Someone asked for the origin of the name of the Canary Islands, with the caveat that it was a trick question. So everyone present wracked their brains. I asked, "Were they named after dogs?" and they were. Four years of high school Latin... occasionally it pays off. The legacy of Rome lives on in placenames and miniseriesses. Uhm, miniseriess? Miniseries'. Uhm, anyhow.
Before there was Rome, the bloody miniseries set in the time of the Roman Empire was I Claudius. I haven't seen either miniseries, but now I've read I Claudius. It was a guilty pleasure, a soap opera in a time of tyranny. Paranoid emperors, poisoning, betrayal, popular uprisings, gladiatorial games, stolen standards, government for by the horses by the horses, troop movements, perversions, unequal taxation... this book had a lot of fun stuff going on.
Labels: barbaric, book, flags of all nations
Here's how I describe watching the mini-series "I, Claudius": it's what "The Sopranos" want to be. See, the problem with "The Sopranos" is that they show 24 episodes that take up a single calendar year. There are only so many people you can kill in a single year. "I, Claudius" spans, what, one hundred years? And it's spanned in eleven hours. In a hundred years, you can kill _alot_ of people.
It's a must see.