Sorry @Exapno_Mapcase I think we double posted. But you bring up a good point too.
Odd, you’ve got a Chicago chef named in that reference, whereas all the explanations I’ve seen of the origin of the Caesar salad attribute it to the San Diego/Tijuana restaurateur Caesar Cardini. Here’s the obituary of Cardini’s daughter and business partner, which tells a little more about the conflicting stories of the invention of the Caesar salad.
AFAICT, as Exapno_Mapcase notes, all the recorded descriptions of Caesar salad in the early 20th century are attributing its invention to Cardini’s restaurant in the 1920s. References to Giacomo Junia’s claim to be its original inventor a couple of decades previously all seem to post-date the media buzz around the Cardini version.
In fact, does anybody have any cites for the actual existence of a Chicago chef named Giacomo Junia, other than the oft-repeated report of this salad invention claim? I haven’t found any. But the existence of Caesar Cardini and his association with the eponymous salad is quite well documented.
In fact, this site claims that “Giacomo Junia” and his alleged 1903 invention of the salad is completely mythical, and links to what purports to be a more detailed debunking of it: unfortunately, the link is broken.
So yeah, at this point I’m thinking that probably Webster’s just plain fell for an urban legend here.
When the poor have cried, Caesar has wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. But Kimera757 says he was ambitious, and Kimera757 is an honourable man.
Well plenty of people blamed Caesar personally for collapsing the republic (some of them were mad enough about it to get quite stabby) despite the fact the republic was not exactly in rude health. What was a bigger factor in accepting its end was the many years of brutal civil war that Caesar triggered and continued after his death. By the end of it most Romans were happy to accept the blatant lie that Augustus was not a king in all but name, if it meant avoiding another round of civil war .
Personally I don’t buy the “the republic was doomed so it’s better someone competent seized power” argument. Sure it may have been doomed, but we don’t know that, plenty of people were doing there darndest to reform it (including Pompie) I’d they’d had a few years without Caesar crossing the Rubicon, who knows how it would have turned out?
I’m surprised no one brought up caesarean section, which may or may not have been named after him.
This site refutes the story that Caesar himself was born surgically, but that story has been around a long time.
archive.org has it. The Giacomo Junia story seems to have been made up from whole cloth in the book Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, Volume 2.
Caesar, while presiding at the Circus, takes note that there is some discontent:
I was going to, but I was slow getting to this thread.
But yes, Julius was so awesome he himself performed the first Cesarian section on his own birth, then sewed up his mother. True story.*
*not
Pompey was a lifetime supporter of the the Optimates party. He was not a reformer. He was ‘doing his darndest’ to keep the elite in power.
The people who opposed Caesar were part of the corrupt and incompetent elite that Caesar was trying to suppress.
If you doubt that the Republic had become corrupt and unpopular, I suggest that you read up on the history of civil conflict in the Republic during the whole century before Caesar’s assassination - the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Sulla, Catiline, the Populares and the Optimates, and the widespread grievances among ordinary people against the Republican government.
who lived and worked in Tijuana Mexico, of all places. The hotel where he invented the salad is still there, at least according to our taxi driver as we drove past it.
I’m not even sure how much the Ancient Roman Republic would ever be classified as a truly representative government at any point to be honest. We know obviously that in the early Republic it wasn’t even close to anything we’d recognize as democratic in a legal sense; the Patrician class were the only ones who could hold Consulships and Senate seats. With the creation of the Tribunes began a long, 200+ year process of rebalance between the Patricians and the Plebs, but even that is hard to identify as a purely democratic revolution.
The popular conception has always been that the Patricians were the few ultra-wealthy landed gentry, and the Plebs were the mass of commoners, in a typical aristocrat/peasant dichotomy. That may have been true in the period of the Roman Kingdom and in the very early Republic, but wasn’t really true much after that. Virtually every prominent Roman politician or leader of the Plebeian class in Roman history was a member of the upper tiers of the Plebeian classes (in the complex Roman class system there were the broad, birthright classes of Patrician/Pleb, but the property-based classes reflected by what order you belonged to in the Centuriate Assembly), Rome was always dominated in a quasi-oligarchical fashion by the very wealthy and powerful, whether the individuals who were wielding power at any given time belonged to a Patrician or a Plebeian gens never really changed that reality.
Those seeking political power, which is always power over others, like to point to and venerate historical authoritarians to justify their own rule. So it is not surprising that those in power used a particular take on Caesar to justify and mystify their own authoritarianism. It has a certain parallel with the divine right of kings. That we are all taught such stuff at an early age is insidious.
Yes, but his greatest feat was persuading his mother to swallow the knife.
Hail, Caesar!
He not only wrote his own history, but was in fact the first person to ever write a book. Before Caeser, people used scrolls for writing. Caeser was the inventor of the codex, which is what we now refer to as a (paper) book.
Right. And IIRC he was one of only two people, along with William the Conqueror, who successfully invaded England.
He left though with all the Roman troops, and the Romans’s invaded it again later to gather it under Roman rule, so presumably those later invaders deserve a mention.
? Do you have a cite for that? This discussion of the history of the codex, for example, seems to date the origins of the Latin codex quite a bit later than Julius Caesar.
Even Wikipedia seems to find the attribution to Caesar dubious:
It was basically a 40 year process to bring modern day England under Roman rule, started by Emperor Claudius. By around 40 years later the border with “Pictland” in the North was decently well delineated by the Stanegate road ( Stanegate - Wikipedia) which was situated a little south of where Hadrian eventually built his famous wall.
I also would contest that only the Romans and William the Conqueror have successfully invaded England.
While we don’t have surviving record of their annals, we know factually that the Germanic invasions were successful and saw the ruling class of England (made up of the Romano-British) be replaced by Saxons/Angles/Jutes over lordship and heavy intermixing between those Germanic peoples and the resident population of the country. As best we can tell this wasn’t a single one-off invasion but a long period of invasions and migrations. [Previous popular wisdom held that the Celtic/Roman Britons were totally supplanted by the Germanic tribes, being pushed to remnant populations in places like Cornwall / Wales / Pictland, but modern scholarship highly suggests it wasn’t really like that, and more likely that there was large scale German settlement under Germanic rulers that live alongside existing Briton settlement, and that the common folk heavily intermarried with a large scale of cultural fusion, albeit Old English that emerged was a decidedly Germanic language so the linguistic aspect was German dominated.]
Then too the Viking invasions that began in the 9th century with the Great Heathen Army saw hundreds of years of Scandinavian control of large swathes of the country. While that settlement was eventually pushed out politically and the remaining “Danes” were either assimilated or killed off in events like the St. Brice’s Day Massacre (in which Anglo-Saxon King Æthelred “the Unready” ordered the mass execution of every Dane found within the Kingdom of England.)
I looked up the passage in Suetonius.
The meaning is certainly debatable, but my understanding is that he’s saying that Caesar wrote his letters to the Senate on scrolls that unrolled from left to right, with the text in columns or ‘pages’ (like a Torah scroll), whereas previously they had been sent on scrolls that unrolled top to bottom, with the writing in the other direction across the whole width of the scroll.