I’m enjoying Tacitus‘ “The Annals of Imperial Rome”. Roman history is meaty and full of fascinating incidental characters. As with reading Gibbon, you learn to recognise certain patterns. Anyone who wins a number of victories while the emporer sits in Rome is bound for a sticky end. If they’re honest and true, doubly so. My favourite, in reading Gibbon, was Belisarius. The poor guy did almost everything right and was vilified and horribly betrayed by his emporer and even his wife. My new favourite is Germanicus. Again, he does everything right, and is even aware of the dangers in doing so. He tries to play it down, never extolling his own virtues etc. It does him no good, of course. Incidentally his son and grandson do not inherit his exemplorary behaviour (Caligula and Nero).
I was interested to read of his visit to Egypt. He was fascinated by the antiquities. Mention is made of Memnon:
Germanicus was interested in other remarkable sights, too, particularly the stone statues of Memnon which gives out the sound of a voice when the sun’s rays strike it.
Intrigued, I looked it up. From Wikipedia:
Following its rupture, this statue was then reputed to “sing” every morning at dawn: a light moaning or whistling, probably caused by rising temperatures and the evaporation of dew inside the porous rock. The legend of the “Vocal Memnon”, the luck that hearing it was reputed to bring, and the reputation of the statue’s oracular powers, travelled the length of the known world, and a constant stream of visitors, including several Roman Emperors, came to marvel at the statues. The mysterious vocalisations of the broken colossus ceased in 199, however, when Emperor Septimius Severus, in an attempt to curry favour with the oracle, reassembled the two shattered halves.
