I like the silhouette of the guy with a hockey stick on his back. Or is a golf club? Some kind of sport stick. I also like how the author claims this is “true historical facts with hardly any fictions” offers no qualifications of his own, apart from claiming to be hugely mendacious.
Not only do the cover, blurb, and author bio not entice the reader, they actively repulse readers. It’s like… negative book marketing.
It’s Latin “Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, three times consul, built this” (Narrator: Although this is the inscription on the Pantheon, He in fact, did not build this)
Those inscriptions can be tricky, because they often abbreviated names (especially when they had to chisel them out). They also tended to use dots instead of spaces, and if a dot was illegible two words might appear to run together.
M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT
L = Lucius; F = filium (son of); COS = abbrev. of consul; TERTIUM = 3 times; FECIT = built (this).
Pretty much failed it for three years – but enjoyed every minute of it! 😀 I’d never been taught about subject, object, etc., and the Latin teacher wasn’t about to take 30 seconds to write “The boy ran to the store” and label “boy” as “subject” and “store” as “object” (and add “to get some cheese” for the indirect object). Worse, I wasn’t organized enough to write down a memo to myself to look this up when I got home. So, despite my copious note-taking and enthusiasm, I just couldn’t grok declensions at all. I could translate quite well from Latin into English (even working out poetic idioms and giving their English equivalents, which impressed the teacher), but did poorly going from English to Latin.
Si Caesar viveret, ad remum darero. (If Caesar were alive, I’d be chained to an oar.)
I also can’t hear the Beatles’ “Life Goes On” without thinking, “O-bla-di, o-bla-da, o-bla-das, o-bla-dat, o-bla-darum, o-bla-datum… I don’t know what any of this means at this point; I’m gonna fail the test on Friday…”
Mine were in high school. In college, I flunked a Spanish class, for an entirely different reason: “La Profesora” maintained that Castilian Spanish was the only correct form, and never wrote anything down. It was not her native language, and she was utterly unintelligible. I secretly taped her lithpy babbling and played it for a friend of mine who was from Madrid and whose Spanish sounded much clearer. She said it was obvious that “La Profesora” had no idea what she was doing. My friend also said that, while Castilian is the way it’s spoken in Madrid, that doesn’t mean it’s more “correct” than other versions.
It’s bad enough that I have partial nerve deafness, which makes it difficult to follow even English without subtitles; “La Profesora” never wrote anything down, so I couldn’t even hazard a guess about what she was lisping. I learned a good deal more from the textbook than from her. Later, I was able to lend a little girl my pencil when she asked for “Una lapiz, por favor”, and ask non-English-speaking Mexican and Puerto Rican folks to “Repitalo suave” so I could parse out the words and try to answer their question in “mi muy mal espanol.”
To get that reflection in front of him, of himself and the explosion, he must be running on a large sheet of glass.
And why does he have a golf club strapped to his back?
This is the Roman version of Hollywood, where anything can happen, and giants look down on it all before kissing.
Ah yes, those classic, historical hashtags.
I like the silhouette of the guy with a hockey stick on his back. Or is a golf club? Some kind of sport stick. I also like how the author claims this is “true historical facts with hardly any fictions” offers no qualifications of his own, apart from claiming to be hugely mendacious.
Not only do the cover, blurb, and author bio not entice the reader, they actively repulse readers. It’s like… negative book marketing.
Okay, who’s got a guess as to what on earth that says across the quasi-parapet there???
It’s Latin “Marcus Agrippa, the son of Lucius, three times consul, built this” (Narrator: Although this is the inscription on the Pantheon, He in fact, did not build this)
My Latin must be rusty, because I feel like some of that translation is missing, @Syd!
Those inscriptions can be tricky, because they often abbreviated names (especially when they had to chisel them out). They also tended to use dots instead of spaces, and if a dot was illegible two words might appear to run together.
M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT
L = Lucius; F = filium (son of); COS = abbrev. of consul; TERTIUM = 3 times; FECIT = built (this).
Well done! Someone was paying attention in Latin class.
Pretty much failed it for three years – but enjoyed every minute of it! 😀 I’d never been taught about subject, object, etc., and the Latin teacher wasn’t about to take 30 seconds to write “The boy ran to the store” and label “boy” as “subject” and “store” as “object” (and add “to get some cheese” for the indirect object). Worse, I wasn’t organized enough to write down a memo to myself to look this up when I got home. So, despite my copious note-taking and enthusiasm, I just couldn’t grok declensions at all. I could translate quite well from Latin into English (even working out poetic idioms and giving their English equivalents, which impressed the teacher), but did poorly going from English to Latin.
Si Caesar viveret, ad remum darero. (If Caesar were alive, I’d be chained to an oar.)
I also can’t hear the Beatles’ “Life Goes On” without thinking, “O-bla-di, o-bla-da, o-bla-das, o-bla-dat, o-bla-darum, o-bla-datum… I don’t know what any of this means at this point; I’m gonna fail the test on Friday…”
Snort. I am NOT going to admit how many years ago my Latin classes were–I ended up taking Spanish and did far, far better in that, lol!
So far back that it was a living language?
I took MY classes from Claudius Aelianus….
Mine were in high school. In college, I flunked a Spanish class, for an entirely different reason: “La Profesora” maintained that Castilian Spanish was the only correct form, and never wrote anything down. It was not her native language, and she was utterly unintelligible. I secretly taped her lithpy babbling and played it for a friend of mine who was from Madrid and whose Spanish sounded much clearer. She said it was obvious that “La Profesora” had no idea what she was doing. My friend also said that, while Castilian is the way it’s spoken in Madrid, that doesn’t mean it’s more “correct” than other versions.
It’s bad enough that I have partial nerve deafness, which makes it difficult to follow even English without subtitles; “La Profesora” never wrote anything down, so I couldn’t even hazard a guess about what she was lisping. I learned a good deal more from the textbook than from her. Later, I was able to lend a little girl my pencil when she asked for “Una lapiz, por favor”, and ask non-English-speaking Mexican and Puerto Rican folks to “Repitalo suave” so I could parse out the words and try to answer their question in “mi muy mal espanol.”
To get that reflection in front of him, of himself and the explosion, he must be running on a large sheet of glass.
And why does he have a golf club strapped to his back?
This is the Roman version of Hollywood, where anything can happen, and giants look down on it all before kissing.