M. Porcius Cato

Whether WW was being facetious or not, I know of several establishments--late night coffee shops, cigar and martini jazz clubs, even neighborhood taverns--that were completely changed after the ban on smoking. When the smoking went out, the joints started closing earlier in the evening--no more 3A/coffee-and-nicotine fueled impromptu philosophy symposia -- they were less busy overall, and during daylight hours they started to get invaded by those armored-infant-vehicles that suburbanites like to carry in their oversized SUVs (shudder). Plus, you couldn't smoke in those places any longer! You might like to think that privately-owned property that is open to public admittance somehow becomes public property, but it's not. If I own a restaurant, it's just as much my private property as anything else I own. These smoking bans use government power to reduce the value of private property--without compensation -- and they should be regarded as the type of confiscation that (in the US anyway) is banned by the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In other words, how do we know the nature of the piracy problem that existed at the time of the lex Gabinia? Diodorus of Sicily is a good ancient source on piracy, and he has much to say about it (going back to at least the day of Alexander). I don't know whether Diodorus was a contemporary of any of the piracy he discusses (certainly not the pirates sponsored by Alexander), but would it really matter? Most of his evidence is ultimately hearsay. If he relates one tale from Thucydides and another tale from his butcher--is the latter more reliable than the former merely because he lived at the same time as his butcher? Polybius discusses the piracy of the Aetolians. Also, there is an inscription praising Epichares for his prosecution of the pirates in the Chremonidean War, which was obviously long before 66 BC. The inscription is surely contemporaneous given the outcome of Athenian resistance to Macedonian domination. There are some more inscriptions that are relevant, but I don't know how much more you want nor why you want it, so I'll stop here. If you want more, I have a couple good articles on Hellenistic piracy. IM me for PDFs. Are you writing a paper? And is it due Monday?

But a bar, a jazz club, a restaurant--they ARE private property. If I want to make my house or my club smoking only--that's none of your business. If you don't want to eat at my restaurant because I want Viggen to enjoy a good smoke afterwards, take your business elsewhere. But to use compulsion to outlaw my contracts with Viggen so that you can enjoy MY restaurant on YOUR terms--that's unjust. I really wonder where all this will lead. Gaius Maximus has already let the logic of the smoking ban lead him to endorse my hypothetical ban on small children and to endorse Viggen's hypothetical ban on bad smells. The Augusta suggested that the state really go for it and ban all tobacco products. Does no one recall the last time the health Nazis won their big victory of banning alcohol in the US? The result was a boon to organized crime, and no reduction in drinking. In fact, in many cities, the number of drinking establishments INCREASED after the ban on booze. The dangerous hypocrisy here isn't the trivial matter of the state restricting a product they tax--it's that people fight for their own freedom like mad, but they have no compunction whatever about taking freedoms from their neighbors. It's shameful really.

I don't find where L. Sicinius (Siccius) Dentatus received a grass crown either. He's the hero from Livy 3.43 whom the decemvirs assassinated, which (along with the Verginia debacle) sparked the secession of the plebs. Livy mentions no Grass Crown. In Gellius' Attic Nights, we're told that Lucius Sicinius Dentatus, who was tribune of the commons in the consulship of Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius was a warrior of incredible energy; that he won a name for his exceeding great valour, and was called the Roman Achilles. It is said that he fought with the enemy in one hundred and twenty battles, and had not a scar on his back, but forty-five in front; that golden crowns were given him eight times, the siege crown once, mural crowns three times, and civic crowns fourteen times; that eighty-three neck chains were awarded him, more than one hundred and sixty armlets, and eighteen spears; he was presented besides with twenty-five decorations;35 3he had a number of spoils of war,36 many of which were won in single combat; he took part with his generals in nine triumphal processions. Gellius gives quite a comprehensive list--yet, no grass crown. I just checked the first name on Wikipedia's list, and I'm not finding any confirmation at all, which leads me to wonder about the rest of the list. Can you find an ancient source claiming that L. Sicinius Dentatus received a grass crown?

Why the heck would you hide caltrops in your armor? Sounds awfully impractical (and painful!). Have you ever seen a caltrop? It's meant to a stop a horse (or a tank)--it's not something you want to have between your armor and your fleshy bits, that's for sure.

Think about this Rameses. The paper in question was published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, an organization that cares deeply about materials science, couldn't give a whit about Egypt, and gets far more serious submissions than they could possibly publish. Now what is the likelihood that they're going to publish a paper that is nothing but speculation on the pyramids? It's about as likely as the Journal of Roman Studies publishing a paper on the electrical conductivity of zirconia at 26 degrees centigrade. That is, absolutely zero. Get real.

In the US today, 1 in 8000 births result in triplets, with a disproportionate number of them being born preterm. The odds that one would have triplet brothers ("trigemini fratres", Livy 1.24) today should be a little more than 1 in 16000 (because more than 1/2 of all children born are male). As a rule of thumb, the probability of triplets is the square of the probability of twins (Benirschke, K, Kim, CK. Multiple pregnancy. 1. N Engl J Med 1973; 288:1276). What population would have been necessary for these two city-states to have had 32000 live births per year? It depends on the "crude birth rate" (i.e., the number of births per 1000). As a rough comparison, the poor in the state of Kerala in India, for example, had a crude birth rate of 31.6. At this rate, the population of the Romans and Albans should have been 1,012,658 to produce the 32000 births per year that would have generated a matched pair of male triplets in every year. Of course, if all triplets survived past childhood, they wouldn't have needed a matched pair every single year, but given infant mortality then, it's probably safe to say that they would have needed a population of around 1 million to produce a pair of male triplets. Given that the population of Rome at its height was only 1 million, it's damned unlikely that the Romans and Albans would have produced two sets of male triplets in the regal period. I don't know what the population then was, but the story in Livy has the sister of one of the Horatii being betrothed to one of the Curatii triplets, which suggests we're either in the realm of total fantasy (pretty likely), or the population of the people was relatively small, or both. (BTW one might quibble that the translation of trigemini fratres admits of more than a literal translation, but I can't say anything about that--my math is better than my Latin.)

And what do you do with the facts and the data? You have to interpret it. What do you think archaeologists do? Just dig up old stuff and haul it to a museum?

Frankly, I'd never even heard of Hawass before, and I thought his argument was fishy-sounding too. The samples taken were clearly not limestone given the patterning, whereas they were completely consistent with concrete. Additionally, the concrete patches that were added later were external rather than internal, whereas those of the new analysis seemed to have been taken internally. Finally, there is the circumstantial evidence: the motive for using concrete was present (it's easier to work with than giant limestone blocks); the means for producing concrete (all the ingredients were present on site); and the opportunity for producing concrete was present (they had plenty of skilled laborers on hand to do the work). Sure, if we had a comprehensive record of every repair ever done, we could rule out cross-contamination, but that's really in Hawass' court not the authors'.

It's actually a more internally-consistent usage, isn't it? In NBC English, "Are you going to school?" and "Are you going to the hospital?"; in BBC English, "Are you going to school?" and "Are you going to hospital?"

If you don't want to smell like an ashtray, go to a non-smoking bar. If your pet peeves give you a right to dictate the terms under which bar owners run their establishments, then so do the pet peeves of every one else. Personally, I don't like small children in restaurants--perhaps we can ban them too, along with bad beer in airports, bad hair cuts in college classrooms, track suits in malls, and music from the 80s anywhere. Wow! Come to think of it, this is fun! Next up: No Caesar-lovers on the Internet. (BTW, I quit smoking years ago. It was hard, and I'm glad I did it, but when I hear the Nanny-Statists blathering out how my health is a "public health" issue, I'd love to light up just to blow smoke in their prissy little faces.)

Source?

I hope you're right. The notion that the pyramids were built with slave labor richly deserves to be re-considered.

From today's NYT: Reporting the results of his study, Michel W. Barsoum, a professor of materials engineering at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, concluded that the use of limestone concrete could explain in part how the Egyptians were able to complete such massive monuments, beginning around 2550 B. C. They used concrete blocks, he said, on the outer and inner casings and probably on the upper levels, where it would have been difficult to hoist carved stone.

I don't know whether it was MADE by a rich guy to impress his guests (maybe it was, but so what?). However, Marcellus stole one from Syracuse, and he loved to impress his guests with it. Definitely not Rome at its finest. Reminds me of that rube who proposed to assemble all the philosophers of Athens to "settle things once and for all" (or at least that's what Cicero jibed).

That's an awfully good point. Is this simply a reasonable conjecture, or did you have a particular episode in mind? I don't recall any of Caesar's legates or troops reporting that his commentaries were full of BS (or words to that effect). Have I missed something important?

I agree with you Cato here are the definitions of Fundamentalism I am working off of from Dictionary.com 1)A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism. 2)strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles. For the purposes of this post I was referring to religious extremeism. But as far as being principled some explanation is necessary. Being principled is a good thing. but blind adherence to a set of principles without room for introspection and questioning leads to trouble Ah, OK. I see where you're coming from. Yes--blind adherence to any policy or idea is simply the essence of stupidity and dogmatism.

You'll be happy to know, Ursus, that political correctness, deconstructionism, and post-modernism lost their luster sometime around the turn of the century. When I was in school, it was the rage; today, I can't find a single student who doesn't take Foucault and company as anything but a punchline. Unfortunately, that still hasn't translated into re-invigorating the classics.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

IF Rome fell because of it's "sheer wickedness and corruption", then why didn't the whole Empire "collapse on itself, by itself" simultaneously? Why did the Empire in Britain "collapse on itself, by itself" so much sooner than the Empire in Italy and North Africa? Why did the Empire in Italy and North Africa "collapse on itself, by itself" so much earlier than the Empire in the Aegean World? Why did the the Empire in the Aegean World "collapse on itself, by itself" so much earlier than the Empire in the Levant? Are you seriously suggesting that the British were just that much more guilty of "sheer wickedness and corruption" than were the Italians, Africans, Athenians, and Byzantines??? If not, then your theory is bunk. If so, then your premises are bunk. Either way, the theory that "sheer wickedness and corruption" caused the Empire to "collapse on itself, by itself" is bunk. What of the rest of your laundry list of causes--paganism, inflation, civil wars, barbarian attacks, no established appointment of emperors, corrupt government and politics, etc? How many of these factors can explain the fact that the Empire in the East lasted for 100s of years longer than the Empire in the West? One and only one--barbarian attacks. And falling due to barbarian attacks is certainly not an example of an Empire "imploding" or "collapsing on itself, by itself". Outsourcing caused the fall of the Roman Empire??? Now I've heard everything. I guess we should call this the Lou Dobbs theory of history.

Yes. Speaking for myself, watching "I, Claudius" in the summer before I started university not only cemented my choice of Latin as my required language, but it also spurred me to figure out how to shoe-horn into my schedule all the classes on Roman history that I possibly could. Also, the content of the movies, games, and TV shows probably matters a great deal to how broadly and deeply someone gets interested in Roman history. I doubt that something like "Rome: Total War" is going to get anyone interested in someone like M Porcius Cato (though did you notice that he's in the game?), but it sure could fire up someone's imagination about the military. Also, nothing about "I, Claudius" had me remotely interested in how the Romans dealt with enemy cavalry (which RTW got me interested in), but it did make me wonder how the heck the Roman republic could have been jilted for maniacs like Caligula. My guess is that more Roman-related media will create the demand for more detail and accuracy, as competitors seek to differentiate their products on the market for increasingly sophisticated consumers. As the demand for more detail and accuracy increases, so will the demand for historical expertise. (Obviously, though, there will still be people who are happy with merely Roman-ish movies like Gladiator and its exploding chariots.)

After you were initially non-responsive to my challenge, I thought you were merely careless. Now, I'm beginning to think you're intellectually dishonest. The poll you cite found that 71% of troops are opposed to the US leaving now, roughly the same proportion of Iraqis who are opposed to our leaving immediately. Thus, the loudest voice on "now?" is "NO!" Indeed, 53% of those soldiers surveyed said the US should double the number of troops and increase bombing missions to contain the insurgency. To take these results as support for your claim that US troops want to leave now is to deliberately misrepresent the facts. I do agree with Virgil that military operations should not be conducted by poll, but if you're going to cite poll numbers, you should at the very least distinguish between what is and is not a majority opinion when characterizing the views of large groups of people.

The current issue of the journal Nature reports on what may be the most impressive archaeological discovery of the century--the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient forerunner to Babbage's Computational Engine, found in a shipwreck dating to the era of the Roman republic (shortly after 85 BCE). Although the device was originally discovered in 1901, its importance was unclear because it was unknown precisely how the device functioned--until now. Researchers have finally decoded the whole mechanism: . The computational device, described by Cicero as one "which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night", was apparently from Rhodes and may have been based on the astronomical calculations of Hipparchos. A similar mechanism was described as having been stolen from Archimedes after the Roman conquest of Syracusa.

You do realize Ludovicus that there is an enormous difference between your previous claim "71% of all Iraqis want the US out now" and your new claim "71% of surveyed Iraqis want the US out within a year"? If your wife moans "Kiss me now", she doesn't mean "Kiss me within a year".

Are you aware that tribunes vetoed the lex Gabinia?