Novosedoff

I mean, we've got to remember that under the republic the Romans effectively had 3 different institutions of the legislative power: curiate, century and tribal assemblies. So from the political organisation perspective it was way more more chaotic and complex than the bicameral British parliament or Russian Duma. There was something blasphemous in the idea that someone could intervene to re-shape the political landscape, to change the order of things that seemed very natural to the Romans because they were accustomed to it by many years of their history. Nonetheless Augustus led by his political instincts succeeded in where his predecessor had failed in the consolidation and re-distribubution of the political powers, Tiberius was the one to finish it off. The thing is that the Romans were very tired of the constant civil wars and political squabbles. Even soldiers and the centuriate assembly were ready to give up any little political powers that they had when Augustus promised them the very basic things that they wanted, such as retirement benefits etc. So it was the game of political trade-offs that Augustus was smart enough to win by surviving through the turmoil of events. After all, as we now know, only 25% of the Roman emperors would die by natural death.

Unlike Sulla and Caesar, who increased the number of senators to buy their loyalty, Augustus actually did the opposite and reduced their number to 600. He wanted to decrease the number even further down to 400, but senators were very displeased, so Augustus had to settle at 600. Nonetheless, the whole Roman policy would be decided at Augustus home by a small group of the chosen senators invited by Augustus rather than the Senate as whole. More importantly, Augustus took complete control over the financial and military matters. All the Roman provinces were divided into senatorial and imperial, the Senate would now have only 1 legion in Africa under its command, the rest of the army was under Augustus's. The Roman treasury used to be kept at Saturn temple and controlled by the Senate, now Augustus additionally established the aerarium military which would be replenished from the 2 new taxes introduced by Augustus (5% inheritance tax and 1% sales indirect tax) to pay the retirement benefits to soldiers (which allowed to buy their loyalty and support), the senatorial treasury would be then funded from Augustus donations and transfers. Augustus bribed the plebs by increasing the number of recipients of social benefits (like free grain) from 150,000 to 200,000, so from the political perspective there was a very little chance for the opposition to influence the streets. He also slashed the greedy interests of publicans by making the taxation more orderly and transparent. That's the very basic political mechanics beneath the Augustus's popularity and the transition to the principate 🙂

Although I am kinda addicted to the western music, Bowie is definitely not one of my favourites 🙂 But perhaps I am just not so much familiar with his music, that'd be more fair to say. I mean, Bowie's name did come up a couple of times within my field of interest. I do remember his wonderful duo with Bing Crosby (frankly, Crosby is way more interesting to me than Bowie) - the Little Drummer Boy. It's like the time when I studied in the UK, the whole student campus was going nuts about the Oasis, but I just couldn't stand their music 🙂 Anyway what other things by Bowie would you recommend? Here is another inspirational piece of music by Dirty Art Club. It's just come out.

Thanks. My first attempt was actually to leave a message in that particular section of the forum. I found myself unable to create any new thread there because I ain't permitted to do so. Frankly, the quota of 10 Mb seems a bit ridiculous because the average on the earth would now be above 1Tb of free cloud disk space per capita (yes, for all 8 bn people!). This is what Terabox happen to offer for free too: https://www.terabox.com/

Peter seems to be in no rush to chase the issue. Perhaps he's on vacation or something 🙂 The quota of 10 Mb for attachments seems a bit relic...

Absolutely. Jews and Christians were populous both in Persia and the Roman empire as well. That's interesting. Thanks for mentioning. However the wiki says that they appeared in the 4th century AD, so it seems the very high Roman empire 🙂

Thanks. I PMed him.

I've been reviewing the below wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontia_gens As can be seen, the first ever senator of the Pontia gens was contemporary with the governship of Judea by Pontius Pilatus. The rise of the Pontia gens to the high imperial ranks happened about the time when Sejanus was a consul (and so a chairman of the Senate). So can we play some conspiracy games and assume that the rise of both Pontius was not a coincidence? 🙂 Both seem to have been raised to high powers thanks to one man - Sejanus. The Roman senators served for life time unless they were arrested, killed and simply kicked out of the Senate for doing something really bad. Consuls served for only 1 year. So even after Sejanus was arrested and punished to death in 31 AD, Pontius Fregellanus could stay in the Senate. Interestingly enough another Pontius can be seen serving as a consul in AD 163, that is three years before Quintus Servilius Pudens became a new consul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Servilius_Pudens So it looks like Pudens and Pontius clans did walk hand in hand with each other, and the rise of both to high imperial ranks coincided at least a couple of times! 😎 Ironically one of the Pontia gens would even become a Christian deacon!

Hi there, I seem to run out of space on the forum and so unable to attach any more pictures to my posts. Is there any option to remove my old attachments? Thanks.

It's all right, Peter. Sorry for bothering you on that particular incident. Thanks for your prompt response.

There is a retired American professor who is very knowledgeable on the subject of Mithraism. His name is Luther H. Martin, he's emeritus professor of the University of Vermont. I happen to know him only briefly because he is the one who introduced to Rodney Stark's books (and the Stark's books did strike me a lot), Prof. Martin was also kind enough to share with me a few chapters from his yet unpublished book. Here is his page on academia.edu, which I follow https://vermont.academia.edu/LutherHMartin We can ask him for more evidence on Praetorian link to Mithraism. I am sure he must know.

It appears that there is also a Mithraeum built by Praetorians on Andros (island) to honour Septimius Severus and his sons (WTF did Praetorians do on a island?) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20180912

Yeah, RSS is considered as a bit old-fashioned these days, but I've just got attached to using Feedly and alike. One can actually filter out a lot of noise by using a blacklist of keywords and additional free services like feedrinse.com before loading anything to feedly or a local app. Unfortunately, not many websites support RSS these days. In fact, if a website generates high traffic due to too many visitors and new posts, then it becomes very cumbersome to load everything through RSS, because the number of idiot posts or questions would normally exceed the number of sensible un-biased posts. So one has to pay a special attention to that before loading adding any new channel to his/her RSS feeds. As I already said in private, I ain't blaming anyone for that particular propaganda post, which may be due to a website security issue, mis-settings or insuffucient moderation of the newcomers posts. Although given the forum's unusually strick policy on the number of views without registration (no more 5 pages to see), such penetration of the undesirable content may seem a bit suspicious, esp. for a paranoid person like me 🙂

Hi all, I'm gonna tell this only once, so it's up to moderators to decide if they want or need to take any actions. I normally get notifications of the new posts on the forum via RSS channel, given the fact that there not many visitors or open discussions. The very last post kinda made me raise my eyebrows. I screenshot the post and copy it here, so moderators could see it and check the below link too. Apparently there are not many Russian speakers on the forum, so the target group gotta be very narrow. https://www.unrv.com/forum/gallery/image/228-using-the-strigil/?do=findComment&comment=2914&tab=comments I ain't here to tolerate the pro-Ukranian or pro-Kremlin propaganda, and I am easy to come - easy to go kinda person. So if moderators think it is time for me to leave, that's ok. Otherwise, I'd appreacite any efforts so that no such updates would ever come up in my RSS feeds again. Thanks for understanding.

There were different kinds of spies in the empire, incl. Frumentarii (though they appeared later under emperor Hadrian and gathered mostly the military intelligence, not political). Overall Roman spies were pretty good ones: it's enough to recall that Romans sacked the Persian capital 5 times, whereas Persians could never approach Rome. Augustus used Praetorians in rather limited way as personal bodyguards for his palace in Rome (that job doesn't require brains, only muscles). The first Praetorian prefect who started to exhibit a lot of political power was Sejanus under emperor Tiberius. Tiberius mostly lived outside Rome after 27AD, so Sejanus became so powerful he could even push his protege and his agenda to the Roman Senate, he even became a consul and so a chairman of the Senate (this is also when the Praetorian service became of high prestige for silver-spoon kids of the Roman elite). Ironically the story of Praetorians ends with the rise of emperor Constantine. As far as I am aware, some folks even link Praetorians with the rise of Mithraism though I never came across any evidence to support that claim. Any locations, where Praetorians were stationed over the course of 3 centuries, could shed some light on that. The following article actually contains the names of the Praetorian prefects (to my surprise) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praetorian_prefect?wprov=sfla1

Welcome to the forum. A few attempts that I made here to get the answers were a bit waste of time because the forum doesn't have many participants, esp. for tricky questions 🙂 Anyway, if I were you, I would have checked the references from the below wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praetorian_Guard You may also want to ask your question on Quora because it has there more visitors and also a few Roman history groups. But hopefully you'll have more luck here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPcuD2_4sz4 Watch this video in slow motion, especially the second part when the archer shoots backwards Imagine him doing the same if there were no stirrups. Stirrups drastically reduced the likelihood of falling. The difference between leather stirrups and iron stirrups is like the difference between shooting from the firm ground and from the flimsy soil of swampland. In addition, iron stirrups make it easier to tame a horse, which may be important when the rider has to change his horses often.

Btw, is it true, caldrail, that in Britain in the beginning of the 20th century women in trousers would be taken to the nearest police station? 🙂 In the US even in the mid of the 20th century women wouldn't be allowed to open a bank account without first securing permission from their husbands. But that is easier to enforce by telling them off. I suspect that in the majority of cases such misbehaviour would be reported to the authorities by own relatives, neighbors or "friends", so they should be blamed for bringing the Praetorians to enforce the order

A bit of Soviet retro https://www.mixcloud.com/freedstadt/freedstadt-we-are-part-of-a-ussr-soviet-vinyl-minimix/

It can also be seen from the photo of the monument that Aurelius was riding his horse without stirrups to support his feet. This is very true because stirrups were invented later outside the Roman empire by nomads who came from the East. The first stirrups used to be made of leather, but the revolutionary innovation was due to Avars who started to use the iron stirrups, which were more effective in helping the rider to remain stable while shooting his bow, which drastically increased the accuracy of shooting. Btw, isn't it true that ancient people were a bit smaller too? Due to malnutrition etc

I never could quite understand why Romans failed to absorb Persia and expand beyond it to the east as Macedonians and Seleucids did it (despite the fact that Romans sacked the Persian capital 5 times)! One theory explains the lack of zeal by Romans by pointing to the falling productivity of the Roman silver mines in Spain as if the trade with China for silver was the only purpose for Romans to advance eastwards.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o7TDOPoP4zI