Fri, 02 Dec 2011

Conspirata

Conspiratais my latest read. And a good read it is, too. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in republican Rome and the transition to empire.

Harris tells the story of Cicero's presidency of the Roman Senate in 63 BC from the point of view of his personal secretary, Tiro.

It's seemingly pretty accurate - haven't run across any really egregious errors (yet). It's fiction, of course, and I'll allow his conjectures, especially when they're as philosophically dead-on as this:

Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.

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On 12/19/2011 16:29:56
Chas Clifton wrote

On 12/19/2011 19:33:33
Dave H wrote

Fixed

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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