Kosmo

Congrats! A wise decision! I love your title...

I dunno quite a coincidence No. Parallel evolution, I would say. Like the wings of the birds and of the bats. Isolated populations develop analogous structures to face similar problems. I agree. I disagree. Models of political organisation were a very rare inovation. When one was succesfull it was often copied by others at least in some exterior forms. Think about vikings in Danemark using a western european model while the Rus used a byzantine one or about muslim sultanates in far away Malaysia or Phillipines. Even more clearly see the western model of state and how it spread to all corners of the Earth. Could have romans, etruscans and carthaginians use a greek model for assemblies? For sure as all this civilisations borrowed heavily from Greek culture. And maybe the greek victory in Campania over etruscans was a good push for abandoning etruscan monarchy for greek style republicanism. Still we see asemblies in many european people that had litlle greek connections like gauls and germans. Rome had a king and an asembly like most indo-europeans and at a point, with internal and exterior reasons and influences, moved to a model that ended the power of the king in the benefit of the assembly.

It will be hard to call those two foreigners. They were the succesors of roman colonists in Spain. Hadrian did not give back the provinces of the East conquered by Trajan, the war was still raging and this places were really not annexed. I doubt that he had other option with a big jewish revolt behind him, an intact parthian army in front and with the failure at Hatra. He only abandoned some areas in Dacia (belonging to Moesia Inferior) north of the Lower Danube and maybe some areas in the plains of Tisa river. He kept Dacia and Nabatea and this is what Trajan really conquered. His defensive work, namely the Hadrian Wall, was in a remote area with little significance for the empire and there was a thread around here about an older frontier system further north prior to Hadrian. Sombody living in the times of Hadrian would have not thought that this was the end of the roman expansion. One needs hindsight for that. And after all the roman empire existed many centuries after that.

G-arheologimanus it's digging a hole in a place used many years. Close to the surface he finds an byzantine thing, 1 meter below a trojan sword and half meter below an idol. Diferent depth different periods (often) Usually the team must be carefull with everything they find, but often the "uninteresting" periods are destroyed beeing on top on what the arheolog cares for. So, many late roman and byzantine things were destroyed by people who cared only about classical Greece. Another example it's the destruction of the medieval buidings that surrounded the Coloseum by Musolini to make it more vizible. G-arheologimanus it's making a dig and founds an chrsitian church made by Justinian and below a temple to Athens. He destroys the church or does not look at the temple?

That is obviously true. Still many indo-europeans showed common cultural and religious traits, not only language. Genetics are irelevant to a cultural trait like political ideology, but other cultural traits like religion, myths, language are very important. What other definition of ethnicity could be besides that? If a population uses a language and a culture it can be described with the loose term of ethnos. A term that it's vague, but still usefull.

The images of the Thracian/Danubian Hero/Knight/Rider are plentiful, but alas we know little about his myth. Actually less then little. Some say that his image was later used for the depiction of St. George, but the stories about St. George are placed in Anatolia and he is beleived to be of Cappadoccian origins. It seems that the image of the Thracian Hero it's the only part of him that survived in St. George.

For sure many roman victories were brought by allies, but can we call the soldiers of allied and client states as auxilia?

It was an indo-european thing, everybody had it to some extent. Even in strong monarchies like Macedon the assembly/the army had an important role. The same it's visible in Homer. The assembly and the army were often the same thing and this remained so throut roman history. The army could raise a leader on the shield and that gave him some legitimacy.

Some units are hard to train because their skill depends on the habits of the population. A roman peasant had no experience with a bow or riding a horse so training from zero was difficult. A person from a nation or group that used this from childhood was already skilled when he joined the roman army. So, a cattle raising nomad that lived on horse since childhood was a much better horseman than a italian peasant that did not ever had a horse (oxen were used in agriculture and transport). He knew how to take care of the horse, how to ride it and how to fight mounted. It simply saved time to use someone with a good knowledge than to train someone fro years before it was battle worthy. A similar problem was faced by US pilots that were trying to train chinese pilots in WW2. It was much harder to train a chinese peasant that had little previous knowledge of modern machinery than an american farmer that had experience with guns and cars. Rome could have never conquer the world without using those who were defeated by her. The ability to turn various people into romans was her strenght. If the failing of this ability caused partly her downfall this happened only after many centuries of glorious rule and it's a debatable assumption.

Yes, it's not even a centrury since they opened the tomb. A good search takes time, especially in Egypt... They did a good job with the gold the first time...

I guess that this is the correct answer. Romans never used the title emperor for designating their leaders. The title of emperor was given this meaning in later times by people with little regard to the constitutional terms of the Republic. So, emperor has little to do with imperator and imperium, but with people that did not believe the republican facede of the principate and had no need to use the complex titles that we see in roman inscriptions and coins. They used also caesar, but given the evolution of the power connected with this title in the Later Empire and Byzantium emperor was better. We should note that after Charlemagne the title meant someone above the kings in the feudal pyramid and later designated the ruler of a powerful state (emperor of India, China, Ottomans, etc) despite local names (sultan, mikkodo, son of Heaven etc). So, Augustus it's called emperor despite being more accurate princeps, Domitian (and others) it's emperor despite calling himself Lord and God, Diocletian put accent on the augustus title and from Heraklius onward Basileus was most used. We call them emperors to make things more simple. And for the same reason the short, unconstitutional rule of Caesar (and why not Sulla?) is considered from the Republic despite having the same unchecked authority as the later so called emperors. It's easier to say that the victory of Octavian heralded the begining of the empire that continued until 1453 then to distinguish between various rulers, the ammount of power they helded and the titles they used. So, if you want to call Caesar emperor, that could be unusual, but not completly incorrect. Of course, calling Sulla emperor would raise an eyebrow despite similarities between the two. For the sake of simplicity I prefer to see the death of M. Antonius as the begining of the empire and the end of an intermediary period between the Republic and the Empire - the period of Civil Wars (from Marius to Actium).

Sometimes when I try to post a "fast reply" when submitting I get this "authorisation mismatch" message. I loved the "select all" feature that kept my post from getting lost. I only managed to post thru "add reply". It's a new upgraded forum bug?

Maybe the measure had also the purpose of protecting the slave from the master if the testimony of the slave was against him. Or even to stop the owners to use the slaves as false witness. As long as a slave had to bow to the will of someone else there were serious reasons to refute his testimony. We should remeber that throut the existence of the empire a women could not legaly make a testimony. Her testimony was rarely accepted when there was no other witness. Today's law in my country does not accept the testimony of a husband against the other husband in criminal cases with some exceptions and in civil cases except divorce the relatives can not make a testimony. They are presumed as interested parts. This roman law makes much more sense the german customs that replaced it in much of Europe. If both parts had witneses that swerd for them than the two parts were submited to "ordalie" (eng.?) that could mean placing a hand in hot water, walk on fire or duel. In romanian Middle Ages to prove a claim you had to bring witnesess and to defeat this the other part had to bring a double number of witneses. So, you start at 4, then 8, 16, 32 etc Also despite having laws based on Justianian collections they did not have the authority of judgement, so a case was never setlled and could start all over again some times lasting hundreds of years. Romans were good at laws...

Happy Birthday!

The rule in Romanopoly is that you will collect 200$ everytime you go over Gaius Octavius?

"We report, you decide." - Fox News If it has the Fox News motto it's no wonder that it's misleading.

LOL You're evil! I love them.

The 2 viking setllements in Groenland are proven facts. There are many arheological finds for this, but also literary sources. They even had a bishop and paid tribute to the Norvegian kings. They disappeared sometimes around 1450's after almost 500 years of existence. The tiny, short lived setllement on the island of Newfoundland, at Anse aux Meadows, was connected by arheologists with vikings and if they made it there thay maybe made it on the mainland. Still, the impact of the viking discovery of N. America on later exploration it's debatable despite the claims that Columus had visited Iceland where he could come in contact with information about Vinland and Groenland. After all he started his westbound trip from the Azores, not Shetland or Orkney. Of course, he could have imagined that vikings reached Northern Asia and in order to reach China and Japan he had to go much more to the South.

At a certain point those descriptions of the cinism and cruelty of a society that puts no value on human life really got on my nervs and I could not read russian classics anymore. I liked the first Dune the most, the next few I find acceptable, the last ones are bad while the ones made by his son are truely bad. But I still read them. Form Hebert I like a lot also "The Dosadi Experiment"

Most roman arhitectural products were standard regardless of region. Still, their style changed in time and the available materials could be different.

Do you claim the following sentances as being true? Please confirm or deny as I'm not really sure what your claim is. People known as ostrogots and visigots were dacians, they spoke dacian and had dacian customs. Danemark and Sweden were inhabitated by dacians. Goths, seen as a germanic population of scandinvian origins, never existed. In their place we should speak about a dacian population named getae originar from the Carpathian region. Our language it's not mutually inteligibile with latin, and a proof of this is that I don't understand most latin words, but romanian still is a romanic language and roman colonists that were the first to speak latin here could understand the people from others regions of the empire (where they came from). I'm sure you're familiar with the branching of languages. If a goth spoke a language that it's not today german does not mean that he was not speaking a german language.

I don't read much fiction this years. I use to love the russian classics, but now I dislike them strongly. South americans have a nice style (except Coelho). Eco it's great and "Pendulo di Foucault" it's a favorite of mine. From the US I like Jack London and Hemingway's short stories. Huxley it's great at this short pieces. Popular fiction writers that I like are often from older science-fiction: Asimov, Herbert, Klein etc. I also like LOTR and Harry Potter series. When I was a teenager I liked Dostoievsky, now, in my 30's, I read Tolkien

The thread about the destruction of Corint brought to discussion the ideea that this city was destroyed to help roman trade and roman merchants. This was dismissed as unfounded, but still the question arose - what was the policy of the romans towards trade and merchants? I believe that romans never carried a trade policy, that merchants never had political weight enough to shape roman policy and that romans did not favoured roman traders at the expense of foreigners. Romans had made roads and ports, but this were made for the transport of army and esential supplies not for helping trade. They never launched large trade companies or infrastructure projects to expand their external trade routes. In the Late Republic when Rome was the main power of the Mediterranean they did little to stop the piracy that plagued the trade routes and only the threat to the strategically and politically important grain supply route prompted their action. During the empire they regulated the eastern trade, but this was more to reduce the trade deficit and to influence the strategic position in regard to Parthia then to help the trade. Profits from trade were viewed as against morality and senators were prohibited from trading. They had a landed class view and trade, as well as crafts, were seen as inferior occupations. The equites that made fortunes usually made them from other lines of bussineses: real estate, money lending, gathering of taxes, annona, selling of loot or taxes in kind etc. This often had to do with political power, but I know no case of the use of public power for helping traders. Traders were often foreigners and provincials. From Ostia market mosaics we know about the provincial trade associations that supplied Rome during the principate. In Dacia most traders and craftsman that we know of were of Eastern origins. By building roads and ports, by sending armies and colonies in far away places, by creating great cities and a common market, by spreading the use of latin and by developing mines and agriculture the romans helped the development of trade, but they never had this as a goal.

Yes, but still the romans would have pwnd them.

My money are on Ditka. He looks big. "Caesar was tackled 23 times in front of the statue of Pompey, while his teammate M. Antonius was blocked at the entrance to the Senate field."