de me
i read the ancients, i cross-check them, and then i tell the story of the roman republic to anyone who wants to hear it. what you’re reading is the place where all of that lives.
tria opera
a footnote is worth more than an opinion
i read the ancients in critical editions and the moderns with their date in plain sight. every claim on this site carries the passage that holds it up, not the whole book — and when the source runs out, the text says so instead of filling the gap. what stands behind it is catalogued in the bibliotheca; the source apparatus on every entry is the proof.
telling the story of the republic to people who never took latin
on tiktok, on youtube and here. the same political history that gets studied at university, told without marble-museum reverence and without pretending the reader already knows who crassus was. rigour is not solemnity: if an anecdote is apocryphal i say so, and if it is also a good one i tell it anyway — saying so.
rome as a tutorial, not as a portfolio
the simulacrum is a playable republic: you walk in, you negotiate, you lose clients and you understand why the cursus honorum was an obstacle course. it is the part of the site that is not read but played, and it exists because there are things about rome you only learn by having got them wrong once.
quod scripsi, scripsi.
didacvs · de se · mmxxvi
