Thursday, March 26, 2009

Notes Taken While Listening To: Roma by Steven Saylor

Notes Taken While Listening To: Roma by Steven Saylor, downloaded from Overdrive.com via dbooks.wplc.info.

Comments: another great job by Saylor (no relation). He follows the founding of Rome. Presents possible beginnings of myths, legends and rituals. Highlights famous Romans and events. Gives great insight into the politics of Rome, political backstabbing and ambitions, family relationships, etc. Neat way of folding the etymology of words and phrases into the story. Shows how, when it comes to politics and war, nothing is new.

Saylor has such a wide history to choose from, it would be interesting to hear how he chose what he did. Someone more motivated would look for interviews or articles. Not me.

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Casual cruelty, spite, class warfare, etc. remains over hundreds of years.
For example: Sending a nephew into slavery to spite a sister and her proposed husband because the proposed husband is a patrician.

The relationship between slave and owner is so wrong. The way owners supercede the child's parents and how the slave's loyalty must be to the owner before loyalty to the parents. The owner's power of life and death is the same as the paterfamilias power over his whole family.

Gerrymandering and screwing with the Citizen rolls (voter rolls) - directly messing with elections. Pandering to the masses vs. "Patrician values" of the wealthy leaders.

One event: The mass poisoning by women against men. One lady did much testing and experimentation. Another used a particularly effective poison by waiting until her husband was screwing her, dipped her finger into the poison and then fingered his ass - an action he demanded. The wife greatly disliked doing the fingering and mentioned in her confession that it caused the guy to have a violent orgasm.

Sulla was awful. As dictator he found a legal way to kill all his enemies and perceived enemies. Names were posted in the forum and each person's head was up for bounty for anyone who could nab him dead or alive. Living people could be tortured. A bounty hunter could break into a house and kill the person in front of his family. The man's wealth was taken by the state and the family left destitute.

Sulla would force couples to divorce and then remarry to others. His cronies would get the women they wanted through Sulla's power. Even couples married for love, for years, and with children would be broken apart and the woman forcibly remarried.

Political shenanigans always going on. Heroes stay popular but , after time, their political enemies come after them and are able to cut them bit by bit.

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