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Monday, March 26, 2007

Rome

Here's an interesting little article on the HBO series titled "Rome". I was drawn to it since on my recent trip to Seattle I was able to catch a few episodes in the hotel and ironically was thinking pretty much the same thing as this author as I recalled my impressions of the excellent book on Cicero that I read awhile back. The shows were very well done with a little bit of soap opera thrown in and certainly well acted and seemed to take pains to try and be culturally accurrate.

Particularly, I found this passge to ring true to what I read previoulsy.

Finally, there is religion. Rome is saturated with it — there are prayers and oaths, offerings made to deities known and unknown, and religious processions and priestly orders. A pagan world, in other words, is not one in which we control the gods, as trendy leftists suppose, but in which we are ever at risk of offending some god for failure to make the right offering or sacrifice. Moreover, these gods rarely provide a guide to conduct or right behavior — they are inscrutable.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I myself don't see the slightest merit in Russello's review.

Another quote from the review:

"those wishing to reject the West’s Christian heritage should take a hard look at what that world was like before the arrival of Christianity."

To illustrate this Russello discusses in particular the brutal treatment of slaves in Rome.

Of course, the arrival of Christianity did not end slavery or ease its brutality for more than 1200-1800 years, depending on when you want to start counting.

Likewise, torture continued to play a significant role in legal evidence in Christian countries for a long time. Note this brief article on torture.

A more realistic fictional guide to life in the Late Roman Empire is provided by the detective novels of Stephen Saylor.

Anonymous said...

sorry meant Late Roman Republic