[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

So, I kept fooling around and looked at the usual source, and found lots of other stuff. But this is it, no, really, I mean it this time.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

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[SunkenCiv]

Unreliable witness
by Barry Unsworth
Robert Graves reissues reviewed

In that world of murderous power struggle, no one took him seriously as a rival, no one thought him worth killing. This enabled him to live to the advanced age of 51 before succeeding to the purple, and it was his own character, timorous certainly, but quick-witted and surprisingly firm in emergencies, that enabled him to survive 13 years as emperor and so to become, in the words Graves gives him, the recorder of his own life and times.

He was otherwise qualified too. In his lonely and neglected childhood he took naturally to study, encouraged in this by the historian Livy, who was one of the few to recognise his talents. He became a historian in his own right, and one of astonishing industry - he wrote 20 volumes of Etruscan and a further eight of Carthaginian history, all in Greek, plus an autobiography, a treatise on the Roman alphabet and an essay on dice-playing, to which it seems he was addicted. Not one syllable of all this has survived. All we have is a couple of letters and a speech in the Senate to the Conscript Fathers, urging them to extend Roman citizenship to provincials. (He was interrupted, even heckled, but bore it with patience.)

[Khurkris]

In an unrelated aside...Orvieto is one of my favorites white wines.