Word: emperor
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Cotton Cloth. The tunic tradition goes back to Flavia Helena, wife of Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus (he is said to have picked her up in a Balkan tavern during one of his campaigns) and mother of Constantine the Great. Converted to Christianity about 312, Helena later journeyed to the Holy Land, went to Calvary, and (wrote St. Ambrose 70 years later) "had excavations made, the debris cleared away and unearthed three crucifixion trees huddled together and covered with mud . . . She also set out to look for the nails which had pinned the Lord to the Cross and found them." Chronicler...
...great port in Carthaginian times. Later it was allied to Rome, but the city fathers made the mistake of siding with Pompey against Julius Caesar. For this the city was fined 300,000 measures of oil annually. Later still it became the home town of a Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, who made it one of the grandest and wealthiest cities of the empire. Nubian slaves, lions for the Roman arenas, ivory and African gold flowed through Leptis Magna into the civilized world, until the harbor silted up. Marauding Vandals sacked the city. Then, in A.D. 523 Berber raiders depopulated...
...beauty of its vivid-hued cliffs and luminous Blue Grotto, Italy's fabled Bay of Naples island of Capri owes its reputation less to its scenery than to two of its former inhabitants. One was the Emperor Tiberius, who retired some 1,900 years ago to a mountaintop villa from which, records Suetonius, "condemned persons, after long and exquisite tortures, used to be hurled, on his orders and in his presence, into the sea." The other was British Author Norman Douglas, whose bestselling South Wind (1917) painted a thinly disguised picture of Capri as a haunt of elegant wickedness...
...appeared as if by miracle within a cave in the mountain one day ten centuries ago. First a church, then a monastery was built near the peak in her honor. The shrine became a military strongpoint in the struggle between Catalonian Christians and Moors; the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V prayed before the Black Virgin many times, and Saint Ignatius Loyola found his vocation in her presence. Today, she is the legendary protector of all Catalonia, and every devout Catalonian makes a pilgrimage to her shrine at least once in life...
...When palace intrigue involved him in a treason charge, he opened his veins, chatted airily with his friends, recited some light poetry; then, placing a manicured thumb to an elegant nose, he wrote out a definitive list of Nero's bed partners and sent it off to the emperor before he lay back...