Posts Tagged ‘Roman Empire’
No Hat, No Cattle…
Dallas, January 1978 (a club once owned by Jack Ruby)
From The Selvedge Yard, a blog that your correspondent regularly enjoys, “Vicious White Kids– the Sex Pistols Take on Rock ‘N Roll & the South.”
Read the entire instructive tale, see other photos, and check out the live Dallas performance footage here.
As tap our toes to “Anarchy in the U.K.,” we might recall that it was on this date in 321 that Roman Emperor Constantine I decreed:
On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for grain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost.
… and dies Solis— day of the sun, “Sunday”– became the day of rest throughout the Roman Empire… and ultimately, the West.
Constantine (Capitoline Museums)
Imperial dreams…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.– “Ozymandias” Percy Bysshe Shelly (1818)
The Roman Empire encircled the Mediterranean:
The Mongol Empire once stretched from the Pacific to the Danube:
More recently, the Ottoman Empire was almost as large:
While the British Empire was the most widely dispersed:
As we remark with Shelley that empires come and empires go, we might recall that it was on this date in 1781 that the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were finally ratified, and the Second Continental Congress became the Congress of the Confederation of the United States of America.
When the vinyl met the road…
From the ever-interesting folks at OOK (Observing Obscure Kulture), a tribute to the must-have auto accessory of the 50s and early 60s:
Hey, vinyl fanatics, have you ever wished you could listen to your records while cruising in your car? From the mid-50’s to the early 60’s, Chrysler made this dream a reality with two generations of in-car phonographs. The original Highway Hi-Fi hit the streets in Autumn of 1955, for model year 1956 — a factory option in the full Chrysler Corporation line of vehicles: Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, DeSoto and Imperial.
More at “Highway Hi-Fi.”
As we crank up the volume, we might devote ourselves to productive thought, following the example of Edward Gibbon, who wrote:
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter (today, the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli), that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind … But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire.
Gibbon completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (timely reading even– perhaps especially– today) on June 27, 1787.
Gibbon, by Sir Joshua Reynolds
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