#ciceronian

[parasect]

12, 41!

12) what kind of day is it? It’s a “take a propanolol before work” kinda day unfortunately 🫠 but I’ll make it haha

41) how do you take your coffee? I like my coffee like I like my women: I’m gay.

thank you for the asks 😚

[madqueenalanna]

ciceronian replied to your post: talents include starting popular tv shows several...

Alanna that show ended *this* January that is not “several years”

first of all i can’t count

second i haven’t heard anyone talk about it since season 1

and FOURTH of all

[elucubrare]

What is a book (or a few, if only picking one is hard — I know how it is) that you desperately wish you could unread and experience for the first time again?

I don't have one, actually – I am, in theory, a re-reader, and the pleasures of discovery are different from the pleasures of familiarity. Take Lord of the Rings. I doubt I'd want to come to it now, at twenty-eight, probably having seen the movies, and having read discussions of it all over the internet. Having had it read to me at four meant that I went into it with no preconceived notions of what it was or should be (or, interestingly enough, what literature should be, which allowed Mr. Tolkien to mould much of my literary taste and opinions – for example, I really like history with no real point in the story. I think I've mentioned before the woman at a book club I went to who said she'd expected all the names of the heroes to "matter" to the main narrative, and how I had a very strong negative reaction to that). 

So rereading now is layers of memory of my previous readings and of things I've done or experienced because of it (screaming our Fellowship names as we jumped into the lake at camp, pretending to be riders of Rohan as we rode funfair ponies, how much I cried at various points, phrases or scenes I loved), as well as noticing new things every time.

I think everything I'd want to reread or possibly experience for the first time is similar – I like the personal history pressed within the pages. 

[caecilius-est-pater]

🌻!!!

I’m thinking about this one professor from my (I guess former?) university’s classics department. He teaches Latin and Greek and literally wrote the textbook about Latin grammar. He’s fluent in Latin and Greek, and by fluent I mean he teaches his classes in Latin (much to the chagrin of Latin 1 students) and teaches both Greek and Latin prose composition. He’s also fluent in English, Spanish, German, and who knows what other languages. I only found out about German after four years when I heard him casually discussing it. A man of mystery. When he’s not busy being an actual ancient Roman, he’s running marathons in his spare time, and he’s one of those people with a million stories about crazy things that have happened in his life.

He is ridiculously powerful and I both respect and fear him. I have a joke that the reason me and my friends in classics got 2:1s is because to get a first, you have to defeat him in single combat. The joke being, there is no doubt he would utterly destroy us.

[catilinas]

🌻

felix showed me this poem a few weeks ago and ive been reading it like every day….. it’s so cozy i love it!!! it reminds me of the hellenic bookservice i.e. the best bookshop in the whole world!

[coffeefrenchandhistory]

90, 24

24. Do you have a collection of anything? I actually have a collection of foreign coins! French francs, German Deutschmarks, Japanese Yen, Israeli shekels, stuff like that. My end goal is to have at least one coin or note from every country on Earth. I also want a 1 trillion dollar Zimbabwean dollar because it’s worthless and use it as a bookmark

90. One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do? Proceed to lose my shit, grab my baseball bat, and start whacking these fucking mummies screaming “YA’LL FUCKERS AIN’T TAKING THIS JEW BACK TO EGYPT GODDAMN IT”

[zagreus]

ciceronian replied to your post “i have spent quite a longe time on this web-site and have reach’d the...”

What about the Nimon

show me the nimon’s tumblr account and i’ll SLAM that follow button

[brainstatic]

Re: Rome as "Democracy": while there was voting, there was no secret ballot & citizens basically caucused in blocks called centuries. Each century had 1 vote, citizens were not distributed evenly between them & for most of the republic's history, the aristocracy controlled an outright majority of them. The centuries voted in class order until a simple majority was reached, so most of the time the lower classes never even got to vote. It was like the Electoral College from Hell. Hardly democracy.

Interesting! The main thing I was skeptical of though was Caesar as martyr for the poor. I hear that about a lot of dictators around here.