Salvete; qui vales?
This week has still been lots of reading and attending classes. My morning class finished with Nero on Friday. From hearing and reading about Nero, I've learned about what kind of legacy people can leave. To the common people of Rome he was great, but it was only the ruling classes that had problems with him. After all a damnatio memoriae or obliteration-of-any-trace-of-you-anywhere was passed and executed by the Senate, well the ones that Nero hadn't executed yet.
Theodore Mommsen's Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is amazing and utterly insane to finally see. These volumes would literally stop a bullet, probably multiple of not too large a caliber to be honest. Right now, I'm looking at part I of volume VI which is only a portion of the inscriptions from Rome. ONLY ROME! This is where I got the idea of doing this project on literacy because Mommsen cataloged thousands and thousands of inscriptions, but these are still a very small percentage of what existed during Roman times due to, you know, that ever present thing called time. Anyways, if the number of inscriptions and instances of public writing was even more common in antiquity than what we can see of it, then there must have been a significant percentage of people that could read it, right?
One of the books I'm reading tracks public writing and social media circles from the time of Cicero through till modern day, and it has been a useful resource for seeing how people have changed the way in which they share information.
Professor Kendall's morning class is more about how high profile individuals, emperors, are remembered while the afternoon class is said to be more about Rome as a whole. I'm not sure; Wednesday we were killing off Brutus and being lectured on the ramifications of reading Caesar's will in public. Was he or was he not a tyrant? That is the question. It's interesting because he left a legacy. Next is how Rome was viewed during the Renaissance...flashback to 10th grade APEuro.
I haven't gotten much into the twitter side of things yet...
I'm really looking forward to how Twitter comes into play for your project. Since I fall victim of posting cryptic tweets for the public without really knowing why, it'd be a nice refresher to be able to understand it and relate it to the outside world and how other people choose to communicate their life experiences.
ReplyDeleteHopefully I'll get into that. There are a few avenues of thought I'm using for my analysis. I know I'm definitely using the idea of memory.
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