rogueclassicism

~ Odi Odioque?

Back when I began rogueclassicism, I regularly linked to stories from various media stories in Africa (especially Nigeria) and marvelled at the state of Classical knowledge there. I stopped, however, because I was increasingly seeing stuff like this, excerpted from the Daily Champion (Lagos):

For fear of torture, and ignominy of being source of their enemies' pleasure of hating, soldiers and civilians alike take their own lives. Rather than surrender to the Romans, after the Second Punic War, Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, decided to commit suicide with a poisonous ring which he always wore. He could not withstand the consequences of the intimidating reciprocal hatred as he expressed in a pungent Latin sentence- "Odi Odioque sum Romanis", meaning "I hate the Romans and am hated by them." He was right. Because, despite his death, the Romans could not condone the existence of Carthage whose material resources had revived with such rapidity as to excite the jealousy of the growing mercantile population of Rome and alarm of its statesmen.

While we might accept the semi-misleading compression of time between Hannibal's death (183/2 B.C.) and the end of the Second Punic War (204 B.C), I am having heckuva time parsing that quotation from Hannibal (perhaps the lack of coffee). Over the past year, there has been a distinct lack of coherence in the Classical references coming out of the Nigerian opinion pages ...

::Saturday, October 23, 2004 7:22:30 AM::

~ Archaic Panionion Found

An rc reader sent this one in (thanks AF!) ... A german archaeologist has discovered the site of the Panionion; the article in Die Zeit is in German.

::Saturday, October 23, 2004 7:02:46 AM::

~ Review from Scholia

Grace M. Ledbetter, Poetics Before Plato: Inspiration and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry

::Saturday, October 23, 2004 6:48:12 AM::

~ AWOTV: On TV Today

5.00 p.m. |DTC| Vesuvius: Deadly Fury
In 79 AD, eruptions from Mount Vesuvius buried the city of Pompeii. A burning wave of gas shot out from the side of Vesuvius killing the inhabitants of neighboring Herculaneum in just four minutes. Archaeologists look to these bodies for historical clues.

11.00 p.m. |HINT|Foot Soldier: The Barbarians
Profile of the savage fighters who surrounded and then conquered ancient Rome, ushering in the Dark Ages. Hosted by Richard Karn.

DTC = Discovery Times Channel

HINT = History International

::Saturday, October 23, 2004 6:44:45 AM::