guidoLaMoto

Gladius is the Latin word for sword. We usually use the word gladius when referring to the gladius Hispaniensis adopted by the Romans after being exposed to it in the hands of Hannibal's Spanish mercenaries in the 3rd century BC. Short, sharp and light (<2 lb), it was particularly efficient when being thrust and slashed from between scuda held in tight formation by well disciplined legIonaires.....The spatha was a variation, lighter, a little more narrow and only a little longer than the gladius Hispaniensis. The efficiency of the gladius Hispaniensis and the terror it struck in enemies newly exposed to it is attested by Livy-- Ab Urbe Condita-- XXXI: 34 line 4 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0164%3Abook%3D31

Bored today, so I'll bite-- Really two aspects to your question....Sixty yrs ago there was a best seller in the psycho-babble popular press, On Agression. One point the author made was that doing injury to an opponent with one's bare hands was more personal and psychologically difficult than causing injury with a handheld weapon, and that still more difficult than impersonally inflicting harm from a distance with a projectile. Today, warriors can sit at a computer station half way around the world and kill with an index finger on a keyboard in a completely dehumanized way. While a certain amount of strength and coordination may be required to fire a gun, it still doesn't compare to lugging around a 40 lb scutum on your left arm while flailing a 10 lb gladius for 8 hrs a day with your right arm....and don't forget that those heavy, cumbersome first firearms were only single shots, so the warrior still had a good deal of hand to hand activity to contend with. The evolution from swords to keyboard has taken a long time. Personally, I hold a black belt in the ancient martial art of Ki-Chi-Ku, wherein one takes his index & middle fingers and strategically places in them on the opponent's upper ribs near the axilla and rapdily alternates them in flexion/extension while calling out "Kitchy-Coo! Kitchy-Coo!".... It doesn't take long for the opponent to giggle himself into a helpless bowl of Jello and surrender by calling "Uncle! Uncle!"

ErIt seems to me that any list of best military strategists should include Marcus Atilius Regulus & Lucius Manlius Vulso, commanders of Rome's first naval fleet, who defeated the Carthaginian fleet, already the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean for a couple centuries.....a bigger upset than the Jets (with the help of The Mafia) beating the Colts in Superbowl III. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Ecnomus#:~:text=The Battle of Cape Ecnomus,(264–241 BC). "AI" is a deceptive term no doubt devised by a publicist as clever as the real estate agents who devised the names Mount Prospect or Arlington Heights for new housing subdivisions of flat as a pancake farmland near Chicago's O'Hare Airport. It should be called "Pre-Planned, Biased Summary of Internet Entries."

"Hundreds of lucky cats..." In Latin, feles is cat and Felix is lucky, hence Felix the Cat, Felix Feles....in Italian, felice is happy. Forty y/a, those cats were thriving throughout the Forum, Colisseum and Palatine. Viewing several YouTube "walking tours" of The Forum, I see a much more formal development of signage, walkways, railings and more excavations than back then, and of course back then it was a "take your life in your own hands situation" trying to cross the street encircling the Colisseum.

It was a capital offence in Egypt to kill a cat, even by accident, with justice often dispensed quickly by the angry mob Some interesting facts & anecdotes about cats in ancient Rome: https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/cats-in-the-roman-world-the-big-and-the-small-of-it/ I haven't been to Rome in over 40 yrs. At that time, feral cats were everywhere and in large numbers. Has that changed?

WThat series ran in the70s. I was in my residency working 120 hrs/ wk--not much time for TV. FWIW- the Wiki article claims Claudius suffered from weakness, particularly of the legs, and had nervous twitches of the head-- consistent with the myopathy and tremors seen in hyperthyroidism. You're right about medical problems of the ancients, not so much that they were exotic, but that without treatment they were carried to extremes not seen often today. These days, I try to avoid watching anything shown on the Propaganda Broadcasting System.

Even that statue (↑↑↑) does not accurately depict the anatomy of the musculature, so maybe the artists just don't give us a good picture......OTOH, the coins displayed in chronological order in Guy's post above do seem to show a progression of the neck swelling over 18 yrs, consistent with Hashimoto's Disease (hypothyroidism) or Grave's Disease (hyperthyroidism, sometimes evolving to hypothyroidism, often associated with the bulging eyes of ocular involvement). I'm not up on my emperors....With untreated thyroid disorders, mental & psychiatric disorders are often serious. Anything in his history to suggest that? Apparently he was bright enough to have compiled a history of the Etruscans, unfortunately lost to posterity, and may have been among the last speakers of the Etruscan language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrrhenika

Interesting question about the oddly shaped neck depicted......Goiter was still endemic in the backwoods of southern Italy at my last visit 45 y/a, caused by Iodine deficiency, but easily avoided by even occasional ingestion of seafood. One only needs to replace about 5 mg over the course of a lifetime. Fish was probably a regular component of an emperor's diet. Goiter from deficiency would be unlikely. Goiter from hypothyroidism is a possibility, but.... A search for "images of Claudius" shows us many statues, none of which show a goiter, but all seem to show a long neck. One can speculate on how much license the sculptors took to depict the emperor in an aesthetically pleasing way....I wonder if the coins, focusing on just the head & neck, accentuating an actually long neck, give an anatomically exaggerated view of the sternocleidomastoid muscle....explaining why that swelling is positioned so far laterally/posteriorly from where a goiter would expected? Other causes of swelling in the neck would include lymphoma, untreated often causing bulky adenopathy, with a median survival in excess of 5 yrs-- long enough to live to be poisoned later.

OK. You win. It was obviously much better to live in the filth and squalor, starving in a Romam slum, needing to rely on the public dole because jobs were taken by the slaves than to live as an enslaved bus boy in a villa on the Palatine hill. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hirt.+Gal.+6+13&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0002. "For the pleb is held almost in the place of slaves, who dares nothing for himself...."

Differences in each of those categories between north and south can be more plausabley attributed to differences in climate, urbanization, topographical & economic factors, rather than the mere coincidence that Rome had a presence in the south.

Apparently not all of us here are famiiiar with the rhetorical device of alllusion ...Beyond that... Perhaps you have a false impression of how difficult life was in an agrarian society, let alone a hunter-gstherer society. There's a reason humanity progressively self-organized into a more urban way of life, a process still going on today with generalized abandonment of the rural areas. The poor of Rome lived in six story tenements. Food was not always available. The streets were filthy. Street crime was rampant. ...Slaves lived in palaces or in the agrarian villae. Food was no doubt always available. A certsin amount of social & economic security comes with slavery.. Had they not been taken captive, those slaves, for the most part coming from the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, living in the frontier, "barbaric" regions, would have continued living their insecure subsistence lifestyle.....Perhaps giving up freedom for security was a good trade. And, to re-iterate, the jobs performed by slaves were not WPA style "make work" jobs. They were jobs that needed to be done. Someone had to do them. Without slavery, all those extra poor would have taken those jobs for low pay, then paid it back to the company store....Net flow of money the same with or without slavery.......The cotton still needed to be picked, so to speak, after 1863.

I'm not defending slavery.....I:m suggesting that freedom of choice denied by law is really no different than freedom of choice prrevented by economics. The life of a free Roman peasant was not much different than that of most slaves, maybe worse. The slave at least could count on timely meals....The Hollywood impression that slaves were regularly starved, beaten and worked to death is illogical. Is it common for a farmer to starve, beat or over work his plow horse? The original question posed was how would things be different had the Romans not used slaves....I'm pointing out that certain jobs needed to be done, and there were large numbers of people who needed work to pay for the bare necessities of life The expenses of maintaining slaves would probably have been about the same as paying wages for menial work. ...I can see how things may not have been much different had there been no slavery..... ....and is an uprising by Spartacus really any different than French peasants storming The Bastille?

In response to your obserstions, let us merely ask how different was the life of a slave from that of a Roman peasant? Not really any different. Maybe worse. A family of eight living in a 400 sq ft insula apartment? Were slaves serving dinner in a Senator's triclinium treated any differently than those in servce in an episode of Upstairs Downstairs? In regards the economic impact of slavery, compare the flow of money in, say, 19th century American coal mine towns, where miners were paid low wages, and then paid rent to live in company housing and bought food & merchandise in company stores. ....Not fundamentally different than slavery with no wages but no expenses. Much of what we know about American slavery comes from a famous book, Twelve Years a Slave https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html The author describes his life as a slave to an owner who he described as being usually good but having moments of cruelty. He reports that a few owners were very harsh, but lost as a fleeting comment early in the book is that most owners generally treated their slaves well. After all, most people don't abuse their valuable possessions. In regards health issues- .life expectancy in Roman times was only ~25 yrs- foreshortened mainly by high infancy/childhood infectious diseases and death in childbirth Iit's been said that a pregnancy in those days was practically a death sentence. Perhaps we could make the argument that a female slave kept out of the reproductive pool benefited by slavery.

Whoops-- I have to throw the red flag on myself.....After further review, soldi is Italian for money or currency. Spicioli is small change.....Now where did I leave those Alzheimer's pills?

For some reason, a "reply" option does not appear after that original post, but it's an interesting question deserving of contemplation. We could present a plausable arguement that a tendency to take captives is a behavior pattern innate to humans and helped improve chances of survival for our species when our numbers were few, helping to avoid the pitfalls of inbreeding. Concerning ancient Rome and slavery- a few thoughts-- Hollywood has tainted our views. While Romans had the legal power & rights of "paterfamilias," the ultimate power of life or death was rarely exercised. Slaves were generally treated well, often playing integral roles in the household, including companionship as well as nursemaid/governess/teacher. Roman slaves were often given wages/"spending money"above and beyond room & board, and were oftrn in a position to take on extra work for pay outside the household. It was not at all unusual for slaves to buy their own freedom. Freedmen wore a felt hat (the pileus) somewhat like a modern fez.....The largest, most ostentatious tomb sitting in a very prominent position just outside the gates of Pompeii was built for a freedman who became quite wealthy. The more menial tasks including construction work was accomplished by slaves as well as by citizens. Cf- recent discoveries showing that the Great Pyramids of Egypt were constructed mostly by citizens, not slaves as previously thought....Those jobs needed to be done by large numbers of people whether they were paid or not. Either way, their room & board needed to be covered, so it's really just a paper shuffle of how that got done and the poor masses needed to earn a living.