M. Porcius Cato

You can have all the benevolent despots you'd like, but there's no guarantee that the next despot who comes along will be benevolent nor that he'll even have a firm grasp on power. Despotism suffers from the intractable problem of lacking (by definition) a supervening mechanism of accession. As a conseqence, transitions between despots are nasty, brutish, and frequent. Just contrast the republic to the principate: During the long reign of the republic (509 - 49 bce), there were nearly 950 legal and peaceful transfers of executive power, with only a few, brief periods of anarchy (375 -370), civil war (21 years, all in the last century of the republic), or dictatorship (only 8 years including Sulla). These brief interruptions to the peaceful norm comprised less than 8% of the total history of the republic. In contrast, the brief and despotic regime of the princeps tottered continually between totalitarian repression and complete chaos. During the era of the principate (about 300 years, 27 bce - 284 ce), the number of princeps (including claimants and usurpers) totalled 78. Of these, nearly 50% were assassinated, executed, committed suicide, or were otherwise deposed violently. Further, roughly 40% of the years during the principate were passed in civil war, anarchy, or divided rule. I'm not a fan of democracy for a number or reasons, but the case for any constitutional government (e.g., a republic) is vastly stronger than the case for one-man rule (whatever you want to call it or however you dress it up). The republic wasn't a utopia by any means, but it was more stable, longer lasting, and grew relatively more than the regimes that followed it.

Democracy? We can't be talking of ancient Rome then can we...! No--thank the gods, Rome was never plagued by direct democracy.

As a staunch Republican, I can't help but wonder if the next poll item will be "Arsenic or Mercury?--Which do you like to eat for breakfast?"

I'm from the States, and I also thought the review was pitch-perfect.

If you haven't already purchased it, I'd highly recommend Ward-Perkins' book. It mobilizes legions of new data to annihilate the trendy thesis that "Rome didn't fall, it just evolved." Even if you don't agree with this thesis, the data cannot be ignored but must be explained in a way that fits the "gradual evolution" idea.

....or religious fantacism and persecution, the growth of monasticism, holy wars against infidels, inquisitions, the suppression of science, religious sanction of dictatorship... yes, it's all stranger than fiction.

I'm reminded by today's NYT piece (link below) that my hypothesis about many societies gravitating toward the Roman way of life probably reflects the very Roman, very Athenian, and very modern ideal of Cosmopolitanism. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine...=rssnyt&emc=rss

Interesting article on Limbo and Dante from today's New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/...=rssnyt&emc=rss

This is really cool--but TWO MONTHS to build a mere 70-foot wall is not practical.

I'm a bit skeptical of the MSN Encarta account. What it says about Polynesian navigation, for example, doesn't jibe very well with the anthropological studies of Hutchins ("Cognition in the Wild"). I also wonder whether the temperature of the winds can be gauged by the human senses enough to determine how far north or south one is. I'll keep looking.

Just when you thought Rome couldn't be made more lurid... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml.../16/bomain.html

I don't understand. Is your objection that people might believe that there is no Limbo?

Agreed. I'm done.

Aside from my namesake, I'd choose Decimus Brutus. Somewhere I read that when Octavian and Antony published their proscriptions and offered a reward for each of the heads of the proscribed, Decimus Brutus countered with an even larger reward for whomever brought the proscribed to him. Very Scarlet Pimpernel. Actually, my first choice for a screen name was Decimus Brutus (not that I regret my own).

And here I thought the admirers of Cato were, in your words, "intellectual equivalents of the mullet-wearing-camaro-driver". Or does the brandy-snifting, pipe-puffing, Bristish aristocrat who likes Cato also wear a mullet and drive a Camaro??? To avoid muddling the colorful stereotypes, perhaps you might just refrain from painting all of us with such a broad brush? Isn't it possible that some of us regard Caesar's DICTATORSHIP as the ultimate "expropriation of power by the few and the mass disenfranchisement of the majority"?

I can find no historical source for this claim. Were you thinking of Brutus' father-in-law Appius Claudius in Ciliicia perhaps?

Dava Sobel wrote a fabulous little gem of a book called "Longitude", which records some of the naval disasters that occurred as a result of navigators not being able to determine their longitude. Does anyone know how the Romans managed to sail along longitude lines without running into trouble? They couldn't exactly hug the coast from Ostia to Alexandria. Or did they?

Thank you--I try. I agree that the transition lasted about 50 to 100 years, but time itself isn't what makes something an abrupt versus a gradual change--it's the status of the society at time 1 minus the status at time 2 divided by the cumulative average state of the society. In the 500 years prior to the Germanic invasions, the rate of change was very gradual, as Britain moved from an iron age civilization to an age of advanced ceramics, agriculture, commerce, and technology that was nearly comparable to that enjoyed in northern Gaul. That cumulative growth was completely destroyed in 50 to 100 years. Yes, 50 to 100 years is not literally overnight; however, compared to the 500-year period over which those advances were acquired in the first place, the change was relatively cataclysmic. Actually, it was both. It was partly a symptom of a political system (the principate) that was prone to civil war due to an absence of any supervening mechanism of accession (e.g., the 'constitution' that permitted peaceful transitions of consuls during the Republic). The civil wars were the proximate cause of the abandonment of the frontiers, which in turn were the efficient cause of the Germanic invasions. I'm open to this idea, but I'm not convinced. Two alternative hypotheses seem equally or more probable to me. The first hypothesis is that barbarian auxiliaries were formidable and well-trained troops who could be trained in short order to supplement Italian infantry with experience in close-order tactics. I know of no evidence to support the hypothesis, but I vaguely recall that Italian recruits made up only a small portion of the troops fighting under Aurelian, who managed to re-conquer almost the entire Roman world. This success strongly suggests that the use of non-Italians was not itself an impediment to victory, leading to my second hypothesis about what was the cause of Roman weakness. In a word, poverty. The might of Rome was directly proportional to the wealth of its taxpayers. Without coin, standing armies could not be supported, roads and ships could not be built to transport them, and defensive works could not protect their cities. Germans were nearly hopeless at constructing siege works and naval forces, but these Roman advantages required coin and resources, which had been frittered away on the idle mouths of the monastic orders and on Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement gestures to the barbarians. The Roman state slowly but largely became impoverished with the rise of the Church. Christian demands for useless buildings and idle mouths helped to bankrupt the empire and left it defenseless to the barbarians. The games went on, but as a shell of its former self. I have a much simpler explanation for this--there is a universal human nature with universal needs that constrain the varieties of human-produced goods and institutions. Consequently, the overlap between historical groups of humans will probably always overwhelm the differences insofar as the obstacles to producing these goods and institutions fall away. It's not that we're all Romans today (or all Greeks, as Shelley maintained), but that we're finally humans who have enough wealth to satisfy our natural desires. To really drive home the point, there is little to no historical continuity between people in modern-day China and the Romans, yet in their manner of living, the modern Chinese are more similar to the Romans than they are to the ancient Chinese.

My girlfriend and I enjoyed Caesar III a great deal, and we're also looking forward to Caesar IV which is slated for release in 2006.

Well, it was straying off course, but not as far as the Byzantine economy. The paper was relevant because it had pretty decent economic data from the age of Augustus, which could be used to assess the average wealth of the ordinary Roman. The upshot is that the average Roman had about twice as much as was necessary to survive.

Maybe. I was basing my comments largely on Paul, Augustine and the early Christian writers, but I do realize that Paul and Augustine are not the spokesmen for Jesus. Nevertheless, I have a hard time envisioning a sect of Christians that have entirely avoided the influence of Paul and Augustine's view of humanity as naturally "crooked" (in Augustine's words) and in need of salvation.

Funny how one of the most virulently anti-humanist belief systems to gain any wide credence is being touted as 'humanitarian'. Almost the whole physical and biological nature of the human condition is ignored or denigrated by Christianity--leading to Christianity's positions on everything from abortion to zoology. Christianity may have been altruist, but it was't because of any love of humanity.

Thanks, Virgil. According to these data, the Germanic height advantage was only 2 - 4 cm, depending on the century. Overall, human heights prior to widespread industrialization remained fairly stagnant, with the total range drifting between 168 - 172 cm. I pretend no military expertise, but a two-inch height difference doesn't sound like much of an advantage to anyone. It's too bad this paper doesn't discuss discrepancies between their own height estimates and those reported elsewhere.

Did Brutus control the troops in Cilicia or not? If he didn't and wasn't involved in where they were billeted in the first place, Brutus is not culpable for extortion (he was also never tried for extortion). Also, do we happen to know how he testified at the trial of Appius Claudius? His testimony might clear up what exactly his role was. In any case, I really don't care that much whether Brutus was a saint or not--getting rid of Caesar was a necessary step in securing the Republic (though obviously not sufficient), and so even if Brutus started off as a scoundral (and I don't think he was), he ended up doing the right thing in the end.

Lucretius--for the poetry and for the philosophy.