M. Porcius Cato

Athens--for all the reasons Perikles gave in his funeral oration.

GO, what walls of Rome extended as far as the Vatican?

Still looking for testimonia. I wrote to Rosenstein about my theory--we'll see what he says.

Anyone have a chance to read The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)? Perhaps his namesake would like to review?

The risks wouldn't be symmetrical because the populations to which they had been exposed previously differed greatly. That is, if you were a Roman growing up in a city of close to 1,000,000, you would have a higher probability of encountering a novel bug than if you were a Gaul growing up in a village of only 100. If that bug didn't kill you as a Roman boy, it is because your antibodies beat them off, and with your life you would have been left with some immunity to the bug in the future. Thus, going to Gaul, you as a Roman would have been less susceptible to encountering a novel bug than your Gallic counterparts encountering 10,000 Romans like you. Hence, the risks were asymmetrical. (BTW, glad this digression got its own thread.)

I'm skeptical about the tablet business, but I agree that the old and middle-aged have been griping about the decline of civilization since Hesiod (whom you'd be better off citing than some vague tablet).

Oh, sure--there wouldn't be a lack of immunity at the same level as in the New World but the risks for disease transmission would be far greater than those presented by Columbus' small crew in the New World or by the Italian traders in Narbonensis. Epidemiology is all about probabilities. What is the probabiliy that 1000 traders from Italy will carry a novel strain of bacteria to Narbonensis? What is the probability that 100,000 soldiers will carry a novel strain to the Belgae? And, given that just one novel strain HAS been introduced, over how far of an area will that strain continue to have a high novelty? Statistically, it seems pretty unlikely that the Gauls didn't pick up a few Roman bugs.

Exactly, which is why the costs of these downloads shouldn't be borne equally by all users. There's nothing "neutral" about the situation in which Mr. Horn Dog can clog the internet downloading Brittany Does Manhattan to his heart's content while I can't load a tiny page at www.unrv.com. That's not 'neutral'--it's the breakdown of the commons.

You think they didn't have antibodies in the ancient world? Of course they did. Throw nearly a million people into one city with a shared water source and you're going to get a population of humans with antibodies that differ very much from those of small rural groups. That's just biology. Moreover, when those urban groups mingle even a little with the other groups, they'll be vectors for all sorts of diseases (in fact, diseases from all over the Mediterranean). Except that the Spanish had already had much contact with Carthaginians who were as cosmopolitan and urban as were the Romans. Further, you seem to imply that an absence of evidence is an actual evidence of absence. You do realize that that is an elementary logical fallacy, don't you? Again, all of these were urban areas where the high contact with other people (i.e., disease vectors) would have meant a much stronger immune system than in Britain, Northern Gaul, Germania, etc. In southern Gaul, yes--absolutely. Among the Belgae? Not very likely. That's true--which is why it would be absurd to maintain that all the Gauls were busy getting sick. Perhaps you can find where I claimed that all the Gauls were getting sick? Rather, I claimed that there are generally more incidental casualties than direct ones (and that's simply a rule of thumb), but even if 'only' 49% of Gallic dead were killed by germs, starvation, and the banditry unleashed by the breakdown of Gallic self-rule, it would still remain true that Caesar could have drastically UNDERestimated the number of deaths that he caused.

What are your sources on this one MCP? Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Les Roberts' work on the effects of war in the Congo (see CNN for some popular coverage) is my source for the general claim that war kills far more by spreading disease/famine than by spreading bullets. From these better-established facts, we can evaluate less certain, prior historical claims regarding mortality figures. For example, in the European conquest of the New World, we have reports of enormously high fatality numbers corresponding with relatively small number conflicts. An easy way to reconcile these two sets of figures is to suppose that a large number of casaulties were caused by disease and famine, and we do have independent evidence for epidemics spread by Europeans in the New World (see Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel). Given the universal--war kills more than just those on the battlefield--we can deduce that more were killed by Caesar's troops than would have been found on the battlefield. How much more? Again, we can proceed from the known to the unknown. In the Roberts work, it was often an order of magnitude or more. Therefore, even if Caesar were overestimating the number he killed by a "mere" 50%, we can guess with a fair amount of certainty that Caesar's overestimate is still an underestimate.

Welcome back Germanicus.

Probably an underestimate--in most wars, the greatest killer is not the sword or the gun but the disease and the famine. It's very likely that Caesar's campaign--which spread all the bacteria and viruses of urban Rome among rural farmers with no immunities to them and which disrupted the food and water supplies of iron-age farmers barely clinging to survival--killed far more by disease and famine than killed by battle or enslaved. Maybe you're right. Why don't you start a separate thread on this?

The conspiracy theory, the modern politics, the tenuous connection to Rome... What more do you want? You need to see the trident and the net before consigning this sort of thing to the Arena?

This has nothing to do with Roman history at all. It's modern politics with a Roman throw-away line.

Favorite examples?

Caesar killed more in Gaul than had ever been killed in any prior conflict.

Given that none of these events have occurred, they fail to explain the September fall in oil prices. Two opposing hypotheses were proposed to explain the observed fall in September oil prices, each with different predictions about the future. That's what we're tracking--with both predictions equally subject to outside risks of the sort that you have adumbrated.

Sure, narratives can contain analytical support or revision of prior historical reconstructions. I should have emphasized in bold letters that it's not the revisionism per se that I like, but bringing in NEW EVIDENCE and tracing out the implications of that new evidence for the received wisdom. Otherwise, what's the point in writing a new narrative if you're just saying what everyone else has said earlier? I agree. A revision with no new evidence (e.g., archaeological) and/or no new methodology (e.g., prosopography, statistics, etc) is just unjustified opinion. I assume that what's being revised is a previous interpretive reconstruction of events, hopefully in light of the best evidence available at the time.

To conquer, to hold, and to improve--these are three very different proposals. Caesar often conquered areas in Gaul and was forced to take them again because he was unable to make a lasting settlement. Ultimately, he resorted to what was to become the typical Roman strategy: to make a desert and call it peace. Contrast this with the remarkable settlements affected by Caesar's betters--in Asia, in Greece, in Spain, and in Africa.

Updated data from EIA: 9/11 - US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.618 9/18 - US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.497 9/25 - US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.378 10/2 - US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.310 10/9 - US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.261 10/16-US Avg (Regular Grade): $ 2.226 9/11 - US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.670 9/18 - US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.549 9/25 - US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.429 10/2 - US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.360 10/9 - US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.310 10/16-US Avg (All Grades): $ 2.274 Data still consistent with two opposing hypotheses: (1) oil company/GOP price manipulation in anticipation of early November elections, (2) the seasonal fall in prices that occurs every year. The real test will come between early November and December. The first hypothesis sees a gradual return to pre-election prices (when oil companies would feel free to 'gouge' consumers); the second hypothesis sees continuing declines until demand picks up again in the spring. Only time will tell...

Ahhh....the unfulfilled plans of dictators. I wonder when Santa Caesar planned to squeeze in this Dacian campaign? He really already had his plate quite full, what with the plan to build a canal through the isthmus of Corinth, the plan to invade Parthia, the plan to reclaim farmland from the swampy areas of Italy, the plan to end Italian famine, and the plan to bring social justice to all and to all a good night. Like Hitler's plan for a Speer-crafted 1000-year Reich and Stalin's endless 5-year-plans, Caesar's plans suffered from the grandiosity of all newly minted dictators--a flush of excitement in what is easy to imagine. But an imagined goal is really the cheapest part of a plan.

Happy birthday Longbow.

Excellent work Sertorius! What were your primary sources for evaluating Plutarch?

Actually, none of the above. I most like an historical treatment that presents a novel thesis supported by novel evidence. Sometimes, these are called 'revisionist' histories (presumably to distinguish them from those mythical histories which were written by the facts themselves rather than requiring interpretation from some human agent), but I prefer to think of them as 'forensic' (in the sense that they support a debatable thesis with something akin to detective-work). Ward-Perkins' Fall of Rome and Rosenstein's Rome at War are two recent works that fall in this category. My least favorite form of historical work is the biography, where authors too often overhype their subject matter in order to justify the whole effort of the biography in the first place. When was the last biography you read that concluded, "L. Manlius Romanus really wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things, but thanks for reading about him!"? The other aspect of biographies that I dislike is that biographers seldom know or treat seriously the ideas of their subjects and how these ideas led their subjects to do what they did. One outstanding counter-example, however, is Thompson's John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, which is IMO one of the finest works on American history ever written by an American historian.

Leaving aside your appalling support for yet another rotten dictator, Citgo stations in the US set prices independently of their parent company. Thus, Hugo Chavez has no more control over the price of gasoline prices in US Citgo stations than he does over the prices of stations operated under competing franchises. If it were otherwise, I'd be very happy to join the Citgo boycott, which is the more likely cause of your local station's low prices.