M. Porcius Cato

Well, we're moving quickly afield of topic! Still, I can't help but add my two cents (no surprise there). On the one hand, I'd say No. Artisans, craftsmen, and trade professionals have never enjoyed as much status as doctors, lawyers, and the landed aristocracy. See particularly the persecution of ethnic minorities that make their living by trade (e.g., European Jews, the Chinese in the Phillipines, etc). Presumably because the economic value of the middleman is invisible, he tends to be viewed as akin to a parasite and is despised even when sought out for the goods he can find and deliver. The ancient Romans didn't appear to be much different in terms of their attitudes toward traders and craftsmen, yet their rate of innovation seems much slower than the rate of innovation after, say, 1688. It seems to me that one very important factor in the increase in technology was the protection of intellectual property via copyright and patents. As far as I know, these had no ancient world equivalent, and so there was very little incentive to make the necessary investments into testing new technology. On the other hand, I do think that the status of different professions during the ancient world bore very little relation to the actual benefits provided to improving people's lives. How is that we know the name of Caracalla's kid brother despite every effort to wipe out his memory, yet we have no idea who invented the arch? or the grommet? or discovered that volcanic ash added to quicklime would allow cement to dry underwater? Perhaps if the Romans celebrated these acheivements half as much as they celebrated the conquest of a backwater like Judaea, they might have gone further (though still I think patents would be much more valuable).

Now, given that emperor portraits were typically based on the emperor's likeness at the time of attaining imperium, what should we make of the fact that Livia's portrait is of a woman much older than Augustus?

FWIW, the iTunes Music Store has free downloads of interviews with the cast and creators of HBO/BBC's Rome.

Well, what's the equation? There's the cost of slaughter (nearly zero) versus its benefits (nearly zero). Then there's the cost of transporting a bonded servant (or slave or serf) versus its benefits (almost invariably higher than the costs because demand for new products and services is only limited by supply, which depends on human effort and creativity). So if there were tradesmen who were on hand to take captured men and women and turn them into slaves, there is no reason why the same tradesmen would give up their profession if they could only sell 10-year bonded servants. I'd also point out that although the financial cost of slaughter is nearly zero, it's not zero. It's a lot easier to defeat an enemy who believes he has a chance of surviving if he surrenders. Given this fact, it seems also likely that an enemy would be more likely to surrender if he knew he only faced 10 years of limited bondage rather than a lifetime of slavery. The difference between bonded servitude and slavery might have been a military asset to Rome.

Gladiators slaughtering each other for sport continued for hundreds of years after Christianity became the state religion. So far as I know, Constantine attended the games with enthusiasm. What's your source to the contrary? More general point: for all their talk about peace and brotherly love, the average Christian was about as blood-thirsty as the average Roman pagan.

Ease of recognition can explain the consistency of depictions, but it doesn't explain whether the person was depicted as a youth or an old man. Age at time of attaining imperium, however, can explain how the person was depicted--and that's probably the more important point you wanted to make, no?

Sure, why not? If anything, the rapid spread of Rome allowed her to take new solutions home to Rome, to bring Roman innovations to places they did not exist, and expansion provided the *potential* for combining the two into an open-ended number of new innovations. The effect of slavery on the tribal landscape was to disperse ethnic groups. The same effect could be accomplished by other means, such as resettlement with a limited, bonded term of service. As best I recall, these were terms under which Americans like Ben Franklin got their start in life.

Good question. Tiberius' portrait (at least the Intaglio one) seems in the Octavian mold, and Nero's is also less Roman and more Hellenist, so I think my account works for them pretty well. The Flavian ones are certainly more verisitic than Octavian's, but overall they have the same idealized (less detailed) features as Octavian. Maybe that's just because they were mass-produced. Really, I've not studied these portraits and the time period well enough to project my power-base theory past the Roman revolution.

I think Augustus' portrait is not veristic because a sea-change in portraiture occurred between the era of the republic and the principate. During the republic, you competed in part based on your power to persuade others that you could safeguard the state. Thus, candidates liked to be portrayed as older, wiser, and more august. They wanted to look senatorial for much the same reason that candidates today want to look "presidential". Interestingly, when candidates stood for office, they even carried the masks of their ancestors with them--as if to say, "I may be young and not so impressive now, but look at where I come from and what potential exists in me thanks to my lineage."* Octavian's portraits were anything but senatorial; Augustus doesn't even look august. Instead his portrait looks like one of a Hellenistic despot--young, virile, athletic, and immortal. Maybe Octavian never had his portrait updated so he really would appear immortal. Maybe he did it for brand recognition. Maybe he wanted to look like someone who really could be Caesar's (adopted) son and heir. All of these possibilities seem reasonable. Here's another possibility though (one I favor): Octavian wanted to appeal to his power base, which really was the whole Mediterranean (where they liked young princes such as Alexander) and not just the voters in Rome (whom Caesar made irrelevant). One thing going for my hypothesis is that it explains another exceptional Roman portrait--Pompey's. Pompey, like Octavian, also had a large non-Italian power base and also modelled his portrait on a young Hellenistic leader--Alexander. It might be that as the center of Roman power shifted slightly away from the voters in Rome and toward the provinces, the need to portray oneself as an old Roman paterfamilias gave way to a more trans-Mediterranean esthetic. Anyway, that's my guess. __________________ * In case you've read Harry Potter, the Malfoys strike me as being dead-ringers for the old Roman aristocracy.

Then why didn't they? It's easy to say anyone can do something AFTER the technique is already known. Heck, many (maybe most) discoveries--ones that escaped everyone's attention for millenia--look obvious in hindsight.

Not as the experiment is currently planned. First, why 200 volunteers? If this is simply a pilot study, you can do a power analysis to determine the number of subjects needed--200 is probably far too many. Second, the design of your experiment is not fully balanced. You have Leather hits Chains and Chains hits Leather, but what about Chains hits Chains and Leather hits Leather? Any calculation of the average effect of the type of armor worn has to take into account the full range of the scale. Also, human volunteers are unlikely to provide good test subjects. If you want to give the armor a "life test", it's better to use equipment that inflicts systematic damage and varying levels of force and violence (say, at 1, 10, 100, and 1000 torque). I'd suggest you revise your grant proposal along these lines and try agan for the next round of funding.

And Sallust was one of Caesar's lackeys.

Andrew is right that my one-sentence economic history of slavery is open to the charge of post-hoc reasoning. Let me add a few to show that the economic argument against slavery is not so flimsy. First off, we DO have a comparison group precisely because slavery did NOT come and go worldwide. Some nations participated relatively little in the slave trade and serfdom; some abolished slavery and serfdom quite early (England); some late (Russia); some (in the Arab world) still practice it. One could make comparisons across all of these groups, but the problem is that these nations differ in many other ways that make it difficult (but not impossible) to estimate the impact of slavery. Luckily, there is an almost perfect test case--the history of technology and industry in the United States, where slaves were held in southern states (like Georgia) but not northern states (like Ohio). As a result of cheap labor in the southern states, there was virtually no demand for labor saving devices. In contrast, there was an enormous demand for such devices in the north. Indeed, one of the most significant catalysts for industrial expansion in the northern states was the demand for farm equipment in the states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Not that the industrial output was limited to making farm equipment: many other industries were created to support the farm equpment business as well, including metalworks, mining, and railways. Thus, by the time of the civil war, the number of railways crossing the lands of northern states dwarfed the number in the southern ones. What makes this particular contrast so interesting, in fact, is that states like Ohio were not even settled by Europeans until long after states like Georgia and most of the slave owning states, yet due to its strong demand for labor saving devices, sparsely inhabited territories like Ohio and Michigan were able to quickly leapfrog the old colonial states. This is where one can see the real causal connection between technological backwardness and slavery. The pre-abolition/post-abolition contrast, however, should (I think) remove all doubts about the impact of slavery on technological progress. In short, after the abolition of slavery, the southern states did not wither and die (as they had claimed they would if the slaves were emancipated), but increased their total economic input drastically, enough so that some southern states today (such as Georgia and North Carolina) have higher per capita economic output than many of the states in the north. This longer argument, I think Andrew will admit, is not a post-hoc argument for the link between innovation and freedom.

Given that nearly every slave-owning society increases its industrial and technological output in the 100 years after the abolition of slavery (or serfdom), it seems likely to me that the same would hold true of Rome.

Yes, Fergus Millar and I are complete idiots. Frankly, I'd suggest you look at the claim I made (again and again), viz., that SOME of the symptoms I mentioned were present to SOME extent prior to the triumvirate, but that there is no other period during the republic when ALL of these existed to the SAME extent. If you want to claim otherwise, produce an alternative five-year-period in which all of the symptoms I mention were more pronounced. If there is no such period, and it was the triumvirate that created and/or exacerbated these symptoms, revise your claim.

What was the Latin word for these products? Cannabis?

Of course one can argue from the particular to the general. It's called induction--without it, there would be no science. M. P. Cato: Are we arguing science here or politics? political science

My dismissal of the Gracchan testimony is based on the fact that Gracchus could not have in fact determined from casual observation whether the spread of latifundia were responsible for poor conditions in the countryside. That's a claim that is simply outside the power of casual observation. How do we know how much support Tiberius had from the countryside? Most of Italy couldn't vote for Tiberius, so it's really impossible to know, isn't it? And what is the reason that Tiberius had any rural support? Because his economic analysis was correct (I think not); because his desire to extend the franchise to them was popular (I think so); both; or neither? The mere fact that Tiberius had some rural support in no way speaks definitively to his claims about land ownership--he could have been supported by Italians simply because they wanted real political rights.

Not 'produced' in the same sense. The triumvirate--by relying on the mutual faith of three men vying (to different extents) for supreme power and relying also on the compliance of many men who had no interest in their concord--was inherently unstable. Insofar as the government depended on this impossible concord, the triumvirate destabilized the republic. In this sense, the triumvirate caused instability. The republic, on the other hand, did not create the triumvirate--Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus did. The republic was an enabling condition of the triumvirate to be sure: if there were no republic, the triumvirate could not have formed. But an enabling condition is not a cause. For example, sunlight is an enabling condition of plant growth (without sunlight, plants fail to grow), but--containing no carbon--sunlight does not directly cause plant growth (carbon dioxide in the air does).

I would disagree, Rosenstein writes well and the book is superb. [...] I agree that the case for the case of the latifundia taking over has not been proven as yet. Then I think we end up agreeing. To my mind, whether Italy was swallowed up by latifundia is an unproven claim. The Gracchan testimony is just that--hearsay evidence, nothing more. Rosenstein offers a compelling counter-explanation for the decline in Italian population, but (as he would be the first to admit) his case still needs more evidence.

The link also mentions a really good idea--selling laminated versions of the map. I'd have gladly paid extra to avoid the bother of having it done locally. Plus, there might be some discount for doing multiples, and the discount could be taken as profit for the secret UNRV patrician orgies that we plebs are always hearing about.

And the Romans had the response to that at Masada. Good point!

If this were true of the Republic, why the change during the triumvirate? Then be more explicit in your reasoning so as to avoid confusion. What was the argument you intended? No--who claimed it was and, frankly, who cares??? We're talking about ancient Rome not NYC. Yes, and no objective definition of 'in extremis' will support the opposite contention. That's not my claim at all. My claim is that voting won't make crops grow or gold spring from the ground.; insofar as poverty is a lack of food and gold, counting the votes of the poor is not enough to end poverty. I would also add that common 'ownership' is the least efficient manner of producing what people need to live, and in consequence, anyone sincerely concerned with the plight of the poor should be the first ones to advocate the privatization of the ager publica. The fact that people like Gracchus did not do so unmasks them as incompetent, poseurs, or both. Quite frankly, your guns lead me to think you prefer the latter. If I misunderstand your intent, then I'd invite you to produce a five-year-period that counterdicts my claim, to admit that the triumvirate--and not the republican constitution itself--produced the symptoms of instability I laid out, to produce a better set of indices of instability, or to find a formal flaw in my logic.

Not necessarily. If conditions in the camp relative to the conditions outside the camp got worse over time, it could still be that materialistic pleasures equal high morale AND that conditions in the camp got better over time.

Source?