Notice: This is the official website of the All Empires History Community (Reg. 10 Feb 2002)

  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Register Register  Login Login

Augustus: 31 BC to 14 A.D.

 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
RonPrice View Drop Down
Knight
Knight
Avatar

Joined: 13-Aug-2004
Location: Australia
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 62
  Quote RonPrice Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Augustus: 31 BC to 14 A.D.
    Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 03:11
AUGUSTUS

After watching the two part series “Augustus” on SBS TV(17 and 24 June 2008--11:40 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.) in the last two weeks as another academic year was coming to an end in school systems across the northern hemisphere; after teaching Roman history at a post-secondary technical college in Western Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s; after studying Roman history in high school as part of the grade eleven curriculum in Ontario in 1960-1961 and in the first year of my liberal arts degree in university in 1963-1964 forty-five years ago; after taking an interest in the field of classical studies since those 1960s, albeit a peripheral one among the many subjects that were part of the general and interdisciplinary studies I taught and the general studies in the social sciences and humanities that I read—after all this, in the early evening of my life, as the years of my late adulthood crept along incrementally more quickly, it seemed, with every passing year, I felt like writing this prose-poem.  I wanted to try to fit Augustus, Octavian as he was also known, the first Roman Emperor, into a historical context relevant to today, at least relevant to how I had come to see the comparisons and contrasts between Augustus and his time as well as my time, my age and my life.   -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 June 2008.

Rome had conquered the world,
well, a big chunk of it in the middle
East, north Africa and what is now
Europe, in the quarter millennium
from 250 BC to the time of Christ.

Was it a set-up?  Setting the world
up for the periodic intervention of
the divine into human affairs, giving
a stage for the spread of the message
that would and did change that mise
en scene forever.  And are we being
set up again, in our age and time in
the midst, now, of this greatest of
spiritual dramas in the world’s history,
so very unbeknownst to the generality
of men, creeping, as it now is, along
the edges of society as that message
did 2000 years ago before it captured
western civilization for a 1000 years?

The most precious Being ever to appear
in the world of creation appears from time
to time and the light of the Unseen shines
above the horizon of celestial might only
to be denied, opposed and disputed with
in vain words to try to invalidate His claim.1

1 Baha’u’llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, Wilmette, 1950(1931), p.5.

Ron Price
27 June 2008

Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).
Back to Top
RonPrice View Drop Down
Knight
Knight
Avatar

Joined: 13-Aug-2004
Location: Australia
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 62
  Quote RonPrice Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 03:31
In the century, 1450 to 1550, European society was rapidly transformed.(1)   The monopoly held by the then dominant institution, the Catholic Church, was placed in serious dispute.  Ten million books were produced in the decade Columbus sailed the Atlantic to the New World raising all sorts of questions and doubts about legitimate authority.   Medieval society, seemingly stable and secure in 1450,  was anything but. The stability was only a veneer.  The world that my years of pre-pioneering-travelling and pioneering-traveling attempt to describe in both an indirect and direct, both a discursive and an intuitive, both a personal and analytical way in my memoirs, if it continues in the same direction for much more of this century, will indeed tell the story of an even greater transformation.  The church, religion and the nation, the state, democracy and Christianity, highly entrenched in 1953 may, by 2053, prove to be based on outworn shibboleths and historical anachronisms.  

The transformation, the tempest, that was unleashed with the coming of the Bab and Baha'u'llah in the nineteenth century, such is my view, and that has been blowing through my life time, my pioneering days, these earliest generations under the guidance of the Universal House of Justice, with continued force, deranging the world's equilibrium and 'uprooting its institutions'(2)  is leaving the world, at least so it seems to me after the passing of more than forty years of pioneering(1962 to 2009), unable to undertake the fundamental reorientation(3) required without a great deal of suffering and despondency. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, MacMillan, NY, 1997, p.99; (2)Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come, 1976(1941), p.1; and (3)The Universal House of Justice, ""Letter to the World's Religious Leaders," April 2002, p.3.

These questions did not exist
for me the year I got my first
baseball glove, my mother saw
that ad in the Burlington Gazette
and they finished that temple in
Chicago………

.....but the world was changing
under my feet as I grew into a
man and then into an old man.
It was all becoming irrelevant,
first that hopeful, Communism,
then one day, it would appear,
democracy emerging as it had
when Shaykh Ahmad was in his
last years in Arabia preparing
himself for his role as precursor
to the Promised One.

As the Holy Church gained
ascendancy from 390 to 420
and lost it from 1490 to 1520,
so will there be in my day a
deliberate and decisive break
with religion and the ideology
of the nation state: and this
Faith I have come to believe---
Where will it be in all this?

Ron Price
2 August 2002
(updated for All Empires History Forum)
Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).
Back to Top
Guests View Drop Down
Guest
Guest
  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 04:08
This is not Military History, but rather philosophy/theology from what I can gather. Thus it will be moved there.
Back to Top
Guests View Drop Down
Guest
Guest
  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 04:11
Also are you writing for this person, Ron Price, or are you that person? 
Back to Top
Guests View Drop Down
Guest
Guest
  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 04:55
Anachronisms merged with Augustus thread. 
Back to Top
Reginmund View Drop Down
Arch Duke
Arch Duke


Joined: 08-May-2005
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 1943
  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 11:20
We're lacking a crazy people sub-forum.
Back to Top
opuslola View Drop Down
Tsar
Tsar
Avatar
suspended

Joined: 23-Sep-2009
Location: Long Beach, MS,
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 4620
  Quote opuslola Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Jan-2010 at 19:27
Crazy or not! Ron Price might well be correct about it? Albeit, I feel he has found the correct answer but he failed to ask the correct questions!

Regards,
http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/history/
Back to Top
Apologia View Drop Down
Immortal Guard
Immortal Guard


Joined: 07-Aug-2009
Location: Geelong
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 4
  Quote Apologia Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Jan-2010 at 14:32
I don't understand the point of this post, what are you getting at, Ron?
Back to Top
opuslola View Drop Down
Tsar
Tsar
Avatar
suspended

Joined: 23-Sep-2009
Location: Long Beach, MS,
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 4620
  Quote opuslola Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Jan-2010 at 14:59
Apologia, maybe it had to do with his own words, such as;

"As the Holy Church gained
ascendancy from 390 to 420
and lost it from 1490 to 1520,
so will there be in my day a
deliberate and decisive break
with religion and the ideology
of the nation state: and this
Faith I have come to believe---
Where will it be in all this?"

There seems to be some missing times?

Regards,
http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/history/
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down

Bulletin Board Software by Web Wiz Forums® version 9.56a [Free Express Edition]
Copyright ©2001-2009 Web Wiz

This page was generated in 0.125 seconds.