I tried to log back into the HJ site just now. Problem is my email address has changed, although my wife's laptop, where I am, obediently remembers all the old coordinates. I have tried to start a new account there with the new email but my old handle and password. So far I haven't had the go-ahead email, but it's only half an hour.
Over there, my old friend oilrag is rabbiting away. Has anyone driven anywhere over easter, he asks.
Well, I took a stroppy granddaughter to the Roman Villa at Bignor this afternoon, just down the road, because there wasn't room for her in the other carload of nippers. It's a very fine site. Of course there's nothing left of it except some foundations and also some very big and very fine mosaic floors, some over hypocaust central heating flues. The site was discovered when someone's plough graunched into one of them, after many centuries of use as pasture.
But why does the face said to be that of Venus have a sort of dark halo? Is it really Venus or really a woman? Third century AD, so could be some Christian stuff there along with Ganymede, dolphins and gladiators. Very beautiful, low key and low pressure, not expensive. Nice place indeed.
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Fishbourne is a little better with better Mosaics. More expensive and more pressure.
Dont forget, the Romans in the UK were christian long before christianity was accepted as the defacto religion by the roman empire. Indeed the early romano british ( and bignore was romano british very few villas were owned by romans here) were the forebears of mono worship - christian worship - in the roman empire. The rest of the empire was polytheistic.
Last edited by: Zero on Mon 5 Apr 10 at 18:07
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Armel,
At t'other end of the country, Hadrian's Wall is worth a look, or more particularly, the forts along it.
I'm not a great one for antiquities, so it must be good if it holds my interest.
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Saint Albans is free! At least it was last time I was there, you only had to pay to go inside the museum building.
www.roman-sites.com/england/stalbans/stalbans.htm
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Bignor? Are they STILL at the footings stage?
I went there on a primary school trip, decades ago, when they were just finishing the digging. I remember looking at the plans and all the foundations and thinking that it'll look quite nice once they've got it up and finished.
Suppose that's what happens when you employ builders on day-rate....
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Ya should ave took a 'burr burr' with thee Sire, and you may have found some aureus' denarius, or sestertius
as their coinage was called.
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By the time Bignor was built; the gold [and silver] denarius was severely adulterated - one of the most direct causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
You can't pay for enough legions with dodgy denarius. The Eastern Empire based in Constantinople paid in pure metal coins - so lasted another 1000 years.
["Those who won't learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them...." Diluting your currency tends to have bad effects - Mervyn. ]
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Fact is, screwloose, you can't run a very large empire for long without modern communications. If it takes months for the orders to reach the fringes those regions have a natural tendency to go independent. Happened to the Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Turks...
Come to think of it, it isn't that easy even with modern communications. In fact what with all the money whipping round the planet twelve times a second, appearing and disappearing as it does so, they may make everything worse.
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you make your outer regions semi autonimous. All the great empires did it. It all falls apart when some other would be empire builder decides he wants a slice.
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Semi-autonomous eh... that sounds stable and reliable I must say.
100 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad the Muslim empire centred on Iraq stretched from Spain to India. It didn't take all that long for the whole thing to dissolve into its original squabbling fragments, although the Caliphate continued to be claimed for century after century by elements camping in places like Egypt and Turkey.
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AC
The Romans did have state-of-the-art communications.
Compared to the mud-bog tracks that existed pre-conquest - one mile a day for a cart in the winter - a Roman road was as revolutionary as the Internet.
You didn't dare to secede if it meant that a Legion would be despatched with orders to crucify you, your entire family and all your friends and supporters. The Romans were also big on "community punishments."
Rome fell through endemic corruption, money debasement and welfare-ism - rinse and repeat....
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Thanks for this Armel. I didn't know about the dark halo on the "Venus", and as you say it's noticeable. I thought at first it might be an obscure example of a Dark Madonna, but no. However, I did discover that prior to 1939 the then custodian did use to clean the mosaics with milk, and by the fifties they were all black and encrusted. One of those snippets I can't now wait to raise at a dinner party, not that I've ever been to one.
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Roman Villa - Zero
