M. Porcius Cato

According to Matyszak's (fantastic!) Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day, Roman highways extended over 180,000 miles. Does anyone happen to know whether these were Roman miles or Imperial miles?

I think this is the right explanation. Moreover, the tactic does seem to be working (at least for now). According to this article on the "Ratzinger Effect", donations to the Church are up 20%, and more people are visiting the Vatican every year.

Drawing general conclusions about a population--"the Americans were sympathetic to the Nazi regime"--from two members of that population is the epitome of hasty generalization ("a swallow does not make a spring"). Yes, there were isolationists like Wendell Wilkie who drew support from German-Americans opposed to intervention. There were also non-interventionists in Britain, including your (German) dread sovereign. But I'd not say that "the British were sympathetic to the Nazi regime", only that in a pluralistic society like Britain and the US, a wide range of opinions existed and were free to compete in the marketplace of ideas. That's one of the things, I thought, we were fighting for...

Yes. Sometimes affiliated with shipping interests or merchants, sometimes affiliated with commercially-minded cities, travelers could book passage about freighters (there were no passenger ships) and buy traveler's cheques. Exchangable for local currency at participating affiliates throughout the Empire, every traveller knew the importance of traveler's cheques. In an age of piracy, banditry, and uncertain exchange rates, you wouldn't want to leave home without them! For more on the joys of ancient travel, see Philip Matyszak's fun book, Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day.

That's great--not your choice (though that's good too), but that you actually went to the trouble of looking at the candidate's proposals. Nothing irritates me more than "charisma voting"--voting for a president like you were choosing a date or a buddy. These voters, incidentally, are never happy because charisma depends on success more than anything, and after their clueless but charismatic candidate starts screwing up, he will have the charisma of a bad ex-husband.

Was Roman rule in Asia Minor continuous after 133? I thought Romans lost control of it before Sulla and Pompey finally brought back under Roman rule.

The issue isn't whether the Gauls were static, but whether they progressed as fast as Rome did. They didn't. They were barely out of the Iron Age.

"Gauls gone soft" seems like a strange way of looking at it. It's not that the Gauls fell apart, it's that the Romans became vastly more efficient, powerful, experienced, and wealthy as they accumulated the experience of building an empire and transmitted that know-how to aspiring leaders. Given how much more powerful the Roman army became over time and how close Caesar came to defeat by the Gauls, I'd say the Gauls were about as tough in 392 as they were three centuries later. Gaul only seems softer because Rome grew while un-Hellenized Gaul stagnated.

The Hebrides? Roman coins in the Hebrides?

Ancient teachers used to beat their students for even tiny offenses. Practicing one's rhetorical skills on one's pedagogue would have been posed a physical risk.

Different virtues were more or less important depending on the sphere of activity. For an ambitious politician, dignitas was necessary to gain auctoritas. For an aspiring poet (like Catullus), another man's dignitas was simply a good set-up for a devastating punch-line. For the merchant class, nothing was more important than the sanctity of an oath (indeed, Livy would have taken this to be the supreme Roman virtue). For a real legislator (and not just a show-off politician), the supreme virtue had to have been severitas--ruthless adherence to the laws, regardless of personal feeling.

You're missing the point entirely--it's not that law professors are simply hired away from top law firms, it's that law schools compete with law firms for the same talent pool. Thus, good students have a CHOICE about whether to take the academic or non-academic route, and if the rewards of the non-academic route are much inferior, smart students will choose the non-academic route (a situation that would be completely unacceptable to academics). Universities do not "make" law professors by "growing them" like crops. Crops have no choices--law students do! The bottom line is that if US lawyers earn more than non-US lawyers (and on average they do), this discrepancy could explain the cost of US law schools compared to non-US law schools. Mine is an empirical claim, and it would be easy to test. If you have another hypothesis for why US law schools are more expensive, what evidence would disconfirm your hypothesis?

I don't see anything in Jo-Ann Shelton's As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook on Roman Social History (Oxford Univ Press) on throwing flour. If the screenwriters don't have everyone wearing a freedman's cap though, you can be sure that they're not over-interested in historical authenticity.

Some religious statements are clearly more offensive than others. Look at the three different prayers used: 1: "Almighty and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy even to the faithless Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness." 2: "Almighty and eternal God, long ago you gave your promise to Abraham and his posterity. Listen to your church as we pray that the people you first made your own may arrive at the fullness of redemption." 3: "Almighty and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness." Obviously #2 is less offensive than #1 and #3. As an atheist, I find them all silly at best, but at least #2 hasn't the scent of Auschwitz floating about it.

Rhetoric is an important topic, but a school day is limited, and there are more important things to teach (in my opinion). I'd rather people learn statistics and economics since these are far more essential to modern life than rhetoric.

OK, take the example of law school if you'd like (although the principle applies to any professional degree). First, in hiring law professors, American universities compete with law firms for talent. Given a choice between making partner and making tenure, a young person with a law degree will not look favorably on a large salary cut for choosing to teach. Thus, law professor salaries are typically very high. Second, the cost of a good isn't the cost of producing the good. If it costs me $1 to make a widget, and you can use the widget to make $100, I'll charge you as close to $100 as I can (if I even sell it to you at all). Given the high salaries of American lawyers, potential lawyers in the US are willing to pay a very high price to go to law school. "All you need is good teachers" wrongly implies that good teachers are in ample supply and willing to forego the opportunities of practicing their valuable knowledge (and, by creating competitors, diminish the market value of their knowledge) for a low price. Of course, the world isn't filled with selfless lawyers (ha!), so you better bet that law school is going to cost you an arm and a leg.

The MBTI is a BS time-waster for corporate quacks, but at least this test has pretty pictures and amusing questions. My score: 66% Extroversion, 100% Intuition, 0% Emotiveness, 57% Perceptiveness You are most like Daedalus. You are extremely clever and inventive, but your methods can be very unorthodox. When faced with a setback, you're more likely to try to defeat it with sheer determination, rather than finesse. You're argumentative, but don't tend to take debate personally (actually, it's fun for you, and most people don't understand that). Regardless, you are a wellspring of mechanical ingenuity, and would make a fantastic engineer or inventor. You can be extremely loyal in relationships and friendships, and you're extremely professional. You're also pretty grumpy. Famous people like you: Thomas Edison, James A. Garfield, Walt Disney, Benjamin Franklin Steer Clear of: Hermes, Apollo, Icarus, Aphrodite Seek out: Atlas, The Oracle, Prometheus

Were you thinking in the Scipio brothers (Africanus and Asiaticus)? Actually, of the Cornelii, I was thinking of Sulla.

It's difficult to attrbute either Greek or Egyptian culture to Alexandrians; they were neither and both. Massilia was even more of a hodge-podge--Greek, Gaul, and Latin.

According to Wikipedia: Summorum Pontificum (Of the Supreme Pontiffs) is the Apostolic Letter of Pope Benedict XVI issued motu proprio which grants greater freedom for the celebration of the "Missal promulgated by John XXIII in 1962", otherwise known as the Tridentine Mass, and the pre-Conciliar forms of the sacraments. The document was released on July 7, 2007, along with a letter in which Pope Benedict explains his reasons for widening the celebration of the 1962 Missal. Its date of implementation, moreover, has been set for the following September 14 (Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross) Now priests needn't ask for permission to recite their ritual apology, Conf

Let me say again that this is a really good question--Why would the fellow who erected an official residence for the tribunes not be a former tribune himself? Strangely, no one has addressed this question before (at least not that I can find). Best I can tell, after his quaestorship, Cato had one of two offices for which he could run: the tribuneship and the plebeian aedileship. I know of no evidence suggesting that either route was a shorter path to a praetorship, but at least in Cato's case, his aedileship was extraordinarily successful, so much so that he was permitted to run for a praetorship immediately (i.e., without the customary delay between offices). This dispensation appears to rest on the two main achievements of his aedileship: the restoration of the Plebeian Games (again, supporting the idea that he was proud of his plebeian status) and his vigorous re-organization of what passed for a police force in Rome. One is tempted to infer that Cato chose the plebeian aedileship in order to restore the Plebeian Games, but of course that's impossible to know. I'll keep an eye out for a better answer, but that's the best I've got for now. (BTW, in researching the answer to this question, I was surprised by how sympathetic Mommsen was to this Cato.)

But in how many of these latter cases was the military involvement retaliatory rather than initiated by Rome?

But in Britain and in Judaea, this wasn't really the choice--to die or to be enslaved. The choice was much more modest--to die or not to fight Rome. Before they ascended the Masada, the zealots weren't facing slavery--they were facing members of a rival Jewish faction whom they detested and often assassinated. Nor were the Britons facing slavery either. At worst, they were facing farming.

Excellent point!

But the event at Skyros couldn't have been the dispute between Odysseus and Achilles to which Bk 8 refers. By my recollection of events, Achilles was rather eager to lose his women's clothes and go off to war. All Skyros held for Achilles was Deidamia, who was rather more sorry to see Achilles go than the converse.