Haha! Very good, Brian! :D

Chiefly for classical nerds and mug lovers
 

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/pictu...&pictureid=145

December 05 2020

My good news is that I located a very tricky text that was smaller than small in finer than fine print.

What I’m writing about here is not the so-called holy grail (as in Monty Python and THC – sorry, THG), but something else that only a Latin or Greek semi-classicist like me could love. By using two stacked bifocals on my head combined with a binocular jeweler’s loupe, and holding the magnifier for my compact Oxford English Dictionary, that in combination all together amounted to about ninety diameters enlargement, I located something and marked it with a green “sharpie” pen on a coffee mug which I recently purchased for $19.99 from “RomaOptima.com” that bears a truly nano-scopic reproduction of the Latin text (with damaged letters too) of the Res Divi Augusti (or Accomplishments of the [Divine] Emperor Augustus). So, what’s that to me, or you in AD/CE 2020? Well, for years many people have said that the census account in what is called the New Testament is incorrect because no census was recorded for or near 1 BC or 1 AD. (There is no year “zero” in the world-wide calendar.)

And the real question is, Is this important now?

The matter that interested me was the relatively recent acceptance by the previous Pope in 2012 in his book “Jesus of Nazareth” of what nerds more informed than myself had been saying for years. That is, that our secular calendar that is based on calculations by the sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus (or in English, Dennis the Small) is wrong by up to eight years. Dionysius added up a lot of poorly recorded intervals and made a mistake because the available records were rather sketchy. Furthermore, multiplication and division are almost impossible to do with Roman numerals. Romans used an abacus which is quite fast for adding and subtracting and wrote down what they got. (Multiplication is like shorthand addition.) So what Dionysius thought was the year 525 was most likely 532 or 531. This redating fits with eclipse records, coins, and the widespread stone census records of the second (2nd) of Augustus’s three (3) pedestrian speed “censuses of all the world” that began in “8 BCE” (“Before Common/Christian Era”). I said “pedestrian speed” because communication from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome took a long time on land or by boats that hugged the coasts and sailed only in good seasons. The names of the Roman consuls for the second census of Augustus are given on this mug and in books. Of the books I have, the best is Res Gestae Divi Augusti; Text, Translation, and Commentary, by Alison E. Cooley, published by the University of Cambridge, 2009, see pp 66-67, which has the texts with the damaged letters identified so that reading the mug was much easier. A less useful version is Res Gestae Divi Augusti; The Achievements of the Divine [to the Romans] Augustus, edited by P.A. Brunt and J.M. Moore, Oxford University Press, 1967 [and continually], pp 22-23.

The relevant sentence is: tum [iter]um consulari cum imperio lustrum [s]olus feci C(aio) Censorino [et C(aio) Asinio] co(n)s(ulibus), quo lustro censa sunt civium Romanorum [capit]a quadragiens centum millia at ducenta trigenta tria m[illia]. Parentheses indicate Roman abbreviations; brackets show damaged stone letters. A Greek translation with different damaged points exists in modern Turkey. The Cambridge translation reads: “Then for a second time I conducted a census on my own with consular power in the consulship of Gaius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius [8 BC]; in this census registered 4,233,000 individual Roman citizens.” Of course, Roman “citizens” were a smallish percentage of the entire population.

What’s particularly nice is that the relevant spot on the mug is shown in the picture just above in lines six through ten in the column just below the words “AVGUSTI” and “ROMANUM”.

I should warn you that the website https://romaoptima.com/collections/all seems to be currently experiencing difficulties which doesn’t make purchasing your own mug easy. I found a link by chance for the mug and used it in September 2020. However, at the top there’s an online picture of what I got.

Allen, could you say what you just said in plain language? I have no idea what you're talking about or what your point is.

I'm thankful for your post, Bob, as I've just helped to sink a sufficient amount of alcohol (two bottles of Bollinger in celebration of my son's birthday) to render me into the 'WTF' bracket.

Jayne

My point is that I succeeded in reading a microscopic text in a very hard copy that I've known about and understood for many years. Eventually, the Roman Catholic Church caught up with me and others. It has to do with the entire dating system most people use. The ordering of almost all events is unaffected of course. Not to worry, unless you want to "reduce" your age by a few years because you weren't born in, let's say, 1992, but in 1998 or 2000. It's just that reading that text on the mug was such a pleasure.

Allen, I feel your joy. I can't read the text or fully grasp the significance of it, but I recognise the pleasure of the discovery.

I speak as one who spent far too much time on trying to prove that the battle of Mons Graupius really did take place, and that it was on Dunsinane Hill, the Roman army in full battle gear moving like a great forest up towards the picts, whose folk memory led to the "prophecy" in the time of Macobey. I recently looked up that proposal to see if anyone else had come up with it and my heart stopped when I Googled it and found that someone had, then re-started when I clicked on the link and found it was - me. Here.
https://ablemuse.org/erato/showthrea...t=29324&page=2

It's the happiness of discovering that Luther and Dürer were contemporaries after I'd quoted them both in a silly little squib about rabbits that ended with a bit of Keats that one day historians will unravel - and understand.

It's the joy of researching the truth of De Nerval and his lobster and finding so much more than I was looking for - ending up devastated by the poet's death and certain that a kindly-meant remark by Théophile Gautier during the day of it might have pushed him to that awful gesture.

It's a special and personal "Wahey!", A sudden and lovely "Hurrah!" that only comes sometimes, making one tip one's chair back on its hind legs and clap one's hands like a Japanese businessman at a brainstorming.

And in moments of tranquility, it's a perfect conviction that one is what one's head is full of, and, having lived completely alone since March, it's a piece of good news worth posting that, here on Eratosphere, I can find other people who occasionally feel the same.

Copy you on that link! Very nice. Thanks. Considering that navigational tools and skills then weren’t what have available, Spain as “west” makes a smidge of sense. They thought the world was much smaller then. Spain certainly isn’t “east”! Thanks.

BTW, the lettering on the mug isn’t only very very small, but it’s gray, and reading it somewhat easily (as if) needed a lot of enlargement. Check out the Cambridge. On this dating question, there’s a whole thing involving the dates of death of a king, eclipses, word of mouth transmission of religious recollection, etc, etc. Nothing is changed about the sequencing of most events, except possibly within a limited span of a decade or so. But since the available chronologies for Roman events are very few, one wonders about other hiccups.

First known math error: beer
 

This is a bit long, but it’s about old beer and record keeping. As such, it gives Little Dennis mentioned above someone to commiserate with, “Kushim”.

Oops! Where’s the eraser?

We haven't had any Good News posts this year yet...
Here's my latest: my 8th grandchild was born this morning, a boy weighing 9lb 10oz. I now have four of each! :D

Jayne

Grandchildren! Been there, done that. Just kidding!! You’re far and away ahead of me number-wise. Congratulations! USA Mother’s Day is Sunday next. I hope all yours are as cool as you are.