M. Porcius Cato

Chicago vs. New England (1985 redux). Of course, da Bears will crush them again.

Plutarch mentions that Libitina is sometimes identified with Venus, and there's a connection between Venus and Isis as well. Maybe Violentilla's suggestion has merit. I did read in Frazier of a case where an Egyptian mother breast-fed her dead babies, but Frazier doesn't mention any precedent.

Perhaps she was a representation of Venus Birthgiver? That's a good idea, but was there any ordinary association between Venus Birthgiver and the dead? Surely an ordinary priestess of Venus Genetrix wouldn't think to drop her nipple in the mouth of a dead man unless it had been done before. EDIT: Perhaps the "wet-nurse" was a priestess of Libitina (i.e., a libitinarii), whose job it was to ritually purify the dead so that others could touch the corpse without spiritual contamination? But by breast-feeding??

I thought the depiction of Roman funerals and funeral preparations was quite interesting, including the posture of the corpse and its customary treatment. In the first episode of season one, Pompey is shown at the wake of Julia, whose corpse is displayed standing rather than reclining. In "Passover", both Niobe and Caesar are displayed reclining rather than standing. (In a different TV dramatization of a Roman funeral, the corpse was displayed sitting.) I wonder what the normal practice was. Also, some, but not all, of the customs regarding the corpse were familiar to me. The coin in the mouth, for example, is proverbially to pay Charon's passage across the river Styx. But, by Jupiter's stone!, why was the corpse of Caesar given the nipple of a wet nurse? I've not seen that one anywhere. It's so weird I'm inclined to believe they have a source for it.

The events depicted in this episode are also described in: Appian, Civil Wars, Book 2, 118-148 Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 44

Wow! This is going to be a very dark season. Impressions?

Cannae. Though Romans outnumbered Carthaginian forces, Hannibal managed to surround and crush the Romans themselves.

Class distinctions in the army were alive and well before, during, and after the much-hyped Marian reforms. Two examples suffice: (1) property qualifications remained for the military tribunes, and (2) freedmen could not serve in the ranks. Marius dropped one property qualification, but he was no egalitarian. Historians estimate that the head count made up only about 10% of the post-Marian legions. This should come as no surprise. An urban mob was a worthless army. In 217 BCE, 90 BCE, and 6 and 9 CE, armies were raised from urban conscriptions, with hardly encouraging results. When Scipio and Norbanus, for example, joined an all-urban regiment to their army in 83, the damned proles ('vernacula multitudo, lasciviae sueta, laborum intolerans') has so little stomach for the fight that they deserted to Sulla (so much for class solidarity, neh?). The head count in Rome were mostly freedmen and of servile origin (recall Scipio Aemilianus' admonition to the mob, "I brought the lot of you here in chains!"), and they had little to no loyalty to Rome, to the republic, or to their commanding officers. At least the rural poor could be motivated by their greed for land, and so it's from their ranks that the post-Marian army came, not the gutters of Rome.

Caesar137, are you seriously suggesting that the god of the Jews punished Pompey and played a causal role in history?

That's not fair. So far, this series has paid more attention to historical accuracy than most any previous original screenplay. I'd also add that the series--while paid for with American dollars--was not produced by Hollywood: the writers, consultants, cast, and crew are overwhelmingly British and Italian. Granted that there are some licenses taken, that's par for the course. Even on the claustrophobic sound sets of "I, Claudius" (which I loved btw), we were treated to a Caligula that was far more Elagabolous than the son of Germanicus.

Not so. With a population of a million, new theaters being built all the time, the chariot races in the Circus Maximus, and nearly half the year taken up in festivals and games (which must have been as fun as marvelous since that's when the snooty aristocrats spent themselves into bankruptcy to impress everyone for the free elections), Rome was neither a mere town nor boring. As for being dirty and Latin, it was, but what city in the ancient world wasn't dirty, and what's wrong with being Latin? Anyway, for me, the real excitement would have been in the Forum, with the contiones and the trials. The prosecution of Verres would have far more fascinating than any dumb gladiatorial contest (which were probably fixed like today's boxing matches). During the republic, politics was the ultimate blood sport.

Do we really have any good ancient sources on mother-daughter interactions?

Having been killed in the Parthian expedition years before the events of the series even began, that's perfectly understandable.

For the record, I have tremendous admiration for Brunt and his theory, which manages to integrate a wealth of data (much of it original) into one simple, coherent, and hierarchical explanation. That's an achievement in any field of scholarship, and it's even more impressive in ancient history, which has been studied for hundreds of years. (Compared to Scullard et al.'s "the Republic fell because of everything that happened before it fell", Brunt is a titan among dwarfs.) I also think that Rosenstein demolishes Brunt's theory, but I have to admit that it fails to go the extra step of offering an alternative explanation of similar scope, which Gruen does (though without actually challenging Brunt point-for-point). You raise a number of good questions, and I'd love to see a work that addresses them within a single framework for understanding the middle to late republic. As far as I know, no such work exists as yet.

LOL. I loved the Frankincense explanation for modern anti-Semitism. Priceless.

There were men as rich (or richer) than these two (e.g., Lucullus), and it did them little good. It also wasn't Pompey's money that got him the lex Gabinia; it was the short-sightedness of the Popular Assembly.

Agreed, but that wouldn't be an example of the Republic's success leading to its downfall. That would be an example of constitutional violations leading to its downfall. And that, I contend, led to the civil war that re-established the monarchy.

And how would you have had the senate conduct its business if it were not to debate matters? Were the right policies simply to emerge from the head of Jove, or is it possible that all that "squabbling" was actually productive and in the best interests of the republic?

The theory goes that the republic's unending propensity to go to war--driven largely by aristocrats competing with one another for honor, glory, wealth, and power--finally led the armies of the republic to increasingly distant theaters and for longer periods of time. Due to the costs of long campaining on the smallholding farmers that made up the army, these wars (the theory goes) had the effect of undermining the social, economic, military, and civic fabric of the republic. That is, the conflict between the requirements of military service and the requirements of running one's farm, the theory goes, led the soliders of the republic to return from campaigning to find their farms ruined and families destitute, led them to agigitate for relief from the senate, and finally led them to turn to their generals as their political patrons in gaining this relief. Thus, by winning territory further and further from their homes, the soldiers found themselves dependent on their generals for their livelihood whereas their generals grew so monstrously rich that they could purchase whole elections and even topple the state. Or so the theory goes. Recently, this theory (most notably advocated by P. A. Brunt) has been challenged on a number of grounds, including a misassessment of the requirements of family farms, a misassessment of the archaeological evidence regarding how widespread small farms were during the period of their alleged decline, and a misassessment of the mortality rate in the army and the life cycle of the farmer/soldier. Following this critique (most notably advocated by Nathan Rosenstein and Erich Gruen), the republic was largely healthy and functioning normally before, during, and after the period of Rome's greatest expansion. So, basically, there are historians who agree with what you've been told and historians who--like you--are skeptical that the republic's success led to its downfall. Personally, I'm with you.

Surely, Augusta, not all women of the late Republic were the sort of dignified matrons portrayed by Lindsay Duncan. Would you have had Clodia played thus? I agree that there's been a mighty license taken with the historical Atia, but the women--and men--of the late Republic were not all cut from the same old Roman cloth, and some of them were surely just as vicious as our Atia was portrayed. Don't you think? Yeah, and we all know that he died miles from Rome. Indeed, which is why I couldn't imagine it was really Cicero. I'm guessing that since this season was ordered before the scripts were even written, this season won't be quite so faithful to history as was the last season. I do hope I'm wrong though.

Aren't you asking for evidence of a negative? Evidence that the intelligence failure was NOT manipulation? No one can provide evidence that the CIA (or a Flying Spaghetti Monster) did NOT manipulate intelligence, but the onus of proof is on the person who asserts the positive claim. If we're going to abandon this principle, then I'd like evidence that Angelina Jolie is NOT secretly in love with me, evidence that Cookie Monster is NOT secretly Big Bird, and evidence that Moonlapse has NOT killed the real Saddam Hussein with a poison cod-fish. (Come to think of it, demanding evidence of negatives is fun!)

From the preview on the HBO web site, it look like Antony is shown decapitating someone in the Senate house. Granted, the footage lasts about 1.5 seconds, so I could be wrong, but who might it be?

Huh? The consular fasti were inscriptions. Take a look.

Mainly just entertainment and to get a broad understanding. I see. For pure entertainment, the Romans themselves could be quite gripping in their story-telling. Livy particularly is hard to beat on the early history of Rome, but you might want to check out Lays of Ancient Rome by Macaulay for some 'modern' stiff competition to Livy's mantle. Horatius is deservedly famous: XXIX

If clock maker's were concerned with inversion, they would have certainly dealt with the IX (9) versus XI (11) problem, where inversion really does have meaningful consequences. The inversion of | \/ (4) is /\ | (which is meaningless). Wikipedia offers an interesting explanation for the IIII versus IV that can account for the use of IIII and IX: The number of symbols on the clock totals twenty 'I's, four 'V's, and four 'X's, so clock makers need only a single mold with five 'I's, a V, and an X in order to make the correct number of numerals for the clocks, cast four times for each clock: V IIII IX VI II IIX VII III X VIII I IX IIX and one of the IX's can be rearranged or inverted to form XI and XII. The alternative uses seventeen 'I's, five 'V's, and four 'X's, possibly requiring the clock maker to have several different molds.