Day 4 of 6(66) Days of Nero. Today we’re revisiting a post from this past winter, when the latest polar vortex seized the Midwestern US in a deadly, icy grip. A song about Nero’s Great Fire on an album titled “Extreme Cold Weather” surely embraces the spirit of FROST AND FIRE. (From the archives)As the […]
Day 3 of 6(66) Songs on Nero. The French band Autokrator (the ancient Greek term for ’emperor’) play doomy, industrial death metal. Their 2015 self-titled debut album is in large part a prosopography of Rome’s most infamous emperors, such as Caligula, Commodus, Caracalla, and Diocletian. Nero is among this lurid gallery, his song’s title the […]
Day 2 of 6(66) Days of Nero. The California thrash metal band Hirax close out their 2014 album Immortal Legacy by duly extending the immortality of the infamous emperor’s legacy. Once more, we see the Great Fire of 64 CE and the original anti-Christian persecution taken up as a lyrical theme (see yesterday’s post on […]
Track 1 of our 6(66) Days of Nero. This song by the American blackened speed metal band Bewitcher is burning hot off the presses, part of their 2019 sophomore album Under the Witching Cross released earlier this year. In the year 64 CE, the Roman emperor Nero was celebrating the tenth year of his reign […]
Offspring of the horse-god Poseidon and the Gorgon Medusa, the winged horse Pegasus is one of the most recognizable and iconic creatures in Greek mythology, yet the stallion’s actual role in the traditional stories is often misapprehended. Contrary to what the creative license of films such as Clash of the Titans and Disney’s Hercules would […]
On their third album “Covenant,” the Floridian death metal band Morbid Angel devoted the iconic track “Lion’s Den” to the often sensationalized history of violent persecutions conducted by the Roman Empire against the Christians. On their followup LP “Domination” the band develops this theme into a direct equation of Roman imperialism and anti-Christian Satanism, with […]
Church of Bones is the sophomore album from the Polish epic doom metal band Monasterium. While their self-titled debut album tipped its hat to classical antiquity with their song “In Hoc Signo Vinces” on the emperor Constantine (a future post!), on this new LP they dive into the underworld of Greek mythology, to pay the […]
In 390 BCE, before the Romans fully developed into an invincible military machine that steamrolled across the Mediterranean and beyond, they got a foretaste of the very medicine they would administer to countless cities. Their own city was captured by an enemy army, pillaged, and burned. 800 years before the Visigoths would get the next […]
For much of the decade of the 50s BCE, Julius Caesar extended Roman dominion over the fields and forests of Gaul (roughly modern-day France). He did so not only through superior discipline, tactics, and logistics of the Roman legions, but also through a careful strategy of divide-and-conquer, taking advantage of the political disunity of the […]
Attila the Hun is the most well known of the barbarian warlords who terrorized the Roman Empire in the 400s CE. Ironically, he was responsible for neither sacking Rome or establishing any permanent kingdom in place of the Western Roman provinces. For the sackings of Rome, we can thank Alaric and his Visigoths (410 CE) […]
Heavy Metal Classicist 