Friday 9 July 2010

"Bloomsbury Jones and the Finding of the Lost Emperor"

.
Gosh, exciting times we live in, Roger Bland announced in the Daily Mail yesterday that a UK metal detectorist had found one of "our lost emperors". This will come as a great relief to scholars who have been unable since the days of Stukely to work out who all those coins that were being found with CARAV... [etc] legends had belonged to. Some brave souls were suggesting that they might be related to certain scribblings of an Aurelius Victor and another bloke called Eutropius who mention in passing such a guy, who seems to be the same lost emperor who is also found in some of the panegyric literature of the period. It would also make sense of the hitherto completely mysterious inscription on the milestone (RIB 2192) from Old Penrith (?) pictured here, it now turns out this is the SAME lost emperor. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, by a strange coincidence a man with a really rather similar sounding name is mentioned by the Anglian historian Bede in the eighth century and the Welsh (?) historian Nennius in the ninth (?). But they were writing in Latin, so not really surprising that nobody has linked the references to a Lost Emperor there written in a lost language with the other bits and bobs of Lost Emporism. Now we have Roger Bland's announcement that like some Bloomsbury Indiana Jones, he has found the Lost Emperor, these make sense as perhaps the same Lost Emperor. Gosh ! But it gets even more exciting, buried deep in the dusty recesses of an old bookcase here at Chateau Barford unused since the days of Grandpa Moses Z. Barford, I found a copy of an old book, a book as old as the United States (gee !!). It's by this stuffy old bloke called Gibbon, rambling on and on (its a big book, which is probably why nobody reads it maybe, even though this one is in English) about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In it, I made a really interesting discovery; this Gibbon bloke whoever he was actually mentions this guy "Carausius" there !!!! Wow. Who'd a' believed it, eh? Three hundred years ago somebody wrote all this stuff down, and it was then forgotten, lost in the mysts of time, only to be found by Roger Bland and myself. Why was it forgotten then? What horrendous conspiracy lies behind this erasure of a whole chunk of ancient history from social memory? Has it anything to do with Leonardo Da Vinci, Pope Joan and the real Tomb of Christ? Well, whoopee for the PAS who alone of all the branches of scholarship is able to recover for us all the information that there was this bloke Carausius and put him on the map. Now if only the study of the coins would give us his wife's name...

No comments:

 
Creative Commons License
Ten utwór jest dostępny na licencji Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Bez utworów zależnych 3.0 Unported.