Those who would detect his lies and fictions would need many books – Plutarch, The Malice of Herodotus

odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris? nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior. — Catullus It is the prerogative of first-t...

He called us to his bedside. We brought our dictaphones, Batteries refreshed Ready for our Master's Voice. He said, erect these w...

Bearded men and ideologies unpopular with the establishment, eh? In June 363CE Julian, the Emperor of Rome, led a cavalry charge against...

Note strategically placed sticker on shrinkwrap. As a postscript to my piece about The Golden Ass , I recently got hold of Milo Manar...

A meditation. A confession.

( This isn't the intended update, but I kind of need my bookshelf for that one and I'm holiday, so Julian the Apostate is going to...

By Jean de Bosschère, from an early 20th century edition of The Golden Ass. This is the first page of one of the most contradictory and ...

The Theban Legion, early modern style. In the last post I talked a bit about the mythology of the Roman Army, about how its representati...

The Roman Army wasn't immune to the collapse of history. As the Empire entered its final state of narrative disintegration, the army e...

I wonder how long it took for the news to filter through, that things had changed, that the sons of the old emperors had fought and one ha...

St. Jerome in the Wilderness, Bernardino Pinturrichio, c.1475 It's one thing to maintain an active religious belief when society at ...

agnosco veteris vestigia flammae. Last night, before sleeping, I found my old copy of Aeneid IV, the story of Dido and Aeneas, and read...

This grave portrait, from Roman Egypt, haunts me. Today, I want to talk about invisibility.

Mary of Egypt, by José de Ribera, 1641. When you talk about gender, particularly when dealing with issues from ages less sensitive, or w...

St. Anthony and the Centaur , by Francesco Guarino, 1642. I picked this one because the look on Anthony's face cracks me up. As a ...

"Excuse me, Jesus. How do we steer this thing again?" Today, I want to talk about Bible outtakes. And that means angels, demon...

This book? Every bit as awful as you'd expect. Ends with him saying Turkey should join the EU. Draw your own conclusions. Yeah, al...

The Welsh epic, the Mabinogion, includes in its middle section a short romance that begins like this: Macsen Wledig was Emperor of Rome,...

Yes, that's right. This is an icon of Lawrence, smiling, with the barbecue grill that killed him. So the Great Persecution ends, and...