Kosmo

I see... Thank you for enlightening me, but I'm more of a BatlleStar type.

Happy Birthday!

Thank you both! I know what you feel Neph, I was frustrated in my search as well...

No, (I've never heard of the Millenium Aesalon)

Up to the end of October Sage offers free access to it's journals published after 1999. SAGE publishes more than 500 journals in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. SAGE Journals Online is the delivery platform that provides online access to the full text of individual SAGE journals. The SAGE Full-Text Collections, SAGE's award-winning, discipline-specific research databases, are also available on SAGE Journals Online. http://online.sagepub.com/ The articles can be downloaded. I'll get to it myself soon, but if you have spectacular finds please share.

Cicero showed lots of guts standing against Marcus Antonius and paid the price in a very honorable manner.

You're welcome! Here it's an image of the monument http://www.dracones.ro/?operatie=subiect&a...20LUI%20DECEBAL

Are you referring to the monument of Tiberius Claudius Maximus, found at Grammeni (near Philippi), in Macedonia detailing his career and the death of Dacian king Decebal? The text is this: "Ti. Claudius Maximus, vet(eranus), [s(e)] v(ivo) f(aciendum) c(uravit); militavit eque(s) in leg(ione) VII C (laudia ) p (ia) f (idelii), factus qu(a}estor equit(um), singularis legati legionis eiusdem, vexillarius equitum item bello Dacico ob virtute (m) donis donatus ab imp(eratore) Domitiano, factus dupli (carius ) a divo Troiano in ala secu(n)d(a) Pannoniorum a quo et fa©tus explorator in bello Dacico et ob virtute (m) bis donis donatus bello Dacico et Parthico et ab eode(m) factus decurio in ala eade(m) quod cepisset Decebalu(m) et caput eius pertulisset ei Ranisstoro, missus voluntarius lionesta missione a Terent[io Scau-]riano, consulare [exerci]tus provinciae nov[ae...] " and the events relating to Decebal's death are depicted on Trajan's column.

A transcript of the debate can be found here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/03/ame...-transcript.php but the smiles of the former beauty queen can not be seen

The video does not work for me, but I found this: Dog attacks shark! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjKuzAA6Vwg

Archery was seen as a cowardly and effeminate way to fight. In antiquity archery was not very effective and only the horse archers from the steppe (Parthians, Sarmatians) made some impression but even for those people the horse archer was below in rank to the heavy cavalry.

Because Byzantine regional armies were not defeated and kept many fortifications. The arabs raided a few times following the main roads as the Persians have done shortly before them but they could not control the area. And of course the Byzantine army defeated them several times. Spain and France were highly marginal for arabs but they would have liked to take Constantinople.

Undoubtedly their legal system; Gaius (aka Gai), Paulus, Ulpianus, Florus, Cassius, Antistius and many other Justinian kids are still non-optional classes in most Universities all over the world. I fully agree.

That is very sad. I really liked him and his unique sense of humour. R.I.P. don Tomasso

The first phrase in the Grant quote speaks about cattle farms, while the second refers to large regions known as cereal production areas. We could see the 2 phrases as having no logical connexion, but my impression was that the second statement was based on the first and as such has a flawed logic. That "the free tenant farmer in Italy was gradually eliminated by great cattle-ranches run for absentee landlords by gangs of slaves"(a fact that I attributed to cheap grain imports) does not imply that "During the last two centuries BC Sicily, North Africa,(agricultural production areas) and above all Italy posessed economies that were ... ground on slave labour... " especially because the decline of Italian agriculture was provoked by an increase in African production.

Romania has the highest ever number of teams in European competitions with 2 in the Champions League and 5 in the UEFA cup. The problem it's that teams like CFR Cluj do well having many foreign players but this adds nothing to the national team. It's a bit like England were the clubs have better results then the national team. CFR Cluj did very well in Rome especially as they have almost no international experience. My favourite team, in family tradition, it's Rapid http://www.fcrapid.ro/home.php

Very nice Caldrail. Your post it's both extensive and detailed. I have to say that Grant's opinion is based on a very old model of the Late Republic that has come under great criticism from many historians. The "great cattle-ranches run for absentee landlords by gangs of slaves" use much less workforce then arable lands. The next phrase "During the last two centuries BC Sicily, North Africa, and above all Italy posessed economies that were more ground on slave labour than ever, in any country, before or since" contradicts the first one because at least Sicily and North Africa, but also the most important parts of Italy: Campania, Tuscany and Latium were still agricultural and not cattle ranches. I also believe that for an animal farm slaves were a good option because the workload it's evenly distributed during the year while agriculture needed a much more flexible workforce according to seasons. When the Roman public supply system brought large quantities of cheap grain on the Italian market, coupled with a good transport network some Italian farms in a land generally unsuited for grain production switched to cattle raising and to a workforce with more slaves. When Rome lost North Africa to the Vandals the agricultural production in Italy increased in a reverse process. But this case of regional change of production does not tells us much about an empire that stretched from Scotland to Mesopotamia.

They might have employed a great number of tenants or dependant workers rather then slaves. Many of the Roman landlords in the provinces were in fact the members of the former local pre-conquest aristocracies and they often continued what they were doing before the conquest, tax their subjects in various ways: money, products, labour etc. This took many forms and rural relations varied greatly across the empire. I mentioned mines because while most of them were small, Romans had also some huge ones that employed a large workforce. Whatever the size of the operation, mining used slaves because it was a hard and dangerous work and the local workforce was often too small or unavailable on the spot, usually in mountains. That's why the state was making sure that he has a continuous flow of slaves available for mining by sentencing criminals to work in mines.

She has a lot of self-confidence, hubris like Gibson said, or she believes that politics it's like playing poker where not blinking it's important. Maybe she stole the spotlight from Obama, but she is not able to make a good use of it, not because she has no qualities, but because the reality it's to dark to be covered up with bluffing. The Wall Street it's falling, 2 wars are fought in distant theatres, Russia and China are asserting themselves etc.

Happy Birthday!!!

I'll be happy if they find a way to produce cheap and safe energy as the existence or not of the Higgs particle does not bother my sleep. Technology overrides science and media circus trumps all.

This can be true maybe if we include those in mining as rural. This would mean a visible change in rural economy from the I C AD but we don't see that. As in other old economies slaves were present but not a decisive factor. Small land owners, colons and other dependant workers, permanent and temporary helpers would have been the great majority of the rural workforce. Egypt it's a great example of that.

Shaving yourself it's a XX-th century habit. Romans went to the barber on the street if they did not own one. Shaving was highly difficult given the poor qualities of available steel, that their scissors had no bolts and the absence of soap. It involved a lot of plucking and cuts. There were even law suits and poems about it. I think we have a thread about it around here...

Romania barely won in Faeroe!!!! This is disgusting. After the team scored one goal the coach started to play like at Euro and made defensive changes. The truth is that with several injuries on the best players he has no good reserves. The clubs did not invest in children for many years and now this can be seen. The last year champion club had almost no Romanian players. At least Austria lost in the away game...

At a time when Athens and Delos were full of slaves in distant Histria there were few or none. If the sources speak of large numbers of slaves in Rome and around it this might have more to do with the capital being the place where the rich from around the Med spent their time and money. No other place had inhabitants like Lucullus, Trimalchio, Caesar or the emperors. In the provinces there are less signs of a massive slave population except some areas like Sicilly or Carthage area and giving that a large majority of people lived in the provinces I doubt that slaves were up to 20 % of total population.