M. Porcius Cato

Very nice, you've shown that Pilate complied with a request. Now, do you have any evidence that Pilate was coerced? It's a critical distinction--the very one that is relevant to whether Pilate was FORCED by Jews to release Barabbas.

How many times were Ahenobarbus, Cato, and Scipio defeated? Once, once, and .... once. Nevertheless, Caesar the Merciful was so proud of his victories over them that he included placards depicting their defeat in his triumph. Caesar's mercy was a charade -- and what's worse, he was even a coward about owning up to his thirst for blood. At Thapsus, he claimed to have had an incredibly well-timed epileptic fit that prevented him from restraining his men from killing FIRST-TIME surrendering troops. If you ask me, this excuse stinks to high-heaven--sort of like Caesar's excuse not to rise for the Senate... because he had diarrhea. What a poor sickly fellow that Caesar!

Given the paucity of secondary source material that is freely available on the web, it's not always possible to link to the relevant scholarly material. If you have JSTOR access and search for 'Barabbas' and 'Paschal', you'll find a few articles that lay out the corroborating evidence for the ancient custom of freeing prisoners at religious festivals. Also, note that I've never maintained that Jewish priests had the power to FORCE Pilate's presentation of Barabbas. There's no support for that claim even in the Synoptics.

I was looking for that!

When he bought them off, how much did Caesar pay Ahenobarbus, Pompey, Scipio, Cato, and Labienus? Nothing, they didn't deserve it. So let's drop the "Caesar the Merciful" charade, shall we?

OK, suppose the Liberators were in fact guilty as you charge them, and they had gone on to declare Cassius dictator for life, to pass a retroactive law declaring all his previous actions legal, and then had proceeded to proscribe Antony, Pansa, Hirtius, etc. If young Octavius had then led a conspiracy to kill Cassius, would you say that Cassius did not deserve to die? Would you say that Octavius had acted illegally? I wouldn't. I'd say that Octavius acted exactly as the Lex Valeria required, and that it is theoretically impossible to fulfill the Lex Valeria under these circumstances without also violating the 12 Tables etc.

When he bought them off, how much did Caesar pay Ahenobarbus, Pompey, Scipio, Cato, and Labienus?

None of these questions have anything to do with the manufacturing sector, but they're all interesting questions anyway. First, on the issue of job creation, I'd point out that the purpose of the economy isn't to produce jobs but to produce wealth. If we merely wanted to produce jobs, we could do that overnight by taking any job worth double minimum wage and split it into two minimum wage jobs. Would it produce jobs? Of course. Would it produce more wealth? Hell no. Clearly, the measure of a sound economy isn't merely the number of jobs produced. If we lived in a world of 100% unemployment, where everyone simply lived off the labor of their robots, I'd not complain--I'd be too busy reading Tacitus. On the issue of the trade deficit, I again see no problem. Again, consider the worst case of a trade deficit--the world sends us all their goods, and we ship them nothing but portraits of dead Presidents in return. I'd call that a bargain! In fact, one can project that there will be trade deficits until the wages of foreign producers (adjusted by the exchange rate) rises to the level of their competitors. The problem isn't that we have an enormous trade deficit; the problem is that it won't last forever. What about the problem of sub-prime mortgages? Again, I don't see a broad problem for the economy unless the government does something really stupid like bailing out the losers who made these crappy mortgages in the first place or cranking up the Mint to paper-dollar over the losses. Then there will be inflation, which--with high unemployment--is the worst thing that can happen to an economy. The risk of inflation is largely driven by runaway government spending. Our national debt is nominally very, very high (though as a % of GDP not the highest ever) because the damned fools in Washington spend money like a drunken sailor. Of course, that's unfair to drunken sailors--at least they spend their own money. I also have no problem with the concept of unions per se, and at one time, I was very active in my union, served on the bargaining team, and even sang a union song. The experience taught me that unions have a critical role to play in some cases but are also infected with Marxist ideology and ultimately propped up by physical force. The whole experience was totally Kafkaesque--we had a damned good case for higher wages, management recognized it, but feared raising the wages of our unit lest they be forced to raise wages for already over-paid units. Luckily, we cobbled together a method for recalculating the number of hours worked that gave us a whopping 30% increase in real wages while making it look like we got only a 3% rate increase (thereby keeping the other union off management's back). The Marxists screamed bloody murder about Labor solidarity blah blah blah, but the union members acted rationally and approved the deal.

That can't be right. What about the tragedies of Seneca? What about the tragedies in which Nero performed? Come to think of it, maybe Nero IS the reason for the decline of tragedy. I know if I were forced to watch Nero perform on Broadway, I'd never pick up another Playbill again.

If we're talking as late as 23 Jan 49, I agree. After 14 Feb 49, however, Caesar had crossed the line that divides criminal from enemy commander. Once the State has been usurped in a putsch, there is no way to apply the laws of the state to punish the usurper. Over the course of history, how many dictators have been brought to trial by their own governments? Off hand, I can think of none. Once Caesar was de facto king, he was immune from prosecution under the law, an immunity that he had successfully cultivated ever since his illegal behavior as consul, when he forced legislation through the assemblies by means of armed violence. It depends entirely on how you want to rule the world. Rome successfully unified all Italy without toppling the republic, and without toppling the Republic, Rome successfully managed Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Narbo, Spain, Africa, Illyricum, the Peloponnesos, the Achaea, Asia, and Cypurs. Many of these acquisitions were associated with short-lived growing pains, but the republican constitution proved sufficiently supple to manage their governance through an ingenious set of constitutional mechanisms that allowed for gradual incorporation into the heart of the Roman system. Nothing in any of this required monarchy. For 500 years, Rome ate monarchs for breakfast, and Roman citizens could (and did!) tell these Hellenistic potentates, "I am a Roman, and you are just a king." The republic did not manage its imperial possessions centrally. They were managed by autonomous proconsuls, and thus the yearly change of consul had virtually no effect in the provinces. The nice thing about limited office is that odd people leave more quickly and can do less damage. More importantly, the notion of hereditary office is particularly obnoxious and unjustified, because you get a Tiberius, Commodus, and Caracalla for every Augustus, Aurelius, and Severus, and even to get to an Aurelius, you have to pass through all the worthless Didii Juliani.

Legally appointed to an office that didn't exist, you should add. There simply was no office of "dictator in perpetuum", which was simply a synonym of rex. By the lex Valeria, everyone who participated in this scam should have been hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, their property confiscated, and a proper ritual conducted to clean Rome of its Caesarian miasma.

I'm constantly stunned by the media's misrepresentation of economic facts. Consider the oft-repeated claim that the US manufacturing sector is "ailing", "hard hit", "dying", and all the rest. Why you'd think it was the Roman republic! Well, it is--strong and healthy, but terribly misunderstood. Here are the real statisticsabout U.S. manufacturing in 2006:

You're missing a word or something here--this sentence is gibberish. Are we in school? Do we get grades? No, but if I don't understand what the heck you're saying, then I can't respond. Do you think this rule applies only in school? Do you need a grade to apply this basic element of communication?

Insofar as I'm interested in the Romans' role in Hellenizing the Near East, the purpose of the Gospels is mostly irrelevant to me. What matters to me is what they have to say about the Romans, and when the Gospels conflict, I have to figure out which of the accounts is most reliable about the surrounding events. My contention is that on these matters John is the most reliable. Some of the differences between John and the Synoptics concerns the mythological. I don't care about these differences one way or the other, as they are totally irrelevant to whether John better understood the trial of Jesus, which is an historically interesting case simply because it offers unmatched details about Roman law in the provinces. There is only one difference between John and the Synoptics that matters on this issue: whether Jesus' last supper was the Paschal feast or not. The Synoptics say it is; John says it is not. If we assume that the Synoptics are right and John is wrong, all kinds of chronological weirdness is implied; if we assume that the Synoptics are wrong and John is right, the weirdness dissipates, and the rest of John's account of the trial of Jesus makes perfect sense and proves to clarify what was meant by the Jewish authorities when they said, "it is not permitted to us" to execute Jesus: viz., it is not permitted to us BY JEWISH LAW to execute Jesus on the day of the Paschal feast. What does the Barabbas story really prove? If the Barabbas story is false (which I don't think it is), it implies nothing about the relative accuracy of the Gospel writers, but it suggests that none of them should be taken as literal and unerring truth (DUH!). Since no one has suggested taking the Gospels as literal and unerring truth, then, what conclusion is exactly being suggested by the supposed "absurdity" of the Barabbas story? The allegation is that the Barabbas story is an attempt to "pin the crime of deicide on the Jews". This argument makes no sense to me. From the perspective of the Gospels, the crucifixion of Jesus was pre-ordained and an act of glorious self-sacrifice by which Jesus saved the souls of all mankind. If one accepts this tenet (and Christians are enjoined to do so), then the Barabbas case is simply part of a divine plan in which the Jews have an essential role to play. If one does not accept this tenet (and thereby rejects the very notion that a God was being crucified), then the Barabbas case is simply a case of bad luck for Jesus, and also says nothing about the Jews. Nor is it even clear whether some, all, or no Jews are meant to slandered by the story. Thus, even if the Barabbas story were false, it would have no meaning for the issue at hand. If the Barabbas story is true, it seemingly implies nothing about the relative reliability of the Gospels (since all cite it), and therefore says nothing about which Gospel should be relied upon in teasing out whether the Jews had the power to execute. Certainly, the truth of the Barabbas story is deservedly questioned, but don't suppose it to be an absurdity. In fact, the release of prisoners during the period of a religious festival was practiced by Babylonian kings, as attested by surviving Assyrian tablets, and the king of Judah was freed under such circumstances after the death of Nebuchadnezzar (according to 2 Kings and Jeremiah). Further, there was the Greek custom of freeing prisoners during the Greater Dionysia, which took place over six days in the month of Elaphebolion (~28 Mar - 2 April), and at the Thesmophoria, as attested by Ulpian. Far from being an "absurdity", the festival release of prisoners was known throughout the region. Finally and most importantly, see C. B. Chavel (1940), "The Releasing of a Prisoner on the Eve of Passover in Ancient Jerusalem," JBL 60, 275ff, which points to evidence of the custom of freeing political prisoners in Mishna tractate Pesah. 91a (The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Mo'ed II [ed. I. Epstein; London: Soncino, 1938], p 485). Critical for my thesis, J Blinzler's (1959) The Trial of Jesus points out that the Mishna text referred to by Chavel "fits in only with John's account, according to which the trial of Jesus and the release of Barabbas took place on the fourteenth Nisan, but not with the synoptics's account, which places the trial on the fifteenth Nisan" (p. 219). Thus, if Chavel's thesis is right and John is the more reliable of the Gospels, then the Barabbas episode makes perfect sense, is not a legal absurdity, and is consistent with non-Gospel sources.

You're missing a word or something here--this sentence is gibberish.

Even if that person was a dictator? I don't think so. Why not? There can't have been an exception in the Lex Valeria for dictators, given that the dictatorship (which was only supposed to last 6 months anyway) was created after the Lex Valeria.

I've read modern speculation along these lines, but I don't see any primary source material that would support it. What are you talking about?

First off, as an atheist, I put absolutely no faith in John's account. My argument so far--if you've bothered to follow it at all--has been restricted entirely to Jesus' trial and based entirely on what we know about Roman law, Jewish law, the Jewish calendar, the Roman provincial territory, who governed which territory at which time, and facts about the background of Jesus that can be checked against other sources. At no time has anyone weighed in on such imponderables as the number of miracles that Jesus performed, the number of demons exorcised by Jesus, or the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Moreover, you apparently have a double-standard regarding historical sources, as many facts about Roman history cannot be checked against independent sources either. For example, when Caesar claims to have been abducted by pirates and to have crucified them all just as he vowed he would, there is no independent corroboration whatever. All we have is Caesar's word and others repeating what Caesar said about himself. Now why is it that you don't charge in with demands for corroboration for this and every other event described in Roman history? The cold truth is that if we followed this standard, we'd be left with only fragments of (redundant) information in Livy, Polybius, Caesar, Sallust, Cicero, and all the rest of our literary sources. To my mind, there is precious little information about ancient history, and while we have no reason to accept testimony of the scientifically impossible (whether it be Romulus or Jesus ascending into the heavens), we ought to operate under the principle that our sources are otherwise innocent of fabrication until proven guilty. If you want to adopt the opposite premise, you'll have little to nothing to say.

If "most" still means "the majority," then most of Cicero's speeches were speeches.

Which acts? By killing Caesar, the Liberators were honoring the Lex Valeria de Provocatione of 509.

Didn't that happen with The Cunctator, Caesar and Julian? Not sure about Julian, and not so much with Fabius, his case was more of a "I know better" Master of Horse. It certainly did happen in Caesar's case at Thapsus and the post battle siege of Munda. Both of which were noted for their bloody, unclementia like conclusions. At Thapsus, Caesar (or Aulus Hirtius) reports, not that the soldiers demanded to be led into battle, but that the soldiers massacred the surrendering troops against orders while Caesar was suffering an epileptic fit.

How many speeches are in Livy, Sallust, Polybius, Plutarch, etc? Of these, how many were pre-battle speeches? How many were political speeches? How many were legal speeches? Etc. It would be nice to see something systematic here. Otherwise, we're just trading impressionistic memories, and on that basis, no resolution is possible. Until then, I'm deeply suspicious of sweeping claims, like "Speeches in the texts of old are almost certainly a fabrication mustered up by the imagination of their authors."

I really like Morstein-Marx, who is a student of Erich S. Gruen, my top favorite historian of the Roman republic. I'd not say that I was a disciple of Millar so much we both are disciples of Polybius. Thanks for pointing that out.

But look at the important qualifier Thucydides makes--"when they were about to enter into the war or when they were in it." I freely grant that war speeches were largely reconstructions from imperfect (or no) source material, but it's hasty to generalize that state to all speeches in ancient texts, especially when we have the example of Cicero.

Does anyone seriously think that politicians failed to use their extensive rhetorical training? If not, if politicians actually delivered well-polished speeches, isn't it likely that they had prepared their speeches beforehand? If they prepared their speeches beforehand, isn't it likely too that they shared these speeches with others, via pamphlets, letters, etc? And isn't possible as well that these written records made it into the hands of historians, who would be supremely interested in obtaining them? Just looking at Cicero, we have evidence for all this--extensive rhetorical training, use of rhetoric in public, written publication of speeches to a wider audience, and ensuring that speeches were available to historians. To think that "Speeches in the texts of old are almost certainly a fabrication mustered up by the imagination of their authors" is cynicism beyond reason. Certainly SOME speeches are figments of imagination (e.g., the pre-battle speeches of barbarian warlords), but let's keep our perspective here.