Latest news with #Domitian
Otago Daily Times
03-05-2025
- Otago Daily Times
DNA of Roman legion will fascinate
The Simmering death pit, revealing a massacre 2000 years ago. Photo: A. Slonek/Novetus In the summer of 1959, I found myself excavating at the Roman city of Verulamium, southwest of the modern city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, England. As we probed ever deeper, my trowel suddenly hit a layer of bright red: the collapsed clay daub wall of a house. All the coins sealed under the daub were dated earlier than 60AD. I was gazing on evidence for Queen Boudica's destruction of the city. This reminds us that seizing other peoples' land, an issue in daily news reports, has a long history. Elsewhere in the empire, the Romans faced constant wars along the entire length of their Danube frontier. So it was with particular interest that I have followed the excavations at a football pitch in the Viennese suburb of Simmering. Last summer, we stayed with son Tom just 2km away and I pedalled past it daily for my exercise. Imagine the shock when workers renovating the field encountered human remains. Archaeologists were called and they have so far uncovered 125 skeletons, all of them young males of fighting age who died in battle. Fragments of Roman armour and weaponry lay among the dead. When Roman soldiers were killed, they were always cremated, but not these. Their bodies lay contorted and mixed together for they had been rapidly and summarily dumped in a death pit. A Roman legion comprised 5200 men, and each had a resounding name. The Emperor Domitian ruled from 81-96 AD and historic records describe Germanic invasions across the Danube to plunder his province of Pannonia. Vienna, then known as Vindobona, was a key in the defensive screen along the course of the river. In the spring of 92AD, the Marcomanni crossed the Danube and massacred the XXI Legion Rapax "the Predator", founded over a century earlier by the Emperor Augustus. Simmering football pitch lies just 3km south of the river. The logical conclusion is that the bones are those of the XXI legion, and they are unique. Their DNA will fascinate. And what happened to their Emperor, Domitian? He instituted a personality cult, his propaganda dominating military and religious affairs. He had himself nominated a perpetual censor, he who controlled public morality and became deeply unpopular with the Roman Senate. Does that political agenda sound familiar? In 96AD he was assassinated by his own Praetorian Guard and the Senate condemned his memory to oblivion — a moral tale that resonates today.
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Mass Grave From Roman Empire Found Under Vienna Soccer Field
Under a soccer field in a Vienna neighborhood along the Danube, archaeologists have found a mass grave dating to the era when the Roman Empire was battling Germanic tribes almost 2,000 years ago, experts announced this week. The grave was discovered in October by a construction company doing renovations for the field in Vienna's Simmering district, a team of archaeologists and historians at the Vienna Museum said in announcing its findings. The extraordinary discovery was tied to what they called a 'catastrophic' military event, possibly one where Roman troops were badly defeated and fled the site quickly. Radiocarbon dating traced the bones to approximately A.D. 80 to 234 — a period in which more than a dozen Roman emperors ruled, including Domitian and Trajan, who clashed with ancient Germanic people in the region. An analysis of other items found in the grave, including an iron dagger, lance points, scale armor and a cheek piece of a helmet, helped confirm the time period. Near the foot of one skeleton, the archaeologists also discovered shoe nails that came from distinctly Roman military shoes called caligae. The discovery of such skeletal remains is exceedingly rare, experts said, in part because ancient Romans almost exclusively practiced cremation until the third century A.D. 'For all of middle Europe from the first century, we don't have any unburned, uncremated human remains,' said Michaela Binder, the lead anthropologist on the project. 'So aside from the military aspect, it is an absolute unique chance to study the life histories of people in the first century A.D.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
03-04-2025
- Science
- The Independent
What a newly discovered mass grave tells us about the ancient Romans
Construction workers have discovered a Roman -era mass grave under a Vienna football field, containing at least 129 skeletons, likely of warriors. The remains, dating back to the 1st century AD, show signs of brutal battle injuries, suggesting a large-scale conflict, possibly involving Germanic tribes. This discovery is unique as Roman soldiers were typically cremated – not buried –during this period. Analysis of artifacts, including weapons and armor, suggests the battle occurred between 80 and 130 AD, and was potentially linked to Emperor Domitian's Danube campaigns. Further DNA and isotope analysis is planned to identify the warriors and their origins, shedding more light on the early history of Austria.
NBC News
03-04-2025
- Science
- NBC News
Mass grave for fighters in a Roman-era battle revealed in Vienna
The pit where the bodies were deposited suggests a hasty or disorganized dumping of corpses. Every skeleton examined showed signs of injury — to the head, torso and pelvis in particular. 'They have various different battle wounds, which rules out execution. It is truly a battlefield,' said Kristina Adler-Wölfl, head of Vienna city archaeological department. 'There are wounds from swords, lances; wounds from blunt trauma.' The victims were all male. Most were aged 20 to 30 years old and generally showed signs of good dental health. Carbon-14 analysis helped date the bones to between 80 and 130 A.D. That was cross-checked against known history of relics found in the grave — armor, helmet cheek protectors, the nails used in distinctive Roman military shoes known as caligae. The most indicative clue came from a rusty dagger of a type in use specifically between the middle of the 1st century and the start of the second. The research continues: Only one victim has been confirmed as a Roman warrior. Archaeologists hope DNA and strontium isotope analysis will help further identify the fighters, and whose side they were on. 'The most likely theory at the moment is that this is connected to the Danube campaigns of Emperor Domitian — that's 86 to 96 A.D.,' Adler-Wölfl said. City archaeologists said the discovery also reveals the early signs of the founding of a settlement that would become the Austrian capital of today.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Should we give human rights to worms? Don't be absurd
The Roman emperor Domitian, if you believe Suetonius, spent his younger days killing flies with a sharpened pen. We're given this anecdote as a précis of what will follow: Domitian will become a ruler of 'savage cruelty', 'an object of terror and hatred to all', someone who 'turn[s] the virtues also into vices'. Beware the child who pulls wings from insects. Modern readers may think of Rome's genocidal wars and human bloodsports, its throwing of Christians to lions and its pitiless slave economy, and wonder whether Suetonius missed the point. The empire of the Caesars was great in many ways, but 'virtuous' it was not. Everyone was a Domitian-in-waiting; they just didn't have the pens, or the time. Looking back on our forebears, we may thank our lucky stars that we have moved on to better things. American philosopher Jeff Sebo comes out of this tradition of thinking about historical moral improvement, and in The Moral Circle, he aims to give the story a new chapter. The 'circle' of his title contains the beings considered worthy of rights, protections, freedoms and concern. Those in the circle matter; those without do not. 'The history of thinking about the moral circle,' Sebo claims, 'has been one of... expansion.' We used to think that various human subjects, like Rome's slaves, gladiators and barbarians, were not worthy of moral consideration, but we 'corrected these mistakes gradually over time'. This sunny view of human progress – suspend your doubts for now – suggests to Sebo that we should keep expanding the circle. He wants us to include non-human creatures, covering not only great apes, dolphins, elephants and domestic pets, but also insects, microbes and – most troublingly of all – hypothesised future beings such as artificial intelligences. Sebo's argument hinges on the difficulty inherent in identifying what actually distinguishes us from non-humans. Homo sapiens possesses capacities of consciousness, sentience and agency that we generally take to be (as he puts it) 'jointly sufficient for moral standing'. We can experience pain and pleasure, understand ourselves as having lives worth living and act accordingly: this is what grants us the rights and responsibilities we call 'morality'. But this picture is overly simple. Not all human beings fulfil all these criteria at all times; conversely, certain non-humans appear to share some or all of these capacities. Who's to say that some level of consciousness, and thus moral import, isn't available to an amoeba? Thus, Sebo insists, we should 'proceed with caution and humility' when assigning moral worth to some beings and denying it to others. Even if we can reasonably doubt that, say, an ant's life is of much innate value, or that there'll ever in fact be machines capable of replicating or exceeding human cognition, we ought to take the possibility seriously. The metaphor of the 'moral circle', meanwhile, reminds us that some beings are more central and some more peripheral to our moral concern. While we can never do everything, we can often do something: if you're reading this at home in Britain, you may owe more to your family than you do to a wasp colony in the Amazon, simply because there's more you can do for the former – but you don't necessarily owe the wasps nothing. The implications are enormous. 'Many beings might matter,' Sebo writes, 'and we might owe them a lot.' Yet that 'might', which is emblematic of The Moral Circle, entails both the book's greatest virtue – its cautious, undogmatic approach – and its most serious philosophical vice. Sebo is in effect asking us to make a bet – in fact, a titanic moral wager – on the basis of what, by his own admission, are very long odds. 'All of the beings discussed,' he writes, 'have at least a non-zero chance of being conscious.' A one-in-10,000 chance that microbes or roundworms might be conscious is 'non-negligible', we're told. I wouldn't risk a tenner on those likelihoods, never mind our entire moral order. Adding to the suspect nature of this jaunt to the moral bookies is Sebo's insistence that long odds are ameliorated by the multitudes who might be affected. We might have 'a weak duty to sextillions of current and future non-humans', he argues: if so, we should overlook the fact that most of them are likely not moral subjects, because a tiny proportion, which is nonetheless a huge number, might be. If you buy enough lottery tickets, you'll surely win in the end. And yet it isn't clear what such a winning ticket would buy you, since the practical implications of moral-circle expansion are here so abstractly drawn. The Moral Circle is a kind of romance of the big number. It repeatedly evokes them as a foil to its highly speculative – in some cases, frankly fantastical – account of the inner nature of nonhuman creatures. (Questions about the moral status of silicon-based replicants or the labour conditions in hypothetical space-colonies work well for Philip K Dick; they're less compelling as moves in a philosophical argument.) But despite Sebo's frequent appeals to nameless 'experts', his numbers seem ultimately concocted: why is one-in-10,000 a significant threshold, rather than one-in-9,999? It's never explained. In fairness, Sebo isn't demanding that we immediately give computers rights, or grant toucans a seat at the UN. 'Morality,' he writes, 'is a marathon, not a sprint.' And yes, as we face the loss of species and environmental disintegration, any action is better than none: Sebo is right that the moral status of non-humans is worthy of consideration. No doubt spearing flies with a stylus is a bad way to have fun. But having read The Moral Circle, I still think the Christians mattered more than the lions.
