M. Porcius Cato

Actually, Brutus defeated Octavian (who was lounging on his litter) at the first battle of Phillipi. For Appian's account see http://www.livius.org/phi-php/philippi/battle1.html.

Isn't there archeological evidence that the average height of the Roman legionary was 5'1 while the height of the average German was closer to 5'10? If my memory is right, isn't the whole physical explanation for Roman superiority based on a faulty premise?

It's interesting--"low" comedy seems to be appreciated universally. I wonder if that's why Vaudeville and the vaudevillian elements in Plautus were so successful in their environments of immigrants and international travellers. When I was in Moscow (as a 13-year-old American delegate to the Young Communist League--if you can believe it ), I didn't detect any particular penchant for "low" comedy at all--quite the contrary. So my guess is that you, me, and your Russian friend were simply having our universal human natures tickled. Maybe I've just a penchant for over-analysis, but it seems to me that comedy should be treated more seriously as an interesting cultural contribution. Where would I start a thread on Roman comedy?

In the history of the institution, slave revolts were rarely successful. I can think of only one off-hand (Haiti). In contrast, small-scale organized escapes were fairly often successful. Perhaps if Spartacus had quietly made for Gaul he would have been better off.

Once again we've strayed from the topic at hand--what were the consequences of the grain dole? Virgil claimed that it was a terrible waste of resources and manpower (though he didn't elaborate and mostly was concerned to reiterate that it was really the fault of the optimates who opposed it). I claimed that it probably had the effect of driving Italian farmers out of business and more certainly was an indirect drain on the treasury (insofar as the grain came in the form of taxes on the provinces and would normally have been used for the legions without thereby affecting the grain supply in Rome itself). Perhaps we can revisit the motives for the grain dole in another thread if we're all in agreement that the grain dole had negative long-term consequences for the total supply of grain that would have otherwise been available.

Funny, the issue of the economy of the Byzantines came up during our discussion of the Gracchan corn dole. There is a very interesting paper on the topic: http://econwpa.wustl.edu:8089/eps/eh/papers/0501/0501003.pdf.

Which is how people manage to survive, to enjoy life, and which can be measured systematically across time. If you want to propose another objective metric for evaluating decline, propose it. Are you hallucinating this evidence or do you have some archaeology to back you up? If you look at the combined metrics of material goods that were available to the indigenous population, there was a precipitous decline in Britain in the 100 years after the Germanic invasions. In fact, it was a faster decline than anywhere else in the Western empire, so Britain happens to be the worst example you could have chosen. During the same period, by the way, there was no drop in the Eastern Empire, demonstrating that the decline cannot be attributed to some larger worldwide event. Vandals invading North Africa devasted the countryside, burning villages, enslaving Romans, raping nuns, and splitting babies in two--call me crazy but that's not for nothing if even if you're not a Christian (and I'm not). Barbarian auxiliaries weren't the main problem. It was that there were NO troops guarding the frontiers because they were needed to fight off foreign-sponsored usurpers.

This is a political tactic--like the manipulation of the state religion--and not a political agenda. And, yes, patricians like Caesar and Clodius did use patsies and bribes, but they weren't optimates. So what is this evidence??? I've gone to the trouble of listing specific families and office holders that demonstrate that the electoral changes brought about by the Social War led to a seismic shift in the alliances between and among the old patrician and plebean classes. All you've said (in effect) is, "No I've not heard that idea before, so it must be wrong". The only commonality between the factions of 133 and the factions of 50 is that in both periods there was one group that had relatively more support in the senate than tribal assembly and there was another group that had relatively more support in the tribal assembly than in the senate. Mathematically, this is almost certain to be the case and says nothing interesting in itself about the continuity of agendas between the senators of these two periods. Look to Cicero's oration against Piso: Cicero says that while Piso attained his power from his patrician countenance and family history, Cicero gained his from the votes of cuncta Italia--all Italy. Really, Virgil, do you think that granting citizenship to cuncta Italia had no effect on the composition of the alliances? Do you think it is an accident that a provincial was finally able to win the consulship? Do you think Caesar was sending his emissaries from transalpine Gaul to canvas the nearby provinces simply for his health? To me it seems bizarre to blame the provincial expropriations of the second century on the champions of provincial rights in the first century. It's rather analogous to equating the faction supporting American slavery with the faction supporting the New Deal. There is a connection of course (both being Democrats), but the connection is only superficial. In the context of the question of the corn dole, I claimed that the corn dole was a middle-class entitlement. Meaning, any person from the middle-class (almost always a smaller group than the lower class and a bigger group than the upper class) could get his share. So, if you want to maintain that the middle class wasn't much of the population, your claim is simply irrelevant. I've read that paper, and I'll quote it's conclusion:

I think you mean, Evocati. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evocati

No, but you are right. After the Christians, all artistic representations of the human form went into technical decline (less realistic, less polished, etc). In their topsy-turvy world, ignoring the flesh was a virtue--even while depicting it. The fact that they robbed earlier sculpture to adorn their public works is good evidence that craftsmanship had degenerated rather than artistic tastes merely changing. If changing artistic tastes were repsonsible for the anatomical monstrostities that the Christians produced, they wouldn't have preferred the earlier stuff to their own. Much later, sculptors in Christendom rediscovered the lost techniques of figural sculpture. For example, Michelangelo mastered figural sculpture by studying Hellenistic works such as the Belvedere torso.

Surely. But she was Cato's daughter.

When I was 4, my grandmother gave me a coloring book of the Roman gods and goddesses, and I was hooked--my mother took me to the library to check out all the books on mythology I could, and I kept at it. Later, we acquired an old encyclopedia, and I read everything I could about the Romans, mostly by following the cross-references. In college, I double-majored in the Classical Humanities (but it wasn't my real major, just for fun). I came to this site because I wanted to look up something or another having to do with the History Channel. Soon, I preferred the site to my old Sinnegen & Boak textbook, and when HBO's Rome was on, I came here looking for news. Two things have always attracted me to Rome--first, it was pagan; second, it was a republic. There's always been something very exciting about those two qualities for me, and I think it's the liberty associated with each.

Welcome, Ursus, to the party of Cato! We who refuse to submit ourselves salute you!

While I agree with it, I think there are two main problems with the "Some people are leaders, some people are followers" sentiment. One is that those who have the drive and the finance to become a leader in a modern democracy, don't do it for the "greater good", they invariably are, or become, self serving. By their very nature they are also totally convinced of the "rightness" of their opinions and subsequent actions. The more I think about it, the less I like the claim, "some people are leaders, some people are followers." It's true, but not qute exact. Some people are quite obviously both sadistic, low-level leaders and fawningly servile followers of still higher status men (Antony strikes me as a good example of this). Probably most of the middle officers making up any two-bit totalitarian regime fall under this description. The fundamental distinction, then, isn't between leaders and followers, but between followers and those who refuse to follow. That's all Milgram's experiments show. Virgil's point that leadership can be trained apparently without reducing overall obedience leads to a corollary conclusion: Some of those who refuse to follow can learn to be leaders--e.g., of an anti-authoritarian resistance; some of those who follow can learn to be leaders too--e.g., as subordinate officers. I think you're right Germanicus that every would-be dictator announces himself as a friend of the common good. After all, if the dictator said "I'm just out for myself", no one would give him power. The lesson I take from this may sound perverse, but I frankly trust an ordinary person more when he says "I live for myself" than when he says "I live for others". The person who SAYS he's living for himself is more likely an epicurean (and interesting) than a power-luster. The person who SAYS he's living for others is more likely a power-luster than someone honest (anyone truly living for others should go to the blood bank and donate all his blood--after all, there is always someone in need).

Begging your pardon, but if you are referring to Octavian, soon to become Augustus, you are dead wrong. Cicero became governor of Cilicia in 51 BC; before Caesar marched on Rome, and when Octavius was a young boy. It was during this governorship that he wrote his intial letters on the subject of Cilicia's condition under the previous governor, Appius Cladius. Yes and these letters were part of his private correspondence, and they were not for public consumption. After Cicero's murder by Antony, they fell into the hands of Octavian, who had them published during Octavian's war with Antony. This isn't new news--we've known this for ages. Also, you've only shown that Brutus' men may have used force to collect a debt. That's not extortion.

Funny--plebs who oppose the populares are simply "patsies" of the patrician class and patricians who oppose both plebs and Italian rights are somehow populares. I'm wondering, Is there any historical evidence at all that would convince you that the divisons of 133 BCE don't apply to the divisions of 50 BCE? It seems you've managed to guard your theory against any falsification whatever. Perhaps you meant to post this in a Friedrich Hayek forum. We aren

yes, I think yours is the received opinion. Still, I think it was a clerical error (darned freedmen!)

How did you get interested in ancient Rome, and what brought you to UNRV?

The Aristocrats was great--great premise (different comics tell same joke), great subject (the Forbidden joke), great backstory (Gilbert Gottfried right after 9/11), and great jokes.

Boy this claim sets my teeth on edge! All I can say is read the chapter "The Disappearance of Comfort" in Bryan Ward-Perkins' book, "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization." The coin counts, pottery quality, tabulations of roof tiles, and livestock weights indicate a precipitous drop in quality of life with the arrival of the Germanic hordes in the Western empire and with the Slavs in the Balkans and Greece. Anybody here read Augustine??? The guy was falling over backwards to defend his religion from the widespread charge that Christianity weakened the empire and let it get overrun by illiterate, thieving, raping, baby-splitting barbarians. "Morphing" is the last word anyone would have used.

Sorry if my sense of humor is broken, but there weren't really any exploding chariots were there?

More than before...but mostly "Party Politics in the Age of Caesar" and articles in Journal of Roman Studies. While still allowing the alliance against Italian dictatorship which just shows things can sometimes be more complicated, the history of internal Republican politics is nothing if it isn’t the struggle between the populares and patricians. You seem to be suggesting some new paradigm of relationships between the two classes that goes against most historical study and quite frankly fails. The relationships among magistrates over a period of more than 100 years were obviously more complicated than is captured by attempting to shoehorn everything into the familiar division between patrician and pleb. The alliances of the late republic particularly demonstrate that the failure is on the part of seeing everything in terms of the patrician/pleb division. The patrician families included Clodius, Caesar, and Catalina--who would thus be 'optimates' in your categorization scheme; the plebian families included Catulus, Metellus Pius, Lucullus, Domitius, and Cato--who thus would be 'populares' in your scheme. Obviously, this makes absolutely no sense because mapping the optimate/populare distinction onto the patrician/pleb divide fails utterly to capture who derived power from the senate (the plebs listed above) and who had power from the tribal assembly (the patricians listed above). A histogram of income distribution almost invariably follows a power law no matter the society. If Rome were the only economy in the history of the world to have a bimodal distribution of the very rich and the very poor, it would be a miracle. The myth of the bimodal income distribution is a cherished one among populists because the myth recruits the middle class into their "us versus them" ideology, but it's the sociological equivalent of creationism and the flat-earth society. Good for you. How many Americans were killed by the Somali mobs to whom we sent that aid?

Gibbon was right: "a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could plead only the merits of astinence and charity." Without the church, Rome would have lasted a little longer against the barbarian hordes, er, I mean terribly misunderstood Germanic tribes.

I read that the jury was still out on why Augustus exiled Ovid and that it may have been an error on Augustus' part rather than Ovid's. Granted Ovid's "Art of Love" might have caused a scandal, but was it really any more scandalous than anything else around? For that matter, Julia was already pretty independent, and I have a tough time believing that a poem could turn a prude into a harlot (even a very good poem ).

I forgot to mention that one of Cato's daughters was Porcia, who later married Brutus the liberator. HBO depicts Brutus as acting at the behest of his mother Servilia, but he was surrounded by more than one woman of the Old Republic.