Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I have continued to work on the new Mithras pages. Today I have found myself mostly working on PHP scripts. Naturally I want to see if there are any hits on the pages, so I have written a simple statistics script. I will beef it up once it goes live and I have more interest [...]
The story is in Macrobius, Saturnalia, book 2, chapter 4: [31] As he went down from his residence on the Palatine, a seedy-looking Greek used to offer him a complimentary epigram. This the man did on many occasions without success, and Augustus, seeing him about to do it again, wrote a short epigram in Greek [...]
Today is the first day of Saturnalia, the Roman winter festival which lasted from 17-23rd December. In honour of the day, I thought that I would collect what the 5th century writer Macrobius has to say about the date, in book 1 of his book, Saturnalia. I have added additional paragraphing, to make it easier [...]
I have been reading the Saturnalia of Macrobius, that curious store of Latin learning from the very end of the empire. Book 2 contains a collection of witticisms. Here are a few. [ 1] But I am surprised, continued Symmachus, that none of you have said anything of Cicero’s jests, for here, as in everything [...]