M. Porcius Cato

I hate to keep nit-picking here, but this isn't strictly accurate, and the inaccuracy is quite telling. First, if you take the republican constitution and add a layer above the senate, you get an office that can veto senatorial actions and can propose senatorial actions -- that is, you get a tribune of the plebs. Since this was indeed one of the powers of the Augustan princeps, Caldrail's statement is accurate to a point. What's inaccurate, however, is that the rule of the Caesars DID supplant a critical republican institution--the plebiscite. That is, in the republican constitution, the senate itself did not legislate and could not enter into foreign treaties. In the republic, ALL legislation and treaties were passed by a DIRECT vote by the people, legally assembled in their tribes by their tribunes. Thus, if the princeps were merely a tribune-cum-consul-cum-censor, all he could do is bring bills before the people and veto the bills he didn't want passed. But that's not what happened. Rather, the rule of the Caesars supplanted the plebiscite and gave legislative powers to the senate itself. This is absolutely key: the difference between the republic and the principate isn't about the power of the senate--it's about the power of the people. The senate had some real role to play in both the republic and principate; the people had NO role in government after Augustus. Thus, there should be nothing surprising about the fact that the senate made decisions during the principate--it wasn't the senate that lost its role in government; it was the people who lost their role in government.

Cool!

Yes, Sulla and Caesar both sponsored laws that changed the republican constitution, but--aside from their personal role as tyrants--their constitutional changes involved democratic elements (e.g., Sulla's codifying open entry to the senate, Caesar's expansion of the franchise to Cisalpine Gaul) as well as non-democratic ones (e.g., nullifying the vetoes of tribunes). These constitutional reforms were clearly far less sweeping than Octavian's consolidation of all powers into one office and Tiberius' elimination of popular elections. I think Augustus intended to centralize domestic and foreign policy under a single central executive. This principate wasn't an accident, but a deliberate policy for establishing permanent order by means of eliminating competition for the highest office. These changes didn't go unnoticed, either, as the excerpts from Tacitus (see above) show.

Druids, with Max von Sydow as Caesar and Lambert as Vercingetorix, was about as bad as it gets. That said, I haven't seen Caligula yet.

Nobody can be certain how well the poor lived in Rome versus, say, Belgae, but with free bread and circuses, free clean water and baths, and a high demand for causal labor, it's difficult for me to believe that it was better to be poor in Germania than poor in Rome. After all, why were the Germans so eager to cross the Rhine if it weren't for the fact that it safer and wealthier on the other side? But that abbreviation is an historical remnant from the early republic. Mind you, I don't disagree that social competition is universal among societies, but what isn't universal are the enforcement of ground rules for the competition. And the republic had a large number of safeguards to protect ordinary civilians from the arbitrary rule of their elected officials. These limits on government were lacking in Persia, Egypt, and among the Celtic tribes ruled by kings. The whole idea of the republic was a rebellion against these arbitrary powers, giving rise to such founding legends as the rapes of Lucretia and Verginia. But it did form networks of fuedal obligation, and even if it didn't correspond to establish social order, it did correspond to wealth, which after all is the decider of who has influence in roman life. That's exactly what I'm disputing. Your original post made Roman society sound like a feudal one--which it DID eventually become, but the classical Roman civilization was far more individualistic than feudal. Even wealth wasn't enough to decide who had the greatest influence (though it helped). The Claudii were wealthier than M Curius Dentatus, the Metelli wealthier than Marius, Lucullus wealthier than Pompey, Hortensius wealthier than Cicero, Pompey wealthier than Caesar--yet in each case, military and political talent was far more influential than wealth. I just don't see this happening to the same extent in truly feudal societies, and I'd say that this is another dimension in which Rome was culturally superior.

Sure, but isn't it silly to think that history is always as dramatic as sci-fi? That doesn't mean the overthrow of the old republic in Rome wasn't similarly abrupt. Within one man's lifetime, centuries of political tradition were overturned, including the ability of the people to elect magistrates, approve treaties, run for office, or seek the protection of their tribunes from arbitrary rule. A child born in a freer society--free of secret police like Sejanus, freedom for historians like Cremutius Cordus (murdered for his history), for poets like Ovid (exiled), and for women like Julia (also exiled)--woke up in a city of marble, but it was the marble of a political tomb.

Not really, in this coin Galba attach the names "Caesar" and "Augustus" to his own. Not really what? Galba didn't actually issue the coin above? The use of the Liberators' daggers was actually pro-Caesarian? I'm not arguing that Galba actually took any steps to restore the republic (he didn't last long enough to do much o anything at all), but it's clear that he was playing to a sympathy that existed in Rome, showing that the term "res publica" (the people's thing) still meant more than just "the commonwealth". You can see the same point in Tacitus as well. (I.7) Nam Tiberius cuncta per consules incipiebat, tamquam vetere re publica et ambiguus imperandi: ne edictum quidem, quo patres in curiam vocabat, nisi tribuniciae potestatis praescriptione posuit sub Augusto acceptae. For Tiberius would inaugurate everything with the consuls, as though the ancient constitution remained, and he hesitated about being emperor. Even the proclamation by which he summoned the senators to their chamber, he issued merely with the title of Tribune, which he had received under Augustus. (I.3-4) quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset? Igitur verso civitatis statu nihil usquam prisci et integri moris: omnes exuta aequalitate iussa principis aspectare... How few were left who had seen the republic! Thus the State had been revolutionised, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality. Stript of equality, all looked up to the commands of a sovereign... In both cases, it's clear that Tacitus uses res publica to mean more than just an ordinary term for the state. It's clearly something that contrasts with the state of affairs under a princeps, where men were "stript of equality' and "looked up to the commands of a sovereign". The dual use of res publica as both a generic term for the state and as a specific form of a good state is in no way unique to the Romans. The Greek term politeia works exactly the same way.

The time frame depends on the argument ("thesis") that you want to make about propaganda. If you want to argue that the triumph was a form of propaganda directed at voters, then you have to focus on the republic, when people actually elected their officials. If you want to argue that the architecture we see today in the Forum is propaganda, then you have to show that it was designed to marble over Octavian's bloody monarchical revolution, which means you have to focus on the principate. The time frame depends entirely on what argument YOU want to make.

This doesn't seem accurate to me at all. Rome was more than the domination of one city over others. By the age of Cicero, all Italians considered themselves 'Roman', and a fair number of them--Cicero and Pomey, for example--even attained the height of power. After Cicero, emperors were often drawn from outside Rome and even Italy. Moreover, the connection between Roman government and city governments were not simply Rome-down arrangements. Local governments had tremendous autonomy, and as citizens of Rome as well as their local cities, non-Romans were enrolled in the Roman tribes so they could vote for Roman magistrates. The system was not completely federalist, but it was far closer to federalism than is implied by the response above. There is a good reason that the Byzantines considered themselves "Romanoi" long after the fall of Rome -- Rome was a national identity that transcended even the city of Rome itself. Again, this simply isn't accurate of the Roman republic. There was no official ruling class in Rome, like the House of Lords or hereditary aristocracy. The people of Rome themselves passed all laws, elected all magistrates, and had to endorse all treaties. Moreover, the system of patronage -- such as we have any evidence of it -- was apparently an ad hoc affair and didn't correspond to permanent class divisions. The best evidence that this is the case is the tremendous social mobility (both up and down) that we see in novi homines--who by the time of Sulla made up nearly half the senate -- and in the impoverished patrician families that simply died out. If Roman feats of architecture and engineering were limited to public monuments and buildings, like the Pyramids or the Parthenon, I'd agree. But Roman superiority in these fields was actually best expressed in purely private works, like private baths, toilets, gutters and roofs, and in public works that served practical purposes, such as roads and aqueducts. Undoubtedly, all of these improved the personal standing of their owners and builders, but let's not pretend that Roman civilization was some barbaric backwater plastered over with a marble edifice for the benefit of their chieftain. Roman life was vastly more comfortable --even for the masses--than was life elsewhere. In my opinion, this counts as a case of authentic Roman superiority, though I understand that primitivists may like to disagree (from the security of their heated homes and within a telephone call's distance from a hospital!)

Maybe Asimov's law should be Asimov's trend -- there was certainly far less expansion in the 300 years after Augustus than in the 300 years prior to Augustus. Surely that calls for some explanation.

The Roman empire stretched over nearly 1000 years. Any particular period in which you want to examine the use of propaganda?

seems obvious now...

Psihohistorical? Is that a term from Asimov?

I agree with Caldrail--unlike an official monarchy, there was no mechanism of succession. Augustus could consider anybody he'd like to be his heirs, but if Gaius had demanded sole power over Lucius (or vice-versa) there was no established order of succession to decide the matter.

I'd also add that the claim to have restored the republic wasn't just a careless use of language. After the death of Nero (the last Julio-Claudian), Galba issued a coin that not only proclaimed the restoration of the republic, its use of iconography was positively anti-Caesarian. Compare (1) Brutus' famous coin to (2) Galba's. (1) Brutus's coin (2) Galba's coin ("Libertas Restituta")

I forgot to add that the story of Samson and Delilah is quite similar to that of Enkidu and Shamhat--wild unruly man tamed by prostitute.

If each page gets its own battle, will there need to be separate pages for the battles of each century? Seem like all the battle pages could be linked to the Battle Index page, which features a table where the columns correspond to centuries and the rows correspond to chronologically-organized battles. That might be too ambitious though.

Right. Plus, there is a long-standing kind of myth that involves men being 'tamed' by women. In Gilgamesh, for example, the wild-man Enkidu (who like Romulus and Remus was raised by wild animals) is tamed by a visit (of sorts) from the courtesan Shamhat. Along similar lines I had an American history teacher in grade school who swore that the men of Jamestown were too unruly to settle Virginia until there were enough female immigrants for them to marry. I guess the parallels to Rome and the Sabine women isn't too difficult to see. Like the wild-man Enkidu or the unruly early Virginians, the village on the Palatine was mostly just a bunch of bandits (and she-wolfs) until they settled down for the proper city life that the Sabine women might have known.

I tend to agree with the broader point, but do you think Martial shows any greater sorrow than did Catullus for Lesbia's dead sparrow? I'm rather haunted by the thought that the Romans viewed their slaves as no more than pets, and on that premise, Catullus 3 can be seen as another instance of how familiarity breeds concern that is out of all proportion to general ideas about the worth of a life. Maybe...

And they cast Aphrodite herself as Caprica-Six.

The Lady of Elx was an important discovery of pre-Roman Iberian sculpture. Seriously, though, am I the only one to see the force in this one? Lady of Elx: Queen Amidala:

Here's the mention of the Arcani in Ammianus 28.8: In the midst of such important events the Arcani, a class of men established in early times, about which I said something in the history of Constans, had gradually become corrupted, and consequently he removed them from their posts. For they were clearly convicted of having been led by the receipt, or the promise, of great booty at various times to betray to the savages what was going on among us. For it was their duty to hasten about hither and thither over long spaces, to give information to our generals of the clashes of rebellion among neighbouring peoples. A further note observes, "This word occurs nowhere else; the Arcani would seem to be connected with the secret service (agentes in rebus), to judge from the name and the description of their duties. They were perhaps the same as the Angarii, so called from ἄγγαρος, an old Greek word for a Persian mounted courier, and were in charge of the Roman courier-service; see Cod. Theod. VIII, de cursu publico, tit. 5."

The primary source material is Ammianus Marcellinus, whose account can be found HERE. Although the Persian expedition ended in disaster, Julian was a talented general who was popular with his army--he had recovered Cologne and defeated a large Alamannic army in 357 (Ammian. 16.12, with subsequent successes against the Franks (Ammian. 17.1-2, 8-10).

Right. According to Brunt, some 120,000 Romans and roughly equal numbers of Italians died in the wars with Hannibal. I think the main issue is that the young men who would have borne the brunt of the fighting and casualties would have been the hastati and principes, who were younger than the median age (30) at which Roman men married and had children. In terms of affecting Rome's agricultural and demographic output, the critical group is the men who would have served as triarii, who were heads of household. On this see Rosenstein's Rome at War (p 87): Even during the height of the Hannibalic War, when Rome's manpower demands were at their peak, the burden on men 30 and older need not have increased beyond this point [i.e., more than half of eligible men serving]. In 212, Rome fielded twenty-three legions of citizens. Brunt estimates that these contained about 72,000 men or roughly 3200 each. These figures presumably include cavalry and so, if of a legion of 4500 men, including cavalry, the triarii composed 13.3%, then these would have made up about 426 men of a 3200-man legion and totaled 9798 in twenty-three legions. If all were thirty and older and the total citizen body stood at about 230,000, then the triarii serving in 212 represented about 13 percent of all Roman men between thirty and forty-six. If over the next eleven years of the war the senate kept an average of twenty legions of about 3200 men each in the field, then 93,720 man-years of service on the part of the triarii will have been necessary. Again, if each triarius served three years on average, then 31,240 men will have had to serve at some point during those eleven years, or about 41 percent all men between thirty and forty-six. Most likely, the birth rate rose after Cannae. The calculations behind this aren't that complicated, so if you're interested, again see Rosenstein.