Very Late Roman AAR
I went and upgraded my PC, the little sinner that I am, just to play this mod . . .
To celebrate, a little AAR to honour all the hard work being done!
Anna Comnena and the Lapsed Chapter
I remember sitting with Von Horvath one night discussing the intricacies of the Iconoclasts in Constantinople and the eminently subtle debates expounded around the flames and the various torture racks when old Van Horvath leaned in and whispered about whether I knew anything about the Lapsed Chapter of Anna Comnena? I professed to utter ignorance in such an arcane title and the wily old antiquarian smiled deeply and proceeded to tell me a strange and puzzling story indeed.
It began when he was in Prague several years ago and stumbled into an old second-hand bookshop down some musty alleyway. Within its Byzantine arcades - and yes Von Horvath used the word deliberately - he chanced over an old Teuting edition of Anna Comnena’s ‘The Alexiad’. Of course, he purchased it - especially as the edition was translated by certain unknown Mexican scholar named Alonzo Estaban y Gonzales in 1846. As far as Von Horvath was aware no such translation was cited by scholars or in general circulation and so it was with some eagerness he clasped the battered copy to his chest and went home to the dingy hotel allotted to him by his University.
It was late that night as he was avidly reading ‘The Alexiad’ that my wizened friend first found the ‘Lapsed Chapter’, as he so quaintly named it. A small insertion about the fate of a Roman dromond blown far off course and later stranded on a eerily alien shore under a blood-red sun. The fate of these few late Romans was short and as bloody as that sun and took up no large space in ‘The Alexiad‘. Von Horvath told me that he re-read that chapter five times in straight succession and only then picked up the dusty telephone receiver to call Bartleby Jones, the renowned Byzantine scholar (who always scowled every time some poor undergrad mentioned the word ‘Byzantine’) and mentioned both the translation in his hand and the curious chapter of the Roman dromond. That dean of late Roman scholarship had barked back down the crackling telephone line that he had drunk too much plum brandy and that as a result the words were swirling about his head like smoky hieroglyphs - and then slammed the receiver down on him.
The next day, Von Horvath had rummaged in the King Charles University Library and discovered that the Mexican scholar, Alonzo Estaban y Gonzales, had indeed translated Anna Comnena’s renowned work into English as part of his Doctoral thesis but that all the extant copies had been destroyed in a fire one night in the University Annex. Gonzales himself had fallen into a deep depression as a result and was later found hanged beneath the Gargoyle Hall’s upper balustrade.
I interjected then and asked if that was the case what on earth was the book he had found in Prague? Von Horvath smiled one of his insufferably superior smiles then and lit up his meerschaum pipe. As the oily smoke enveloped us, he said he too wondered that but suggested that perhaps this single chapter found nowhere else in all the translations and originals of ‘The Alexiad’ was perhaps an heretical chapter, a lapsed chapter, as it were. A single counter-point to the orthodoxy of Anna’s adulation of her father.
Of course, I asked him to expound further on the ‘Lapsed Chapter’ of Anna Comnena and of course my friend concurred with delight repeating from memory the words which had so captivated him -
It was in the year 1082 and during the War with the Normans and a single dromond under the command of Romanus Diogenes is tasked by the Emperor to sail westwards through the Sicilian waters to attempt to make port along the French coast. There, Romanus was to dissuade the ‘Franks’, as Anna terms them, to aid the Normans against the legitimate Roman powers along the Italian and Adriatic shores. A violent storm ensued and the solitary dromond was battered without release until it had been blown so far west as to pass the Pillars of Hercules and become lost amid the ocean of Atlantis. Weeks passed and the broken vessel drifted at the mercy of the seas until, with all her crew and the Roman soldiers onboard racked with hunger and thirst, a distant golden shore was sighted. With a last effort, the dromond shook itself and made landfall even as her timbers creaked and fell apart. Those that staggered ashore found themselves in a land of snakes and lizards and where the sun seemed to glisten as though bathed in a faint mist of blood. With prayers to Christos and the Emperor, Romanus Diogenes assembled his survivors and warned them that they had sailed into Hell itself and must now fight under the sacred labarums to escape whatever demons fell upon them. After a night of feverish prayers and fasting the soldiers formed up and marched a little inland deeper into the Hell they thought they had been washed ashore upon. Before long, manic cries assailed their ears and the devils Romanus had warned them about crested the baking dunes to fall upon them without respite. The consequent battle was short and violent - and despite the presence of a bombard or two heaved ashore - utterly fatal. Romanus was cut down by an obsidian axe even as his guard attempted to rally to his falling form. All the Romans, the infantry, the cataphracts, the sagittarii and the gunners, were massacred under the shrieks of the devils from Hell itself - and so ended the fate of that dromond and her crew . . .
It was then that that damnable Von Horvath puffed out a last veil of pipe smoke so that his face seemed to vanish from view.
For a long while I remained silent and then I slowly poured more wine for us. My friend remained silent also and eyed me with a sardonic light. Finally, I could take it no longer and I burst out laughing at his jest. What nonsense, I exclaimed! Bombards in the Eleventh century?! Byzantines washed up in Southern America?! Aztecs butchering Romans before they had even existed?! And if all the Romans were slain, how on earth did Anna Comnena even know about the dromond?! This Alonso was surely a fantasist who had corrupted his translation as some sort of hoax! No wonder he hanged himself from the balustrade - he must have know he was going to discovered!
Von Horvath nodded sagely, too, and remarked that I was surely right. He had been beguiled by a dead hoaxer and embarrassed himself before the world’s leading Roman scholar. A heresiarch from the grave had indeed had the last laugh. We drank some more wine and I consoled Von Horvath and told him that it made an interesting anecdote, if nothing else. The remnants of the night passed insouciantly away and eventually he retired to his bed.
Alone, I found my eyes staying to his discarded meerschaum pipe and wondering on the hapless Mexican who stole a false story into an ancient history. Perhaps this man was in some arcane way re-writing our history in revenge for all the burning and effacing done to his by our own crusading knights all those centuries ago? History is written by the victors, a sage once wrote, but what of those who re-write such history?
I lifted the last of my wine in a little toast to that pitiable man who swung from the Gargoyle Hall in shame if only to honour his memory and his act of little bravery . . .
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. Beforehand I had to have all the settings on lowest, but now It's like a totally different game 
Originally Posted by SeniorBatavianHorse
(Okay, just once)
...is my daddy!
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