M. Porcius Cato

Also, I'd just add that Porcia--who killed herself by swallowing hot coals--was Cato's daughter. If you ask me, Petronius' suicide (in Tacitus) was much more civilized: Petronius showed Rome that an Epicurean had all the mettle of a Stoic but twice the charm. Here is Tacitus' story:

Not necessarily--that's a modern bit of Germanic death-worship if you ask me. When Varro hurried to Rome after Cannae, the Senate applauded him for rescuing what few he could (if my memory serves correctly).

Has anyone ever maintained such an absurdity?

Another inaccuracy concerns the lead-up to Caesar crossing the Rubicon. In the HBO version (I think the episode was "Titus Pullo Brings Down the Republic"), the tribune acting on Caesar's behalf was Antony, who foolishly forgets to use his veto (sounds like Antony), thereby leading the Senate to declare Caesar an enemy of Rome, which led Caesar to march against his country-men and put a sword to the republic. True in spirit but not in fact. The acutal events ran like this. First, one of Caesar's buddies Caelius brought a bill that would allow Caesar to run for the consulship while still a governor of Gaul. This was an unconstitutional bill, and not even Pompey Magnus dared to break this important tradition--and for good reason, the lapse between offices was a defining element of the republic: only monarchs served continuously. Moreover, the bill would have allowed Caesar to escape prosecution for his crimes during his first consulship, his illegal levies, and his illegal crossings into Germania. As consul, he could ram through rewards for his veterans, as Pompey had done with Caesar's help, and thus the cycle of the politician-general would go on, spiralling to who-knows-where? Convinced by Cato and the long debates in the Senate, Pompey finally declared that Caesar had to give up his province just like everyone else, months before the consular election. But then, either bought with Ceasar's Gallic Gold or wishing to play for Caesar the same role Caesar had played for Pompey, the tribune Curio vetoed the motion--and every motion--to bring Caesar home at the expiration of his governorship. What would happen if Caesar brought a Roman army against Rome? Here the HBO series quotes Pompey almost perfectly, "I only have to stomp my food and all over Italy legionaries and cavalry will rise up from the ground." Taking command of the two legions at Capua, Pompey ordered fresh levies, while Caesar ominously stalked Ravenna with the 13th. Now Antony was made tribune, and he attacked Pompey viciously at every chance, vetoing anything that was proposed. When on 1 Jan 49, Metellus Scipio finally named the date by which Caesar was to return his legions to the republic, Antony vetoed the bill, despite the nearly unanimous assent of the senate to Scipio's motion. On 7 Jan, a state of emergency was declared, and Pompey moved his troops into Rome and warned Antony that he could not guarantee his protection. Antony quickly scurried off to Ravenna where Caesar was dining. Immediately, Caesar ordered an attack on Italy, and after taking a leisurely day of banquets and baths, his carriage caught up to the troops at the Rubicon, where he delivered that well-rehearsed line of political theatre thas has lived in infamy. After 460 years, the Old Republic--risen from a single town on the banks of the Tiber, successfully resisting kings and conquerors from all over the Mediterranean, expanding the light of Rome over most of the civilized world--was to suffer the final blitzkrieg and spiral downward into the horrors of perpetual dictatorship.

Good catch! I've harped on this a few times on this forum. Cato was younger than Caesar, who was younger than Cicero. Also, Cato wasn't present at the battle of Pharsalus, so it wasn't Cato you gave Pompey the stupid advice to attack Caesar when Pompey had Caesar cornered and starving. Another inaccuracy is that Octavian didn't sleep with his sister. That's just salacious rubbish. Still, I love the show. It's very accurate in most details.

The Roman way of life--specialization of labor, material comforts, economic activity--were all vastly reduced over a period of about 100 years. How is this evolution??

True but he sounded terrible, and Keith Richards looked like death-warmed-over. I'm not even sure Keith was really playing.

What are you reading? Have you read the archaological evidence from Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization"?

FVC, who "you"?

Funny, I don't see Caesar in your post or anything concerning government. There's lots on government in my post. And of course Caesar is singularly responsible for everything bad that happened to Rome--it just goes without saying!

But what if the injury caused internal bleeding?

That's an exaggeration. Roman aristocrats who intended on a military career generally served as military tribunes quite early in their careers and their subsequent assignments allowed them to develop a fair amount of military skill before they were entrusted with commanding a whole army. It's true that they weren't all professional soliders full time, but it takes more than good sword-work to raise, equip, lead, and field an army.

Were slingers used against the Macedonian phalanx too?

If Romans thought it was so admirable to exploit one's priviliges, why were there so many courts set up to prosecute those who did exploit their privileges? Why were men like Cincinnatus celebrated? Let's remember--for the Romans of the Old Republic, "rex" was an insult.

It seems to me that the character of Roman conquest changed very much after the sacking of Corinth and Carthage. Is there any evidence prior to this period that the Roman conquerors viewed themselves as so thoroughly superior to the vanquished that they should celebrate their raping of women?

You're right Sextus: mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!! Now, what's the right ritual to cleanse myself of this Pompeian miasma so I can look at the statues of my ancestors once again? My namesake was Cato Uticensis, the great grandson of Cato the Censor. It's confusing: there were 8 M Porcii Catones (see my stemmata, Kinsmen of Cato). Both of them, by the way, were factional to their very bones--the elder Cato was hauling people to court (and being hauled to court) well into his 80s, about the time he took a second wife (Salonia), who was the about the same age as his first son.

OK--Latin and Chinese are both just dialects of the Proto-World language, the language spoken before Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Sino-Tibetan dialects evolved under geographical isolation. Actually, my claim didn't butcher their view--you deliberately turned the claim into a straw man so you could knock it down.

Funny, I actually voted for economic decline as the single biggest contributor too, but I'd add that the declining economy wasn't some irreducible primary factor, but a consequence of (inter alia) bad domestic policy (e.g., the Edict on Prices, financing spectacles and public works through debasing the currency), bad foreign policy (esp paying more to bribe the barbarians than to build bigger armies and fortifications), Christianity (in the form of spending wildly on economically worthless churches and purely parasitical monasteries), and civil war. In my view, perpetual economic decline was the thing that made all the rest a real danger instead of a mere nuisance.

Really, I don't think there is a universally understandable account. The various theories of spontaneous generation have satisfied many people but not all (which is why we have science). The idea that the universe as a whole is atemporal (advocated first by Aristotle, now accepted by many theoretical physicsists as self-evident) is an easy idea to accept but not being as exciting as a creation myth, the idea isn't as well known and, when the idea is lost, it's difficult to rediscover. But even if there were a universally understandable account, so what? Should the lowest common cognitive denominator dictate what you believe to be true or false?? Some of the best discoveries really do run against so many intuitions that few people will ever understand them without lots of good explaining. The basic concepts and discoveries of biology, economics, calculus, cognitive science, and statistics run counter to almost everyone's intuitions, but that shouldn't lead us to give up on these discoveries--it should lead us to make the extra effort to teach them properly and often. In my opinion, the idea that the universe as a whole is atemporal--like the ideas of modern evolutionary theory--falls in this category of 'intrinsically difficult (but not impossible) to understand'. If humans have to have answers, then they also have to be willing to do the cognitive work to get these answers through the hard but true path of observation, experiment, and logical analysis. There are no short-cuts, and the opinions of the many count for ZERO--even if they do stomp their feet and demand easy answers.

This is absurd: you're fighting a straw man. The claim is that the only thing distinguishing a 'dialect' from a 'language' is the power of the speakers. Obviously, having an army isn't part of the definition of a given language. The point is that there is no real linguistic basis for distinguishing between dialects and languages. This is exactly the point. There is no good linguistic reason to say that Cantonese is only a dialect of Mandarin. The sole reason people say this is that Mandarin speakers have an army behind them (the PLA), whereas there is no indepedent army in (say) Hong Kong.

Belief in a god without godliness (omnipotence and omniscience)? Why bother? If you don't believe in godliness, what's the point of theism?

Actually, right before the final push of the germanic invasions, the emperor was busy fightiing off one usurper after another. If he had had a stable government, he could have concentrated entirely on the enemies of Rome instead of his personal ones. Polybius remarked that one of the major reasons for the rapid rise of Rome was its internal stability. If he's right, the contrapositive must also be true: that Rome would fall (yes FALL) once it was destabilized. Only Rome could defeat Rome; and it did.

To get back on topic, during those temporary lulls in expansion, were the Romans simply tired of imperialism? Clearly not for some time after the sack of Carthage and Corinth (which seemed to convince Rome that they world was theirs for the taking), but eventually the expansionism did die down. (BTW, historians have mercy upon us if Pamela Anderson is our most lasting influence!)

Why didn't you mention this in the first place? Now I'm convinced that Dacia wasn't backwards!

Will the Met have anything left???