If you want to watch for deep characterization, actors’ range, or a realistic plot, I suggest avoiding this film.  It almost virtually remakes the original 1981 version which, even when it came out nearly 30 years ago, was the kind of denigrating ’sword-and-sandal’ epic that makes everyone cringe.

However, I have to say that I sincerely enjoyed watching it (and not simply because Sam Worthington would be worth watching under any circumstances).  The film added a gritty element to what was previously terribly camp.  The ongoing jokes about Harry Hamlin’s hair in the 1981 version are a perfect example.  In the latest version, people get dirty, people die, and people get stuck in gigantic scorpions full of – naturally – green goo.  And it’s hysterical. 

This is one of those good bad movies that audiences will enjoy watching.  It’s fun, partly because the story itself is a bit of a romp, but also because the film tries to take itself seriously.  Ignore the drama, enjoy the game!

Charlotte Higgins includes her own joyous review on her blog with The Guardian here.

Congratulations to Ms. Higgins.  I hope to follow her example and add something of my own to public consumption of Classical history.

Among the various questions I was asked, one stands out because it is a question that I never thought to ask when I was an undergraduate student myself and only recently became aware of.  There are important implications for historical study when the necessary primary sources are not only unavailable but, in all likelihood, no longer exist at all.

This student was looking for a primary source similar in scope and detail to Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars which ends with the death of the third Flavian emperor, Domitian in AD 98.  The most obvious extension of Suetonius’ work is of course the Historia Augusta that chronicles the reign of Hadrian beginning in AD 117 to Carinus in AD 284.  Written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine (Diocletian reigned from AD 284 until his abdication in AD 305; Constantine reigned from AD 306-337 and was sole emperor from AD 324 until his death), the authors of this document claim to be picking up precisely where Suetonius left off.  This of course suggests that the reigns of the Five Good Emperors and that of Trajan were once included in this compilation as well and have since disappeared.

More recently, scholars have disputed this claim, stating that there is nothing to suggest that the Historia Augusta ever contained the histories of emperors prior to Hadrian.  So where did we get the information on these emperors?  And what can be said about the information from the Historia Augusta on the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus?

At this stage, I will address the latter question.  The Historia Augusta is not a primary source for the second half of the second century AD.  It was written nearly one hundred years later by an author, or multiple authors (that debate still rages as well), who could not have seen the events they described unless they lived well into their hundreds (as unlikely 2,000 years ago as it is today).  Therefore it is a wonderful primary source for the fourth century AD but must be taken with grains of salt regarding the second.  It is also largely agreed that the information in the opening pages of the HA are much more reasonably objective than the grossly unsubstantiated details in the later chapters, where chronologies and events vary sometimes by decades.

In situations like this – and, in fact, it is good academic practice to take every primary source at less than face value – we can compare and contrast the primary sources that are available to paint a fuller picture of events at a given point in time.  What the HA cannot offer with reasonable accuracy, we can sometimes find in other sources, such as the letters of Simon bar Kochba written during the Second Jewish Rebellion in AD 132-136, the report on aqueducts written by Rome’s Water Commissioner, Sextus Julius Frontinus, in the first century AD, and even other historical treatises that may be Roman but do not represent eye-witness accounts or living testaments to the nature of the world in the second century AD.

One must look at historical evidence with the same discerning eye that a jury considers witness statements during a trial.  Are they trustworthy accounts?  Is there something about one account that makes more or less sense than another?  Are there details that do not quite fit that you feel would benefit from further study to confirm or deny?  Remember, what you might consider an outlandish description may in fact have more grounding in truth that you would expect.

Never assume, always corroborate.  Happy hunting!

The wall once ran right across northern England for 117km and cut off the Caledonian ‘barbarians’ from the romanized civilians to the south.  Hadrian built it as part of his campaign of peace and stabilitythroughout the empire (he also had another border built along the farthest reaches of Roman Africa.   Following the massive expansion efforts under Trajan (including the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 and the campaigns against the Parthians beginning in AD 107), Hadrian was faced with a formidable task when he came to power following Trajan’s death in AD 117:  how to consolidate power and stabilize the Roman empire when it had been overstretched for far too long.  Among his various solutions – some successful, some not – were the construction of the wall in Britain and the huge pallisade across North Africa.

Among the benefits of such an undertaking, the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain kept some potentially rebellious soldiers occupied with other tasks.  The wall took years to build as legionaries dug the foundation from the cold, wet clay-mud of northern England and built the forts and milecastles to maintain security at the Empire’s northern border.

The Wall is a rather surprising thing to see, particularly when you only realise after the fact that you have indeed seen it.  During one train trip to Edinburgh, the train I was on passed by a rural neighbourhood near the east coast and there, nestled in a little valley between the train tracks and a farm house, was a small pile of cut stone.  Nothing so spectacular as some of the taller sections and certainly less impressive than the restored section of the wall, this little bit of Hadrian’s political power was enough to catch in my throat all the history that it stood for, and still does stand for.

Also from The Guardian, here is a cute little video of the lighting of the wall this weekend.  THe music may be a bit schmalzy, but it’s a lovely event none-the-less.

The second of the two gold coins is believed, by experts at the British Museum, to be a forgery so this coin is rightly considered to be a unique addition on loan to the collections.

Brutus would likely have minted these gold and silver denarii in 43 or 42 BC to pay his soldiers.  It is very unusual for a coin to bear the likeness of a living person, something that Susan Headley from About.com sees as counter-intuitive to Brutus’ declaration that he was restoring the Republic by assassinating a tyrant.  In addition, the coin is also stamped with the name of the moneyer who had them made – L. Plaetorius Cestianus – and the inscription EID MAR (for Eidibus Martiis, or Ides of March) flanks a freedman’s cap.  The symbolism is clear:  Brutus wanted his soldiers to know that the Ides of March brought about the freedom of the Republic from tyranny, and that he was the instrument of that liberation.

However, Brutus was unsuccessful in his bid to make his name as a saviour.  He and his fellow conspirators were tracked across the known world by Marc Antony and Octavian Caesar and defeated at Philippi only a few years after the assassination.  Brutus committed suicide rather than be captured by Antony.

Sir Kenneth Dover, who has died aged 89, was a towering figure in the study of ancient Greek language, literature and thought. Very few could approach the range and quality of his scholarship, especially his synthesis of philological, historical and cultural acumen. His name became known to a wider public partly for his groundbreaking 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality, and partly for the publication of his controversial autobiography, Marginal Comment, in 1994.

Greek Homosexuality treated the topic with unprecedented openness and nuanced definition. The work drew together the evidence of literature (not least a prosecution speech in a sensational Athenian court case); visual art (Dover inspected hundreds of sexually explicit vase-paintings, often in the basements of museums); and history, mythology and philosophy. The result was a compelling picture of the complex web of sexual and social practices that constituted the phenomena now grouped together under the label of Greek homosexuality.

The book proved a turning-point in the modern study of ancient sexual cultures, leading to the growth of this field in the 1980s (and not just among specialists – Michel Foucault was among those influenced by it). Later in life, Dover was sometimes impatient that the subject had become an academic industry and that Greek Homosexuality had become the best known of his works, partly occluding what he felt to be his own central achievement as a historian of the Greek language. But the book is deservedly admired for harnessing scholarly sophistication to a shrewd and broad-minded historical imagination. If parts of Dover’s argument have been challenged in relation to the kind of weight given to different sorts of evidence, the book remains an indispensable resource.

Dover was born in London and educated at St Paul’s school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics. He showed an early fascination for the varieties and intricacies of language, going so far as to teach himself the grammar of some Pacific languages as an adolescent. A capacity for close, subtle investigation of what linguistic usage can reveal about the fabric of human experience was to remain his hallmark, but he distanced himself from theoretical linguistics (as he put it, “my attempts to read Chomsky are enfeebled by the rapid onset of boredom”).

His undergraduate studies were suspended for war service in the Western Desert and Italy, bringing him into contact with working-class soldiers whose unpretentious attitudes made a lasting impact, he maintained, on his conception of life even in Greek antiquity. He returned to Oxford in 1945 to continue an academic trajectory illuminated by a succession of prizes and scholarships. In 1948 he began doctoral study under the great historian Arnaldo Momigliano (who later said there was nothing he could teach Dover), but this was overtaken by appointment to a fellowship of Balliol in the same year.

In the early 1950s, he began to specialise in Greek comic drama, historiography and oratory, three areas in which he was to become a world authority. When he left Balliol in 1955 for the chair of Greek at St Andrews, it was with the general expectation that he would succeed Eric Dodds (author of The Greeks and the Irrational) to the Regius chair in Oxford; but when that opportunity was presented in 1960, family considerations led him to decline it. He remained at St Andrews until 1976 (and was subsequently chancellor from 1981 to 2005). During his two decades as professor there he became the finest Hellenist of his generation in Britain and the author of a succession of books, including commentaries on Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds and on parts of Thucydides’s History.

Always a polished stylist and, in his prime, an assured lecturer, Dover was capable of adapting his expertise for very different audiences, even if a 1980 BBC television series on the Greeks was blighted by maladroit directing. The Greeks, a book commissioned in connection with the series, distils many of his guiding ideas for students and general readers, while Greek Word Order (1960) is an exhibition of formidably meticulous analysis on a subject so improbably specialised to some eyes that its title has sometimes been “corrected” to Greek World Order.

Highly characteristic of Dover’s methods and mentality was Greek Popular Morality (1974), an attempt to reconstruct the value system of 4th-century BC Athens from the various argumentative strategies used by orators in the city’s courts and political assembly. This work brought out his concern to try to understand the Greeks in realistic rather than idealised terms. His complementary suspicion of abstractions engendered an impatience with philosophical aspirations (not least Plato’s) which was one of his few intellectual weaknesses.

Dover became president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1976, was knighted the following year, and in 1978 published Greek Homosexuality, subsequently translated into several languages. The later years of Dover’s career included two volumes of collected papers; a commentary on Aristophanes’s The Frogs; and The Evolution of Greek Prose Style (1997), a difficult but searching essay on historical stylistics. Dover’s presidency of the British Academy (1978-81) was marked by contention over Anthony Blunt’s fellowship after Blunt’s exposure as a Soviet spy. While privately favouring Blunt’s expulsion, Dover felt obliged, in the interests of the Academy’s unity, to maintain public even-handedness, a policy which made him the target of animosity from opposing camps. He was more trenchant in declaring his own convictions when, at Oxford in 1985, he lent open support for the opposition to a proposed honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher.

The same year brought to a head a protracted problem in Corpus over the unstable conduct of Trevor Aston, a history fellow whose disputes with the college led Dover to wonder, as he expressed it in his autobiography, “how to kill him without getting into trouble”. When Aston did kill himself, Dover felt immense relief, which he described with ruthless honesty in Marginal Comment. This frankness, which soured his relations with certain Corpus fellows, shocked some people, as did the book’s occasional passages of personal sexual detail. But Dover had taken a principled decision to write an autobiography in the confessional mode, one of the oldest traditions of the genre. The furore over certain aspects of Marginal Comment obscured its attempt to explore the motivations and passions that had shaped a life of academic inquiry at the highest level.

The value of Dover’s remarkable body of work lies not just in its consummate linguistic and historical adeptness, but in its fusion of these qualities with an insight that never ceased to find the whole gamut of human behaviour worthy of attention. To a degree extremely rare among top-rank academics, Dover was interested in all dimensions of life – from the sounds of people’s voices to the largest ideas which inform their actions in the world. He was exemplary not for his pursuit of a method or ideology (he was scrupulously undidactic) but for the finesse with which he displayed how the best historical thinking can fuse technical excellence with deeply reflective understanding. His death marks the end of an era in classical scholarship.

His wife Audrey, whom he married in 1947, died last year. He is survived by their children Alan and Catherine.

• Kenneth James Dover, academic, born 11 March 1920; died 7 March 2010

• This article was amended on 9 March 2010. The original stated that Audrey Dover died earlier this year. This has been corrected.

No matter how skillful these translations, Virgil’s Latin suffers far more in translation than does Homeric Greek. It’s worth learning Latin just to read the “Aeneid.”

Clearly there are some people who enjoyed translating the mightily convoluted 4th Eclogue more than my high school latin class who condemned the technicolour sheep for their very presence in our busy lives.

Not to condemn the value of learning Latin, of course.  Yes, to read the Aeneid, you must have some sincere appreciation for the beauty of the language Virgil uses throughout his poetic epic.  But you need that same appreciation to recognize Caesar’s wit and political prowess, to sympathize with Catullus’ sparrow, and to understand what a conceited wretch Cicero really was.  To know the people, you must know the language so that you can know how they thought about the world they lived in.  It’s as simple as that.

“The extensive hoard was unearthed at Bishop’s Wood, near Ross-on-Wye, just across the Herefordshire border and within the surroundings of the Forest of Dean. Several other, smaller finds, of similar coins had also been found along this route but none as vast or as interesting as this. It was discovered in a rough walling built against the hillside by workmen who were in the process of repairing a road and who struck an earthenware vessel containing the coins. The accidental strike from a pick broke the jar and scattered its contents in various directions.

Details of the hoard were first published in the 1896 edition of the Numismatic Chronicle, and also in the editorial of the Numismatic Circular in November of that year. In both publications a total of 17,550 coins were listed, although a number had already been lifted and dispersed around the region by the time the coins were rescued. Many of these coins were subsequently given to local museums and the portion now being sold by Baldwin’s (containing 1,661 coins and the restored jar that contained them) has remained in the family of the original landowner since they were found in 1895. Included with the hoard is a reprint of the article from the Numsimatic Chronicle of 1896 and a reprint of ‘Notes on a Great Hoard of Roman Coins found at Bishop’s Wood in 1895’ from the “Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society”, vol. XIX, pp. 399-420, both written by Mary Bagnall-Oakeley. The latter also includes the author’s handwritten annotations and a list, dated March 1898, of the museums and institutions that she was aware had received portions of the hoard.

Following the revolts of the usurpers Carausius and Allectus in Britain in the late third century A.D., it is likely that the area in which the hoard was found was occupied by Roman soldiers at the time the coins were deposited. Given its size it is assumed that the Bishop’s Wood Hoard formed part of a military treasure, intended as payment for the legions. There were no banks in Roman Britain, so the usual practice was to hoard large quantities of money and deposit it in the ground for safe-keeping. It is therefore a fascinating primary source of information for the mints employed in supplying Britain with coinage.

The contents of the hoard are composed almost entirely of bronze coins of the Constantinian family and we can surmise that it was deposited after A.D. 337 as there are many coins of Constantius II, who had received the title of Augustus in that year, included within it. The Numismatic Chronicle lists its contents as follows:

• Claudius II, Gothicus (1)
• Diocletian (1)
• Maximian (1)
• Helena (315)
• Theodora (271)
• Licinius I (21)
• Licinius II (7)
• Constantine I (2,455)
• Constantinopolis (3,512)
• Urbs Roma (4,214)
• Crispus (4)
• Delmatius (30)
• Constantine II (3,683)
• Constans (450)
• Constantius II (2,201)
• Illegible (384)

The majority of the coins were minted at Lugdunum (Lyons), Treveri (Trier) and Arelate (Arles). Rome and Aquileia are also present, as well as a sprinkling of coins from Siscia, Thessalonica, Heraclea, Constantinople, Nicomedia, Cyzicus and Antioch. The coins are in very good condition, many of them having seen little or no circulation. They have been expertly cleaned and preserved and the coins, together with the reconstructed vessel, are now housed within a custom-made cabinet with a glass lid.

There are many coins of interest included and careful viewing of the lots is recommended. For more information about any of the other lots or to make an appointment to view the hoard please contact Paul Hill on +44 (0)20 7930 9450 or at paul@baldwin.co.uk.”

Most recently – and, as far as I’m aware, not the first time this has been implemented – a group of archaeologist who discovered a huge sealed urn utilized the X-ray machines at the Exeter Airport to determine what was inside it.  The answer was the remains of a Roman, discovered at the site of a Roman fort at St. Andrews Hill in Cullompton.

From the dates of the fort and of the urn, it appears that this site was abandoned shortly after the Romans established more definite control over the south coast of England.  This would have been years after the Boudiccan Revolt of 60-61 AD/CE and well after the sweeping invasions of Aulus Plautius during the reign of Claudius (41-54 AD/CE).  In AD/CE 43, distinguished senator Aulus Plautius landed at Rutupiae with four legions:  the Second Augusta, the Ninth Hispania, the Fourteenth Gemina and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix.  The Ninth Hispania would later march north in 117 AD/CE to support the defeat of an uprising and were never heard from again (although it is argued that they survived their stint in Britain and were thereafter posted to the East, where they were destroyed during the Bar Kochba Revolt in Judaea) .  The Second Augusta was commanded by the future emperor Vespasian, sweeping through the countryside to Wales, where they established their base of operations at Caerleon in the Usk valley.