M. Porcius Cato

The Pullo/Cicero scene was nothing short of ridiculous, though it at least showed the intestinal fortitude of Cicero in the end. As far as I can tell, the creators of Rome have set themselves two goals that are bound to conflict and create a number of needless problems. The first goal has been to depict incredibly important historical events through the eyes of Pullo and Vorenus (i.e., a sort of worm's eye view of Rome). That, by itself, is a great idea since it gives us a perspective that's lacking in our source materials and helps the audience relate to the ancient world. The second goal has been to have Pullo and Vorenus participate in as much as possible so we can get a glimpse of the main events of the period. This is where things take a turn for the worse. The problem is that much of what occurred during the civil wars wasn't pretty (murdering Cicero, for example), and for the writers to keep Pullo and Vorenus likable, they have to downplay how awful these events were, which they do at the risk of trivializing the events themselves. Thus, the writers have put themselves in a no-win situation: either they convey that the events are themselves trivial (and thus uninteresting) or they convey that their protagonists are unlikable (and thus unwatchable). The authors largely avoided this in the first season by having Pullo and Vorenus serve as foils to each other. Thus, the audience could participate in the "strict Catonian" Vorenus' horror at crossing the Rubicon, but also participate in Pullo's jovial irreverence regarding the unbearably austere dictates of the Roman order. Unfortunately, as the civil conflicts grew in intensity, the conflict between Pullo and Vorenus was bound to grow as well, but the writers had this conflict climax and resolve far too soon in the first season and it's been a nearly listless careening for the two characters (and the whole series) ever since. Dramatically speaking, all of the conflicts of the series should have climaxed at Philippi, which would have set us up perfectly for the rest of this season and for more seasons to come.

How do you reach this conclusion? From the excerpt you quoted, the Senate was prepared to deny to Caesar the Gallic provinces. If anything had "fallen to a low estate", it was Cicero, not the Senate. In any case, Cicero's argument for continuing Caesar's tenure doesn't have any more bearing on the fall of the Republic than any other debate on provincial rule. Had the senate gone the opposite way, there was still nothing preventing Caesar from assembling his legions and attacking Rome.

I have to say I was more disappointed in this episode than any previous one. If ever there were an episode that could have served as a climax to the series, this was it: the anger of Antony and Octavian and their proscriptions, the courage of Cicero and his final efforts on behalf of a republic he'd saved at least once before, the hopes of Brutus and Cassius resting on an army that included the sons of Hortensius, Bibulus, Ahenobarbus, Lucullus, Livius Drusus, Cicero, and Cato. It was the final showdown between the Free State and the New Order. Yet, the episode provided nothing but anti-climax. The vast list of the proscribed was depicted as a few names scribbled on a wax tablet (with Atia tossing in a name to put a tradesman's daughter in her place). Cicero's final hours were depicted as mere chit-chat with the jovial and lovable Pullo. The vast armies--greater in size than any previously assembled in the Roman world--joined battle in a pell-mell so undisciplined it would have ashamed the Gauls. I admit I wasn't expecting anything like Lucan's Pharsalia ("Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni") or something from Horace (who was also at Philippi, fighting for the republicans), but this episode wasn't even up to "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic". Of course, I'm still going to watch next week. I wonder if we'll get to meet little Livia, cowering in Perusia as her family is butchered by her future husband.

Coming from one who is usually so scrupulous about source information, Cato, that remark takes me by surprise! 100% love? Not even 0.1% doubt? OK, OK, you got me. Instead, let's say, "Love is the best explanation for why Antony--who could have left Cleopatra at nearly any time and who could have had a much easier life without her than with her--renounced his wife and former friends, fought beside Cleopatra, and died in her arms." It's possible that Antony had many independent motives for each of these actions, but the motivation of love is the most parsimonious explanation. It's possible that our sources were all fooled, but that possibility rests on an equally large number of baseless assumptions. But, you're right, it's possible that Antony fooled Cleopatra (and everyone else in the ancient world) about his love. It just seems darned unlikely.

Fantastic review of two recent books on Pythagoras here. You'll never look at the number '7' in the same way again. In the meantime, enjoy this advice from the man who didn't invent the Pythagorean Theorem: Abstain from beans. Eat only the flesh of animals that may be sacrificed. Do not step over the beam of a balance. On rising, straighten the bedclothes and smooth out the place where you lay. Spit on your hair clippings and nail parings. Destroy the marks of a pot in the ashes. Do not piss towards the sun. Do not use a pine-torch to wipe a chair clean. Do not look in a mirror by lamplight. On a journey do not turn around at the border, for the Furies are following you. Do not make a detour on your way to the temple, for the god should not come second. Do not help a person to unload, only to load up. Do not dip your hand into holy water. Do not kill a louse in the temple. Do not stir the fire with a knife. One should not have children by a woman who wears gold jewellery. One should put on the right shoe first, but when washing do the left foot first. One should not pass by where an ass is lying.

So, as social habits decline, the culture becomes more affluent? Let the orgies commence!

But views such as Juvenal's have been expressed since Hesiod. How likely is it that public morals have been in a continuous free fall since the 8th century BCE? I think the more realistic interpretation of the satires is that Juvenal--having lived through the oppression of Domitian and having suffered torment from his own wife--is understandably nostalgic for a previous point in his life and is embittered by his personal trials. (BTW, I also think the notion that the poor are more virtuous than the rich is simple bigotry.)

I have no quarrel with this qualified thesis, but I still don't think Rubens' paintings "surely" provide evidence of the thesis. Not all paintings are meant to portray beauty. The textual evidence is much less ambiguous. I have no quarrel with the idea that someone thought Cleopatra was beautiful (nor do I doubt that Antony really loved Cleopatra). I would agree that art is produced to reflect a subjective viewpoint, but the critical question is: a viewpoint on what? on the beauty of gods--or their monstrosity? on the sexiness of the powerful--or their evil charisma? In a certain political context, such as one in which your livelihood and all your hopes depend on a bunch of rich, idiotic, capricious, and artistically tasteless patrons, what might your subjective viewpoint be and how might you express it? If it were me, I'd get a real kick out of portraying the powerful--like pagan goddesses or those creatures in the "Garden of Love"--as fat, licentious fools. Whether this really was Rubens' viewpoint is up for debate, but I think it's clear that one can't take all depictions of women as the artist's intended personification of feminine beauty. More broadly, though, I don't take artists as either representatives of high-brow taste or representatives of low-brow taste: artists (like everyone else) have the capacity for being both conformists and non-conformists, for expressing a dominant viewpoint and for expressing their own idiosyncrasies.

What is the evidence for historical change in what is considered healthy? What is the evidence for historical change in what is considered sexy?

Earlier I'd depicted as "cartoonish" the History Channel's policy of ignoring Hitler's ideas in favor of showing him as a raving lunatic. Actually, I wasn't being fair to cartoons. Enjoy this explanation of Nazi ideas from Walt Disney.

Divide waist by hip. For details, see Waist-to-Hip Ratio (NB, I carelessly inverted the two variables in my note above). Just to emphasize that WHR and weight are not the same, the WHR for Twiggy and Sophia Loren are quite close (~.7). For a comparison of judgments between Harvard undergrads and a tribe of hunter-gatherers, see this article.

Have you modified your views on any of the 'eternal questions'? How so?

Yes, I'll happily admit that there are people in the world right now who think Rubenesque ladies are sexy and who think that Twiggy-type ladies are sexy. My guess is that this state of affairs will always be likely no matter what period in human history we're talking about because these two groups comprise the tails of a statistical distribution in which the mean, median, and mode of ideal feminine sexiness is closer in weight to Scarlett Johansson than to Kate Moss or to Kirstie Alley. I should also explain that I think there is a good reason for this. Generally speaking, hip-to-waist ratio is a good sign of sexual maturity and fertility, and (probably due to natural selection) there is very broad cross-cultural agreement that women with a high hip-to-waist ratio are sexy. Hip-to-waist ratio, being a proportion, is completely independent of base sizes. However, in the real world, as people get fatter, they don't retain their proportions-- add 200 pounds to Kirstie Alley, and you don't get a super-curvy Kirstie, but a less curvy Kirstie. For this reason, I don't think that body fat ends up being unimportant to judgments of sexiness.

Another interpretation is that young people have always engaged in risky pleasure-seeking, and old people have always groused about it. If there's an historical period where the opposite pattern dominates (i.e., when most of the old folks are up at all hours partying whereas most of the young people are scolding them for their licentiousness), I'd be very surprised (and please, don't cite [Ab Fab as your sociological evidence!). Yet, if we take the idea seriously that risky pleasure-seeking ebbs and flows, then there must be some period where the younger generation is overall less likely to engage in debauchery than is the older generation.

Did you think Augusta was correct when she wrote " People's perceptions of beauty change with the ages. For instance, all those Rubenesque ladies who were depicted as the epitome of feminine beauty would hardly find takers these days, with our tastes for skeletal women!"? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the "something" on which you and Augusta agree. (BTW, I, for one, don't think there is a widespread sexual desire for skeletal women: there is a vast difference in weight between runway models--whose job is to make fabric look good--and Playboy centerfolds--whose job is to arouse sexual desire.) I'm disputing the idea that Rubenesque ladies were once considered the "epitome of feminine beauty." My claim is that the evidence from art isn't sufficient to justify this claim. Actually, I wrote: "if there were historical changes in what people found sexy, we should find the evidence from human behavior (e.g., from marriage records), from non-artistic works (e.g., in discussing private lives in letters and literature), and from works that were not meant for public display (e.g., in everyday pornography, erotic literature, diaries, and so on, and the examples should far outnumber the counter-examples.)". As you can see, my example of erotic arts was included as merely one opportunity to support the hypothesis I'm disputing. My broader point was that measures of private tastes (e.g., what people think is sexy) can't be drawn from works designed for public consumption (e.g., the art that people hang in their houses). The reason, I think, is clear: what people consume in public and what they desire in private are very often quite different things. BTW, I don't think I'm caricaturing a general outlook on human nature. In addition to comments on this board that "ideas about feminine beauty have changed; look at Rubens", I'd point to Phillipe Aries' claim that "in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist" as a great example of what I'm talking about. Moreover, I'd point to anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and a generation of social constructionists who have maintained (among other things) that facial expressions of emotion are caused by social norms. More recently, psychologists like John Money have maintained that even gender identity is determined by how society treats the child (and he even attempted to raise a biological boy as a girl to prove his point!), and his ideas are still used to justify gender re-assignment to newborn boys whose penises are considered too small. Finally, the root idea here--that the mind is a blank slate (or "wax tablet") until it is shaped by society--has been expressed throughout history, from Aristotle, to Locke, to B.F. Skinner. (My own outlook FWIW is that what people think to be sexy--or childish, or signals of emotion, or what they think about their own sex--is largely dictated by biology rather than by culture.)

I wouldnt praise him, but the world did at that time. Wasn't he on the Times cover at one point? Being on the cover of the Times (do you mean, Time Magazine?) is evidence that a person is newsworthy not praiseworthy. At various times, all sorts of reviled figures have been depicted on the covers of magazines. And, for it's worth, Hitler wasn't praised in his early years--in his early years, he was an obscure and struggling fanatic. He came to no public attention in Germany until his trial for the Beer Hall Putsch, an absurdly inept attempt to seize power.

Even if we assume that there was a market for Rubens' work, we can't conclude anything about changes in taste over time. One, Rubens may have been catering to a niche market: the fact that his paintings sold at best tells us that there were as many fat-lovers as there were paintings to be sold. Two, we don't actually know how Rubens' women were perceived: maybe people liked them for their novelty or even comical value rather than finding them sexy. Third, the mere existence of other works like that of Rubens is equally consistent with either a change in taste or a mere artistic fad--e.g., does anyone really want to claim that during Picasso's lifetime, men found distorted heads and disfigured bodies sexy? Fourth, and most importantly, if there were historical changes in what people found sexy, we should find the evidence from human behavior (e.g., from marriage records), from non-artistic works (e.g., in discussing private lives in letters and literature), and from works that were not meant for public display (e.g., in everyday pornography, erotic literature, diaries, and so on, and the examples should far outnumber the counter-examples.) To my knowledge, no one has ever produced such evidence. Instead, the evidence for an historical change in sexual tastes depends entirely on a small number of paintings by a single school of painters in a small geographic region over a small number of years. I'm tempted to say, "a swallow doesn't make a spring," but in this case, I have to say, "a tail feather from an unidentified bird doesn't make a spring." Yes, I realize that this line of argument is heresy to classicists who are raised up on the notion that art history tells us something profound about the "history" of human psychology. Frankly, at the scale we're talking about (i.e., at the grain of decades rather than epochs or even millenia), I think this notion is hogwash, akin to inferring the history of the brain by comparing Chaucer to Marlowe. Art history is interesting, to be sure, not because it tells us about sexual preferences but because it tells us about...art.

But what is the evidence for this "decay"? The only evidence that's typically offered is Cato's crabby complaint that young men began to question their elders (which I would call moral progress, not decay) and that women spent more on luxuries than they had before (hardly a moral vice, imho). EDIT: By "the end of the period", I assume you're talking about the second century; if not, can you clarify what period you're talking about?

I don't see any reason to praise him for his initial years. What are you talking about? The Beer Hall Putsch? His years as a vain, deluded, and talentless painter? His unremarkable military record? You're right: it's no different.

If this isn't a witch hunt, I don't know what is. Is there any further evidence of orgies in the republican period? I'm starting to have serious doubts that they ever existed, except as part of the same feverish fantasies that today would have us believe in Satanic ritual abuse.

Those who unquestioningly worship authority will always love winners, regardless of the means by which they won or the righteousness of their cause. The comparison to Caesar is indeed apt.

Sorry, Cato, I have to disagree here. Rubens was a commissioned artist and many of his works are indeed reflecting the tastes of a group. Many artists in his position didn't just paint whatever took their fancy; he received commissions from the Spanish court - among others to paint some of his more voluptuous offerings (Garden of Love etc). Other baroque artists adhered to this robust feminine form too, so I think I can safely say that it was within the taste of at least the high brow art lovers of that generation. Again, I don't doubt that there were then--as now--a range of of tastes in body fat. But you can't compare a non-representative sample from one historical period to a non-representative sample from a later historical period to make sweeping generalizations about historical changes in taste. The data are equally consistent with changes in sampling rather than historical changes in taste.

The most recent episode of Rome, "Heroes of the Republic," portrayed the early stages of a Roman orgy. I'm wondering: What do the ancient sources really tell us about orgies? When was the earliest recorded orgy in Rome? What (if any) religious significance was attached to the orgy? Who participated in them? Did they change over time? Were they merely a passing fad in the Imperial courts of degenerate emperors? References highly appreciated. Baseless speculation totally unwelcome.

I'd just like to point out that you can't measure what a group thinks is beautiful from the paintings of one guy. For all we know, Rubens had a fat fetish, and his contemporaries had exactly the same range of tastes that we have today.

Ursus is quite right that the Senate was an august body, revered by all pious Romans. Underscoring this fact was that the Senate only met in templa, i.e., locations that had been officially inaugurated as sacred. At the risk of taking us too far afield, however, it should be pointed out that the Senate's decision-making role in foreign policy was limited to defining provinces and allocating forces to them. Decisions on war and peace were not made by the Senate but by the people, who, having been summoned by a magistrate, were addressed in speeches at the Forum or the Capitol, and who voted for war or peace as the centuriate assembly in the Campus Martius. Indeed, even treaties had to be ratified by the people voting in a lawful assembly.