M. Porcius Cato

There is an interesting follow-up article to the National Geographic Gospel of Judas story in latest issue of Chronicle of Higher Education. The upshot is that the effort to announce the translation was very nearly contemporaneous with the translation itself, which later scholars found to have serious errors that affect the meaning of the Gospel. From the Chronicle article: One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest. As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind

As much as "Bellatrix" has a nice ring to it, Bellatrix Lastrange was a sadistic DeathEater. For that reason, I'd say the name hasn't a much better chance of eclipsing "Hermione" than does "Lucius" have of eclipsing "Harry". That said, if all Bellatrices were as fascinating to behold as Helena Bonham, I'd be happy to let 1000 Bellatrices bloom:

But the fact that this is on television at this point is what makes the whole business fishy. The normal procedure among researchers is to submit their findings to peer-reviewed journals, where important questions about methods can be raised and addressed. Once the report has been accepted by the journal, the media is alerted to the findings, and journalists wait until a set date to announce those findings to their readers and viewers. When this procedure is ignored, we end up with cases like the cold fusion debacle.

No, it doesn't. You can't judge a person's character from his actions under duress. Cicero 'flipflopped' because he was threatened. Curio 'flipflopped' because he was bribed. Don't you think these circumstances suggest that there is a world of difference between their two characters? Not everyone in the republic was a Cato who would literally stand up to an armed mob throwing stones and tell them all to shod off. To take this a step further, I think this is exemplary of modern politics. Politicians 'flip flop' for various reasons; perhaps physical threats aren't as prevalent nowadays, but career assassinations are. Politics is about the same, in that sense. Maybe, but there is a very palpable difference between assassination and career "assassination". Opponents of Caesar were actually assassinated--even after their careers had been. One, an opponent of Caesar living in exile, was summoned back to Rome thanks to the intervention of Cicero. Caesar ostentatiously pardoned the fellow--then had him murdered en route to Rome. In that climate, Cicero's compliance with force shouldn't be put in the same category as those opportunists who went out of their way to help Caesar after realizing that Pompey's star had fallen.

No but it showed that he was more of a flipflopping "politician" than we would think most of the time, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. You can't judge a person's character from his actions under duress. Cicero 'flipflopped' because he was threatened. Curio 'flipflopped' because he was bribed. Don't you think these circumstances suggest that there is a world of difference between their two characters? Not everyone in the republic was a Cato who would literally stand up to an armed mob throwing stones and tell them all to shod off.

I know the law is very irritating to uphold--it would be much easier to just do whatever makes the powerful happy, wouldn't it?--but the law forbade Caesar from standing for consul in absentia. Moreover, once Caesar had crossed the Rubicon with his troops, he was no longer in absentia, and the Senate DID offer to let Caesar stand for consul. Caesar refused--demonstrating that all his previous objections were simply pretexts for his real object, the dictatorship.

The "struggle of the orders" is a term that is typically used for the expansion of civil rights for plebs during the early republic. I don't think that's a myth at all--it's just not appropriate for the era of Cicero. Why did (some) nobiles support Caesar? Probably for the same reason that Caesar supported Pompey--attaching oneself to a rising star isn't a bad career move (though it is terribly unimaginative).

Thanks for the link to Mary Beard's article, DC. Another point is that the bust appears to be of the type that drops into a nude statue (hence, much longer and no indication of toga). Have a hard time believing Caesar would have commissioned such a portrait to commemorate founding of Arles.

Doesn't look that much like the Tusculan bust that was also supposed to have been a living likeness. I think this story may develop further over time.

I agree with doc that teaching oneself Latin isn't an optimal strategy. An expert Latin reader can provide feedback on errors, suggest effective learning strategies and alternative translations (and back-translations), provide insight on why Latin works as it does, and (maybe most important) provide a playful environment where learning Latin is fun. It's bad enough that we can't learn Latin via immersion in a Latin-speaking culture; removing oneself entirely from the social context of language learning would make a bad situation even worse.

OK, maybe not that miraculous given that we've had 4 translations of the Aeneid in the last year or so. Still, it's been a while since a woman translated Virgil's epic. Full story HERE. Here are the article's side-by-side translations of Aeneas' flight from Troy:

My favorite Latin comes from Spinoza's Ethica (Part 5, Prop. 42, Note): Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt--All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

In case you missed Nephele's wry allusion, this thread has indeed jumped the shark.

What a pack of smears! Humorlessness and cluelessness has never seen a greater champion than this Zoe Williams. I'm sure she'd be appalled by Monty Python too (had they any modern equivalents).

And here's the Latin website.

The New York Sun muses that it's not impossible.

What an interesting point!

Good point. What's interesting is that the Salonian line of Cato the Elder turned out to be more responsible and optimate than the well-born Licinian line, which (best I recall) included the seditious tribune and die-hard Pompeian Gaius Porcius Cato.

I think this case was anomalous in nearly every way, and it doesn't speak too much about changes in restrictions on freedmen. First, wasn't Cato the Elder nearly 80 when he took the young Salonia from her father? Obviously age differences were nothing new in Rome, but an age gap of more than 60 years was certainly an anomaly even by Roman standards--most people never even lived to 80. Second, Roman custom against marrying freedmen's daughters would have prevented the inevitable conflict of interests that would follow such a match. Again, consider Salonia's case. Though it reportedly pleased her freedman father enormously, for Salonia marriage to Cato couldn't have been a happy union. To say nothing of the obvious horrors, the teenaged Salonia would have been facing widowhood while her children were still toddlers and while she had not yet acquired the ability to manage Cato's estates, let alone fairly claim her rights against Cato's hostile children (one a consul) from his previous marriage. Strange to say, but had Cato had more respect for Roman tradition (!) poor Salonia would never have had to face such a bleak future (not that life in slavery would have been a rose garden either), nor would his sons from the previous marriage been forced to accept their former slave as their own mother. Last, the Romans themselves seemed to think rustic Cato's marriage to Salonia was an anomaly. That's not certain, but the fact that Salonia's son was marked as M. Porcius Cato Salonianus is certainly consistent with the idea.

In his oration for Sextus Roscius, Cicero alludes to the lex Remmia, which forbade calumnia. The penalties are not actually known, according to Smith's Dictionary, but we might gather what they were from Cicero's threat to the prosecutor Erucius that "if you act in such a way as to accuse a man of having murdered his father, without being able to say why or how; and if you are only barking without any ground for suspicion, no one, indeed, will break your legs; but if I know these judges well, they will so firmly affix to your heads that letter to which you are so hostile that you will hate all the Kalends too, that you shall hereafter be able to accuse no one but your own fortunes!"

Is there a lawyer on the boards who could compare this trial to what would be admissible in a modern court? In the trial of Sextius Roscius, it seems like the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on hearsay evidence (for an amusing explanation of exceptions to the hearsay rule, see ). I love these historical recreations because it puts everything together in its context. Sort of like the difference between seeing the plans for an airplane and actually seeing one fly.

There's a very nice re-creation of the trial of Sextius Roscius HERE. It's well worth a watch.

Best I can tell, the Romans were firm believers in prevention, esp. in clean water and regular bathing. Beyond that, they certainly believed in vigorous exercise: "A person should put aside some part of the day for the care of his body. He should always make sure that he gets enough exercise especially before a meal" (Celsus).

Yes. So what? There was also an age qualification, a sex qualification, and a nationality qualification. But if keeping 3-year-old Egyptian girls out of the senate constitutes an oligarchy, the term has no meaning. Oligarchy is "rule by the few"--an inspection of the massive two-volume Magistrates of the Roman Republic should surely convince anyone that Rome was not ruled by "the few" (even if they were overwhelmingly Roman males with enough money to buy a couple horses and old enough to ride one.)

Two points: 1) The composition of the senate doesn't support the idea of an oligarchy. It's true that the senate was relatively stable over time, but that's the genius of the system--there was a mixture of short-term and long-term groups governing the state. And in this case, the long-term group (with its accumulated wealth of experience) had an important advisory capacity, but it was not the body that had actual legislative power. The actual legislative power belonged to the tribal assemblies, not the senate. With no power to legislate, no power to pass treaties, and no power to select magistrates, the senate could not have exercised oligarchic control even had it wanted to. 2) Sulla's massive purge of the senate shows that he wasn't an optimate--either by Cicero's definition or by the looser definition of "senatorial party". Sulla was a criminal who waged war on his enemies wherever they could be found (including the senate), and his reforms were designed to keep his enemies from rising again.