“You gotta come up with something better, love. Come on, exercise what few remaining brain cells you have.” My friend said with much exasperation when I told her the plan for my last ACTA. Well, my last few brain cells have already handed in their two weeks resignation three weeks ago, and I am a woman set in my ways. It’s not that I don’t know that Life of Brian doesn’t belong in a Roman history course just as Olive Garden doesn’t belong in an editorial on Italian cuisine. That doesn’t stop me from arguing for it, though. 

The final session of Roman Rev hammered into all of us the importance of legacy. And just as we often interpret history to be unchanging words printed on dry paper, legacy seemed such a static thing. What has caused it to happen has already happened, and here we stand, in a shadow as permanent as the death it commemorates. It is passive, and can only fade rather than rise. Yet the colosseum has lights fitted into it now, to help improve its attractiveness for night time tourism. My relative installed a god awful cherubic statue on her porch, which was promptly dubbed “pasty boy” by her son. My point here is that legacy is very much an active part of history as people take part in manipulating and shifting what has been left to them, highlighting this part and ignoring that part to make the past fit their narrative. We take shadows from ancient tales and wove plays out of them, and those plays then become the true history to many people. Legacy and historical narratives are always shifting, and reflect more on the current world as much as it did the past.

Life of Brian is a story which keenly focused on this sense of a shifting legacy. Set in the time of Jesus, it is very much a religious satire as it poked holes or offered alternative explanations for the fantastical stories recorded. But even more so, it is a satirization of the narrative which we have assigned to the past. The Romans portrayed were pompous and kafka-like in their obsession with bureaucracy, armed with upper-class British accents and a resounding deafness to humor or timing. Monty Python Troupe had taken the ideologies that we masked the Romans’ with, and turned them into caricatures.

From Ben-Hur to Spartacus, an interesting dichotomy of our obsession with Rome is that Rome is often played as the bad guy in our stories. Rome to the modern soul meant power, and while we idolize power, we also idolize a controlled sense of individualism. Spartacus or Ben-Hur, while rebelling against Rome firmly represented the widely popular ideas of vengeance, justice or freedom, and later a new form of populist power itself. The story then quickly turns into taking down the establishment. Life of Brian understood this take, and turned it around its head. Rome is still the establishment, but it is in effect a relatively powerless one, swamped by bureaucracy and general idiocy. The supposedly heroic populist movement however, is even more meaningless, and in the end succumbing to its own mania and in fighting. Nothing is serious in Brian, nothing makes sense, because what it isn’t grounded in reality. It’s almost like taking the lights of the Colosseum and making a light show out of it complete with inflatable statues, and through that spectacle the organizers show the audience how far our perception is from what once truly was.

For my second acta, I decided to do another actum delectamentum. This time, I sought to recreate the dessert dish “ova Spongia ex Lacte. This ancient Roman dessert is thought to be similar to a sweet omelet a pancake with milk. Once again, I noticed the lack of ingredients in the recipe. Maybe this makes sense since if it was during the Roman Republic, then they had not gone too far to find other ingredients like they would have during their imperial period. I did not really understand how this was supposed to be a pancake since there were only wet ingredients. A sweet omelet with milk felt more appropriate. Because of the simplicity of the dish, I luckily had all of the ingredients in my apartment already. I scaled the recipe down and mixed the eggs, milk, and oil together. I used olive oil because I thought that it would add more flavor than a neutral oil like canola oil. Because of the oil, it was fairly difficult to emulsify since I would whisk it and achieve that but I was also cooking a Bolognese at the same time so I only paid the actum so much attention. I poured the mixture into a heated pan and let it cook until the bottom and some of the top set and then I attempted to flip it. However, because of my lack of skill and the omlete to pan ratio, I broke it a bit. I let that cook for a bit longer and then served it on a plate and topped it with honey and black pepper.

I was honestly happy with the dessert. I thought it tasted better than the libum I had previously made. I guess that isn’t too surprising considering that it was basically an omelet with some honey. The honey was a great touch as it served to complexify the flavor a bit more. Once again, the dish was in dire need of salt. That would have definitely brought the sweetness and egg/milk mixture out more. I feel that this would have been a great combination of sweet and savory for a dessert course after having a Roman dinner with some savory garum!

05/05/22

My Acta Reflection is based on a movie called Pompeii. It seems like more of a drama than a historical account of what happened on the island of Pompeii. The inspiration of the movie comes from the eruption of Mount of Vesuvius that completely covered the island with lava and ash. This happened around 79 A.D. and allowed archaeologists to learn a great deal about the Roman people, customs and culture since the lava and ash preserved the city very well. In the movie, there are a lot of circumstances that were plausible for a city during Ancient Rome intertwined with the plot.

The story begins with the conquest of a tribe of Celtics by a Roman army and the protagonist’s younger self was captured by slave traders. Ancient Rome held a large amount of land surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including parts of present-day North Africa, the Middle East and a vast majority of Southern Europe. The Romans often took prisioners of war to serve as slaves for the aristocracy or anyone wealthy enough to afford them. Similarly, the protagonist Milo was reared as a gladiator for the Gladiator games held at the Colosseum. He attracts the attention of a royal princess named Cassia who is the daughter of a governor, a relationship that would never gain a blessing from anyone at the time. This particularly angers Roman Senator Corvus who was responsible for the death of MIlo’s parents during the Celtic horseman invasion. Corvus is unaware of this connection but is more concerned with Milo gaining the affection of the woman that he is interested in.

After a lot of fighting and gladiator style epic shots, Milo and his love are unable to escape the incoming lava flow and fireball and within the embrace of one another. They are shown in each other’s eternal embrace in the modern day as archaeologists excavate the city. I know that is love story is probably not how the couple lived their lives but it was a wonderful Roman Tale that I would recommend to anyone young and old.