Salvete Omnes!I'm
Marcia Sempronia Pulla and am new to SVR. Currently not a member of Nova Roma, though have filled out an application for it. Haven't heard anything back yet. I have to admit SVR seems more my style: simple, friendly and informative. At any rate, I live in the Washington D.C. area and have been here for most of my life. I'm ethnically a mix of different things, but from my mother's side I am of Roman descent according to my grandfather (vs. just being called Italian). My uncle told me that my recent ancestors had been shepherds from "southeast of Rome" just as I saw someone else mention in another introduction thread (the southeast part, that is). However, I think the area they were from was somewhere like Potenza, but it's hard to say for certain. To add to the confusion, my grandfather supposedly spent time in Syria for some reason when he was young (later associated with Syrians in his community in Massachusetts). One thing I can say is that I definitely inherited the Roman bumps in the nose, and some big dark eyes like on those painted Egyptian coffins.
Currently, I'm a single mother to
an adorable son (though who
doesn't say that about their own?). Because of my ancestry, he was named Suhayb, after a famous Arab that had earned the nickname al Rumi (the Roman) on account of his blond hair and Greek accent (he had grown up around modern-day Basra but had been taken into slavery by the then Romans i.e. "Byzantines"). After my son was born I had a dream where everything was in white and some girls dressed me in a bridal costume and handed me a red thread. While holding the red thread, I got onto a white horse and rode, jumping over a small fence, to follow where the thread was. In the dream I was ecstatic. The thread lead to a blond man with a Roman nose, "Roman" haircut and pale skin sitting on either a gold or ivory throne with a gold crown on his head. He was holding the thread in his hand and had the attitude of something like, "Oh, yawn, another one." But in my dream that didn't bother me and we were somehow "married." Never been able to interpret that without being confident of not having my own biases. It's stayed with me, however.
I've been into the Classics ever since I was a young child, Greek mythology especially. I was honestly like a young innocent Ovid in that I was drawn to anything and everything that involved metamorphoses. With mythology having a lot of that, and readily available when young, I adored it (didn't learn about Ovid's collection until much later). Took Latin all through high school and was a kind of nerd about that. Was in Certamen but for culture, history and mythology, not so much Latin. I struggle a lot with learning languages (just like the people in the Rosetta Stone commercials). During my last year of Latin I had a very cool and fun teacher who was teaching us
the Aeneid. It was then that
Gladiator came out and he took the Latin Club on a field trip to see it at an IMAX theater.
Around age 17-18 I got into Religio Romana / Hellenic Neo-paganism (as I called it back then) on a very informal level. Didn't associate with any groups or anything of the sort, juts hung around a few other pagans during my freshman year of college and kept practice to myself based on several books that I still see on recommended reading lists for Religio Romana (
Dictionary of Roman Religion,
Classical Living et al.). By the time I was in my 20s, however, I abandoned paganism and took a different course. I'm only just recently getting back into Religio Romana. Now (since 2000) there seems to be a lot more information online and a lot more books. Just finished reading
Religion of the Romans by Rupke and have a lot more books to go through (currently reading
Greek Religion). Got a lararium set up already, but am taking things slow to not get overwhelmed and confused.
My main areas of interest are culture, art history, Religio Romana and historical personalities.
I look forward to participating on this board!
Di vos incolumes custodiant!