Looking for messages from Rome

Stacks of books and binders like these have been absorbing me lately, as I get ready to do a major project on Rome to complete my master's in liberal studies at Simon Fraser University. 

Anyone wondering where this once-daily blogger has been for the last couple of months need only look at the book-piles in my house. Brand-new, second-hand, library-borrowed, they stare at me from the bedside table, my spot on the couch, my downstairs office; even the back of the toilet. You try writing a blog item when Cicero’s On Duties, Livy’s The Early History of Rome and Zygmunt Bauman’s Community are casting beady eyes at you!

Optimistically or masochistically, probably both, I’ve chosen to complete my master’s program at Simon Fraser University with a 75-to-100-page paper on community, mass migration and ancient Rome, instead of the two courses I could have taken instead. Why do this, when perfecting a three-paragraph blog item can take me hours?

 Hmmm.

Because “O tempora, o mores” (“Oh, the times! Oh the customs!”) is a phrase I’ve heard since childhood, and now I know where it comes from (the Roman orator Cicero’s speech against Catiline). Because the satirist Juvenal, who coined “bread and circuses,” wrote unforgettably about how it feels to be poor and jostled, humiliated and pushed out of his beloved city by newcomers. Because the world is changing around us now in ways that echo some of the things that happened in ancient Rome.

My blog will return, but for a while, I’ll be in those stacks of books. I want to find out whether people who knew about bread and circuses and the world’s evils more than 1,000 years ago have some messages for us today.

We all have different ways of taking notes, and this -- good news for the Post-it note people! -- is mine. Mary Beard's excellent SPQR, a history of ancient Rome, is a readable introduction to the topic.

Some of the books I have collected so far for my project.