15]

The sources do agree that Romulus took up residence in the Castel dell'Ovo (Lucullan Villa) in Naples, now a castle but originally built as a grand sea-side house by Lucullus in the 1st century BC,[15] fortified by Valentinian III in the mid-5th century. From here, contemporary histories fall silent. In the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon notes that the disciples of Saint Severinus of Noricum were invited by a "Neapolitan lady" to bring his body to the villa in 488; Gibbon conjectures from this that Augustulus "was probably no more." The villa was converted into a monastery before 500 to hold the saint's remains.

Cassiodorus, then a secretary to Theodoric the Great, wrote a letter in 507 to a "Romulus" confirming a pension.[5] Thomas Hodgkin, a translator of Cassiodorus' works, wrote in 1886 that it was "surely possible" the Romulus in the letter was the same person as the last western emperor.[17] The letter would match the description of Odoacer's coup in the Anonymus Valesianus, and Romulus could have been alive in the early sixth century. But Cassiodorus does not supply any details about his correspondent or the size and nature of his pension, and Jordanes, whose history of the period abridges an earlier work by Cassiodorus, makes no mention of a pension


Mysterious eh?
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Wiley has bumped into Poggio.

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (11 February 1380[2] – 30 October 1459), best known simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early humanist. He was responsible for rediscovering and recovering a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated find was De rerum natura, the only surviving work by Lucretius.


Poggio discovers..... De Aquaeductu also known as De Aquis or De Aqueductibus Urbis Romae by the mysterious Sextus Julius Frontinus, a new man so no set dates or biography. I came across Frontinus on the frontier beating up the Ancient Brits.....as Wiki notes it was a useful find


With the recovery of Frontinus' manuscript from the library at Monte Cassino in 1425, effected by the tireless humanist Poggio Bracciolini, details of the construction and maintenance of the Roman aqueduct system became available once more, just as Renaissance Rome began to revive and require a dependable source of pure water.


Very convenient. A happy coincidence.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Classical Scholarship (and the Vatican Library) endorses Poggio wholeheartedly

The humanists dedicated themselves to reviving antiquity--that is, to searching for, copying, and studying the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Poggio Bracciolini, a long-time employee of the church, was the most brilliant of the early fifteenth-century manuscript hunters. He braved what he described as the squalid, neglected libraries of Germany, Switzerland, and England in his quest for new texts.

Poggio's manuscript codex of eight of the orations, Vatican Library lat. 11458. Poggio's Latin colophon to one may be translated "This oration, formerly lost owing to the fault of the times, Poggio restored to the Latin-speaking world and brought it back to Italy, having found it hidden in Gaul, in the woods of Langres, and having written it in memory of Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero] and for the use of the learned."

In the Further reading section of Wiki's article on Poggio

Louis Paret, The annals of Poggio Bracciolini and other forgeries, (Augustin S.A., 1992)

and
Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, (Princeton Un. Press, 1990)
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Mick Harper
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Wiley has bumped into Poggio.

Oh dear, you'll wish you hadn't. When Hatty and I 'bumped into Poggio', a few hours on the old Wiki treadmill told us that his activities were so vast, his forgeries so epic, that the whole fabric of (even quite modern) history began to shudder. We didn't tell each other in so many words -- we are supposed to be fearless exponents of the chips-where-they-lie school -- but we tacitly filed him in the Life's Too Short drawer. That's my recollection anyway, Hatty's might be different.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Thanks guys.

My homework was supposed to be in yesterday, so I will have to crack on with Poggio swiftly.

Meanwhile whilst I am on the frontier, limit etc can you give a view on why the Stanegate is not straight, it wanders all over the show.

When the Military Road, after the Jacobite rebellion, was built in 1760s they made a better job.

Nope, Stanegate is the example of a non straight chaotic Roman road. Yet the dates (at least along some points) are getting pushed towards Trajan and Hadrian. Some folks see it as embryonic Hadrian wall.

Stanegate ain't straight. Even Mr Wik sees a bit of a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanegate

The Stanegate (meaning "stone gate" or "stone road" in Northumbrian dialect [1]), was an important Roman road built in what is now northern England. It linked two forts that guarded important river crossings; Corstopitum (Corbridge) on the Tyne in the east, and situated on Dere Street, and Luguvalium (Carlisle) on the Eden in the west. The Stanegate ran through the natural gap formed by the valleys of the Tyne and Irthing. It predated Hadrian's Wall by several decades; the Wall would later follow a similar route, slightly to the north.

The Stanegate differed from most other Roman roads in that it often followed the easiest gradients, and so tended to weave around, whereas typical Roman roads follow a straight path, even if this sometimes involves having punishing gradients to climb.[2]
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Mick Harper
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I think I've cracked it. Consider east-west trade in northern Europe. Britain gets in the way. You can go round it but either way, to the north or to the south, it's a huge and dangerous detour. So you set up an east-west transit route across the middle of Britain at a suitably narrow point. In today's money, Newcastle to Carlisle. Since this is a trade route involving pack trains and carts and pedlars, plus there's no need to worry about navigation, you don't make it a straight road going uphill and downdale in the usual fashion, but gently circuitous as level as you can.

The only trouble is that bastard Scots are always swooping down and pinching the gear. So you build a wall to protect the road.
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Hatty
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How does Britain 'get in the way'? On the other side, to the west, you just have Ireland which wasn't officially part of the Roman empire and therefore, presumably, not a participant in the larger trade network.
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Mick Harper
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I am dealing with the Megalithic era. What the Romans did by way of improving the wall or exploiting the whole set-up for their own strategic purposes is another matter.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
I think I've cracked it. Consider east-west trade in northern Europe. Britain gets in the way. You can go round it but either way, to the north or to the south, it's a huge and dangerous detour. So you set up an east-west transit route across the middle of Britain at a suitably narrow point. In today's money, Newcastle to Carlisle. Since this is a trade route involving pack trains and carts and pedlars, plus there's no need to worry about navigation, you don't make it a straight road going uphill and downdale in the usual fashion, but gently circuitous as level as you can.

The only trouble is that bastard Scots are always swooping down and pinching the gear. So you build a wall to protect the road.


So it's a civilian road for carts?

Mules can handle inclines....

So military = mules =straight roads whether Roman or not?

Maybe we are looking at Stanegate something they are putting in carts. Maybe (don't laugh Hats) Stone?
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Mick Harper
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So it's a civilian road for carts?

I'm a bit uneasy about this but I think it's fair to say that wheeled transport is available in the late Iron Age for specialised purposes -- as this clearly would be -- but it is useless for Megalithic trade in the general run of things. As it was for most places, most of the time, right up to the Turnpike Age.

Mules can handle inclines....

Actually not. There's a lot of evidence that steps had to be built into steep mule routes -- it's a question of a slipping and a sliding. Ditto manhandling. I don't doubt it can all be managed in extremis but why not make it easy when you can make it easy? Ask a mule and he will tell you he much prefers to go round than over. Not she, they're not great talkers. Something to do with sterility.

So military = mules =straight roads whether Roman or not?

No. I regard straight roads as merely the result of navigational straight lines being trodalot. The Romans then paved a lot.

Maybe we are looking at Stanegate something they are putting in carts. Maybe (don't laugh Hats) Stone?

No, I don't think so. Carts allow for bulk transport -- i.e. grain exports to Gaul in the Iron Age -- but surely not stone, unless for special purposes and I can't see any special purpose going east west across northern Europe. Stone only became economic to transport inland in the Canal Age. I suppose a stane road could apply to a stone road but I don't know if the Stanegate is a stone road (in the sense that a Roman road is).

I don't buy this gate = road anyway unless someone can provide me with a Geordie etyymology. I prefer gate = gate. What about the road being the Gate to Stane (i.e. Ireland or Scandinavia). Unless -- and this would be at the furtherness of my imagining -- Megalithic stones from Dartmoor, Carnac etc were being transported across for erection in the east.
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