M. Porcius Cato

I am not entirely sure whether I agree with this. The Athenian Empire was extensive and controlled the Ionian coast some sections of the Greek mainland and a lot of the Western Med. The glory days of the Periclean Empire were short lived, however. And why do you think the glory days were short-lived? Don't you think it had something to do with some of the disastrous decisions made by the Assembly? Also, just for the record, most of what's quoted in your post above came from tflex, not me. I vastly favor the Athenians to the Spartans for the reasons to be found in Perikles' funeral oration, which is one of the most wonderful speeches in the entire history of mankind (imho).

If you want to re-open an old topic, why not start by summarizing the major points that were made previously? For example, if you want to restart a Republic vs Principate thread, sum up the points that were already made in favor of each and then add what you think is new (e.g., new evidence, new questions, new connection, whatever).

I think pure fanaticism is a prerequisite for empire building. Fanatacism doesn't build roads: rational engineers do. Fanaticism doesn't train troops: disciplined centurions do. Fanaticism doesn't build infrastructure, feed armies, plan for the future, develop contingency plans, or do anything that is necessary to build a nation-state. Only consistent rationality does. The Celts, Picts, Germans, and Huns had plenty of fanatics--they were great at destroying what the Romans left outside the walls, but they were lousy at building anything--including an empire. The Romans didn't build an empire by being more fanatical then their neighbors, but by being more adaptive and more rational. Very interesting. BTW, good book review--I look forward to reading Heather's book.

Yes, the correlation is quite strong--but what's the causal variable? It's not wealth per se, but women simply postponing their child-bearing (e.g., whether because of education, career, or just choosiness about her future mate). According to UN statistics, simply by women postponing their child-bearing a few years, a nation can go from population growth to population decline. The same is inevitably true for all sub-groups within nations.

Contrast the years of the rise of Rome to the years of its fall, and one of the most striking differences you'll observe is the investment private citizens are willing to make in the state. Whether building theatres or serving in the military, Romans made Rome great because they thought the system benefitted them and their families much more than the alternatives--in terms of potential for advancement, for wealth, for honor, etc. When all of the best opportunities were monopolized by one family of dynasts, the whole system of rewards was undercut, and civic participation was threatened accordingly.

During the republic at least, I'd say Sicilia was the most important province. The taxes from Sicilia were paid in grain, which formed the basis of the original (Gracchan) grain dole as well as providing important supplies for the army. Additionally, control of Sicily opened Rome up to the east. When Sextus Pompey controlled it, he was able to prevent shipments from Egypt from reaching Rome. Its strategic importance is further underscored by the intense interest that the Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans had in the province.

Although Google has been rightly taken to task for capitulating to Chinese demands to assist in censoring dissidents on the internet, rival Yahoo has been doing vastly worse--actually assisting Chinese authorities in tracking down and imprisoning dissidents. More in today's New York Times. What a shame--now I'm going to have to abandon Yahoo entirely. Does anybody have a suggestion for a good MyYahoo alternative?

Well, I would criticize Plato too. But he's not a fundamentalist religous nut. Nor, for that matter, was Kant--who also believed in timeless and absolute morality. My point is only that it's laziness to criticize a view by claiming that only a nut would believe it. If Plato's view of morality is wrong, point to the error--it's not enough to show that religious nuts come from Plato's tree.

Crucifixion was astonishingly rare for Roman citizens. For non-Romans, not so rare.

I can't think of a single example of pure fanaticism accomplishing anything great (unless you include "great destruction", "great famine", "great depression" etc).

Interesting idea. Certainly the Carthaginians practiced crucifixion. What's the earliest evidence of Roman crucifixion?

I'm a very long-suffering Cubs fans (why do I always choose the underdogs?), but I don't follow them religiously. FWIW, I think the whole "baseball is the American pasttime" idea is a bit over-blown (much like our supposed reverance for the flag). Most people I know think baseball is boring.

Wouldn't you know that an imperial palace would lead to the destruction of the Palatine itself??? Seriously, I'd happily pay a ticket price to the forum if it could help preserve the monuments. I heard from an Italian friend that the number of tourists visiting Italy each year is greater than the number of Italians. Even if this is an exaggeration, it's clear that the cost of preservation should be passed on to tourists like us.

I think only a fundamentalist religeous nut would. Does that make Plato and Aristotle religious nuts?

Like that old joke: stretch all the linguists of the earth from end to end and they'll never reach a conclusion. Seriously, how do you explain the fact that his linguistic clades map onto the clades identified independently by population genetics?

The nomenclator was used when candidates were canvassing for the vote. So, if Poplicola Candidatus walks up to Manlius Advia to ask for his vote, but Poplicola doesn't actually know who the heck Manlius is, the nomenclator would whisper "Manlius Advia, fishmonger from the Aventine, son of nobody" in Poplicola's ear so Poplicola could say, "Ave Manlius! May I talk to you about the plight of the fishmongers? My opponent wants to give free fish to everyone and put you out of business--vote for me so I can put a stop to these radical proposals!" Manlius Advia, presumably impressed that Poplicola is at least making an effort (however clumsy), then casts a vote for Poplicola and tells his friends that he knows Poplicola personally, and they share an interest in stopping radicals from putting honest plebs out of business. Or at least that's how I think it's supposed to work. BTW, there's a nice bit in the HBO/BBC Rome series where Caesar's slave Postumo serves a similar function for Vorenus who is running for an indeterminate magistracy. It's a good scene.

As Germanicus I think rightly implies, Nazi-apologetics is the inescapable conclusion from the premise of moral relativism. And I would add, it is simply a conceit to assume that one can adopt an historical moral standpoint. Living amongst the Nazis, there were dissidents. Amongst the Imperialists, there were republicans. During the early republic, there were resisters to the oligarchy (hence, the "secession of the plebs"). In every era, there have been moral DEBATES. There is no such thing as a "1929 Berlin Attitude" or a "First Century BC Roman Attitude." There is no singular, historical moral standpoint by which we can judge Nazies, Romans, or whomever. All we have by which to judge historical agents are our own standards, which are themselves debatable. And what's wrong with that? If your friends say that Romans were bad because they owned slaves, there's no point in trying to defend slavery "from the Roman perspective". I'd happily admit that the Romans were guilty of violating the individual rights of (say) the Gauls. But I'd also add that the Romans weren't alone in this, and that--unlike the Gauls--the Romans did more to define and protect individual rights than nearly any other culture for the next 1500 years or so. To put it another way, the best case for "Why I love Rome" is that the Romans were way ahead of their time, we owe a lot to them, and we should admire them for how progressive they were whatever their faults. To me, this is a much stronger case than "Judge not lest ye be judged" or the secular version "I'm OK, you're OK". BTW, many Romans were clearly ambivalent about slavery. My favorite example of this ambivalence comes from Cato's suicide. The reason his suicide was so gristly was that he botched the job because his hand was injured. His hand was injured because he struck a slave so hard. The slave was hit because the slave had attempted to save Cato by stealing his sword. And Cato, in his will, freed all his slaves. It all so perfectly captures that peculiar institution in which there could be (and sometimes was) contempt, affection, mutual dependence, and a desire for the slave's autonomy all at the same time.

Obviously this won't be definitive, but the basic argument originates in Joseph Greenberg's work. Greenberg was a professor of anthropology at Stanford and a founder of the linguistics department there; first for his seminal work in the 1950s classifying the 1200 languages of Africa and later for his magisterial work on language universals (including his 1962 paper, which is perhaps the most-cited article in linguistics ever), and the reduction of several hundred language families in the New World to only three, Greenberg has been compared to a modern-day Darwin. To my mind, the most compelling evidence for Greenberg's line of reasoning--which ultimately leads to the construction of PW which Greenberg was attempting--is that the mass comparisons that Greenberg conducted for New World languages accurately predicted that the gene frequencies of New World populations would fall into the same three families identified by Greenberg. Much, much more work from biology is needed to determine how well the Greenberg linguistic families map onto data about human migration over time. But the major insight was to bother to do this in the first place, and this insight directly follows from the hypothesis that all human languages have a common ancestor. But we don't know exactly when it evolved, how it evolved, or when it was first utilized to form a language. Demanding this level of detail is simply absurd. Ulitmately, whether the first mutant was born on a Tuesday or a Wednesday is completely irrelevant to whether all languages descended from a common ancestor. We don't know the birth day of many common ancestors, but it doesn't matter "exactly when it evolved". Any of these complaints might be lodged against any cladistic reconstruction, but if these lead you to doubt evolution, so much the worse for you not for Darwin. Why be mutations? Merely having the capacity for language does not equate to actually having a language itself. Having the capacity for language-learning plus exposure to a non-syntactic group of symbols (e.g., a pidgin) is a necessary and sufficient condition for language to emerge. On this see Bickerton's discoveries regarding creolization and the the birth of Nicaraguan sign-language; his work on language evolution is also highly relevant.

Is this the meaning of soup sandwich?

What, in principle, would prove to you that it did? Further, would proto-Indo-European meet your standard of proof or do you also deny the existence of proto-Indo-European? There is no requirement of the PW hypothesis that this be true. All that is required of the PW hypothesis is that all modern languages descended from a single ancestor language. The alternative hypothesis is that modern languages descended from more than one independently-emerging languages. I don't think this is particularly likely if the language-learning phenotype evolved only once, and the likelihood of random mutations leading to an identical phenotype multiple times is highly unlikely.

I think the title was just "The Spartans". The documentary covered their civilization from about 900BC until around 300BC. It was mainly concentrated on the Spartans role in the Persian wars and the Peloponnisian wars. Great documentary, I think you can rent it at blockbuster. That was a great documentary. And the woman who was narrating it was breathtaking (imho)!

And what about the Romans' virtues? If someone said, "Wow! The Romans delivered more water to Rome than did the New Yorkers to New York until the 19th century! How brilliant and innovative of them!". Would you also disagree, and simply shrug that it was fascinating but not commendable? And, perforce of logic, in disagreement with others. I really do maintain that it's impossible to judge Romans by contemporary ancient perspectives because there as no one ancient perspective any more than there is no modern perspective. Just as there were Catones and Clodii then; there are Catones and Clodii today!

The asphyxiation hypothesis was debunked by experiments, I think. Probably shock from injuries was the most common cause of death according to the experimenters who debunked the asphyxiation story. Here's the money quote on asphyxiation:

Not only was the death sentence rarely applied, but citizens had the right to a trial (at least during the republic). Special courts existed for all sorts of crimes. For example, there was a court specially dedicated to prosecuting people who violated election laws (e.g., bribery). Some election laws, however, were rarely followed and almost never enforced. For example, candidates were forbidden from using a nomenclator to whisper the names of citizens ot them. The only candidate to obey the law was Cato, much to the embarrassment of his opponents (who were widely ridiculed, but never prosecuted).

Look, no one is claiming that we can reconstruct and revive the original PW language--only that it existed and that it in principle it should be possible to identify some elements of the language with at least a small measure of certainty. Given that machine translation of modern langauges is still a ways off (i.e., computer translators suck), it's unlikely that anyone could successfully complete a full reconstruction of languages that are far more modern than Indo-European.