Top 10 Greatest/Most Famous People

Here's my top 10 of the greatest and most famous people of all time. The criteria:

* No-one famous or great since 1900 - that's too recent
* Must have actually done stuff, not just talked about it
* Must have stood the test of time
* Must have instant name recognition
* Must have done something first, or started a trend, not simply followed on or built upon
* Ranked in order.

1. Julius Caesar

Pretty obvious I know, but truly great he is. You may argue that without William Shakespeare's play, he'd be far less known, maybe Pompey would be the one we'd all admire instead. However Caesar holds his own in any company. Today his place of cremation is a shrine attracting millions of people. What is it about him that pulls on so many heartstrings. He was betrayed, perhaps that's what it is. His accomplishments are many, and he had a capable team around him. But most importantly, his influence led to the founding of the Roman empire.

2. Marc Antony

Caesar's sidekick and one of few men Julius Caesar confided in. He wasn't as gifted as Caesar nor as lucky.

3. Cleopatra VII

Rounding out the top three, an argument could be made that Cleopatra VII deserves a higher place. However her kingdom was badly in decline by the time she came to power and her joining with Caesar and then Antony is simply clutching at straws. She was clever, no doubt about it, but doomed - sadly. Sidebar note: she was the mother of Cleopatra Selene II, wife of my personal hero Juba II, King of Numidia.

4. Alexander the Great

A warring tourist. He'd also jumped on the bandwagon started by his father.

5. Genghis Khan

He started something great, and established it, but the Mongols were based off a nomadic lifestyle that could not sustain expansion indefinitely. That's why the Mongol advance to Spain halted, the harvests back home had ceased, or were not as good, meaning families were having fewer children and so replacements were not arriving in sufficient numbers.

6. Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley)

'Old nosey' was the greatest defensive military commander of all time. Beat everyone up, never lost, started the Great in Britain, the world's biggest empire (and still is, suck on that). Then he became a statesman. He could be described as somewhat odd, and maybe a little daft. He used to say, when it was time to wake up, it was time to roll out. He meant it, sleeping in a small bed if he slept at all. In later life he'd give out little medals to the children who played on his estate. One girl he liked a lot and he told her he would arrange for a place at horse guards to be kept open for her. This either meant he didn't know she was a girl - horse guards were all men - or he was the first modern male. Maybe the latter as he was a loyal servant of Queen Victoria.

7. Giuseppe Garibaldi

Africa needs a Garibaldi. He unified Italy and had the sense to not place himself on the throne. Everywhere you go in Italy there is Garibaldi this and Garibaldi that. But he earns his place on my list because he was trans-continental, taking his ideas and 'freedom fighting' to Brazil and Uruguay. Special mention must be made of Anita Garibaldi, she makes makes my list of top women to follow.

8. King Henry VIII

Henry gets a bad press. He reformed institutions that led to the later rise of the British Empire, so a pretty significant figure then.

9. Aristotle

The father of western philosophy. You can't be logical without reference to Aristotle.

10. Leonardo da Vinci

A polymath, da Vinci was good at everything. He makes the list due to this sheer breadth of creative work.

*********

A few names missing then, so to explain: Machiavelli and Sun Tzu are lionised by Americans but don't make the cut. Marco Polo too is not on the list. No idea why? They're largely only talking about things. And note, no Americans on the list either, the US hasn't been around long enough, George Washington was just a small-time farmer and Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. They wouldn't even make a top 100. Get over it.

Special mention must go to two outstanding historical figures. The first is Xerxes I the ruler of Persia 486- 465 BC who withstood Greek aggression and took Athens. Forget all the Hollywood movies portraying him as a psycho, Xerxes was bringing enlightenment to Greece and all who took his side. Think about his major engineering, the pontoon bridge across the Hellespont and when the first attempt failed did he take it out on the men? No, he flogged the water. A reasonable man indeed. And both modern and ancient historians try to describe Xerxes invasion of Greece as unsuccessful or a defeat. That he burnt Athens. No on both counts; Athens burned because the inhabitants ran away, leaving their fires burning, which resulted in part of the city burning down. And when Xerxes got to Athens he found the place a shithole and cold. He went home. That's what happened. The 300? That was 300 Spartans plus thousands of others, they don't tell you in the movies about Sparta only sending a small force as it was harvest time. Hmm?? But Xerxes doesn't make the list as hardly anyone knows his name in the West, due to thousands of years of propaganda. The reality is everyone took his lead and wanted to be on his side as he was a most reasonable man.

Then we have Vlad III Dracula, otherwise known as Vlad the Just, Vlad the Freedom Fighter, Vlad the Most Wise, Vlad the Prosecutor of Corruption. His enemies unkindly call him Vlad the Impaler. He probably deserves making a list of the most maligned and misunderstood. Vlad failed though, betrayed and assassinated by so-called friends. But he gave Romania its identity, still evident today. 

Rome II

We sampled McDonald's in Italy while in Rome. It wasn't that good, bought from the McDonald's next to the central train station (not the outlet inside the station itself), must avoid McDonald's while in Italy in the future:

Yes we checked out the Coliseum in case I haven't mentioned that before, this pic shows how it sits alongside Constantine's arch:

Then a nice view of the Coliseum coming down from the hill Nero's golden home sits on:

Inside the structure, my daughter dryly noted the use of 2,000 year old scaffolding (not), oh and a modern concrete batching plant outside as well. In other words constant work is ongoing to keep the structure from falling down - suggestion: throw the cars out from the vicinity, that might help:

We checked out the place it is said Julius Caesar was cremated in the Forum, people place coins and other offerings there, no idea why they do that:

We took in other sights, such as the Trevi Fountain, and noted the large volume of souvenirs connecting the fountain with Audrey Hepburn's film, Roman Holiday. No surprises guessing the age of the visitors:

A short walk then to the Pantheon, the absolute highlight of our whole trip:

The famous ceiling:

And the drain holes in the floor to take away the water that falls through that hole at the top:

People seem to forget to walk around the outside of the building, just to see how old the structure is:

We then visited Vatican City, walking there from the Pantheon, and the next day for a second time by taking the hop on/hop off bus which commenced its journey right outside our hotel. By using the bus we had a lot of time to see the Vatican Museum:

Walking back from Vatican City we came upon the Largo di Torre Argentina and its Roman Republican temples. Many believe this is the location of the assassination of Julius Caesar. This is not well promoted by the Italians and the sign explaining the site is very poor:

Then heading in the general direction of the hotel, came up close and personal with the Circus Maximus:

Then on the next day we get off the hop on/hop off bus at their stop on the hill to the right, to get a view of the Circus Maximus from that vantage point and head to the Bocca della Verita or Mouth of Truth, as my daughter is obsessed with the thing. Initially we couldn't find it and that was because guide books put us badly wrong. The simple explanation to find this; from the hop on/hop off bus-stop at the Circus Maximus, head down the hill in the direction the traffic is travelling. Go over the first street, then keep going straight, the Mouth of Truth is on the next corner inside the building on the corner, the entrance just around the corner on your right shoulder.

That was fun, daughter didn't lose her hand. Then back on the bus and off to the Vatican Museum. Interesting, learnt that Raphael is much better than Michelangelo and that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is totally overrated. Another tourist trap. Though on one of the displays I did read that there is no proof at all that Christians were fed to the lions by the Romans. Thank you Vatican, I knew that, and finally comes confirmation from people with a vested interest in saying the opposite.

The Vatican Museum has a lot of really old stuff, such as Egyptian pieces 5,000 years BC:

5,000 BC are those little pieces in the middle of the pic. That's old. The Vatican Museum is better laid out but English did evaporate at times, though not as often as with Italian Museums. The museum can be beautiful:

But the exit staircase is treacherous, watch out:

Outside, the Vatican was having some festival for agriculture:

Rome

Our travels in Italy ended in Rome. I also give it top spot due to the layout of the streets which are logical and well signposted, and considering that most of the main sights are in Rome as well. My personal favourite place is Florence but I have to admit it is much smaller. If heading to Italy, you have to visit Rome.

We spent a week in Rome, the first few days just walking around, then another day using a hop on/hop off bus, then our last full day we devoted to shopping.

On our first walk around we stumbled upon the Coliseum:

It's an imposing structure and you can see how it was constructed, rather like an onion with the outer layers going higher and reaching over the lower inner layer.

But while impressive, it's still only a sports complex. For me the Forum and Palatine Hill are more interesting. The Italians get complicated with their ticketing, there is something called a Super Ticket which I'm not sure about as the place advertising it was not selling it. Italians are idiots like that. In the end we bought a ticket for the Coliseum and Palatine, which gave one entry to each, valid for two days. We visited both over one day, which was hard work, we wore our legs out.

Without needing a ticket you can get a good view of Constantine's arch,

and the gladiator school that sat right next to the Coliseum (gladiators went into the stadium underground):

Plus, aqueducts which brought in water are clearly visible as are what is left of 2,000 year old apartment blocks.

Using your ticket to gain entrance to the Palatine, you can get a good view of the Circus Maximus, still an impressive structure today. Do they still race horses on this track and if not, why not (look out Ben-Hur)?

At the other end of the Palatine you can get a good view of the Forum:

Tomorrow I'll continue describing our Rome experiences, including the awesome Pantheon which was the highlight of the whole trip. But before I go I'll leave you with a pic of the hop on/hop off bus we used.

The advantage this afforded was the ability to quickly get to the main things, but also in having the upper deck we got a really good idea of how things looked 2,000 years ago. Take out the cars, and it would have been stunning having Trajan's column at one end and Titus and Constantine's arch at the other, to one side the Palatine, and the other side the hill with Nero's golden house on it. The Coliseum standing between the two. You can get this from up top on the bus, but while walking around on the ground down below you can't see the layout all that well.

Pompeii

For most of January 2019 I have been in Italy travelling around. Over the next few days and weeks I'll report on my experiences and the impressions I formed of the people and places. Not all of this is going to be positive, be warned.

I was travelling with my wife and youngest daughter. This was going to be a rail trip, travelling between cities on the Italian rail system which I must say functions quite adequately as a fairly fast system, but nothing like that of Japan. Few can match the speed and efficiency of Japan.

For me, the ruins at Pompeii were near the top of my list of places to visit. I ended up disappointed and I can safely say this is a place to avoid unless you are absolutely obsessed with everything Roman and just have to go there.

We stayed in Naples, which is another city worth avoiding, but more about that place later. Getting to Pompeii turned out to be a mission. We wanted to get to Pompeii by rail and set out in the morning, we found out the hard way how to do this: go to Napoli Garribaldi station which is on a lower level of the central railway station, and take the heavily tagged, ugly and uncomfortable trains called the Circumvesuviana Napoli to Sorrento line. Make sure to get on the train indicated on the electronic signboard - (Pompei Scavi), in parentheses after the displayed final destination. This train will take you to the excavations themselves, and right at the entrance gate to the site, and not to Pompei city which is farther away. You can see the city from the hill Pompeii sits on, so it's not that far away but make every effort to be on the right train. Here's what that view looks like:

Our story about this is somewhat convoluted. Leaving our hotel thinking it would be easy to just walk to the train station (okay, it was me who thought this, I'll never live it down), I got us badly lost. Unbeknownst to us at the time we ended up at a station on the correct line, one stop closer to Pompeii (the station was called via Gianturco), but not knowing this we headed on a train back to Napoli Garribaldi. Note, at this stage we hadn't bought a ticket as this via Gianturco place had no ticketing at all. Strange indeed. We were soon joined on the platform by a group of young Spanish people, apparently they'd got off the train they were on as they'd found it wasn't going to Pompeii, so now they were on our platform looking to head back to Naples in order to start their journey again. You'd be right in thinking that a lot of people get lost on their way to Pompeii (as an aside, maybe it's best to stay at modern Pompei city or its surrounds, don't try to stay in Naples and make the day trip to Pompeii Scavi, just saying).

At Naples we approached an attendant and were promptly given some kind of fine for not having a ticket but being within the system. After much gesticulation he found out we were trying to get to Pompeii, and weren't coming from Pompeii. He refunded our money and waved us away. After some wandering around we found ourselves on the platform for Pompeii Scavi.

This didn't go as planned as an Englishman who thought he knew everything informed us the very next train was going to Pompeii Scavi. It turned out he only had half the information he needed, at best. We got on this train, and just past via Gianturco (that one again, we'd just come from there with the young Spanish speakers) a very nice Italian gentleman started telling us where we needed to be. We didn't understand a word of what he said but someone else on the train knew English and interpreted, telling us we needed to get off at the next station and take the train coming after this one, that would get us to Pompeii Scavi. On our travels we found Italians to be very helpful like this.

So we got off the train at the next station to see the Englishman there too, I avoided talking to him as I didn't want a Commonwealth incident in Italy, we were meant to be Allies after all.

So at last we were on the train to Pompeii. Yay. Then some hustlers boarded the train and began playing loud music, beating drums and shaking tambourines. I guessed they wanted us to pay to make them go away, but at the next station they were thrown off. Given the patience the locals had toward this din, my guess is they're used to it. The locals seemed amused at my appalled reaction. Do not pay these so-called entertainers anything (the noise-making hustlers that is).

Arriving at the site, there was no ticket check at the station exit and so we had just managed to travel to Pompei Scavi for free (going home at the end of the day we bought tickets at the ticket window and paid about 50% more for the privilege, the price displayed on the actual ticket showed less than we'd just paid). We were then constantly berated by more hustlers and swindlers just outside the main gates. Very low class and not a good first impression.

The cost to get in to Pompeii? 30 Euro, my wife and I had to pay, the child was free. Was this a good deal? No it wasn't, that was way too expensive. We collected our free map, which turned out to be useless as it contained such little information and virtually no English. Once on site, there is very little English and next to no information about what is what. So we wandered around all day, me being guide as it turns out I actually know what I'm talking about.

Were there highlights of this day exploring Pompeii? Yes, I enjoyed the Villa dei Misteri. I've looked around for a good map of the site to indicate where this house sits and found this link:
http://www.tourpompei.com/alex/sites/default/files/Itinerary_3_forkids_0.jpg

The Villa is illustrated at the top left of the above map, outside the city walls. What is good about this place is it is intact and you can see the art still on the inside walls of the house. No-one knew about this place until the twentieth century, so it hasn't been looted.

My suggestion; do not leave it too late to visit the Villa dei Misteri. It's a walk away from the main site, and knowing this I had it first on my list. When approaching the house which is a walk up and then down a small hill adjacent to Pompeii, a nice man called out from the house, were we English? No, I replied, New Zealand. He knew where this was; we found Italians generally knew where New Zealand was and they also knew Italy always lost to the All Blacks. They tell us that, we would never mention it of course.

Here are some pics from inside the Villa:

It turned out this nice gentleman was touting for his neighbouring family restaurant run by his mother. He proudly informed us that Morgan Freeman had eaten there. The place is called Bacco e Arianna. Yes, another hustle, but a good one as he sold us custom made takeaway sandwiches that were too big for us to finish, half the price of sandwiches selling on site that are a third the size.

A couple of photo's, what the restaurant looks inside the courtyard, and what those sandwiches looked like:

(This is the street view of the establishment:
 https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@40.7531859,14.4773121,3a,60y,13.6h,86.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL_Ai38goZ0ytz31kVWqBZg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 )

See the white hut at the end there? That's some kind of backdoor entry to Pompeii, and the turnstile was always open. The two guards just waved us through, one saying he'd remember us when coming back from the restaurant, but they didn't notice or check when we returned. Very Italian all this, as was the Mum making those sandwiches. Like some kind of scene from a movie. I must say they had a brilliant crop of Mandarins coming on there, diners can sit outdoors underneath the trees while they eat.

You may have picked up on my thinking here. If you're clever and scout around, you could easily get into Pompeii for free. They deserve to have this happen as the site is so badly managed. One of the major secrets is the museum up the back and next door to the amphitheatre, it appears devoted to Etruscan and Samnite stuff. There was nothing promoting this museum earlier, and by the time we found it we were running out of time. The amphitheatre was a waste of time and polluted with Pink Floyd blaring from below. As the young one pointed out, those vibrations are probably breaking down the structure. Message: leave Pink Floyd out, I don't care if they played there, they're irrelevant, pretentious twits.

While the Villa dei Misteri is very impressive, it's not where I could picture myself living. No, my favourite house was the sunken garden place, which funnily enough is toward the Villa in terms of direction (to the left of the Forum as you look at it upon entering from the main gate). This is the sunken garden house:

Walking back to the main gate my daughter asked if the pavement we were walking on was 2,000 years old. No, I could safely say, it was probably laid last week. A lot of the site was like that, new plaster, recent pavement, new roofs. Give the place to Disney to manage, they'd do the job properly.

Oh and one last thing; the Romans weren't stupid. Stupid people would have rutted roads impossible to use. Those stones in the surface of the city streets, those cracks would have been filled with sand. How do I know this? Very few of the stones were broken at the edges. Wagon wheels get stuck in cracks and break, or they break off the edges of the paver. But more prevalent were wheel ruts in the stone itself., meaning the wheels were running over an even surface.

Fill those cracks with sand and make the site easy to walk around, like it would've been back in the day. The other benefit (which the Romans knew about) is the sand locks up the paving stones, and they're less likely to move around plus the sand soaks up animal waste and also glues everything together. The site management have gone out of their way to make the site difficult to navigate, the streets could put your back out they're that bad.

Here's what I'm talking about:

Look at the road itself, nicely worn stones, those cracks would have been filled with sand to make the road surface flush. If they didn't do this all those stones would be broken away at the edges, and back in the day wagons would be breaking axles and wheels, and they'd possibly hit stepping stones used for crossing the street by failing to make clearance.

This looks better, more like this:

Slavery: Roman Empire

Something I feel is often overlooked about the institution of slavery during the Roman Empire, is that it worked as a social filter. More recent slavery failed as it worked the opposite way, keeping people in slavery generation after generation.

What do I mean by social filter? The institution funnelled people from the outside, into becoming civilised. Now I'm grossly exaggerating of course, see a Wikipedia article below for a more detailed description. However I think my generalisation still holds.

I use an example, the instance is Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. When a region is conquered he takes a certain number as slaves. Wholesalers followed the army and they would take the slaves and sell them. This would have had two effects, the first being the conquered get to rid themselves of their troublemakers and underclass (that's because they had a say in who got enslaved). It also kept everyone left that wasn't enslaved behaving nicely.

Then the slaves once taken supported the Roman economy by conducting mostly menial tasks (though some were highly skilled and others were treated brutally in the mines, they are the exception not the rule) and they then had the chance to become free and a Roman citizen of low rank. This wasn't just a rare occurrence, laws had to be passed stopping the rapid freeing of slaves, it became so commonplace. And slaves were generally looked after with laws evolving to protect them from mistreatment. Some were expelled from Rome for being too dangerous, but most led productive lives after being freed, including those expelled.

The social filter remained effective for longer than the period of enslavement as freed slaves were connected to their former owners who became the freed slaves patron. They had obligations to one another. And critically, the children of freed slaves became Roman citizens without restriction. 

For a good intro to Roman slavery see the following Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

And a plug for my novel Dana Point, which has the Herculean society biochemically ranked. Status is determined by blood test at birth but individuals can rise by achievement. If they commit a crime they're busted back to the rank they were born with. It's the way I see a fully advanced Roman society evolving if it was allowed to.