M. Porcius Cato

I agree with WW--Downfall was a fabulous film. Personally, I don't understand why anyone should object to 'humanizing' Hitler. What's truly objectionable is concealing the real, human embodiment of evil beneath a cartoon mask. The best example of this cartoonish mask, I think, can be found on the Hitler History Channel, where Hitler is typically shown raving in untranslated German. Why not expose Hitler's ideas so that we can avoid them? As it is, all the next Nazi has to do to escape detection is (1) not rave, (2) not speak German, and (3) not wear a funny moustache. And people wonder why history repeats itself...

I hadn't even thought of including "preserving the glory of Greece" in the poll. Rome's own achievements, I thought, presented enough to choose from. If you throw "preserving the glory of Greece" in the mix, I'd have to switch my vote from Roman law to Greek philosophy.

There's a third possibility too. Antony and Cleopatra were ugly, but ugly people can be romantics too. It's not a pretty possibility--but between the coins and the historical accounts, it fits the data.

Cannae might be the greatest military achievement in the ancient world. Hannibal defeated not only a larger army, but a well-equipped and well-trained one, as well. And he did so by means of a tactical brilliance that remains difficult to replicate to this very day. It was a sad day for Rome, but it was a brilliant victory nonetheless.

But they were also known to charge interest at rates other than 12% and its multiples and factors. We have Latin terms for: Asses usurae, or one as per month for the use of one hundred = 12 per cent Deunces usurae 11 per cent Dextantes usurae 10 per cent Dodrantes usurae 9 per cent Besses usurae 8 per cent Septunces usurae 7 per cent Semisses usurae 6 per cent Quincunces usurae 5 per cent Trientes usurae 4 per cent Quadrantes usurae 3 per cent Sextantes usurae 2 per cent Unciae usurae 1 per cent

"Nice horsey...whoa boy!" --Catherine the Great

But the problem is: a trend towards Westernization--in what respect and to what degree? Is Lebanon sufficiently Western? Egypt? Jordan? Syria? Iran? I think a case could be made for or against any one of these countries showing a trend towards Westernization, certainly as good a case as could have been made for Meiji Japan. Or: look at the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, Afghanistan was far less Western than Iraq, yet Afghanistan seems to be going much better. How could this have been predicted beforehand--and why didn't anyone?

... before which it seems to have been on a par with Southern Europe and Scandinavia. Nevertheless, immense differences remain Yes, there were also large differences between Japan and Iraq as well. But which of these differences really prevented the regime change in Iraq from having the same good outcomes as those attained in Japan? My point is only that while blanket optimism for success in Iraq was unjustified, blanked opposition to democratic interventionism ignores the real success that have attained in the past. If there are lessons to be learned from Iraq, it's not isolationism.

Yes, I know. I think Japan is a telling counter-example to the general lesson that you're attempting to draw from the failure in Iraq. Japan had been a fascist dictatorship (like Iraq) before a liberal democracy was imposed on it at the point of a gun (and battleship and nuclear weapon). Thus, the notion that you can't impose liberal democracy on a nation that has only known dictatorship is contradicted by the American experience in Japan. That's an interesting anecdote, but one can't compare standards of living on the basis of anecdotes. According to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japanese per capita GNP was only $153 in 1950 and U.S. per capita GNP was $1,883. As you can see in the following chart, while Africa and the rest of Asia remained very poor, per capita income skyrocketed in Japan (series III) after the US invaded and re-wrote the Japanese constitution: In my view, the failure in Iraq did not come about because of any inherent impossibility in imposing democracy. The failure came because there is no guarantee of success, either, and the administration acted and planned as if all one had to do was topple the tyrant and watch liberty flourish. (Hey, Roman history fans, doesn't that sound familiar??)

As far as its citizens (if not its own colonial slaves) were concerned, Japan had a similar standard of living to the US and Europe, and its citizens had a measure of democracy already. To sustain the argument you're making, you need to show that Japan was considerably more democratic and industrialized than Iraq. Based on the Meiji Constitution, I don't think it was. What evidence do you have that the Japanese had a similar standard of living to the US? I'm almost positive I've seen evidence of the opposite--that the per capita GDP of the Japanese prior to WWII was comparable to that of Czarist Russia, and certainly far, far less than that in the US and Europe. I think the lesson from Japan is that if you want to export democracy, you have to break the will of your opponent and write the constitution for them. We didn't do either in Iraq.

What about Japan after WWII?

Don't you mean Liberators?

Yes, of course. But if we vary the compounding period over an infinite hypothetical space, is there any value which returns an algorithm for calculating financial losses on one's fingers?

This takes us far, far, far from Rome (and close, close, close to my work, which is what I'm trying to avoid at this particular moment). Here's a good textbook on the topic, and here's another.

Nor the Divine Julius! Neither of which is surprising given that their intellectual influence was vanishingly close to zero.

Cognitive archaeology is criticized by traditional archaeologists. "New wave Archaeologists" is a term you invented? In any case, I hotly disagree that cognitive methods are unprovable: after at least a century and a half of research on cognitive processes, we now have detailed knowledge about the processes involved in vision, attention, memory, language, learning, motivation, and decision-making. These studies--which can be found in nearly every issue of Science and Nature and have been rewarded with several Nobel Prizes--laid the basis for almost everything we know today about functional neural anatomy. None of this, of course, came from "cognitive archaeology", which is a realm of--at best--informed speculation.

As promised, here is an excerpt from Cicero's letter spelling out the length of the loan: Now for the case of the Salaminians, which I see came upon you also as a novelty, as it did upon me. For Brutus never told me that the money was his own. Nay, I have his own document containing the words, "The Salaminians owe my friends M. Scaptius and P. Matinius a sum of money." He recommends them to me: he even adds, as though by way of a spur to me, that he had gone surety for them to a large amount. I had succeeded in arranging that they should pay with interest for six years at the rate of twelve per cent., and added yearly to the capital sum. 2 But Scaptius demanded forty-eight per cent. I was afraid, if he got that, [p. 136] you yourself would cease to have any affection for me. It's interesting that Cicero arranged for a loan that perfectly fit the 6/12 rule for doubling one's money.

One of the nice things about this forum is that we not only have an opportunity to learn a great deal from one another, we also have a written record that documents our learning trajectory. Re-reading this post of mine from over a year ago, I'm mildly astonished to find myself expressing both views that I continue to hold and views that I've since abandoned entirely. For example, I remain convinced that On the other hand, I wonder whether young Cato might not have lost his mind when he wrote: What exactly I meant by the "old Republic" is completely opaque to me now. If I meant the period from Sulla's resignation to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, then I was simply wrong. If I meant some other period, then I'm really assuming a great deal of evidence that simply hasn't been collected. In either case, a year of further study leaves me disputing this characterization entirely. I was also mildly astonished to find myself endorsing a very specific (and novel) hypothesis regarding the fall of the republic: As much as I like the simplicity and subtlety of laying the cause of civil wars at the doorstep of a state intrusion into the economy (the lex Claudia), this hypothesis depends on a large number of highly questionable assumptions: that the lex Claudia was not almost completely ignored (e.g., I can't think of anyone ever having been tried for violating it), that the only alternative to trade profits were agricultural profits (as though Crassus made his fortune from farming), that those who were encroaching on the ager publica were mostly senators (again, ZERO evidence for this idea), that this encroachment led to the decline of small farms (the archaeological evidence suggests the opposite), that the landless urban poor formed the backbone of private armies (in fact, on the two and only occasions that a legion was recruited from the urban poor, the army was so soundly defeated that the urban poor were almost never recruited in large numbers again), and that the privatization of armies was affected entirely by economic rather than political motivations (again, the defections of soldiers from richer camps to poorer camps--such as from Lepidus to Antony--suggests that this idea is an oversimplification at the very least). In any case, it's amazing how much one can learn in the course of a year.

BTW, what was the Latin idiom for calculating on an abacus? I'm starting to come around to this view.

The Latin you requested: <alii> nihil impudentius Scaptio qui centesimis cum anatocismo contentus <non> esset, alii nihil stultius. mihi autem impudens magis quam stultus videbatur; nam aut bono nomine centesimis contentus non erat aut non bono quaternas centesimas sperabat. habes meam causam. quae si Bruto non probatur, nescio cur illum amemus. sed avunculo eius certe probabitur, praesertim cum senatus consultum modo factum sit, puto, postquam tu es profectus, in creditorum causa ut centesimae perpetuo faenore ducerentur. hoc quid intersit, si tuos digitos novi, certe habes subductum. (emphasis added for the cheap seats in the back) For more of Cicero's letters to Atticus (in Latin), see here.

Since I'm being paged... I'll first put a second on much of what others have said. Like PP, the show rekindled my waning interest, though (like Nephele) my TiVo managed to miss the preview for next week, so my expectations might not be as high as others'. I was also a bit miffed to see Atia yet breathing: the wicked witch of the Julii should be writhing in Tartarus rather than gloating over her ability to reunite the enemies of the republic. I'm becoming utterly convinced that Atia is meant as a combination of every female reprobate to be found in Rome (or at least a combination of Fulvia and Clodia--which is much the same). On a slightly more historical note, I thought I'd link to the correspondence between Cicero and Brutus, which was featured in this episode. Unfortunately, I can't find all the letters yet, but the show was correct about their timing: the first letter from Cicero to Brutus apparently came after Antony's defeat at Mutina. The important content of the letters was that Cicero not-so-obliquely chides Brutus for leaving Antony alive while expressing genuine hope and self-delusion (yes, I mean, genuine self-delusion) about Octavian. More generally, I'd like to compile a list of sources for this episode. The key events concern: the union of Lepidus and Antony, Octavian managing to get himself appointed suffect consul (with a relative, fwiw), his formation of a junta with Antony and Lepidus, passage of the lex Pedia that formed a court to try the Liberators in absentia, and Cicero's correspondence with Brutus. These being the events of 43--one of the most important years in the history of the republic--there's much to cover, and I can't help but wish they had shown much more of what was going on with the Liberators. Trebonius's tale, for example, is far more fascinating than this snoozer of a story about Timon. Trebonius--you might recall--was the legate of Caesar who had at one time conspired with Antony against Caesar, and later it was Trebonius who had kept Antony talking outside the Senate as Caesar was put away. Then, Trebonius went to his proconsulship in Asia, where he was killed by the mercurial Dolabella, who was in turn condemned by the senate (with much gloating from Cicero,who had been Dolabella's father-in-law). As the senate deliberated about whom to lead the army against Dolabella, Cicero sent word to Cassius to use his fledgling army to defeat Dolabella, which Cassius promptly did. Or--the writers might have told about how Brutus had gone to his province in Macedonia and taken Antony's brother hostage. That would have been a good story too. Instead, we got the nonsense about Duro. Ugh. Anyway, enough about the episode we didn't get.

This is a really good idea, but when one mentally retrieves a product from a memorized 'times table', no fingers are involved. So, if Atticus is memorizing anything, it must be an ordinal series that can be counted out on his fingers. My first guess (when I posted this) was that the Romans were using a trick for estimating the outcomes of compound interest, which I know only as the 6/12 rule. The rule of thumb of is: at 6%, you can double your money in 12 years; at 12%, you can double your money in 6 years; and so on. (As I say, this is a rule of thumb. The numbers aren't exactly correct, but it's darned useful if you're haggling in the marketplace--and it would be just fine for Atticus.) If this is correct, Atticus could quickly estimate that Brutus' friends would double their money in 6 years at 12% interest. The problem is that the rule (by itself) doesn't really work that well for 48% since (1) the rule of thumb breaks down for very low (0-2%) and very high (>36%) interest rates, and (2) all it would tell Atticus is that Brutus' friends could double their money before the end of 2 years. What it doesn't tell us--and this is what Atticus is supposed to be counting on his fingers--is that Brutus' friends would have increased their money 10-fold after 6 years at 48%. Which leads me to think that Caldrail's suggestion might be onto something: maybe Roman businessmen simply memorized a series of financial outcomes for conventional rates of interest (normally fixed at 12% in the provinces, btw). If this is right, they could have memorized that after 6 years, every 10k drachma loaned would yield approximately 12k at 3%, 14k at 6%, 20k at 12%, 36k at 24%, 64k at 36%, and 108k at 48% (which is, btw, a typical log function). Still, I'm not entirely satisfied with this solution either. Try memorizing this table for yourself and see how quickly and accurately you can guess what the difference would be between two different rates. I think it would be an awfully unwieldy strategy, and I'm not sure how you'd use your fingers either.

According to a subsequent letter by Cicero, the loan was due in six years, with interest compounded annually. This struck me as an awfully convenient term for a loan, given the rule of thumb I have in mind. EDIT: I'll link to the letter shortly.

Is this in any way connected to the patrician dominance and politicization of the religious colleges? If the city sacrifices served as a sort of "meat dole," it's easy to see why officiating the events might have had political significance.

One of Cicero's letters to Atticus (15 Feb 50 BCE) discusses the interest rates at which the Salamanians in Cyprus were being loaned money by friends of Brutus. What makes this discussion interesting is the last line below, which I bet will delight our Primus Pilus to no end. From Cicero's letter: Everybody in court, exclaimed that Scaptius was the greatest knave in the world for mot being content with twelve per cent. plus the compound interest: others said that he was the greatest fool. In my opinion he was more knave than fool. For either he was content with twelve per cent. on a good security, or he hoped for forty-eight per cent. with a bad one. 12 That is my case; and if Brutus is not satisfied with it, I cannot see why I should regard him as a friend: I am sure that his uncle at any rate will accept it, especially as a senatorial decree has just been passed--I think since you left town--in the matter of money-lenders, that twelve per cent. simple interest was to be the rate. What a wide difference this implies you will certainly be able to reckon, if I know your fingers. Now here's a math puzzler for you: how could Atticus quickly calculate Scaptius' claim under the two different interest rates (12% and 48%) ON HIS FINGERS? Now don't be lazy and give up--I assure you it can be done fairly easily. I'm wondering if anyone with, say, the expertise of an accountant, knows a fast and frugal heuristic for solving this puzzle. (Totally off-topic needle to Clodius: Note who Cicero mentions as the potential savior of our Cypriot debtors?? Far from being guilty of extortion, Brutus' uncle--i.e., M. Porcius Cato--is mentioned by Cicero as the very one who will stand up for the Cypriot's lawful rights! OK, digression completed.)