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Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
"a late antique source suggests"
It's frustrating to find things like this in Wikipedia... the line was very likely taken straight out of the 1911 Britannica, so there's no way to track down this reference, especially given the thick muck of romantic drivel about Rome as the city of Romance. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.131.16.137 (talk) 17:52:17, August 19, 2007 (UTC)
The 1911 Britannica is rarely flat-out wrong on such matters. The 'late antique source' is Ioannes Lydus, a Greek writer of the time of Justinian, at De mensibus 4.73. Lydus is not an easy author to look up, but a pdf of De mensibus is available here, in Greek with notes in Latin. There is also a graffito, I think from Pompeii, which may be a magical diagram or just a palindromic square of Roma/Amor, which I can describe but not duplicate under present conditions: ROMA, with AMOR linked to the A and descending, then ROMA at the bottom reading backwards (or Amor left to right), and again ROMA on the vertical left. It has nothing to do with modern notions of Rome as a city of romance, but possibly does have to do with the genealogical myth of Venus/Aphrodite as Rome's divine mother (the birth mother of Rome's founder Aeneas).Cynwolfe (talk) 18:56, 23 September 2008 (UTC)Reply
