Exploratores (paper request)

[lukeuedasarson]

I don't know where you are based but I deduce from the local time on your profile that it is not in the UK. Here it would be easy to get a copy of the paper through one's local library and Austin & Rankov could be borrowed through the Inter-library Loan Service but things may be different where you are. If all else fails, you can buy a copy of the paper by going to Google Scholar and entering 'numeri exploratorum'. This will give you a link to a page of de Gruyter's website which deals with the paper and from which you can order a copy. If you are not associated with a relevant institution, it will cost you 30 euros, $42 or £23.

I'm in Japan, at Osaka University. I can't even get the usual history articles through JSTOR here, and interlibrary dealings cost over 30 dollars each, or so I understood the one time I tried.  We aren't really set up for western history here...

And as for buying such a simple paper; don't get me started (or do!) - that is the antithesis of what academic research should be about!  I admittedly have bought the odd book on the strength of a citation, but only if it was one going cheap, but paying so much for 7 pages is crazy, especially as copying for research purposes is completely fine in the first place.  So the only reason to pay that money is basically to extort the geographically challenged, like me.

Unfortunately, historical journals are still for most part commercial (unlike many in the sciences, and which are thus not published for profit), so the puplsihers are, at last, in it for the money.

Anyway, rant over!

Would anyone like to opine if a unit important enough (= big enough?) to both have their officer included in the Notitia and be named "exploratores" would have been an entire unit of "scouts" (whatever that may mean)? Or would the name more likely be commerative?  I'd incline toward the former, but that raises the question of how large a unit is such a numerus, anyway?...  And if the later, commorative of what?


Cheers, Luke