M. Porcius Cato

And it really is cheap--the average Roman earned 1000 sesterci per annum, which is 2500 asses per year (literally, if Martial is correct).

Anna is a fascinating case of a thoroughly home-grown Roman goddess. According to Wikipedia, "The idea of the good soul and the bad soul offering advice from above a person's shoulders is thought to have come from the idea that Anna told Dido what to do with Aeneas." Anyway, I obviously celebrate the Ides for an altogether different reason.

The purple "nearest black" looks like it's illustrated in this mural from Pompeii:

Rome: Fast Food Nation.

Jacoby's pronunciation of Latin words in an English context shouldn't conform to the pronunciation of Latin words in a Latin context. English is a hodgepodge of borrowings, so much so that only a linguist or polyglot could stick to all the original pronunciations. And English-speakers aren't even alone in this. Speaking to an Italian woman, she had no idea who /sisero/ was, let alone /kikero/, but after describing him at some length, she said "Ahh! /chich-eh-roh-neh/". If Jacoby had called Caesar "Kaiser", Cicero "Kikero", etc, it would have been an interesting exercise in classical pronunciation, but it wouldn't have been a good reading of the English translation of Suetonius. If purists want to practice classical pronunciation, they should begin by repeating De gustibus non disputandum est five times.

OK, try this one. .

Capital of Thrace: Ulpia Thrimonzium (Plovdiv)

Excellent! Wow, that was fast. Was it really so easy?

Whether Crassus was a private citizen (privatus) is actually an interesting issue. On the one hand, we have clear descriptions of Crassus as a praetor from the epitomes of Livy (which are notoriously unreliable). On the other, modern historians are firmly on Cleopatra's side of the argument. According to Gruen's Last Generation (p. 536n9), "That Crassus was a privatus at the time should no longer be doubted; see Shatzman, Athenaeum, 46 (1968): 347-350." For argument's sake, let's assume that Crassus was indeed privatus. Does this show some new weakness in the Senate? I don't think so. Going back to the Samnite War, in 295, four ex-consuls were given propraetorian imperium. Two generations later, the privatus Scipio Africanus was also given proconsular imperium, as was M. Marcellus and a whole string of Spanish governors. Thus, even if Crassus were privatus, there was nothing new here, and thus no need to invoke a "weakened" Senate to explain anything extraordinary about the imperia extra ordinem.

Thanks Maladict. What's the Roman name for this ancient city? .

It is. Chersonesos?

Really? And the fact that Venus is closer to the sun has no effect on its temperature??? Give me break. Venus illustrates that on a hot planet with no oceans of water, CO2 fails to condense at the same rate as would occur on a colder planet with huge oceans of water. First, CO2 is not an anthropogenic gas. Before humans (or any plants or animals) existed, the atmosphere was mostly CO2 and N2. Second, the fact that CO2 has almost doubled since the industrial revolution is NOT telling. It would only be telling if this doubling were accompanied by a contemporaneous increase in temperature. Yet, this is not the case. Indeed, when CO2 doubled from 1940-1980, temperatures were overall flat, and during the years in which CO2 increased most dramatically (1950-1970), there was an actual cooling trend (see Figure 6 in this paper for historical data). Simply put, neither the high CO2/high temperatures of Venus nor the fact that CO2 increased during the industrial revolution support the CO2 theory of climate change. What a stunning misrepresentation of my views! My example was that of a researcher interested in one topic (mating of Belding ground squirrels) obtaining additional funding to examine the impact of global warming on Belding ground squirrels' mating behavior. In this example, his normal research topic (i.e., causes of various aspects of mating behavior) was disrupted by a line of research (effects of global warming) that would have been otherwise irrelevant to the researcher. Moreover, this example neither supports nor was intended to support the idea that scientists' views on the causes of climate change are part of a nefarious plot. That's stupid hyperbole. Also, being a college professor, I am all for "fancy book learnin".

True. Despite being vastly outnumbered, they managed to keep their armies from being annihilated, thereby leaving all Italy open for Spartacus to do as he pleased (e.g., besiege Rome). Through their judicious use of Fabian tactics, they cost Spartacus his German allied army, kept him bottled up in Italy, and they gave Rome time to raise a larger force. I freely grant that the consuls were no military geniuses, but they were better than the praetors who preceded them, and I see nothing that made them less qualified than Crassus, who got an ovatio .

LOL--PP's post came just as I was composing mine! We say the same thing though.

I don't see any evidence that the senate was weak in their handling of Spartacus. The senate prudently dispatched two waves of forces. The first wave was a rapid-deployment force of conscripts under the commands of the praetors, Gaius Claudius Glaber and Publius Varinius, and the second wave was a proper legionary force led by the two consuls of 72, Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus and Lucius Gellius Poplicola (Plut., Cato Min. ). The consular legions thoroughly defeated Crixus' forces, killing Crixus and wiping out 2/3 of his army. They then successfully prevented Spartacus' escape from Italy, prevented him from assailing Rome, and kept him in check with their two legions (against Spartacus' 120,000 men). Seeing that the consuls could not overcome Spartacus' forces, the Senate then recalled the consuls to civilian life and supplanted their two legions with a surge of additional forces (6 legions), led by the praetor Crassus and large numbers of nobiles. In my view, the early successes of Spartacus were much exaggerated by Crassus and his political allies, and since his friends and allies were those who wrote the subsequent histories, their account of events needn't be taken at face value. Yet even with this bias, however, the Senate is nevertheless portrayed as responsive to events, capable of re-appraising their strategies in light of new evidence, and ultimately their policies led to an utterly crushing defeat of Spartacus and his brigand army.

A very good list of maps is available from the Shepard Historical Atlas, including a map that seems to fit your requirements.

On the topic of mythology, I found G. S. Kirk's The Nature of Greek Myths to be quite interesting.

I don't think there's any good reason to believe that Spartacus (whatever Marx thought of him) was either a communist or even in favor of abolishing slavery. What we know of Spartacus' views derives entirely from the record of his behavior. Luckily, the record is exceptionally well-covered, and it can be found in Appian (Civil Wars 1.116-120), Florus (Epitome 2.8), Livy (Periochae, 95, 96, 97 Velleius Paterculus (2.30.5), Athenaeus, Varro, Diodorus Siculus, Frontinus (Strategies 1.5.20-22 and 7.6, 2.4.7 and 5.34), Cicero (Att 6.2.8), Sallust (Histories 3.96 and 98), Plutarch (Crassus 8-11, Pompey 21.1-2, Cato the Younger), Aulus Gellius, Suetonius, and Orosius (History against the Pagans 5.24.1-8 and 18-19) (major sources in bold). Two remarkable facts stand out from these accounts. First, Spartacus himself is treated as a somewhat noble enemy (like Hannibal) rather than as an ignoble enemy (like the druids). Second, and more remarkably, there is absolutely no hint whatsoever that Spartacus was opposed to the institution of slavery. On this, the Oxford Classical Dictionary correctly observes, "Their object was not to eradicate slavery but to extricate the disaffected from its rigours" (p. 1416). Spartacus' failure to question the institution of slavery should be less remarkable given the fact that all the surviving writings from the Greco-Roman world take slavery as an unquestionably natural state of affairs. Stoics, it is true, inspired legislation for the more humane treatment of slaves, and they sometimes freed their slaves upon their own deaths (as Cato did), but their concern was typically with the ill-effects of slave-holding on the slave-holders (Seneca, Ep. 47). Christians, in fact, claimed that slaves should "obey their masters" "with fear and trembling" (Paul, Eph.6:5). Returning to Karl Marx, that old rotten bastard had a hodgepodge of contradictory and incoherent ideas regarding the nature of "class" conflict in antiquity. In the Communist Manifesto, he wrote of the conflict b/w "freeman and slave", but writing of the rich and poor freeman in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Marx claimed that slaves were "the purely passive pedestal for these combatants". In Das Kapital, Marx claimed that the class struggle in the ancient world "took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors", but in a later edition of the same work, he claimed that the venue for this contest was to be distinguished from that of the capitalist system which was the object of his critique. Thus, the Marxist position on the role of slaves in the class struggle of capitalist societies is that it plays a central role, a minor role, and no role at all! In any case, if you're interested in finding some communist heroes in the ancient world (whether for lionization or scorn), I would refer you to the world's first recorded communist--the character Praxagora from Aristophenes' comedy, Ecclesiazusae. Praxagora was a communist even before Plato was, and--what's more--Aristophenes foresaw how absurd the system was nearly 2500 years earlier than Gorbachev did. (This edition has a good translation with a great intro.)

Yes, the Jacoby reading is much cheaper as a download. You can get it either from publisher Naxos or from Audible.com, where one can hear a sample of Jacoby reading from the life of Caesar. Another, more expensive, version is also available through the iTunes Music Store.

Since CO2 is a natural by-product of breathing, I venture to guess that we ALL profit from CO2 "pollution"!

The effect of state funding for global warming research is interesting. It's true that early funding came from utterly irresponsible, totally alarmist claims. For example, Jim Hanson testified before Congress that the hot summer of 1990 was almost certainly caused by global warming--until the summer grew quite mild after he had finished testifying! Now that increases in funding occur as some kind of religious duty, researchers can go about their business in more or less normalcy. I say, "more or less", because it still is the case that a researcher whose interests are (say) mating habits in Belding's ground squirrel will today seek additional funding by examining the effect of global warming on Belding's ground squirrel. The whole thing is a racket and it disrupts normal science, but you'd be amazed by how generous agencies are (with other people's money) and by how creative scientists can be in motivating agencies to care about real scientific issues for stupid reasons.

You're absolutely right: after Caesar took up arms against the republic, he lost the moral right to a trial. I don't think there's any disagreement on that score. If there's any disagreement, maybe it's about the exact point in time dividing when Caesar was merely ambitious but not criminal, when his ambition had led him to actual criminality, and when he had gone beyond mere criminal to total traitor. (Caesar was guilty of so many sins, crimes, and atrocities that it's hard to keep them all straight!) Only in the last case--of taking up arms against Rome itself--did Caesar forfeit his right to trial. Clearly, Caesar's consulship was simply one crime after another. If his consulship included anything legal at all, I can't recall it. Though he deserved to be tried at this point, he was unfortunately immune from prosecution (being consul). Caesar's proconsulship, too, consisted of crimes heaped upon atrocities. He had no authority to linger in Gaul after the defeat of the Helvetii, no authority to cross into Germania, nor any authority to cross into Britain. Indeed, the totality of these Gallic adventures was a violation of the ius fetiale, the most ancient of rules governing the conduct of men at arms. Though he deserved to be tried at this point too (or, acting on a previous precedent, turned over to the Germans), he was unfortunately still immune from prosecution at this point as well (being proconsul). Thus, the first opportunity to try Caesar came at the expiration of this proconsulship, when Caesar was so rich from looting all three parts of Gaul that he could have bribed his way into a peaceful retirement.

Great find Nephele. Was there a comprehensive list in your source?

Oh wow--that was soooo bad (it was great).

Wasn't the origin of the Minotaur due to a coupling of a bull and a queen? And that bull wasn't even a disguised god!