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Friday Fun Thread
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I discovered a fascinating thing.

There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome has a Secret Name.

Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting some property in Hawaii?

But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm

Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):

How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.

Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.

Absolutely fascinating.

I took Latin in high school; we watched “I Claudius” on Fridays in class which gave us a flavor to the language we were learning. I really hadn’t kept up with such entertainment, such as HBO’s Rome, until recently reading Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy. What stunned me the most about those books was not just his scholarship on the cultic nature of life in ancient Rome, the historicity of the plot to turn the republic into the empire, or the focus on the daily lives of high and low class slaves. What, impressed me was his ability to weave everything together into a coherent reality, as real as my own daily life.

In that context, I see a Rome which treated its relationship with the gods as transactional and just part of the business of a city. It also now makes sense to me why the early Christians were called atheists by the Romans: they had no rituals other than feasts and sharing, no sacrifices, no negotiations with the gods. They treated other gods as simply not existing, unlike the usual civil courtesy of treating other peoples gods as their business and a relationship that was not to be impinged upon.

I’m going to go read more from that website; linking here for my convenience.

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