caesar novus

No, the series debunks christian claims against rome as mainly propaganda... using allegations of victimhood as manipulative branding, just like todays commercial products try to brand themselves. It is surprising because you would think a series by that name would largely attract the faithful, who the advertisers don't want alienated and tuning out. It wasn't approached thru top down hand-waving, but they delved into specific context of events. Like when christianity was in a lull and needed to rally support, they would bait the romans and write up claims about being persecuted for their beliefs, when it was actually for their behavior or some special circumstances. I'm not sure of where the truth lies, but it did give the impression of a somewhat scholarly approach.

Victor Hanson gave another interesting book talk on his choice of 5 historical generals who snatched a visionary victory out of an apparently certain (to their demoralized countrymen) defeat. He explains why he didn't include Scipio the Hannibal buster, but rather chooses a lesser known "the last roman". He explains why these sharp elbowed high achievers always seem doomed to be unappreciated later: http://www.booktv.org/Watch/14554/The+Savior+Generals+How+Five+Great+Commanders+Saved+Wars+That+Were+Lost+From+Ancient+Greece+to+Iraq.aspx While you may want to skip the more contemporary generals he discusses, I would urge you to hear out his coverage of the US Civil War and Korean war. These wars were headed for disaster and lost support by the fickle public, only to be saved with lasting good consequences by generals mostly poorly thought of afterward (less thanks to Grant, Lincoln, or McArthur).

When you click in a reply textbox anywhere near the top 20%, a couple thick rows of buttons appear under your cursor and instantly activate whatever button was under your cursor. This can lead to a bouncing in and out of modes you don't even comprehend. It may not be a bug, but a "feature" where we must remember to illogically click way below where we want to type. If it makes any difference, it happens in an unavoidable browser for large win8 touch screen devices... only IE is FULLY adapted to running without a keyboard, even though it is buggy, annoying, and requires running in desktop mode to get anything done. You may not notice this problem with a keyboard, but if you have to click somewhere to bring up virtual keyboard, then you then have to click the textbox to refocus. The main issue for me occurred from the color change before the downtime, and I posted a screen shot at the time. It is the font found in the new-posts mode and elsewhere, but nobody is troubled by it... yet. The lack of contrast is brutal when brown over dark grey... there is NO intensity contrast. To rely only on color contrast is russian roulette until you move on to a device that folds those colors closer together. Grey isn't even a color, so it isn't a color blindness issue. Someone recently complained about the hover color being black... at least then there is an inherent intensity difference between black and dark grey and I find that at least readible. Changing the soot grey to lighter or the soot brown to brighter would help.

This TV series http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/jesus-rise-to-power/ has a remarkable point of view about Rome as a benevolent or at least hands off interested bystander in early Christian history. A historian goes point by point thru the supposed clashes with Rome, and finds them overblown for propaganda reasons, or done without higher authority. or just a lust for self sacrifice for instance. Great vi

the editor can strobe on me between wysiwyg (sp?) and html, and double enters the html. May be a bad interaction with win8 ie, which yahoo tells me to abandon. Possibly when clicking in the edit area, some buttons emerge from under the cursor and get activated by accident. Often get strikeThru font for instance. Hard to unravel... limping thru on firefox a bit better

I find the new edit environment here very unstable... esp when going beyond the simple post-now mode.

Above is from white rose leaflets in 1942.. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/wrleaflets.html contains maybe the most high minded and passionate critique ever of totalitarianism. The first 4 leaflets are by a German and a Russian medical student roped into army service on the Russian front. I guess the Russian guy had fled Stalin into Germany only to be drafted there, but anyway these are even more articulate about freedom than US founders documents. The leaflets 5 and 6 are kind of dumbed down as more folks became involved, discovered, and ultimately beheaded (an air raid happened to kill the hanging judge and allowed one condemned rose person to escape).

A documentary on the Romans in Egypt (discovery military channel, a few years old?) showed amazing Roman archeo finds east of the Nile, and especially around Berenice on the Red Sea. The only emerald mines in the empire, and worked by non-slaves. Trillion$ of trade with the east by Roman ships, such as for pepper and other Indian spices. Not a ragged fringe of empire but a prosperous focal point. I wonder what the digging status is... web news seems to drop off by the time of Egypt's recent uprising. Here are some related links I found on trade routes, east desert archeology, and berenice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea http://archaeology-easterndesert.com/html/graeco-roman.html#RomanIntro (note extreme posted tax on prostitutes) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Troglodytica

And the very first again by vimeo (really sharp when you click fullscreen icon), and the last bonus unclickable ... Rome 1 http://vimeo.com/54083907 Interlude EDIT... HeHe, it's fun to watch the pairs of two videos running at the same time.. i can rotate my convertible laptop screen sideways for good large view of both.

Ok, here is a try to make those later snippets clickable, this time using vimeo. Rome 2 http://vimeo.com/54084908 Rome 3 http://vimeo.com/54085755

You know how cable tv is forced to carry a bunch of amateur local channels at your expense... usually an outlet for cranks and kooks? Well, we have a quite redeeming one that often covers some travel to ancient roman sites, but unfortunately in low def like this one on pompeii . That is a youtube version, but there should be a nicer vimeo version somewhere. Anyway, I noticed more recent versions are stored online in higher def. Look at this amazing coverage of a tour of much of the archeo part of Rome by segway. My point is NOT to show the novel segway transportation, or the fact that it is a vacation type tour, or even the slightly fractured explanations by the well meaning Italian or US guide. What looks strange? Holy cow, the crowds are sparse enough to see the sights, let alone plow thru them on wheels. I think the trick is they traveled in the fall/early winter rainy season and chanced upon a clear crisp day. Other parts of that trip were deep into gloom and wetness... but for this we can reap the benefits below. And as a bonus, I will include one of his Venice clips... not showing the best of venice or music, but the best hair flipping accompaniment of classical music (in the vivaldi chapel I think). EDIT: WHY CAN'T I MAKE THE LAST 3 LINKS CLICKABLE? I HAVE NO NEED FOR THE VIDEO INSET ANYWAY.

Hmm... i'm having the most trouble getting the reply box to accept any input. Anyway, i wanted to point out that the london episode also touches on the roman period, although as always in too brief scenes that benefit by freeze framing. They say london was uniquely blessed with brick making material due to the foot of the glaciers dumping just the right kind of rock flour on it. Sort of like the way rome was uniquely blessed with cement deposits from volcanos.

The whole series of cities is currently rerunning on the discovery science channel. It's a bit weak on logical content but has luscious highdef views once in a while worthy of freeze framing. I wonder if they are correct that 90% of roman aquaducts are underground, especially because they are only now finding the path of some of the tunnels. There seem to be teaser or maybe entire versions on the web, sometimes with lots of commercials. These may behave differently depending on your location. Yesterday a canadian .ca site seemed to offer the whole film (it's one of those canuck subsidized documentaries) but now I can't find the site. Today I get some clips from http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/strip-the-city/videos/roman-hill-of-garbage.htm which starts with commercials and a clip that I think was missing from the actual show. Then it appears to go on to the actual show. You can try for other options with something like http://www.bing.com/search?q=strip+the+city+ancient+rome+discovery+science&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=strip+the+city+ancient+rome+discovery+science&sc=0-27&sp=-1&sk=

There was a documentary on one of the discovery channels deconstructing parts of ancient rome. I think you can bring it up on the web, if not catching a rebroadcast. I was puzzled by their speculation of why the crater lake overflowed, because the same scenario in modern camaroon lakes killed most folks due to the flow of (heavy) co2 rather than water flow (which the romans recorded).

Also on a top end Apple Macbook Pro 17, the most useful "new content" way of accessing these forums is still virtually unreadable: http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=active Essentially the same as my picture above, with no contrast of font over background.

Best to visit British Museum a couple or three short times rather than one long time because they chronically close down sections due to staff shortages. Maybe fit in their evening hours for one but that can be the worst for closing juicy roman stuff, maybe in a darkened hall behind a rope.

EDIT==> NOTE... The problem comes in the new posts mode. Also the font for the post edit button is near invisible light grey. It's still a brutal lack of contrast of color or intensity, even on my brand new convertible laptop (Lenovo yoga 13, the most cool but buggy morphing tablet). If it just temporary on the way to the example posted earlier, that's fine. But as now if you don't have the most recent or whizzy design, the colors can fold together to look about blank. And that's not even accounting for vision issues. Good vision is actually a mirage... your eye is actually transmitting a messy image due to many things, like the spaghetti cluster of nerves that connect on the front rather than back side of the sensors. And middle age folks go thru a jelly detachment (PVD) that puts more or less debris floating around. Your brain rebuilds and cleans up the image best it can, but it is a fragile process that can suddenly be overwhelmed. Then you see the real mess, and can benefit by strong font contrast. I have always hated the black and white extreme contrast, but have rarely encountered the opposite low contrast extreme or support of it.

the new color gives unreadible topic titles in my tablet... almost zero contrast of dark brown over dark, dark grey (clic the pic) Edit... now when i switch to a laptop some contrast can be seen in my pic... but on a pretty powerful large tablet, the text vs background colors show almost no difference

See http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ashes-to-ashes-the-latter-day-ruin-of-pompeii/ for inefficient spending, as well as the claim from another source the sites tolerate 70% absentee rate for gov't staff. Europe is using austerity instead of stimulus to solve fiscal problems. Normally you could hope that stimulus builds tax money thru increased economic activity, but i guess they consider the entitlement rot too intractable unless you starve the economic beast. So unless there is some sugar daddy like a billionaire or berlesconi...

Hmmm, an electoral college isnt needed to implement a little math weighting... and indirect (overridable) voting was in play already for electing congress by state reps back then. But anyway what irks me most about the system is how states are allowed to erase the votes of their minority and vote for president as a block (winner takes all). Its hard to argue with legally tho, because the federal gov't was created to be at the service to the states as entities. However US state independence can be a protection against mob rule, at least letting you switch to a mob that you hate less. The supreme court is increasingly failing to protect state rights, most recently for the unaffordable healthcare act. Niccolo by the way advocated a ruthless court to keep the politically powerful in line, although maybe from a french rather than roman example. I would say europe and increasingly the us is falling under mob rule, where you basically vote yourself possessions of your harder working or wiser spending neighbor. The leaders knowingly support failing tax policy, and push it thru demogogery. The tax attack on high incomes brings hardly any revenue at all compared to expenditures, even if it didnt kill their risk-taking creation of new economic activity (and its potential tax revenue). This is proven by the small diversity not yet stamped out, where us states that have or plan smaller or zero income tax are booming, while the ones increasing it are in fiscal death spirals. Machiavelli advocated a mix of democracy and elites and a figurehead ruler like republican rome or UK monarchy. Actually, the Wiemar republic was originally supposed to be that kind of british model, with maybe a respected but weak Hindenburg at top and some elites like a house of lords all sharing power with the everyman... which might have been more resistant to a populist brownshirt infiltration because they could only legally replace the commoner elements of govt. Another example of mob rule is when leaders knowingly kowtow to and push populist green measures that actually sabotage green-ness. Block and harass the changeover to abundant and clean natural gas... let it just flare off wastefully and promote impractical expensive subsidized alternatives. Pretend you do green work by banning pipelines, and force more dangerous, spillable, expensive transport by road or rail. Just a few years ago, the people in power would temper populism with sane judgement from knowing more facts about the issue than joe sixpack. Niccolo looked to periods of Rome and elsewhere to systematically solve or at least refine such problems of a republic. Maybe i havent done it justice, but readers here should find his Livy discourses easy to scan over. I like the way he breaks down issues into multiple possible approaches, and says for instance approach c has often been disasterous (like hiring mercenaries) which Rome avoided.

It used to be common to relate Roman history to pivotal issues of the day. I ran across a couple examples I will share. First is a speech from U.S. ambassador to Germany 1933 on Economic Nationalism http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box32/t299b09.html And it goes on and on about how the example of Rome disproves the viability of national socialism. I looked it up since the new book "In the Garden of Beasts" mostly ridicules that ambassador except for the good reception of that speech, even by the targets of it in the audience. He was said to be an ineffective academic type who was sabotaged by his (married) daughter sleeping with many German adversaries... therefore his German confidants didn't dare give him valuable information which might be leaked back by his daughter. Another example is Machiavelli's "Discourses Upon The First Ten (Books) of Titus Livy" http://www.constitution.org/mac/disclivy_.htm . Did you know that Niccolo's work http://www.constitution.org/mac/niccolo.htm is generally a love poem to ancient Rome and it's happy republican ways? Did you know Niccolo is not "Machiavellian" in the sense that he never intended "The Prince" to be published or applied to any but very rare and dysfunctional situations that were facing the Medici's or certain failing Italian city states? Well, that's what I gather from the course http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/Course_Detail.aspx?cid=4311 (now under $30).

The problem is if they have reconstructed it to artificially appear as a market, based on fancy and not evidence. Both that market and ostia antica have a lot of features that ring false to me... they dont have that slightly alien and thrilling ancient roman feel, and i asume that is due to overeager and ideological rather than archeological driven fascist era reconstruction. Well, that has been criticized, but here is a summary that puts that effort in some positive light... getting things done where moderns would delay and shrink from: http://courses.umass.edu/latour/Italy/Mussolini/index.html P.S. saw a good recent episode of 'unearthing ancient secrets' about roman engineering of colosseum, aquaducts, and the pantheon. I dont get why aquaducts were built sometimes half again too long in needless zig zags to maintain the gentle slope. They say to prevent wear from fast moving water, but why not save tremendous construction and ongoing maintence by having special water ladder drop downs like we do now for fish to climb? I'd suspect the builders were paid by the length, and like taxi drivers were padding the distance, but that seems too brazen.

Below find a review on Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate by Claire Holleran Oxford, 304 pp,

Ho ho he he... yes, i felt that "unnerving" aspect was the elephant in the room, and had considered defending it in my first example of irish immigrants dying on jobs too dangerous for US slaves (digging malarial canals and such). Before proposing the greater good of that arrangement, allow me to unburdan what unnerved me. The whole issue of romans torturing innocent slaves as a routine procedure before they are called to legally testify irks me, to say the least. Actually the rules do address real issues where the slaves would be motivated to hide important truths, and later laws were issued to apply this less widely. I think we dont know much of how this was implemented, so i propose to dream up an acceptable modern version. Many murders in the US are done in public with witnesses. The witnesses wont say a word when police ask, because their neighborhood is under threat of revenge killings by the thugs. So how about we reinstate torture of witnesses, for the good of all?! Force them to eat only healthy food in moderation, watch only educational tv (ballet?), and listen only to opera. Bam, they will finger the street gangs so comprehensively, the neighborhood becomes quiet except for the crunch of cheese doodles. Well, back to the sweatshops. Maybe rome as well as a few modern places has congealed social mobility, but normally this can be a ladder for motivating folks to better themselves. The irish climbed out of desperation and hostility as famine immigrants to the US, just like 3rd world asian immigrants leapfrog to sucess today (in spite of highly discriminated against by univ. Calif. admission racial quotas, due to predicted good success). Meanwhile the long time residents of rustbelt declining cities, instead of relocating towards jobs like their recent ancestors did, are encouraged to stagnate as a paid off victimology group. I traveled thru crummy third world areas long ago that have uplifted themselves tremendously since, thru willingly tackling bad jobs such as in east asia. Counterexamples, like enduring indian sweatshops actually seem the product of blind compassion rather than tough darwinian love. Their govt puts a smothering restraint on details of the economy like preserving outdated jobs, and little attention on the normal functions of govt. Southern europe is also suffering from superficial generosity rather than tough fairness. Aww, i'm running out of steam before completing the case, but it is natural for free people to better themselves unless there is social or environmental interferance. The slaves were the oppressed ones (with some roman exceptions), but at least had a slight safety net in being worth more when healthy. The bottom rung of free workers at least had a shot of changing their profession or location. I was trying to connect the dots to this amazing psychology book presentation of how blind compassion sometimes leads to unfairness and loss of liberty, but time is up... http://www.booktv.org/Watch/13277/The+Righteous+Mind+Why+Good+People+Are+Divided+by+Politics+and+Religion.aspx

From 'as the romans did' i note even the romans could recognize slave health was an asset to protect. Varo, on agriculture, says 'it is more profitable to work unhealthy areas with hired workers than with slaves'... and presumably better than jeopardizing indentured servants promise of work, which he was also discussing. Also that book quotes 'the digest of laws' as saying in spite of laws declaring slaves as nonentities, 'according to the law of nature, all men are equal'. I note that the US constitution tried to head off a socialist interpretation of this by saying 'all men are created equal'. I guess it all depends on the point of time... the early republic didn't even have slaves iirc. Later in the empire, there seemed to arise more humane rules for slave treatment although i dont know if well enforced. Hadrian got positively soft hearted in banning the torture of all slaves before testifying in court... well he at least banned fishing expeditions of torture then testifying of slaves who probably weren't witnesses.