M. Porcius Cato

I agree with PP: Someone else may have loaded the gun, but Caesar pulled the trigger. Whether the "someone else" was Marius is (to me) an open question. The military reforms of Marius are always discussed as a revolutionary change that created private armies, but I'm not so sure that Marius is as much to blame here as was Sulla. I'm currently devouring "The Army in the Roman Revolution," and I'm continually surprised by the extent to which Sulla's military reforms destabilized the republic. Hopefully, I'll have a review of the book shortly--it's quite germane to this discussion.

In case you missed it, NASA's global warming data was recently corrected (with no announcement) after an independent auditor discovered a strange anomaly: temperatures everywhere strangely shot up in January 2000. Turns out this was due to a Y2K bug (and a very poor attempt to kill the bug) that lead to widespread errors in NASA's data set (managed by Jim Hanson, one of the earliest alarmists). With the corrections having been made, the warmest year on record is in fact 1934, not 1998. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now move to before WWII. DailyTech broke the story: "The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.". Later picked up in the NYT, the most complete source I've found on this came from Watt's Up with That?

Thanks for the tip, Nerva. Hopefully, the episode will inspire a good entry to the Historical Essay Contest.

Cato the Elder was intensely concerned about the education of his sons, and he devised a whole curriculum for them through which Cato also led the sons of local boys. I'm also not convinced that foreign teachers--some of them notoriously cruel--would make their Roman charges sympathetic to their callous teachers' homeland.

Wow--what a find! It really is one of the nicest portraits of Hadrian. Here's a photo so you can judge for yourself:

To add an intermediate example in the sordid decline of the sacrumentum, Antony required the whole Senate to take the sacramentum to him before he left for Mutina. EDIT: sacruamentum.

No, it sounds totally absurd. Urban cattle are not treated better than rural cattle--if anything, the reverse would be true. Also, why a free person submit to being milked along with his cattle (or being similarly used as cattle)? It makes no sense. Yet the reality was that--unlike humans and cattle--free labor and slave labor typically shared the same tasks. Yes, there is an analogy to be made between slavery and animal husbandry, but an analogy is not an identity

Exactly. Mommsen's idolatry has had a tremendously pernicious influence on the understanding of the Roman republic, and it was borne of an ideology that was very much in keeping with the rising tide of totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th century.

This discussion has become completely unhinged from the documentary evidence about the lives of slaves. Although the legal status of slaves made no distinction between urban and rural slavery, the experience of slavery varied tremendously. Indeed, even in the countryside, free workers (including Cato himself!) shared in the toil of slaves, who were valuable to their masters and often worked side-by-side with free citizens. The notion that rural slaves, mining slaves, and urban slaves were all equally downtrodden by free citizens is simply not supported by the evidence.

Isadora Duncan, I believe, was arrested for her impromptu performance before the marbles, so I'll restrain myself accordingly. Prince Albert's is a good suggestion though Nephele. Thanks. Isn't there a great bookstore in London? Blackstone's?

Legally, the sacramentum, or military oath, was sworn to the presiding commander, to whom the soldier vowed to obey, to execute the orders of his officers, and not to desert (Polyb. 6.21.2). Oaths to the republic itself--which might have saved Rome from Caesar's designs--were typically required of foreign nations and allies, but such an oath was never required of soldiers. Thus, Caesar had only to command his men to cross the Rubicon, and they had no choice in the matter. I might add that soldiers DID have a choice about whether to take the sacramentum in the first place, and they took the oath quite seriously. Consider 88 BCE. When Marius obtained Sulla's command (under dubious circumstances), Marius sent his agents to administer the sacramentum to Sulla's troops--and the troops stoned the agents to death. Examples abound of commanders requiring new oaths from deserting, captured, and fraternizing soldiers. Indeed, when Caesar's men finally mutinied against him, Caesar reminded them of their oath to him (App. BC 2.47). In addition to the logical inference that Caesar could have gained the support of his men merely from the sacramentum, we also have ancient testimony to the fact. According to Appian (BC 2.140), Caesar was directly charged with having taken advantage of the sacramentum in order to lead his unwilling soldiers against Rome. For more information on this topic, Arthur Keaveney provides a useful discussion in "The Army in the Roman Revolution" (pp. 71-92). EDIT: "sacramentum" not "sacrumentum" (ye gods!)

Have a conference south of Zurich in late September, but I'm hoping to get to London (first time) for three days. Aside from the Elgin Marbles, what would be simply daft to miss?

The exact text of most Roman law has been utterly lost, and we rely on descriptions of laws from our primary literary sources (Cicero, Appian, etc). If you follow the link that PP provided, you'll find references galore, including Cicero's reference to the Campanian law. You can also find Goldsworthy's book at Amazon here. Search inside for "campania", and on page 175 you'll see his discussion, where he is quite clear about there being two laws.

Disobedience to authority is a death sentence. There was no greater threat to their families than that.

The bill had been vetoed by THREE tribunes of the plebs. When that happens, the law goes nowhere.

Re-read my post. I already listed two secondary sources--Goldsworthy and Long.

I think the sources are offering slightly different versions of events because there were two separate bills under consideration.The first was the lex Iulia agraria. The second was the lex Iulia agraria Campania. To understand the relation between the two bills, imagine that I ask you to sign a contract accepting an ostensibly free lunch (who would refuse it?), and then I demand to sleep with your wife in payment. That's the essence of the two bills, but now to the details. The lex Iulia agraria was introduced to the senate on 1 or 2 January, the last day when Caesar could have had any bills sanctioned by the senate in time for the vote by the Tribal Assemblies. The bill--while needing approval almost immediately--had been crafted with care. The chief problem with most agrarian bills is that they contained hidden costs that were unacceptable, but Caesar's bill seemed to avoid all these: the land to be distributed to Pompey's veterans and 20,000 families were to be purchased with Pompey's largesse, and (more importantly) private property was to be respected--farmers weren't to be forcibly hauled off their plots of land and subjected to violence and starvation. Moreover, so that these deals didn't provide massive clientele for just one man, the bill provided for 20 commissioners (though an inner circle of 5 made most of the decisions), and Caesar specifically excluded himself from participating lest he be accused of graft and kickbacks. According to "Caesar: Life of a Colossus" by A. Goldsworthy (who has an apparent distaste for such "cumbersome and tortuous legal prose"), "little or nothing within it could be reasonably criticized". Nothing??? In the history of republics, I know of no comparably far-reaching legislation--however reasonable--that has ever been passed on first reading simply because EVERYTHING can be reasonably criticized and improved, even the legislation of (dare I say it?) some darling of Venus. Consider just a few problems with the bill. Which of the eligible 20,000 families were to receive this unexpected largesse? Would it be first-come-first-served, or would they be chosen by lottery, or were they to be selected by the consuls themselves? And what prices would be paid to those willing to sell to the land commissioners? Would there be a set price, no matter what the land is worth--whether it was been carefully preserved through conscientious steps and back-breaking labor or left to neglect or rendered infertile by carelessness? And if the price were not fixed, would the commission be licensed to pay any price, no matter how exorbinant? And--this is most important--what if there weren't enough money or enough willing sellers to settle all of Pompey's vets and these 20,000 families that are chosen by who-knows-what method? What then? Although we have no record of Cato's "filibuster", no doubt he (or someone else) raised all these questions--as these are exactly the questions that any responsible statesman would ask. And for his questions, the ex-quaestor was not thanked, but hauled off to jail by that oh-so-reasonable Caesar! Let's be clear: if there is one thing that reason abhors, it is the silencing of questions. And this was too much for the senate, that one deliberative body of the republic, who walked out en masse, following the old grizzled veteran Marcus Petreius--who had by then seen more years of military service than Caesar had spent out of his diapers: "I'd rather be in jail with Cato", he shot at Caesar, "than in the Senate with you!" As it turns out, Cato's concerns with the bill were entirely justified. After the bill was illegally passed through physical violence (including the smashing of the consul's fasces) and over the vetoes of three tribunes, the senators were forced to swear an oath that they would uphold the law no matter what. No matter what? What if the bill proved impossible to enforce for all the reasons I listed? What if no one was willing to sell their land to the commission? What then? After one senator heroically went into exile rather than take this Oath of the Impossible, the answer to "What then?" came into sharp relief: the lex Iulia agraria Campania, which contradicted all the provisions of the first law that it seem reasonable. By the bill, private property was not respected. Instead, the Campanian lands--lands that were settled by the heroes of the Punic Wars, that had been in families for generations, that provided Rome with nearly one-fourth of her income, that had been expressly excluded by the first law precisely to gain passage of it--were to be confiscated from their rightful owners, who were to be left starving in the streets of Rome for the sake of Caesar's ambition. What a lover of the poor! What a champion of the people! What a friend of the dispossessed--that now dispossessed so many! In most modern secondary sources, the Campanian law is barely mentioned. Goldsworthy admits, for example, that "perhaps Caesar had always thought that its [Campanian lands'] distribution would also be necessary at some point, or maybe the realisation that his first law was on its own inadequate came more gradually. If we knew this, we would certainly have a clearer idea of whether he genuinely hoped to win over the Senate to support his first land law, or whether he had merely wanted to put them in the wrong in the eyes of the electorate." In other words, it isn't clear whether Caesar was a fool or a scoundrel. Well, in my opinion, Caesar was no fool. Rather, the summative verdict of this Campanian law was best put forward by that titan of Roman history, George Long (1864), "This monstrous, this abominable crime was committed to serve a party purpose; and the criminal was a Roman consul ... too intelligent not to know what he was doing, and unscrupulous enough to do anything that would serve his own ends." In my view, Caesar would "be duh bad guy".

For eight years in wild and hostile Gaul, every one of these soldiers' needs--for companionship, knowledge, food, and security--was met by fellow soldiers obeying orders. In a very real sense, their lives depended on this obedience to military authority, which was already enshrined in Roman religion and in social custom. Disobedience to authority--difficult for most men even in times of peace and in more individualistic societies--was probably unthinkable to the legionary. Even still, Caesar's armies mutinied several times and became successively more unruly as the civil war dragged on.

How one crucifies a dog is beyond me. Impaling seems more likely.

Since XIIII isn't 18, I wonder: did Romans count market days only? Apologies for the digression. (My sketchy source was This Day in Ancient History.)

Isn't today (30 July) the anniversary of the conflagration?

An image from the site:

Rome was not some backwater Hellenistic monarchy, but a republic. Dominance by just one 'big man' was simply not the norm. Look at the breadth of leadership that Rome enjoyed here. After Sulla quit the scene, there were many eminent figures in Rome besides Crassus and Pompey. Between the Sulla's retirement and the consulship of Cicero, eminent figures included P. Servilius Vatia Isauricus (cos. 79; first proconsul of Cilicia; defeated Cilician pirates; captured Corycus; defeated Isauri), M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. 78; proconsul of Further Gaul), Q. Lutatius Catulus (cos. 78; patronus senatus), L. Licinius Lucullus (cos. 74; conqueror of Mithridates), and Q. Hortensius Hortalus (cos. 69; whom Cicero called "king of the courts").

There is no connection between the Sabellian bull and the Sabellian heresy, which was started by a Libyan priest, Sabellius, teaching around 400 years after the end of the Marsic war 'Sabellic' (and cognates) was the name given by Mommsen for the pre-Roman languages of central Italy that were neither Osco nor Umbrian. As Mommsen's linguistic theory has fallen out of favor, the term Sabellic has fallen out of use, and people have generally gone back to talking about Samnites and Sabines rather than Sabelli. Here's the coin in question:

As a companion to the 101 Leading Statesmen of the Roman Republic, these biographies may be worth your while. Feel free to add to the list. P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major _____B. H. Liddell Hart. Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon.Da Capo. Hannibal _____T. A. Dodge. Hannibal. Da Capo. M. Porcius Cato _____A. E. Astin. (1978). Cato the Censor. Oxford. P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus _____A. E. Astin. Scipio Aemilianus. Oxford. T. Gracchus & G. Gracchus _____D. Stockton. (1979). The Gracchi. Oxford. C. Marius _____R. J. Evans. Gaius Marius: a Political Biography. Unisa L. Quintus Sertorius _____C. F. Konrad (1994). Plutarch's Sertorius: A Historical Commentary. University of North Carolina Press. L. Cornelius Sulla Felix _____G. P. Baker. (2001). Sulla the Fortunate: Roman General and Dictator. Cooper Square. _____A. Keaveney. (2005). Sulla: The Last Republican. Routledge. L. Licinius Lucullus _____A. Keaveney. (1992).Lucullus: A Life. Routledge. Spartacus. _____T Urbainczyk. (2004). Spartacus. Duckworth. _____M. J. Trow. (2006). Spartacus: The Myth and the Man. Sutton. Cn. Pompeius Magnus _____R. Seager. (2002). Pompey the Great. Blackwell. M. Tullius Cicero _____A. Everitt. (2003). Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. Random House. C. Julius Caesar _____C. Meier. (1997).Caesar. Basic Books. _____A. Goldsworthy. Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Yale. _____J. F. C. Fuller. Julius Caesar: Man, Soldier, Tyrant. De Capo Catullus _____A. K. Hurley. (2004). Catullus. Duckworth. Lucretius _____J. Godwin. (2004). Lucretius. Duckworth. P. Clodius Pulcher _____W. J. Tatum.(1999).The Patrician Tribune. Univ North Carolina. M. Junius Brutus _____M. L. Clarke. Noblest Roman. Cornell. M. Antonius _____E. Hubbard, & F. E. Hubbard. Mark Antony. Kessinger.