This was an interesting article, and I'm always very thrilled to see quantitative analyses of Roman history. That said, it seems like the article ignores an important insight gained from the many previous attempts to understand what caused the changes that occurred in the late Roman empire. That insight is that the variables that appear to explain change in one part of empire (e.g., the Western empire) fail to accurately predict what happens in another part of the empire (e.g., the Eastern empi
Nobiles ("the known") were the senators whose family-members had climbed the highest rungs of the cursus honorum. How many modern-day nobiles are in the US Senate? After the death of the nobile-st Senator, Ted Kennedy, somebody bothered to publish the results, and the results are good news for New Men like Nixon and Obama: US Senators with family-members in the Senate have never been lower.
Check out THIS graph to see the dramatic fall from the 1st Congress to the 101st.
Los Angeles City Council is mulling whether to ask Uncle Sam for $ 30 million to sponsor Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps LACC will also adopt Panem et Circensis as the official city motto?
I love Steve Pinker. Here he explains how a "thick-witted analogy to Latin" caused our Chief Strict Constructionist to become a judicial activist on behalf of an unconstitutional construction.
Apparently the daughter of John F. Kennedy wants to be a senator. Having held no previous political office, which seems to have been both a necessary and a sufficient condition to be a senator in the Roman republic, her ambition is remarkable for a number of reasons. But what is says about political culture in the US and Rome is what has me fascinated.
One of the trickier Latin political terms is nobile. The root of our word, "noble," it connotes royalty and aristocracy. But the Latin term
In a speech here in Columbus, Barack Obama posed an unusual challenge to McCain's independence: "He hasn't been a maverick. He's been a sidekick. He's like Cato to the Green Lantern."
Don't they teach anything at Harvard Law School? For the record, it's Green Hornet, not Green Lantern.
From Wired Magazine:
"We've reached an age where egotism is considered too much work. Why discuss your hopes and fears when you can just post the results of online tests, show cartoon versions of yourself and collect "friends"? It's a good thing Anais Nin wasn't a blogger, or instead of a steamy tale of sexual awakening and creative fervor, we'd just know that if she was a Ninja Turtle, she'd be Raphael."
I blogged earlier about the robust health of U.S. Manufacturing, so I was miffed to read that the word hadn't gotten out to the Washington Post, where Harold Meyerson recycles the same old myths in his critique of NAFTA.
The amazing thing about the free-traders' arguments is that they never change. Today's free-trade commentaries make the same points as the pro-NAFTA editorials of 1993-94. Now, as then, bilateral trade is a win-win proposition for the peoples of both signatory nations. It r
HERE the NYT reports that former classics student Boris Johnson stands a chance of beating Red Ken for mayor of London. Can anyone across the pond tell me, What do Brits think of Boris?
"We are all Greeks," Shelley once wrote, rather exuberantly. It's easy to see why he'd say that. As Rabbi Michael Lerner observed, "Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes."
Only Lerner wasn't giving Hellenism
I'm constantly stunned by the media's misrepresentation of economic facts. Consider the oft-repeated claim that the US manufacturing sector is "ailing", "hard hit", "dying", and all the rest. Why you'd think it was the Roman republic! Well, it is--strong and healthy, but terribly misunderstood.
Here are the real statisticsabout U.S. manufacturing in 2006:
Marius is infamous (perhaps to a degree that is unwarranted) for opening up the ranks of the Roman legions to the landless, propertyless "head-count" of Rome. The result: an army that unquestioningly obeyed its commanding officers, even when the officers threatened to topple the republic (and finally did).
The widely-vaunted alternative to this ever-present threat--in the US, most recently revived by Douglas MacArthur; elsewhere, seen in military coups from Venezuela to Pakistan--is "civili
The efforts of Hugo Chavez to hide Venezuela's continuing slide to dictatorship has become truly absurdist.
According to the BBC, Chavez has vowed to expel foreigners who even accuse him of dictatorship, remarking "How long are we going to allow a person - from any country in the world - to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?" These comments came on the same weekend that Manuel Espino, president of Mex
Ron Paul, the libertarian presidential candidate who bears some resemblance to the historical Cato, has apparently eclipsed John McCain in the fundraising effort, according to this ABC news story.
I'm wondering who a good Roman analog for John McCain might be. Regulus, perhaps, the war hero tortured by the Carthaginians? Nominations welcome.
Left-wing Gauls are in an uproar that the leader of the Republic is...jogging. "Le running" is apparently too individualistic and too (say it with disgust) American for some. I guess they'll just have to replace their favorite term of abuse, "creeping Americanism", with "jogging Americanism"!
There's a great response to this fashionable idiocy by that Cato of perfidious Albion, fellow jogger Boris Johnson. (Of course, Cato didn't actually jog, but as a good Stoic, he did walk a lot -- and
So far Ron Paul strikes me as the most Catonian of US Presidential contenders. Though he's much, much older than the historical MPC (who was John Edwards' age when he died at Utica), Paul's opposition to fruitless military adventures, his principled constitutionalism, and his general philosophical outlook would certainly piss off any modern-day Caesar (or Livia).
Here's Ron Paul on The Daily Show.
Today's NYT has an interesting report that claims that the Virginia Tech killer's history of mental illness made his gun purchase illegal. The report is interesting because (1) it challenges the assumption that more gun control laws are needed to prevent future VT-type massacres, (2) it demonstrates the difficulties in enforcing existing legislation, and also (3) it illustrates how small differences in the implementation of federal law at the state level can have devastating repercussions. Fro
