M. Porcius Cato

Thanks for the pointer Horatius. The coinage reform of Diocletian is a bit puzzling. If the old currency contained metal and was not acceptable as legal tender, the old coins ought to have been melted down to provide for the new ones. Did this not happen? If not, then the new coinage would simply have increased the money supply, which is the opposite of what you'd want.

I'm not saying that he said it. That was completely my idea If Mrs Cato ever finds lipstick on my collar, I'll have her call you.

Can I use the law of gravity to judge whether they knew that tossing people over the Tarpeian Rock would prove fatal?

Aurelian the Hammer--and he actually defeated enemies of Rome rather than the senate and people of Rome itself. To my mind, it's self-evidently anti-Roman to proclaim the defeat of Romans more splendid than the defeat of lunatic potentates like Zenobia, Queen of the East.

But unless they're virtually uncontroversial, modern examples don't help your point. More importantly, if you force yourself to argue the same points strictly with Roman examples, we'll all learn something interesting even if we disagree with your conclusions.

Antinous as Hadrian's heir? Right.... I'll bet he said that about all his lovers! Seriously, does anyone really believe that those lovingly crafted statues were meant merely to commemorate the loss of a potential heir? All Rome must have been rolling their eyes and sniggering at the old sugar daddy.

Autonomy protected by a client king? Nothing struck you as odd when writing that?

So, to combat inflation, Diocletian: issued a low-species (i.e., low value) currency, a high-species (i.e., high value) currency, wage controls, and price controls. Wow, that man needed an economist! I don't know whether to refer him to Gresham's Law, the Quantity Theory of Money, or something really radical. In any case, he seems to have operated under several conflicting intuitions about the causes of inflation, and he just tried everything. Do we know which reform came first and lasted longest?

If we can leave aside the druids for a minute... the suppression of the Bacchants strikes me as a quite interesting case. According to Rives, this suppression reflected the senate's desire to draw "a line at the point where private pursuits began to affect people

Sure, but the facts were present to be discovered by anyone interested in reforms. Let's put it another way. If Diocletian were an honest but mistaken reformer, why didn't he attempt to implement his reforms on a limited scale before imposing them on everyone? Or--why didn't previous emperors attempt wage and price controls? My explanation--that Diocletian was cavalier about the consequences of his behavior--neatly accounts for both how widely he implemented his novel practices and why previous emperors never tried anything so bad. Yes, the prior clipping was the cause of the inflation that Diocletian was attempting to combat. If Diocletian increased the metal content of coinage, it's news to me. My recollection was that he debased the coinage still further, but I'm happy to be corrected.

This isn't my area of interest, but Fergus Millar is widely known for his contribution to the area. See the third volume of his fantastic "Rome, the Greek World, and the East" series: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East.

What becomes necessary is a short but pronounced restriction of the money supply. Price controls only increase shortages and beget the need for more controls, which begets the need for further restrictions, and then you quickly find yourself on a road to serfdom. Come to think of it--Hayek's thesis is literally PERFECT for what happened under Diocletian. I'll not dispute contemporary economics in this forum. There were several alternatives open to Diocletian. Most importantly, he needed to restore the value of coinage so that fewer coins were needed for the same goods. Rebasing the currency would have have helped enormously here. Second, several steps were necessary to increase productivity so that more goods were chasing the fixed supply of gold that existed (which would also deflate prices). The most important step would have been to have increased public order, peace, and security throughout the empire by turning local forces on brigands instead of neighboring lands. Greed did not cause the inflation of the era. There is no good reason to belive that the men of Diocletian's time were any more (or less) greedy than they had been prior to, during, or after the period of inflation. In contrast, examination of the coins from this period show massive clipping, debased precious metal content, and similar moves that had the effect of devaluing the currency. All of these factors were widely known to cause higher prices. Any moron who tried to buy a loaf of bread with a bunch of clipped coins knew he had to pay more than the guy who tried to buy a loaf of bread with non-clipped coins.

Ciaran Hinds is my favorite Caesar. He has the charm, ease, dignity, arrogance, vanity, and flashes of cold rage that could, in two consecutive instants, attract and repel with equal force. Patrick Stewart was a very good nomination for a Caesar. The one contemporary portrait we have of Caesar looks quite a bit like Stewart, but I doubt Stewart could ever project the haughtiness and humanity that Hinds did. Hinds was so good I *almost* felt pity for Caesar. Almost.

Interesting article, and with baited breath, I'm waiting to hear about the esthetic changes that attended the end of civil wars.

Hadrian obviously adored his boy Antinous. It's hard to imagine how they could tell Hadrian's story without mentioning that particular fancy.

In addition to the insignia of the fasces and the augury, the Etruscans also seem to have introduced the rituals involved in a treaty, a declaration of war, and the surrender of a foreign people (Livy 1.24, 32, and 48); land-division, priesthoods, appeal to the people from a judicial verdict (Livy 1.26.5-14); and the census and comitia centuriata (Livy, 1. 42.5-44.1). As far as the Hoplite fighting style, there is evidence of hoplite armour being depicted on fragments of terracotta friezes from Etruria and Latium, but there is no evidence of the formation fighting that is depicted on the protocorinthian "Chigi" jug imported to Etruria from Greece. It may be that the hoplite armored troops were simply members of an elite band of fighters (the suodales) who had the wealth to use Greek armor.

Diocletian's reforms amounted to feudalism with all its attendant evils. Whether his motives were right or not is open to rank speculation, but I have a hard time believing in the good intentions of anyone with such a cavalier attitude toward foreseeable consequences. Wage and price controls inevitably lead to shortages and fail to curb inflation, which is caused almost entirely by monetary policies (such as debasing currency). Moreover, the Roman economy -- like all advanced economies-- was heavily dependent on specialization and free trade, which Diocletian upset enormously. As far as I can tell, Diocletian was an uneducated rube. His asendancy was in direct proportion to the waning influence of Hellenic ideals and everything that made Rome great.

Get a Mac--they just work (and they run Windows too).

As a preliminary, I should say that I don't think that the writings of historians alone will provide high-quality estimates of population sizes and changes in those populations over time. Basically, a human population (like the population of any species) is the result of many interacting factors which were of no concern to ancient historians, including birth rate, infant mortality, the effective reproductive age of females, availability of males, disease, vitamins, and so forth. A change in just one of these factors can have an enormous effect on population size. For example, if the average age at which women have their first child increases from 16 to 24, a population can go from growth to decline, a feature one can see all over Europe and the developing world. Moreover, this variable is strongly related--at least in the modern world--to maternal education, which can significantly cut into a woman's reproductive longevity. Turning to the ancient world, we do have some rough estimates of population growth before, during, and after the establishment of the principate. The 'before' statistics, discussed at length in Rosenstein's "Rome at War", depict startling increases in population during the Republic--very near to exponential, which is the theoretic limit of population growth. Given a continuation of the same exponential trend, one would expect larger year-to-year changes in population size over time, thereby giving rise to larger gains in population during the principate than the republic REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT LIVING CONDITIONS IMPROVED. Now, did the population continue to grow exponentially from the end of the Punic Wars through the end of Augustus' reign? Clearly not. Several civil wars devastated the population of Italy. Whether peace brought a resumption of exponential population growth or not is an empirical question, but I think there a few reasons to suspect that it didn't. First, we have Augustus' own concerns on the matter. Recall how frightfully anxious he was that the equites and senators of the period reproduce? (Keith Hopkins' work on this topic, btw, was seminal and is worth looking at.) The Romans had several methods of reproductive control, and they used them liberally. My bet is that if you look at the names appearing on Roman coins in this era, the great and prolific gentes of the past (such as the Cornelia) will be represented much less than in the past. Second, we can look at the growth of new Roman colonies. If the population of Roman citizens were growing exponentially, there should have been much greater colonization than previously. To my knowledge, however, this was not the case--indeed, the growth of the empire as a whole seems to have been nearly checked. In contrast, over a mere period of 50 years of the Republic, new roads of Rome branched out over an area that was never matched since all imperium was granted to one man.

Verres, Hortensius, Cato, Catiine, Clodius--Cicero took them all on. Rather hard to see how Cicero could have spent a lifetime in the law courts not "standing up to anyone"....

I know of no ancient source attesting to Cicero's being offered anything by the triumvirs.

Sounds more like Bushido than anything Greek to me. Can you provide any examples where Spartans were killed for failing to win in war? Seems like a speedy way to deprive your nation of an army.

Mosley not only met Hitler, when he was married to Diana of the infamous Mitford sisters, Hitler and Goebbels were the only invited guests (though it is strange to call Goebbels a 'guest', given that the wedding took place in his living room).

In the event of a loss at the BoB, wouldn't someone like Oswald Moseley (Eighth Earl of Sidcup?) have been a threat to British independence? He was a frightful fascist and lifelong European unionist. Backed by the Nazis and their sympathasizers in the House of Lords, what would have prevented Moseley from turning a merely spineless government of appeasers into a full-fledged Vichy-style 'neutral state'?

According to the review, Cicero had chick peas engraved onto dishes as a play on his name. Does anyone know the source for that? BTW, it was nice to see this excerpt from the speech against Verres: "If you, Verres, had been made a prisoner in Persia or the remotest part of India, and were being dragged off to execution, what cry would you be uttering, except that you were a Roman citizen? What then of this man whom you were hurrying to his death? Could not that statement, that claim of citizenship, have saved him for an hour, for a day, while its truth was checked? No it could not