Arve and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from La Trobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today I am joined by two guests.

Associate Professor Riannon Evans from Classics and Ancient History at La Trobe University

and Professor

Kalin Davenport, head of the Centre for Classical Studies at the Australian National University.

This is episode CCL, Anthology of Interest, I.V.

In which we, the triumvirate of interesting people, will talk about three topics for three minutes.

There we go. That is an in-situ intro recording. Are we already? We're familiar with the format. It's been a while.

Yep, ready to go. Okay, who wants to go first? Who has something interesting to open us with?

My first topic, I've entitled A Phoenix in the Forum, mostly for the alliteration.

Now, you might think you know something about the Phoenix and maybe if you know something

associate this mythical bird, I'm sorry they don't exist, with Egypt, it's very much associated

with the Sun. I think my first experience of it was reading the Phoenix and the in the carpet as a child with a very long life and with rebirth. So the

whole idea that the phoenix burns itself up and then a new one is born from the

ashes and egg appears, something like that. That might be your association that you

already have with the phoenix. And the implication from this is that there is only one.

So if we go back, way back, Herodotus says it appears every 500 years.

This then gets a bit murky and the time gets expanded.

So in Tacitus, it's seen in Egypt, but he says that it should come every 500 years or maybe every 1,461 years.

So because Tacitus says that it was seen in 34 CE, he also says it hasn't been long enough.

That's only been 250 years.

So as you can see, it was pretty jumbled in,

...