Monday, October 29, 2007

History Blog of the Day

A superb blog- A Don's Life by
Mary Beard 'a wickedly subversive commentator on both the modern and the ancient world. She is a professor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS'

Here's an interview with her about her book, The Roman Triumph.

Some of her posts;
Orientalism . . . or, What's in a name?
10 things you thought you knew about the Romans . . . but didn't
Upstairs at the brothel;
One of the Pompeian places that is sure to feature somewhere in this book is The Brothel. Now that the famous House of the Vettii is closed to the public, it is this that is the tour guides’ hot spot, nicely restored with Danish money a few years ago. On the ground floor, it consists of five little rooms, each with a fitted stone bed – plus a single loo, though no running water.

What makes it 100% certain that it is a brothel rather than (say) a cheap lodging house is the decoration (a lot of more or less unimaginative bits of painted erotica above the doors to the ‘cells’).

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