M. Porcius Cato

What good was an extra lictor anyway?

In addition to Robocop, the show also has my own Roman Art professor, Kim Hartswick, who was as charming on the show as he is in person. In my time zone, the show after this one was called "Roman Vice," where we get to see Tom Holland interviewed (his book Rubicon was fabulous, though he wasn't sympathetic enough to Cato).

perseus.tufts.edu

Julius Caesar, I guess, but only so I could hang out with Cicero and Brutus (they could have used some advice).

My avatar is a coin minted to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar. It depicts the freedman's cap (center) flanked by the daggers of Cassius and Brutus (nephew of my namesake).

The claim that Romans merely adapted and didn't innovate strikes me as disingenuous. By this reasoning, everything we write would be 'merely an adaptation' since we use letters invented by the Phoenecians. By this reasoning I could charge, "You've not said a single new thing! Every word in your statement you learned from your parents!" The reasoning rapidly descends to absurdity--why not claim that the inventor of the typewriter was merely adapting Phoenecian technology, or that the inventor of the word processor was merely adapting one of its adaptations. Or, for that matter, that Shakespeare was merely an adaptor of what his mother had to say? As far as I can tell, the innovation/adaptation dichotomy is meaningless. ALL innovations are adaptations, and this is particularly true of complex machinery (and language), which are combinatorial by their very nature and therefore require something old to be combined. If there were, say, heated swimming pools in ancient greece, fine--not a Roman innovation. But there weren't, and the Romans loved those things with a passion--they were the iPod of their day, and I think this innovation (among others) belies the notion that Romans were inherently distrustful of innovation. Generally, I think the Romans seemed pretty open to new technology.

Hmmmm....wouldn't the cosmopolitan ideal fall under philosophy? I guess the laws on governing provinces turn that ideal into a reality, but you're right it's hard to categorize this very important legacy.

That's what some people say, but what about all the innovations in engineering that the Romans made? They didn't come into existence without capital, and that took someone convincing someone else that the idea was worthwhile. If they really had such a totally different mindset, how did all these innovations come to exist?

The modern world is shaped by Roman practices in many different domains. Which domain of Roman excellence left the broadest and most beneficial influence on the modern world? In other words, what have the Romans done for us?

...maybe because it is astonishing that there were unknown people that made this massive building in the middle of europe and it was unnoticed until recently? But the story says that the people were known, and even local villagers said this massive building was a pyramid.

I've got TiVo auto-recording anything mentioning Roman history and let me tell you--Roman history documentaries are on ALL THE TIME. If I see Secrets of the Colisseum again, I think I'm going to do an Oedipus (the eye thing, not the mom thing).

What's the source for the age being 12,000 years ago? The Associated Press story never mentions this figure at all, just that it's older than 600 ce, which isn't saying much at all.

But don't they find pyramids everywhere? They're in South America, Indonesia, Egypt, China, and sub-Saharan Africa. So why is it surprising they found one in Bosnia too? If you're going to build something tall and either don't know anything about architecture or are cursed with lousy building materials, the most stable structure you can build is a pyramid. Am I missing something? Why is this such an astonishing discovery? As far as I can tell the only thing astonishing is that the Europeans DIDN'T seem to have any pyramids until today.

Yep, I think that puts a finger on it and why it's easy to find racial prejudice in all groups.

Did anyone see the new version of Spartacus with the deleted scenes restored? It's better and more modern than the original (e.g., there's an oblique mention of competing theories of sexuality). BTW, when I see the Pepsi commercial, I always think of the Life of Brian and say, "No I'm Spartacus, and so is my wife!"

What Ursus said, except maybe to simplify the first section somewhat I. Non-Fiction 1. History and politics ____a. Republic ____b. Empire 2. Military and Warfare 3. Philosophy and Science 4. Latin and its literature (including translations and textbooks) 5. Geography and Atlases 6. Economy and Trade 7. Art, Architecture, and Culture This seems a bit simpler to navigate. Biographies can be split up among the other sections (e.g., a biography of Caesar under history, of Augustine under philosophy, of Catullus under Latin). Also, mythological works fall under literature pretty well, and religion could be put under philosophy or culture as appropriate. I tested this scheme on my own collection of books, and it worked without a hitch. (What's *really* weird is that the order of my collection is almost identical to Ursus' scheme!)

While the Romans may not have been the most racist society to ever exist, it strikes me as a whitewash to think they weren't racist at all. What is a race? It's like a family, but a family of families of families of.... you get the point. And the Romans were positively obsessed with establishing that they came from 'noble blood', were 'true sons of Numa', and the like. Even if they didn't CALL it a race, it's what they were talking about. Here's a perfect thought experiment we might ask a Roman to test whether he was a latin supremacist: If a baby born to German parents were raised in Rome by Roman parents alongside Romans of noble birth and given a proper Roman education, and the child had no accent and looked the same as everyone else and learned the same manners as everyone else, could he and his family ever achieve as much as what his true Roman brothers could achieve under the same circumstances? And if a baby born to Roman parents were raised in Germania by German parents alongside German barbarians, and the child spoke no Latin whatever and looked the same as every other German etc, could he and his family ever achieve as much as what his true German brothers could acheive under the same circumstances? My guess is that almost all Romans would say that the baby born to Germans and raised by Romans would never be a true Roman or acheive as much as true Romans and that the baby born to Roman parents and raised by Germans could excel over most other Germans due to his true Roman nature. What makes me think that this is how Romans would answer is the fact that a question like this has been asked by cognitive psychologists and anthropologists to every sort of group imaginable and this is exactly how most people in every society answers the question--whether Mongol herdsman, Indian brahmin, New Guinea tribesman, or American preschooler. It's the basic story of the ugly duckling, of countless ancient myths, etc etc. When you change the characters from people to arbitrary castes of insects, even the most politically correct hippy answers the same way. My guess is that something-that's-darned-near-to-racism is simply a natural way to think, and it takes EFFORT to quit treating people as if they were divided up into breeds or races and to treat them as individuals. And frankly, on the battlefield, you don't put effort into this sort of thing at all. So, basically, if the Romans weren't racist, they were gods. That said, I think everybody posting here is making an awfully important point about the fact that the 'natural' social groups that the Romans thought about had nearly zero correlation to the modern 'races' that used to be called "Negroid", "Mongoloid," "Caucasian", etc. These categories reflect a modern form of stupidity that vanished from anthropology with the liberation of Treblinka.

If my girl perceived Brits as more like Peter Ustinov and less like Hugh Grant and Jude Law, I'd sleep easier!

I wasn't a fan of the movie at all, but I liked the book (which I read as a kid) a great deal, especially its portrayal of Petronius. His death-scene was very true to Tacitus' description, and I came away from the book with an impression that some Romans were neither blood-engorged parasites like Nero nor bloodless prudes like the Christians (Lygia, I think, was her name), but full-blooded human beings like Petronius, who had a real zest for living well. The "Whither Goest Thou Lord?" scene was also powerful, and I'm not even a Christian. If you haven't already read the book, it's worth a read if only for its vivid depiction of the difference in world-views possessed by pagans and Christians. No claims made, btw, about its overall historical accuracy--obviously, there were plenty of pagan prudes and bloodthirsty Christians as well. Read the book--you'll see the love affair with the slave girl makes more sense, but I don't want to spoil it for you.

First, thanks for taking the time to participate in our forum. I'm looking forward to reading your book (on its way from Amazon now!), where my question may already be answered or where I may find that I've misunderstood your thesis. Broadly speaking, I'm wondering how you would apply your analysis of the effects of Roman-'Barbarian' relations in the late empire to the same relations earlier in Rome's history. For example, what changed such that the Roman-'Barbarian' relations earlier in Rome's history (e.g., Roman-Gallic relations during the late republic) initially did not bring about the ruin of Rome yet later did have this effect?

Leaving aside art and literature, can you name any virtually useless Roman inventions? I'm always reading that Romans were deeply conservative and suspicious of innovation, but this claim seems overblown to me, and it sounds like you think it's overblown too. So what examples would you cite as counterevidence? I'm guessing the counter-examples would come from artifacts now classified as toys (which electric gadgets were too initially), but I'm just speculating...

I'd say! Normally, the emperor named his own successor (invariably ratified by the hollow men in the Senate). But what if the emperor were killed before naming a successor? Who would be the emperor then? At various times over Roman history, the successor was--a person of abiliity adopted by a good emperor (Hadrian), the idiot son of a good emperor (Caracalla), the victor in a civil war (too many to list), the first person found by the palace guard (Claudius), and the winner of an auction conducted by the palace guard (Didiamus Julianus). In my view, the impotence of the principate to handle the succession undermines completely its reason for being.

ROFL