Rome
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TRAJAN
Have you ever looked back on history and thought to yourself: “Wow. Everyone who came before me was a bag of dicks.” I mean, seriously: Most of our world today was shaped by jackholes being jackholes. By all rights, Ghengis Khan, Alexander the Great, Nero, Caligula, Henry VIII, Louis the XVI, were all jerks; hell even JFK was kind of a git. Great man with great ideas, but that doesn’t always mean he was a good person. So does that mean that our world was built on the shoulders of dirtbags and murderers? To some degree. But see, in the wake of every genocidal expansionist tyrant there were a whole…
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Attila the Hun and the Sword of God
When Attila was a young boy his mother would have told him the story of an ancient Scythian sword that was forged by the Gods for Scythian kings. During his childhood, the Sword of God was that of legend since it had been lost, and the children would often hear the elders exclaim “Look for it, search for it, for he who finds God’s sword will rule the world”. The Sword of God, also called the Sword of Mars and the Sword of Attila, was forged from the iron of a meteorite by the Gods so that the Scythian kings would have the power to conquer all nations. Legend says…
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Spartacus
Do you know why we love the story of Spartacus? And why it is told and retold over and over again in television, movies, and literature? I bet you do, but I'm going to say it anyway because I absolutely have to. Spartacus is the ultimate underdog. It's like a militant rags to riches fairytale where everyone dies in the end… or really, just a fairytale as written, y'know prior to the rigorous Disney sanitizing.What was that? Some people don't KNOW the Spartacus story? Well that is just pl [...]
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Publius Vergilius Maro aka Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro was born of peasant stock in 70 BCE, but managed to rise into the upper echelon of Roman society by the time of his death in 19 BCE. He is best known for his epic poem The Aeneid, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It was this epic commissioned by Augustus Caesar outlined the founding of Rome by a Trojan refugee and gave Rome its sense of destiny and history, which the young empire lacked compared to the older civilizations of the age.Virgil was twenty when th [...]
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Augustus Gaius Octavius and the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea
”If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.” Augustus in a speech to the Senate in 17 B.C. Augusts Gaius Octavius, also known as Gaius Octavius and Augustus Gaius Julius Octavius, was emperor of the Roman Empire from January 16, 27 B.C. until his death on August 19, 14 A.D. The famous Julius Caesar had adopted Gaius Octavius and named him heir to the throne, but with…
