Ursus

You are lucky. I wish my mother had given me a nice Latin name instead of naming me after some angry Old Testament prophet.

Do you really think any Western government has the balls to use nuclear weapons these days? The Israelis would have to do it for us.

Don't be afraid to branch out, NH. When I first came to the site two years ago, my primary interest was in the Roman paganism of the Augustan era. Since then, thanks to interesting conversations with my colleagues and some of their book reviews, I've broadened my research and have become much more well-rounded. There are those who seem to see this site as as a debating club, but I've always looked upon it as a learning experience. It is with the sentiments of the latter option I encourage you to poke around into discussions.

Let us know if it is any good!

Oh, don't worry, RtG, you'll get no argument from me there is an increasingly militant faction of Islam waiting to take over the Arab world - and from there establish a global jihad. Whether they actually succeed is another matter, but certainly there are those would try if given half the chance. I remember sitting in my senior year seminar of political science back in college in 1999 discussing global trends. We had read Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" written a few years before then in which he pretty much predicted the coming tensions between the West and an increasingly belligerent Islamic world. He was of course roundly criticized by those who felt his predictions were maligning the Muslim world - and by those who were hoping the end of the Cold War would usher in some new age of global peace. Pope Benedict's views on Christianity as a Greco-Roman cultural experience which helps define Western Civilization, and which places it in conflict with cultures defined by other religions, is priceless. And something that Samuel Huntington would say is the stuff of 21st century politics! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations

Well, given the "artistic" types I met at college I share a certain skepticism about self-declared artists - but this is the first time I have seen history lumped in with the arts!

"eeeryajmrb" or "rjmamsajreebeey" for a male.

Yep, good point. That was the first recorded instance of monotheism. And there are those who say the Hebrews must have gotten the idea of Monotheism from their servitude in Egypt (although outside the Bible there is little evidence for large numbers of Hebrew slaves in Egypt). To be fair the Egyptian experiment with monotheism ended after Akhenaten's death. The Monotheism of the Hebrew tribes obviously took strong root in their culture.

Edit: never mind.

Someone, I believe perhaps Cunliffe (though I could be wrong), said Celts is a modern shorthand for many different groups sharing loosely related languages and culture - but that this is no more meaningful than using "Latins" to lump together French, Spanish and Italians.

Ratzinger just opened up a second front in the war between the West and jihadist Islam. I hope he didn't bite off more than he can chew.

Meh. The way of the world is that one group tries to take another group's land and gold. The group with the better technology usually wins. Que sera sera. But unlike the Romans, the Conquistadores saw the need to eradicate other people's cultures and religions. Something I can't quite countenance, human sacrifice notwithstanding. In the last decade or so, as part of a greater pagan movement, there has been a nascent rebirth of Aztec and Inca religious and cultural studies, with some people pouring themselves wholeheartedly into those lost faiths (albeit often with a few concessions to Catholicism). I wish them well. If they need suitable subjects to revive human sacrifice, I can suggest some of my neighbors and co-workers.

I'm sure that would be an interesting read, but it's a little beyond the scope of what we're looking for in a review for Gladiator. :-)

To get back to the original question and away from this riveting coinage debate .... Diocletian's reforms were presaged by Aurelian and finalized by Constantine. You can see him as a link in a chain rather than as chief instigator. Yes, the trend in the Late Empire was toward a more commanding government - some would say the embryo of feudalism and the divine rights of kings. This needs to be taken into context - the preceding fifty years of anarchy of civil war and barbarian invasions where the Empire nearly collapsed. The Crisis of the Third Century. The old rules of the lax Principate were no longer working, thanks in no small part to the rise of a regional superpower in Persia. The government needed more oversight of its localities, especially their finances, and a better military vehicle to deal with the increased threats. The result was a heavy top-down structure of government with Oriental overtones at the imperial court. If one wants to call this the death of freedom, so be it. But it seems to have given the Western empire a few more generations of life, and to have completely reinvigorated the East. I do point out in this

To answer the original question broadly, the cultures of the Mediterannean didn't exist in a vacuum. In studying Roman history, I have found it extremely useful to know something about the cross cultural contacts that occured. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Punics, Etruscans - perhaps even Near Easterners on one end and the Celts on the other. I'm not saying one has to be an expert in all those cultures - I am certainly not. But knowing something about how they all interacted within a greater context gives you a big picture.

There has been some acidic debates about whether or not the Druids really practiced human sacrifice as Caesar described it, or if it was merely Roman wartime slander. For my own part, I think the ultimate answer is superfluous. The Druids were simply one of the few people who could not fit into the Roman socio-religious scheme (for reasons described above), and thus they had to go.

“…it was the senate as a whole that made the actual decisions concerning the public religion … The colleges of augurs and pontifices were in many ways more like standing sub-committees of the senate than independent religious authorities. …public religion was no different from foreign policy or the governance of the city… … There was little connection, however, between public and private worship … The only general obligation individuals had toward public religion was to abstain from business during religious festivals. … Although mythology, philosophical speculation and antiquarian investigation were all important parts of Roman religion, they were left entirely up to individuals to pursue or ignore as they pleased. … In general, the public authorities seem to have been little concerned with private cults … Since private religion was largely uncontrolled, individuals in a sense had the freedom to construct their own religious identities, in so far as in their private lives they were not obligated to worship any particular set of deities or adhere to any particular doctrine. … In their private lives, people could to a large extent worship whatever gods they chose in whatever ways they pleased. Public religion, however, was another thing entirely. The elite, as embodied in the senate, were the ones who decided which gods the Roman people as a whole would worship and in what ways, and who were responsible for performing the required cult acts. They were in short the mediators between the community and the divine world … … the cult of Bacchus provoked such a strong reaction from the senate because … it served almost as an alternative, rather than a supplement, to public religion. Although the senate allowed people to pursue their private religious interests as they wished, it seems to have drawn a line at the point where private pursuits began to affect people’s public identities or where private religious specialists began to acquire independent social power. … The lack of any doctrine meant that the very ideas of mission and conversion are inapplicable to Roman religion. … There was little reason for Roman authorities to prohibit or discourage the worship of ..local gods. …. Roman authorities were actually more likely to want subject peoples to maintain their traditional cults. …. The druids, however, did not fit this model at all. Although the evidence is uncertain and open to debate, it seems that they derived their authority not from wealth but from command of arcane traditional wisdom, acquired over many years of study. It was because of this knowledge that they had important roles in cult, education and the resolution of disputes. Roman authorities, however, were accustomed to religious authority lying in the hands of the political and economic elite. They thus found it very difficult to understand the social role of the Druids, and accordingly viewed them with suspicion. The arcane nature of Druidic lore only increased their mistrust, since religious authority that was not exercised in the open was a potential source of resistance and unrest. …. This was even more true of Christianity, which claimed the highest level of allegiance from its adherents and explicitly forbade them to participate in traditional public religion: it thus completely severed the normal ties between religious identity and civic identity. This seems to have been one of the chief underlying reasons for the persecution of Christians, although its mechanics were in practice more complex than this would suggest." James Rives. "Religion in the Roman Empire." Experiencing Rome. Routledge. New York, New York. 2000.

I can give you a little more detail. After its defeat by Thebes in 371 BCE, Sparta became a second rate power. It launched several internal reforms (losing its distinctive character in the process) and tried to regain its old glory - but to no avail. It was forced into the Achaean Confederacy in 195 BCE as a puppet. Many Romans admired classical Sparta - certainly Hellenophobe Romans could not accuse Spartans of being dandies as they did with other Greeks. Rome supported the remains of Sparta, and Sparta became an enthusiastic supporter of Rome. With Rome's blessing, Sparta left the Achaean Confederacy. The Spartan leadership became official clients to Augustus. However, Sparta was by this time a shadow of its former self, and basically a tourist attraction for Roman citizens. The city was sacked by Alaric in 396 CE and there, I believe, is where the city's significance to history ends. PS - can a Trimumvir please move this to Hellenic forum?

May you find something more profitable and enjoyable.

Welcome! Sparta under the Roman Empire? I believe it was basically a tourist attraction at that point.

Those would have been mine, too.

Very interesting. It hadn't even occured to me there might be a dichotomy in architecture structured along patron/client lines. It does make perfect sense though within the context of Roman cultural values.

It's always possible my own paticular idiosyncracies may very well prejudice me against the finer points of said movie. Perhaps someone on this site beholden to this cinematic blockbuster could formally pen their praise in the form of a review? It does seem to me that "Gladiator" carries enough weight among the general public to deserve an official word on our front pages, if not from a Patrician than perhaps from one of our well-spoken Equites.

It's not a dumb question at all, but it's complicated , and I had to reread a lot of things before I dared answer your question (because Jewish matters are not my strong point) What set the Jews apart from the other peoples of the empire was their official Monotheism, and the peculiar practices that derived from their Torah. Greeks and Romans always found it a bit odd - and to the extent that honoring the official pagan gods of city-state was seen as a civic duty, the Jewish refusal to do this could be construed as unpatriotic at best, treacherous at worst. There are instances where Jews living in the Diaspora lost their Jewish identity and rose far in Roman society. A man of Jewish heritage became the equestrian prefect of Egypt, for instance. There are even a few instances when Greeks or Romans converted to Judaism and became high-ranking members of a Synagogue. But generally there wasn't much overlap between paganism and Judaism, and the religious systems did not cross over. Culturally speaking, the Jews living in their native land fiercely retained their identity. Those living in the Diaspora were able to assimilate to some degree - they learned Greek and Latin, partook of amphitheaters and so forth, and attained some civic offices. But most of them did not lose their particular religious identity. Jews rose higher in the Greek East than in the Latin West. But because of that power dynamic, Jews and Greeks were more likely to come to blows than Jews and Romans. There were bloody conflicts in Alexandria between Jew and Greek. Under Caesar and Augustus, the Roman authorities actually favored the Jews because the Jewish high priest at the time was a client. After that particular arrangement ended, though, the differences between Jewish and Greco-Roman society became apparent. Tensions worsened until it culminated in the destruction of the Temple. Sometime later, the Hellenophile emperor Hadrian tried to destroy Jewish identity by outlawing circumcision. However, the Severan emperors (themselves of Semitic origin) reversed the trend and gradually the upper class Jews could again become high ranking members of the provinces. How the Roman State treated the Jews therefore depended on the particular emperor. I suspect at the lower level, in relations between the common Roman and the common Jewish Diaspora member, both sides were simply apathetic to each other with a bit of suspicion in the background, but they nonetheless lived with each other and did business with each other.