New Romans for old?

Legate, senate, imperial secretaries, centurion, people’s tribunes, praetor, vigiles? All terms we may know from ancient Rome. What are they doing in the 20th and 21st centuries? Well, they’re used in Roma Nova, the (imaginary) last Roman province in the West that survived into the modern age.

Roma Novans have kept many of these words […]

Obiter dicta, or something to say in Latin

Homo sapiens consulting a vademecum

Latin isn’t dead; it’s everywhere, perhaps more than we realise – alibi, agenda, consensus, versus, homo sapiens, veto, alias, via, affidavit, vademecum, an item carried around, especially a handbook, and those indispensables i.e. (id est) ‘that is’, and etc. (et cetera) ‘and the rest’.

Maths lovers and problem […]

Cursing the Roman way

Roman curse tablet from Bath (Photo by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net))

The wish to curse a rival, a rip-off merchant, or somebody who cuts us up on the motorway or pushes in front of us in the queue for the first life-saving coffee of the day, is an age old instinct. Nowadays, when we […]