Ramblings, rumblings, grumblings, and rambling grumbly rumblings.

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Those who mark it, of course. Dreamwidth has been being a pain for me for a couple of days, which is why I haven't updated until now. Today I had lamb for lunch, and very nice it was too. I love lamb, and fortunately it's easy to get here, if a bit expensive for the good stuff. Right, I'll try posting again. Let's see if this one goes through!

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Content warning on this one: there's a lot less sugar-coating here than is usual for this subject.

I've long been interested in Roman history. It's a remarkable period, spanning centuries and full of interest and genuine achievements in various fields. But we often tend to marvel at the civil engineering of the aqueducts and the figures like Julius Caesar without much active thought as to the human cost of the Romans' dominance – which was enormous, arguably the real precursor to the indistrialised cruelties of the modern age. Indeed, Roman logistics and civil engineering were such that in many ways the late Republic and early Empire were about as close to industrialism as you can get with a human-powered society.

It's no secret that Rome was a society built on slavery – but we're often very careful about which parts we like to discuss. We talk, for example, about the fact that manumission was more common than in most slave societies, and that a freedman could in theory rise to a position of great influence in business or the civil service. We don't so much talk about the fact that the lead that lined the pipes for those aqueducts was often mined by people condemned to a fate everyone knew was just as much a slow death sentence as the Nazis' "extermination through labour" of almost two millennia later.

As for the Colosseum? We look at it and we think of something like Gladiator – violent, yes, but with a core that we can at least relate to the combat sports of today. How often do we think about the people condemned to act out Greek myths for the amusement of the vast crowd? These weren't purely fictional plays in the modern sense: if a character in the myth was killed by a bear or raped by a bull, then that really happened to a real human in the arena. There is at least one report of a re-enactment of the Icarus myth wherein a man was fitted with wings and literally thrown to his death from a height. Romans would sit with their friends and treat this as good entertainment.

Now we come to what may be the darkest truth of the Roman world, one which I can approximate by saying this: if you've read the Epstein files, then everything you've read in them could have been done to a slave, who could quite legally be bought expressly and openly for that purpose. The Romans even had words – delicia and delicati – that applied specifically to young slaves. The words are often translated as "pets", which implies relatively affectionate treatment, but that's another comforting myth. Some were treated that way, yes. Others were tortured and abused, including sexually. And it was legal.

As for the modern notion of "war crimes"? It didn't really exist. In the Siege of Alesia in 52 BC, the Gaulish defenders built an inner wall and the Romans an outer one around the town. When food ran short, the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix let the elderly, women and children out in the hope the Romans would take them as hostages and at least feed them. Instead, Julius Caesar refused to do this, there was not enough food left for the Gauls to provide for them, and so the vulnerable people slowly starved to death in full view of both sides. Vercingetorix himself was taken prisoner, being executed in Rome after six years' imprisonment.

Finally, we come to one of the most famously decisive conflicts of ancient history: the Punic Wars. When Rome achieved final victory in 146 BC, Carthage – then one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of hundreds of thousands – was destroyed after a three-year siege. While the myth that the ground was sown with salt is a later embellishment, "destroyed" is not an exaggeration: it was a literal scorched earth policy. The Roman commander, Scipio Aemilianus, ordered the city burned to the ground, every building demolished, and by the end all but 50,000 of the city's inhabitants were dead. All the others, of any age, were enslaved. Carthage did not begin to recover for a hundred years.

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To Stourbridge today to see the dental hygienist, which isn't my favourite activity. At least if you need a filling at the dentist, you get an anaesthetic! :P Still, it wasn't too bad and it's done now until next time. Later, I went to the nearby Old White Horse, a pub I'd never actually been to before despite walking past it a zillion times, for coffee. It was peaceful and relaxed in the middle of a weekday, and the coffee was cheaper than in Costa or Coffee #1 as well! Not much going on beyond everyday boring things later in the day, although I did manage to have a brief walk on the edge of town, which was nice.

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It rained a bit. I went for a walk. I had chicken pie and broccoli for tea. I watched telly for a little while. It stopped raining. I fixed the clock I'd forgotten to put forward last night. I made this DW post.

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...although originally stemming from harm. Sandra Peabody, after being repeatedly and severely emotionally and psychologically abused in connection with The Last House on the Left, went on to do great things. She went into children's TV production and won an Emmy, among other awards. She became an acting coach, putting into practice the expertise she had studied with Sanford Meisner in the late 1960s. She became a talent representative who I have literally never seen a bad story about – and I see a lot. She's still coaching at the age of 78, in the Pacific Northwest where she has lived for decades.

And this is exactly why David Hess in particular, even though he died fifteen years ago, should not be allowed to rest easily. Because he harmed and dehumanised Sandra Peabody, bragged about it publicly, did so repeatedly, and never faced a reckoning. Sandra herself does not need to be, and should not be, asked to contribute a single word. Those who enabled and glorified Hess in public for so many years are a different matter.

Sandra Peabody is the most important person in this story. And the public record of her career speaks for itself.

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A big signal failure in the afternoon left me stranded at a freezing cold Stourbridge Junction for nearly an hour today. It's at least got a canopy over the platforms, but it wasn't exactly fun, especially when it started hailing diagonally. Eventually a rail replacement coach turned up to take me (and a few other cold souls) back to Kidderminster, via various roadworks and traffic jams. Unfortunately all this had knock-on effects, but those were just annoying, not disastrous.