Status Updates From Makten och Heligheten * En ...

Speaking of beasts of burden, I was last week listening to the Rolling Stones over at my sister’s house, while assembling May Day baskets for her son to deliver.

May Day!

It seems beasts of burden, whether they be sisters or mothers, smokers or non-smokers, protectors or persons guilty of setting a bad example,

will not live down their reputation for passive civil resistance.

First chapter (listening, not reading, yet I recorded this quote)

“Slaves, whether sold or born into slavery, were by definition degraded to the level of beasts of burden. We do not and cannot know what it was really like to be a Roman slave since most left no trace at all of their interior lives. But everything we do know about slavery at the points in human history tells us this was a condition which…

Psyche/Eros (Cupid) tale arose from Apuleius’s writ oral history.

I am yet reading (listening to) the first chapter on the Romans, slavery, and just now a reference to Apuleius the 2nd century writer Anno Domini (AD) who wrote The Golden Ass, a collection of myths and tales belonging to the oral tradition, and the collection of histories at that time KNOWN about the Greek Pantheon.

I love this book. Learning specific statistics about Romans, population, land area.

A form of the bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestsis, spread by fleas that hopped on small mammals, black rats and human beings. Probably killed millions between 541 and 543.

Barbarian: was a term used to encompass a huge range of people from itinerant nomadic tribes.

The eastern seaboard of Britain had long been a tempting entry point for raiding parties of Picts, Scots, and Germanic tribes known collectively as Anglo-Saxons.

Late in Heraclius' reign all Jews in Byzantium were forcibly converted to Christianity.

Between A.D. 350 and 370 eastern Asia suffered a "megadrought" which remains the worst drought recorded in the last two thousand years.

The official language across the Roman Empire was Latin. Latin competed with Greek for the position of the most useful language in 4th century A.D.

The antique world can be said to have crumbled and the Middle Ages begun on the banks of the river Volga in the year A.D. 370.