Theodora Elucubrare

I'm going to justify this by saying that I need something to read while I'm on the bike, but really that's a lie. Anyway, I read "The Sword of Attila," whose tagline is "He feared no man, no god, and no nation - and now Rome itself would know his wrath." And it's pretty much as melodramatic as that makes it seem. Nonetheless, by the end I was really non-ironically into it.

There were problems, yes: I wish he had better female characters. Honoria is a hilariously terrible person in history - she proposes to Attila because her brother imprisoned her!* And so you could and probably should do a lot more with her than having her be defined by sleeping with/wanting to sleep with people. Aetius' wife, while not important to the story historically, could be fleshed out in a novel, and, well, I forget her name. I think it's Priscilla. Also there's a developmentally delayed man who can barely manage one word at a time, and of course he sacrifices himself heroically for our hero.

But Our Hero is pretty damn heroic (it really should have been called "The Story of Aetius' Awesome or something. I am not good at names, but the point is it's less about Attila and more about Aetius.). And likable, or maybe that's just because he's my type, to a tee. I mean, he's 1. fiercely loyal to a doomed cause 2. he's a great man who is surrounded and subordinate to lesser men 3. he's lean and dark-haired. And he goes and learns Hunnic fighting! and one of the Huns has a life-debt to him! In short, Aetius is awesome and makes the book. Attila, tbh, is kind of boring, although there is a pretty awesome scene at the end in which he begs Aetius to kill him after being defeated at Châlons.

Even the prose wasn't too bad. Not great, and with a certain tendency to purple when it was aiming for lyrical, but not awful, the way too many historical novels are.

So as a whole, I'd recommend it, if you're looking for a quick read and like awesome Roman generals.
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*NB: Facts may well be drawn from the Huns Age of Empires II campaign.**
**fun story about that campaign: there's one scenario where you get gold for destroying minor settlements. I always ran out and ended up having to attack Byzantium.*** So Byzantium totally got destroyed by the Huns in my alternate history.
***Attacking Byzantium is a pain. I can see why it didn't fall till 1453.

I saw The Bacchae in the park the other day. It was - well, not great, but it could have been a lot worse. Insert spiel on how I hate modern dress productions here. But the real point is a question on the translator's use of "censor." The line was, I believe, "Do you ask me to censor my speech?" Now, anyone with the slightest bit of classical training knows that a censor is a Roman official whose job is to see if the senators are getting up to anything fishy with Vestal Virgins or not having enough kids and so forth.

So, should a translator of a Greek play of the 5th century BC¹ avoid using words with such blatantly anachronistic origin? I think it's different from using words from German or French or even Latin, since e.g. "god" is just the modern word for theos. But "censor" can be avoided, and it's a specifically Roman office.


¹Ha ha, guys, Rome was founded in 754 BC. Right²
²And even if it was, the likelihood of Euripides paying attention to the local offices of a bunch of barbarians = 0.

Tonight I made rabbit with an ancient Roman recipe from the works of Apicius. While the recipe seems to call for a lot of things with conflicting tastes, they all work out in the end (and in fact, some of them seem to disappear).

There was also honeyed wine; I like it very much, but my parents are not so enthusiastic. It involves a pound of honey and three and a half quarts of wine, and the quantity of wine overwhelms the honey, so it's not too sweet. It also has lots of spices in it - saffron, bay leaf, cinnamon, cumin, and two dates. I think that they would have been more tastable if we had been able to find fresh dates and not dried ones.

In any case, although it was a lot of work - lots of chopping and standing over things and stirring them.




also the rabbit had a tiny cute heart that tasted great.