Historical errors in a new Halas/Miguel story

[Kriton Kyrimis]

SIGVALD:

> But as our Italian friends here will know, this is off
> course historical nonsence. The Italians didn't know
> about pasta before Marco Polo tasted it in China more
> than 1000 years later than the period of this story.

Well, the Greeks did have some kind of pasta (though not spaghetti,
I would assume), so the Romans could have learnt it from them if they
did not have an equivalent of their own.

> And as far as I know the pizza is not more than around
> 200 years old.

Manhattan-style pizza probably is. But "pizza" means "pie", and I find
it unlikely that the Italians would not have invented pies till 1800!

What you describe was probably an intended anachronism. Another inaccuracy
is that Roman soldiers did *not* eat good food, such as spaghetti and
pizza or their Roman era equivalents. Remember the scene in one of the
Asterix books, where someone, after being told that the more powerful
an army is, the worse their food is, then tasting the Roman soldiers'
food, he said that he didn't know that the Roman army was *that* poweful?

	Kriton	(e-mail: kyrimis at cti.gr)
	      	(WWW:    http://dias.cti.gr/~kyrimis)
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