Wrangling Reform in the Roman Republic
In 133 B.C., a Roman tribune named Tiberius Gracchus attempted to ram through a law redistributing land for the benefit of poor at the expense of the rich. The process was… contested. There were some exceptionally clever political maneuvers, several murders, and a wide array of skulduggery on both sides. It’s amazing inspiration for an […]
Germanic Barbarians As Orcs
There’s been kind of a thing in the RPG blogosphere of recasting standard fantasy monster races. Two that have stuck with me are Hayami Rasenjin’s hobgoblin and Monsters and Manuals’ Lamarckian orc. This is my version. The Roman historian Tacitus gives us another version of the orc in his portrayal of Germanic barbarians: a bunch […]
The Cruel, Prophetic Witch of Northern Greece
Ancient Greece was full of legends about witches in Thessaly, a wild region in the north. The Roman poet Lucan (39-65 A.D.) channeled the most horrid of these in his Pharsalia. This epic poem about the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey includes an aside where Pompey’s son consults a monstrous fortune-teller: the cannibal […]
What Aeneas Saw in Hell (pt. 2)
Last month, we looked at four memorable things the Trojan hero Aeneas saw in the Underworld, and we turned them into encounters fit for dungeons and extraplanar adventures. Let’s look at four more! After Aeneas enters the cave to the Underworld, he encounters a cluster of minor Roman deities. Most fall into the standard Roman […]
What Aeneas Saw in Hell
Virgil’s Aeneid was Rome’s sequel to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Written almost a thousand years after the first two works, it continues the story of Trojan hero Aeneas after the end of the Trojan War. At one point, his wanderings take him down into the Underworld. Much of what he saw there makes great […]
Elephants vs. Dragons
I stumbled upon this wonderful bit of Pliny the other day, and there was no way I wasn’t sharing it. Pliny the Elder was a first-century A.D. Roman author, natural philosopher, military officer, and senior Imperial official. His Naturalis Historia was an encyclopedia covering much of what Romans knew about the natural world. It also […]