Titus Pomponius Atticus

The plunder from Gaul was vast, and Caesar used it in Rome in ways that kept his name in front of the city while he was hundreds of miles away.

Cicero, who was helping arrange the purchases himself, mentions in a letter to Atticus the land being bought in the center of Rome for a new forum in Caesar's name, and the cost was staggering.

Pompey had just opened a vast theater complex paid for out of his Eastern fortune, and now Caesar was answering him in the heart of the city with money from Gaul.

The less visible spending mattered more.

Historians know this, in part, due to various written records left behind by the Romans.

Rossus was mentioned, for instance, in a letter from the famous orator Cicero to his close friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, which he wrote while he was governor of Cilicia in about 50 BC.

In the note, Cicero writes that He had ordered Rosica var... which means vessels or dishes for Rossus.

In the centuries following the discovery of that short reference to these ceramics, archaeologists and scholars have debated the exact production site of Cicero's tableware.

So, now because I'm doing this solo... through this stuff at kind of a rate of knots and i could either make this a really short episode or we can have a look at some of the crazy news from around the world and i think we'll go crazy because i like a bit of crazy news one of the strangest stories although we're kind of used to it really hit me it's also from auditsinteresting.com who again i appreciate because they are a wealth of information But it's about the mass murderer Nicholas Cruz.

Now, since his incarceration, Cruz, who killed 17 people and injured 17 more when he opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February the 14th of this year, he's become something of an icon to fascinated people across the country.

teenage girls, women and even some men have been writing to the Parkland shooter declaring their support, offering friendship and sending him encouragement.

Now I fucking despise people like this.

Soon after this time, I commenced Euclid, and somewhat later, Algebra, still under my father's tuition.

From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin books which I remember reading were the Bucolics of Virgil and the first six books of the Aeneid, all Horace except the Epox, the Fables of Phaedrus, the first five books of Livy, to which my love of the subject I voluntarily added in my spare hours of leisure the remainder of the first decade, all Sallust, a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphosis, some plays of Terence, two or three books of Lucretius, several of the orations of Cicero and of his writings on oratory, also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Miguel's notes.

In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through, one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little, all Thalicides, the Hellenics of Xenophon, a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias, Theocritus, Anachron, part of the Anthology, a little of Dionysus, several books of Polybius, and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric, which as the first expressly scientific treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life, my father made me study with particular care and throw the matter of it into syntopic tables.

During the same years I learnt elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly and differential calculus and other portions of the higher mathematics far from thoroughly, for my father, not having kept up this part of his early acquired knowledge, could not spare time to qualify himself for removing my difficulties and left me to deal with them with little other aid than that of books, while I was continually incurring his displeasure by my inability to solve difficult problems for which he did not see that I had not the necessary previous knowledge.

There is no period in Cicero's life so touching, I think, as that during which he was hesitating whether, in the service of the Republic, it did or did not behoove him to join Pompey before the battle of Pharsalia.

At this time, he wrote to his friend Atticus various letters full of agonizing doubts as to what was demanded from him by his duty to his country, by his friendship for Pompey, by loyalty to his party, and by his own dignity.

As to a passage in one of those, Mr. Froude says that Cicero had lately spoken of Caesar's continuance in life as a disgrace to the state.

It has been seen also that he had long thought of assassination as the readiest means of ending it, says Mr. Froude.

The it has been seen refers to a statement made a few pages earlier in which he translates certain words written by Cicero to Atticus.

He considers it a disgrace to them that Caesar was alive.

That is his translation.

When even to draw the breath of life at such a time is a disgrace to us.