M. Porcius Cato

Really? So, what is your reason for preferring Camillus to Caligula? Surely there must be some moral factor in your thinking.

Unless I missed something, the images you referred to depict walls that were built long after the time of Caesar. Isn't it possible that these walls were built precisely because the Dacians lacked siege works?

Language is a combinatorial, conservative system. Therefore, it is possible to reconstruct elements of previous languages based on current ones. There is no need for a time machine--just massive computational power and loads of data.

PhD, University of Michigan.

Who was in the pantheon? All I ever hear about is Baal.

The Lupercalia seems pretty tame to me. Compared to college fraternity parties, the Lupercalia is quaint.

Given that you earlier claimed that PW didn't even exist, are you now claiming it did exist but that we simply can't know what it would be? I think this is an absurdly pessimistic view. But give linguistics and allied sciences 50 years, and we'll find out if your pessimism is warranted. The only certainty is that your pessimism won't contribute an iota to the project.

Enormously. Given that the republic lacked a written constitution, precedent and tradition was all they had holding the system together. Once one was ignored, it was nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. BTW, I wonder if Kathleenb will ever bother to read this.

Why not judge them by both? If we were to judge Romans by modern standards, we'd find many reasons to criticize Romans but also many reasons to admire them more than their neighbors. Many of our modern criticisms, in fact, would have been shared by a fair number of Romans. The games, for example, didn't thrill everyone: one of the emperors hated the games so much he brought his paperwork along so he could at least get some work done! If we were to judge Romans only by their standards, we'd also find many reasons to criticize them but also many reasons to admire them. Our adopted Roman attitudes, for example, would lead us to claim that they had gone soft from being too Hellenized, and we'd upbraid them for letting too many inferior people into the system. On the other hand, we'd also rightly praise the early Romans for their virtus and perhaps emulate their tough-mindedness a bit more than we currently do. (When I hear pampered college students whining about what victims they are, I sort of wish there were a Marcus Junius Brutus around to show them the meaning of severitas.) Personally, I don't think it's really possible or desirable to judge Romans simply by the standards of the Romans. First, the Roman state lasted nearly 1000 years, and their standards changed enormously during that time. So, if we follow the advice to judge Romans by their own standards, which Roman standards should we use? Those of Cato the Elder? Lucretius? Seneca? Augustinus? Second, why limit our analyses by pretending not to know what we do know? Thanks to the enormous progress made in economics, biology, statistics, and physical anthropology, we know a lot about what does and doesn't work. Why not use that knowledge to gain insight about what the Romans were doing right and doing wrong?

Now that would be a Rubicon-crossing I'd look forward to.

Well, Spartacus lasted quite a bit longer than 10 seconds. Also, the political gang-warfare led by the likes of Clodius and Milo was undoubtedly unlawful, and most of these brigands got away with it for some time.

You may have trouble with the concept, but lots of things are arbitrary. My iPod, for example, has a shuffle function which plays songs randomly--does it sound sometimes like there's an algorithm guessing what would be best to play next? Sure. But there's not one. Sometimes, things are random even when they don't seem to be. Believing in order where there is none is a very human reaction--but it's still wrong.

Language may not be random as a code (if it were, it would be unlearnable and non-creative), but the arbitrariness of morphemes is one of the defining features of human language.

What is the justification for identifying Melqart with Hercules? They don't seem interchangable at all to me.

I agree. I've learned a lot and hope to learn even more from our 'ideological' clashes. As long as the clashes go beyond the chanting of "Hail Caesar!" and get to meatier topics (Were the Gallic Wars legal? Could the republic have been saved? Was Caesar another Sulla or simply a tragically misunderstood populare?) that bring in neglected data, the forum is working the way it's supposed to. Undoubtedly, old ground will be covered, but that's to be expected on any topic. What makes the late Republic different is that there are timeless issues at stake (e.g., monarchy vs republicanism) and there is so much material to cover from so many different angles that there is a high potential for learning.

Limited options??? Are you crazy? The first language could have taken so many forms the problem is exactly the reverse! And the point of reconstructing PW is exactly the same as reconstructing a dinosaur or any other fossil--to find out about things evolve and what underlying mechanisms constrain the changes. Don't get me wrong--getting at PW is like trying to do a genome for the first living thing: it's such a difficult problem that it's nearly quixotic. But so what? All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Are "Proto-Elephant" and "Proto-Human" dialects of each other then, since ultimately all animals began as one? Given that only humans speak, what exactly is your point?

That's nice of you--in a society where 'academic' is also a synonym for 'irrelevant', every bit helps.

As prosecutor, you should charge the Liberators with high patriotism and press that they face the stiffest penalty imaginable--a vote of thanks from the Senate. Caligula started off OK too, but then look what happened once he realized what he could get away with. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. If the liberators hadn't stopped the madness when they did, the Divine Julius would have had his head on every street corner and the liberty of all Rome in the Cloaca Maxiuma.

Justice would demand that Brutus and Cassius face a jury of their peers. Since they were the "last of the Romans" (as the historian Cremutius Cordus observed before getting killed by yet another tyrant), the only modern-day equivalents would be those who have witnessed dictatorship first-hand, especially under a dictator who managed to convince himself that he was a living god. So, if there are any ex-pats from North Korea on the forum, they would do just fine. Also permissible would be someone who escaped from Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Mao's cultural revolution, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, or Mussolini's Italy.

I thought that was rather the point--you recline and just nibble for a long time.

Why would extending citizenship to Roman provincials be a bad thing? Do you think extending citizenship to Italian allies also led to a drop in 'civic pride'? I'd think that having a right to trial would make you more loyal to your government.

Geez--I thought all women did that.

Quite so, but remember the Magna Carta was won by gathering a bunch of nobles and threatening the king with rebellion. Exactly. Which is why it's important for them to guard their power jealously lest there be no internal counter-weight.