you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

Last night's Colbert Report was super classical! (I watch on the internet, a day or so behind and especially when I'm grading) Oh, and it also had Anthony Everett, noted popularizing historian of Ancient Rome on it.

The contrast was interesting! Colbert's opening segment was an incredibly tasteless routine about Donald Trump. Seriously problematic jokes about coerced pathic homosexuality --- oh, hey Catullus/Martial/Juvenal/... But really. There's an interesting point of continuity with the ancient world, there: male identity, power, authority, who gets to speak, sexual domination. But elderly (white, male) professorial types waxing fondly in British accents about the Empire, mostly in terms of its military and its exciting imperial personalities? Not so much.

I'm not bothered by the gross generalizations, the really bizarre statements about Romanization (straight out of the 19th century), the reduction of Rome to a homogenous machine enlivened with a few salacious anecdotes. (I'm a pedant and I have a field of expertise: of course I think he said everything wrong!) I'm just a little annoyed that this is what history, and especially Roman history apparently means. When there are so many more interesting things being done, and so many more interesting people doing them (plenty of whom are popularizing personalities, I might add), why is it still comforting traditional authorities and Great Man history?

Since it isn't relevant to my topic, really, I'm just footnoting the nify "addressing the emperor in the plural" stuff; it's really cool, because Th. addresses all of the kings he corresponds with this way, toward many of whom he is being kind of supercilious, so it becomes a kind of egalitarian "we're all partners in this ruling the ex-Roman empire business" thing.

Secondly, the Really Useful Book came in today. Not only does it sort of disparage the usefulness of the Extremely Crucial Book that Doesn't Actually Exist (which makes me feel better about not being able to have it), but it casually pulls an example "to use the language of 1066 and All That." It must be so awesome to be British: such a rich cultural patrimony.

So because NO ONE has done a complete translation of Cassiodorus' Variae, and because I am trying to write a ridiculously ambitious short paper, I am struggling through flowery late antique official correspondence all by myself. In the dark.

But it's sort of nifty. Theodoric refers to himself in the plural, which I expected, because a) "royal we" and b) everyone seems to do that in Latin; but he addresses the Emperor in the plural, too. Am I seeing an early (or maybe not so early) proto- tu/vous distinction happening? That would be awesome.

ETA: Yes! Because the next letter, merely to a consul, is firmly in the second person singular!