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 […]
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) […]
According to legend a man named Romulus, the son of the war-god Mars and the Vestal virgin Rhea Silvia, founded the city of Rome on the Palatine Hill in 753 BCE. Romulus gained the right to found and rule the new city in his own name after a power struggle with his twin brother Remus, […]
The sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid is devoted to Aeneas’ descent into the Underworld, where the ghost of his father Anchises gives him a vision of the future glory of the Romans, a future dependent on Aeneas’ fulfilling the destiny assigned him by the gods to settle the Trojans in Italy at whatever cost. Guided […]
Rome’s domination of the ancient Mediterranean was by no means inevitable. Between 264 and 146 BCE, the Romans fought three long and bloody wars with their most formidable rival, the Phoenician superpower of Carthage, a city-state in North Africa. The First Punic War (called Punic after the Latin word for ‘Phoenician’) was a slugfest waged […]
Starting with the iconic anthem by Iron Maiden, the myth of Icarus has not infrequently been taken up by metal bands as a tale of one pushing the limits of humanity and nature to achieve immortality, even if that immortality comes in the form of deathless fame after a tragic but memorable downfall. But the […]
The Roman epic poet Vergil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, placed these words in the mouth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an aged prophetess who guides the Trojan hero Aeneas into the Underworld: facilis descensus Averno: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,hoc opus, hic labor est. Which may […]
The role of fate, of the destiny of mortals divinely predetermined, is an essential feature of the epic and tragic tales of classical myth and literature. In ancient Greek, there are a handful of terms to express the concept of Fate: Aisa, Heimarmene, and Moira. All three basically contain the idea of “apportionment” or “allotment.” […]
Like heavy metal music, Classics, i.e. the study and reception of the ancient Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean world, does not belong to any one nation, culture, or ethnic group. The genre and field, respectively, suffer when narrowly defined as the province of “Western” culture (whatever that means, it being a modern construct). It is disingenuous […]
Classical reception by Italian bands most often takes the form of recreating the glory of imperial Rome before it fell to the malignant forces, as they see it, of the modern world. Yet some artists, such as the folk/black metal band Selvans, look even further back in the past, to a time before the Romans […]
Heavy Metal Classicist 