sylla
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Posts posted by sylla
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In Caesars case, he already knows who's behind it because how else would Philemon have been found out?
You're plainly reversing the logic; Philemon was first "found" (that's the antecedent) and then the identity of Caesar's enemies was discovered in any suitable way (that's the consequence).
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I think the romans would win, read about the battle of Pydna and you will understand
Yeah.
Didn't the Romans conquer the Hellenistic world? Why exactly is this such a pressing debate?
I would say because the Romans were never able to conquer Persia and the other Asiatic countries as Alexander III did, and because of the clash of national prides; the Greeks never let the Roman forget it.
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Are there are records of Roman masters fathering offspring with slave women? In such a litigious society I would think that there'd be legal language on such relationships. If Roman slaves weren't considered fully human, as many have proposed, wouldn't it have been a common practice for masters to use slave women or men for their pleasure? And what about the children of women fathered by their masters? Their legal status?
The child was a slave if any of his/her parents was a slave while the mother was pregnant.
If both parents were slaves, the issue was the property of the mother's master.
It was a regular method for perpetuating chattel slavery.
In generaL terms, however, the Romans seem to have been less successful than other slave societies, especially the southern United States.
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Suetonius does not explain the slaves motives. In one sentence, he merely writes that Philemon was attempting to poison Caesar and was found out, and that Caesar had him killed without torture.
"The slave Philemon, his amanuensis, who had promised Caesar's enemies that he would poison him,"
I rest my case. The witness can be killed, your honor.
That doesn't state his reasons. It only records that he agreed to commit the crime.
If the quoted sentence is true, the motives for poisoning Caesar were those from his unnamed enemies.
Naturally, such enemies may have come to tell him about his traitorous slave.
Or Philemon might have spontaneously confessed (if he didn't care any more for his life) without any additional stimulus (like torture).
Even under such extremely unlikely scenarios, any Roman politician (or rational human, for that matter) would have proceeded to an exhaustive interrogation by any mean available.
(Even if only to be sure that it was all the truth and nothing but the truth).
In fact, this candid anecdote is atypical enough for Suetonius selecting it as an outstanding example of Caesar's wonderful (but irrational) clemency.
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The only differences are cultural. The ambitions and motives of individual Romans are fundamentally no different than at any other place and time to others.
And this is the huge stumbling block, and the difference between us, Calders. No - they are not! Each individual is a product of his/her society, which society helps shape his/her ambitions and motives. Are you saying that a Roman woman's motives and ambitions are the same as an 18th century Swedish woman's, or a 21st century English woman's for that matter?
Same for the men. Roman men were imbued with a sense of history, duty to the state and Rome's destiny. But was this ALL Romans? Or just those in government? Do we even have evidence to make an informed analysis of the urban poor and their motives/ambitions? Sweeping generalisations do not help us here.
Well, there are some comments we can make, sweeping generalizations though they are, as cultural anthropologists have gone to some effort to identify what are called 'cultural universals'. That is, all human societies have certain features which they share - making jokes, liking music and dance, a tendency for males and females to form long-term unions, a desire for social status, and to raise children to whom we are genetically related. (And I'll add a tendency for teenage males to make idiots of themselves, as I've just come back from watching a bunch of mall-rats doing so.)
Human nature is basically unchanged from the time we left the African savannahs - however, the manner in which it finds expression is indeed radically different from society to society, and history can also show some interesting social pathologies (I'll put Sparta in this group - possibly we should add the aristocracy of the Late Roman Republic as well.)
So yup, I'd say our Roman woman, 21st century lass, western or otherwise, or your average (I stress average) female in any society wants a good marriage, to enjoy social status in her peer group, would prefer wealth to poverty, and would probably like to give that little cow down the road a good slap. And should it happen that the average woman does not want to raise a brood of bonny bouncing children, the human race is in trouble.
Once we recognize these basic human traits, we can see how they find expression in different societies. So I'd say Caldrail's cause is not totally lost!
Apples and oranges are being mixed here.
The "cultural universals" of Maty are indeed anthropology, closer to biology. They essentially mean humans are humans after all. The same as we all have kidneys, lungs and heart, in general terms we all care about our families, need to live in society and learn to behave as the people we have around us. Such traits are fundamentally inherent to our human condition, even if their expression could be greatly affected by the environment.
Augusta is talking about historic events and processes, the quintessential example of the Chaos theory; an extremely complex and dynamical system where the smallest variation of virtually any condition may produce large and unpredictable variations in the long term outcome. The typical Butterfly effect: one flap of its wings could change the course of weather forever; the endless "what-if" scenarios. Contrary to physical sciences, we can never control the conditions of our observations; there are no historic experiments.
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Has anyone read the fictional account of Zenobia, ( I gather it is a trilogy):
The Rebel Queen by Judith Weingarten.
Or the non fictional account:
Palymyra and its Empire: Zenobia's Revoilt againts Rome by Richard Stoneman?
And / or could anyone recommend other non-fiction books about Zenobia?
Aurelian and the Third Century (Alaric Watson, 1999) has a couple of well written chapters on the Palmyrean Dynasty and Kingdom.
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Suetonius does not explain the slaves motives. In one sentence, he merely writes that Philemon was attempting to poison Caesar and was found out, and that Caesar had him killed without torture.
"The slave Philemon, his amanuensis, who had promised Caesar's enemies that he would poison him,"
I rest my case. The witness can be killed, your honor.
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... Then lets make this as obvious as possible. Your logic is yours, not Caesars... Why would Caesar bother to investigate? ... He already knows who his enemies and rivals are... be aware that your own humanitarian views are not those the Romans...
That you can in some way find "humanitarian" my previous post amazes me.
You don't have to acknowledge humanity to dogs or wolves for being aware that they may hurt you if unchecked; and you might be in big trouble if you underestimate their intelligence; there's nothing "modern" in that concept.
Social status is entirely different from rationality; even deep social discrimination is perfectly compatible with the awareness of risk. Long before Eunus and Spartacus, the Romans were permanently paranoid regarding any chance for a slave rebellion (as any other slave society, BTW).
Romans were well aware of the potential cognitive abilities of their slaves; after all, most of their couriers, their physicians and even their children's teachers were or had been slaves, as well as many of their philosophers and literates. In fact, we may find slaves exercising almost any activity.
Recruiting slaves was the ultimate resource for the Roman state in extreme situations, as was the case after Cannae; no fact could be more eloquent.
And last but not least, the were also aware that the slave of today may very well be the freedman of tomorrow.
Caesar's psychology is an issue for another day; I will simply state by now that my impression of Caesar's intelligence is too high to admit he would not have extracted any relevant information from Philemon by any mean at his disposition. In fact, he did it; that's why Suetonius was able to explain us the slave's motives. We have only Suetonius' word against the chance that Caesar used torture to get such trivia.
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Very nice movie except for the plot that I did not like that much.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
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The historian and author Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution) viewed the period from Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon until Augustus Caesar's victory not as two independent civil wars but as a unified Revolution which saw one oligarchy being replaced by another. The French author Henry de Montepelant saw this period as a model for understanding the politics of power.
The study is to use the reference of Ronald Syme and built a intellectual model from this period of Ancient Rome and test it against contemporary politics of power. Is anyone interested in joining this study?
No way can I disagree with Augusta here.
My two cents: I would prefer another approach, more in the Popper
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Actually, I think that it's not so much me misreading my sources as you misreading half a sentence in a post of mine.
My reference is, pure and simple to the fact that the law contained included a prodigal amount of regulations for provincial administration that remained in force for the entirety of the Imperial period.
Regulations govern (in theory) how one does something; regulations about how to administer a province govvern how one does... run a province.
A law containing extensive regulations for how a province is run could be said to "lay out details for how to run a province", to establish how I came to write my own sentence.
Still, I'm glad that our Citizens' Rights debate appears to have finally burnt itself out
Any debate based on pure subjective grounds ought to burn itself out sooner or later; we all knew that beforehand.
It's only when we discuss over objective evidence when we have any hope of getting any useful conclusion.
Paradoxically, nothing strengthens the faith in democracy so much as watching an antidemocratic argumentation done by the exercise of the democratic rights.
Still, I'm glad that now I know a little more.
Such is the glory of internet forums: we have managed to fill some 4 pages with an extensive argument that has established precisely that we... disagree.Actually, our democratic glory is that nobody has to agree about anything; ; the exchange of knowledge and ideas is all we need and all we get.
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We may have found something really interesting... or we may not.
One could make a case study out of the benfits provincials got out of Julius Caesar alone. Had his career ended after his 1st Consulship, he still could have laid claim to one very great deed: the introduction of his Lex Julia, which effectively laid out all the details about how to govern a province, pand was such a successful document that even Cato could find nothing wrong with it, and it was still being used as the basis of law well into the Byzantine period. However, Caesar's career was even more extensive than this, and one should also note his efforts to crack down on tax-farming, his personal reorganization of many of the provinces, and numerous other helpful measures. No loss of political rights here that had barely existed, much gained.Over a hundred chapters long, the Lex Julia de repetundis, also known as the lex Julia repetundarum would remain in force for the entire Imperial Period. Broadly what it contained can be divided into three parts:- Exact definition of all possible offences, and who came within its scope. In addition to the magistrates, the senatorial members of their staff, partularly their legates, were included, as well as senatorial jurymen, plaintiffs, and witnesses who took bribes.
- A new procedure for the conduct of trials.
- A mass of regulations for provincial administration that would into Byzantine times continue to govern how provinces were run.
Obviously the last is the part relevant to your query.
Sadly, I didn't explain myself right; what I was asking you for was sources, provisions and details from this ground-breaking Lex Julia de repetundis, as you described it.
Most Roman laws were quite specific; the various (no less then six) Leges de repetundis or, in plain English, bribery laws (repetundis and related declination forms are Latin verbal nouns meaning the recovery of extorted money) were no exception and, by themselves, they were no mystery; as their name may suggest, they were advanced against the illegal money acquisition by Roman magistrates, especially but not exclusively in the provinces.
The Lex Julia in particular benefited from at least a century of legal precedents, and most of its provisions were adopted from previous Leges; for example:
- improperly retained money should return to the affected victims,
- pecuniary penalties would be defined by litis aestimatio,
- convicted magistrates would lose their rank,
- and they would also be disqualified from being senators and many other charges.
It was indeed a nice Republican law, proposed by the appropriate magistrate, analyzed and approved by the still fully operative Senate (as opposed to later Imperial decrees).
Our main primary source is Cicero, as you can check on the internal link posted by Primus Pilus.
BTW, when Cicero praised this law ("For by that most just and admirable law of Caesar free nations were really and truly free"; In Piso 37; 55 BC) he was trying to convict L. Calpurnius Piso (Caesar's father in law and one of his main supporters) for his shameless extortion of Macedonia; this stuff is regularly called irony, and it made Cicero famous and a nightmare for people like Catilina, Anthony and Caesar.
Corrupted politicians had always posed as anti-corruption activists for obvious reasons; in fact, the last previous Lex de repetundis was decreed by Sulla.
Later Imperial Roman jurists commented extensively in all relevant Republican laws, from the XII tables onward, notoriously as late as Theodosius II and Justinian.
The Lex Julia de repetundis was indeed the last Roman bribery law, mainly because the Imperial system made such laws essentially obsolete; people like Augustus, Claudius, Domitian, Hadrian and Aurelian were not restricted by legal subtleties when they desired to punish their administrators, even for imaginary faults. Besides, the advancement of Roman laws drop drastically under the Empire, as the proposals could now came from only one source.
All in all, as you can see, there's nothing here even remotely similar to a rule-your-own-province Manual for Roman dummies.
Naturally, my first guess would be that either your sources are wrong or you have misunderstood them; however, you may perfectly have access to relevant sources unknown to me.
If you would be kind enough to post any input on sources, provisions, implementation and any other legal details about this law as you originally described it here, that shall be highly appreciated.
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Well, I think we've pretty much reached the stage where we agree on the facts, we just disagree on our interpretation of them. Except for just a few points:
We agree, and we shouldn't be afraid from keeping disagreeing. Taste is subjective.
However, please note that what I compared was the misery of 44 BC versus other years of the Civil War, not with anything else.
In other facts we essentially agree; for any reason you simply don't want to use the right English words. Definitions are objective and the dictionaries are there; that's not for grabs.
For example: Corruption (Webster): "when applied to officers, trustees, etc., signifies the inducing a violation of duty by means of pecuniary considerations".
On the other hand, evidence is objective and can be discussed; for example, the Lex Julia de Repetundis, a nice Republican law from a more than century-long tradition of leges de repetundis against extorsion; a good law indeed, but no where can I see anything that could be depicted as the law that (SIC)
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Thanks for the text, sylla. I am reading it in a Dutch translation. That one slighty more stresses that the boards with the inscriptions caused the Germans more bitterness and rage than the loss of that many people.
From Dutch to English I would translate it as : ' The sight thereof [the boards] filled the Germans with more bitterness and rage than the dead and wounded they had to mourn.'
That is a strong statement I think if the boards were only ment for the Roman legionaries, which I also dare to doubt. Remember also that the Germans were led by Arminius - to all intents and purposes a Roman. In my opinion Germanicus had those boards put up with the intent that it would cause the effect that it seems to have had : away to further humiliate the beaten Germans. It wouldn't have been very effective if none of them could read.[Edit] I am also a bit confused by that mention of Tiberius all of a sudden. We are talking about Germanicus, I think ?
Tacitus presented this maneuver as a wise strategy from Germanicus and his legate Tubero (ibid 20) for deliberately provoking the Cherusci. I would think the trophy mound as a whole (and not just the boards), including the spoils of their fallen comrades, was the intended raging sight for all the Germans (and not just for the clans inscribed in the boards). Even if some former auxiliaries and other Cheruscans were able to read Latin, I doubt many of them would have been close enough to read the inscriptions. In any case, the whole picture must have been rather eloquent for even the less literate men.
The inscriptions were undoubtedly done for the Roman posterity; after the subsequent second victory, Germanicus "raised a pile of weapons, with a legend boasting that "the army of Tiberius Caesar, after subduing the nations between the Rhine and the Elbe, had consecrated that memorial to Mars, to Jupiter, and to Augustus"." (Ibid 22)
From the very beginning, all victories of the Imperial Army were systematically considered as the acting Emperor's triumphs; occasionally, some other member of the Imperial dynasty (like Germanicus) may share some of the glory. As usual, Tacitus tries to abuse Tiberius via Germanicus; however, this was the standard practice, and the unilateral claim of a personal triumph from any commander would have carried the obvious risk of being considered a sign of rebellion.
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Augustus had created a post service for the relay of important messages, magistrates, taxes etc.
How were the private letters and packages sent across the empire? Important people had their own messengers but this is clearly too expansive for the many letters that commoners send.
Such couriers were called tabellarii, usually slaves or freedmen; if for any reason you were unable to use your own, you ought to pay the services of the tabellarii from the publicani, the private contractors that collected taxes and did other services for the government; Cicero recommended some of them to Atticus for answering his letters (Att 5.15.3). Sometimes the merchants were able to transport the mail too. Private men often have to share the cost of this service with their friends; essentially, you were on your own. With the advance of the Empire, the local administration of some prominent cities eventually hired their own municipal tabellarii.
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...Tacitus, Annals II, 18, 2 and II, 19, 1 about the battle of Idistaviso during Germanicus' campaign in Germania. That seems to indicate to me that not only the legionaries could read, but the Germans as well. Why else would they consider boards put up after the battle with inscriptions to commemorate it so offensive ?
From the Loeb translation (Bill Thayer's site)
"It was a brilliant, and to us not a bloody, victory. The enemy were slaughtered from the fifth hour of daylight to nightfall, and for ten miles the ground was littered with corpses and weapons. Among the spoils were found the chains which, without a doubt of the result, they had brought in readiness for the Romans.
After proclaiming Tiberius Imperator on the field of battle, the troops raised a mound, and decked it with arms in the fashion of a trophy, inscribing at the foot the names of the defeated clans.
The sight affected the Germans with an anguish and a fury which wounds, distress, and ruin had been powerless to evoke. Men, who a moment ago had been preparing to leave their homesteads and migrate across the Elbe, were now eager for battle and flew to arms. Commons and nobles, youth and age, suddenly assailed the Roman line of march and threw it into disorder. "
The Germans' frustration and rage after such a sight was understandable, but such rage certainly didn't imply that any German was actually able to read.
What Tacitus undisputedly implied here is that at least some Roman soldiers were able to write.
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I suspect most people would be curious to discover the reason for betrayal. However, you also need to realise that most of us aren't of the same mindset as Caesar. He isn't a man to prevaricate. He considers the risk and dismisses it as an obstacle to be overcome in the furtherment of his objectives. He acts. He does things. He believes he can succeed in his endeavours.
His slaves, as described by Suetonius, are possessions and whilst he may not have been as cruel as some owners, he clearly doesn't have any humane leanings such as Claudius. The period in which Caesar lived was the high point of slavery. The wars had brought in thousands. Delos had apparently traded ten thousand in one day. Labour was cheap, faceless, and as we see in the earlier root causes of some slave revolts, so plentiful that some owners bought more than they could afford to care for.
Caesar therefore isn't concerned with the petty motives of his possessions. They aren't human beings, certainly not comparable to a man of breeding and status as Caesar is. They are expected to be obedient and loyal. If not, they are dispatched. Why would he need to discover the reason for a slaves betrayal? Caesar is already well aware of his enemies, their activities, and to ignore or be unaware of such things in the political bearpit of late Republican Rome would invite an assassination.
Since a slave cannot by definition have any high handed motive of his own, and indeed Philemon is acting on the behalf of others, his motive is clear without need of further investigation. Therefore, Caesar is not concerned with Philemons desires. He is concerned solely that it happened, and therefore Philemon must be punished.
Criminal investigation doesn't seem to be our strong point by now.
At the risk of overstating the obvious, the only rational choice for Caesar (or any other slaveowner from any time or place) after a criminal intent from any of his slaves must have been the utter determination of the motives by any available mean, and certainly not because of his concern for the slave's sensibilities.
Needless to say, the Romans (like everyone else) were perfectly aware that any slave could have motives of any kind like any human, irrespectively of their legal status.
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If no one of us is saying that anything is perfect, we are in a good way. The Roman Republic was at the end quite far from being the perfect democracy; from the very beginning, the Empire was rather close of being the absolute autocracy. The definitive right of any citizenry is the vote; any autocratic "respect" to such right is just an oxymoron. The right of disagreeing is by itself another typical democratic trait, and even if we have not restricted ourselves in using it, no one questions that Caesar became an autocrat, simply because the evidence available here and elsewhere is insurmountable.
The exercise of our right to disagree has changed our predominant topic; we are now mostly comparing the relative benefits of the Republic (democracy) versus the Empire (autocracy). BTW, our use of this right is a positive action, and actions speak louder than words, now and ever. In any democracy we have indeed the right for the paradoxical choice of living under autocracy (the opposite is evidently impossible), as the German people did in 1933, and one notes that as long as the Nazi autocrat was not overly insane, the system functioned far better than its Republican predecessor. Once it happened so, Hitler did stir up a lot of angst, to put it lightly. By definition, all autocracies lack the checks and balances developed to protect us from the potentially deleterious effects of the abusive use of power by our rulers.
A critical major part of the argument here that definitely comes down on the side of anti-Empire is that it couldn't control the army; it was the unopposed army which controlled the Roman state after the demise of the Republic. . The careers of men like Caesar, Pompey, Octavius/Augustus and even Brutus and Cassius make this all too clear (Sulla was a more complex case) ; they ruled just because they were active commanders backed by huge armies; from the late Julio-Claudians on, the rulers were openly selected by the Army. Such were the significant foundations for an imperial system, and even those could hardly have been attributed to Caesar alone; any rebel Roman general since Marius used their soldiers as a political factor, and the Roman Republic was perfectly aware of the risks inherent to an autonomous military force since its very beginning; arguably, it's plain common sense.
How can Caesar be seen as anything but Republican? Not only was he the product of centuries-long Republican society and family; it was not just that Caesar thrived from the use and abuse of the Republican rules. Each and any one of Caesar
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This is interesting. I found this in the book, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome by Donald G. Kyle, pgs. 168-169
Thanks,DD.
Kyle indeed seems to be a rather interesting source; he quotes literally myriads of non-political crucifixions, for example, Scipio's on Roman deserters (obviously citizens) in 146 BC at
the siege of Carthage.
I don't think any more evidence on the high prevalence of non-political crucifixions will be required.
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Another point that's going to need a Bible scholar to resolve definitively... Let's agree to disagree why Jesus was crucified, but what about the two gentlemen he was crucified alongside? The English version of the Bible says 'thieves'. We might stretch this to 'bandits' or even, to get technical, Jewish 'listim'.
However, if these are defined in the Latin version as 'ladri' (thieves) then we have to accept that in a book designed for a Roman audience, in a section which those writing it wanted to be as credible as possible, people are reported as being crucified by the Roman authorities for being thieves.
The four Gospels were originally written in koine Greek, which I can't read.
As explained in previous posts, bona fide political rebels like the zealots were regularly called "robbers" or equivalent terms under the legal nomenclature of the time, widely attested by Josephus; this would be analogous to the Nazi terminology for the European resistance.
My position is still the same (BTW, in agreement with Maty): the relevant point for this thread is not if the zealots and the WWII partisans were regular thieves or not (which they obviously weren't) but rather that the use of such denomination allowed both the Romans and the Nazi to punish their opponents; ergo, the crux was as valid an option for regular thieves in Roman Judea as a firing squad was in the Nazi occupied Europe.
This passage clearly came from Mark, as the three synoptic Gospels (but not John) called
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This girl sure likes building... and destroying...
A piece of trivia from Ms. Glynn:
"...in Nero's Golden House, the Domus Aurea, they perfected the use of concrete."
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Were we studying marriages in our regular classical sources (ie, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.), we would find that almost all of them were of political nature, involving the families of famous men and women and their close associates.
That doesn't mean the regular anonymous Roman mob remained unmarried for life; it simply means that our scholar annals and biographies couldn't care less about the prosopography of "Caius Populus" and his wife.
At the risk of overstating the obvious, the vast majority of the Roman sources available to us are political in nature; unsurprisingly, their record of specific social events is heavily biased. That applies the same to marriages as to crucifixions. That's why it's so hard to find the detailed description on how "Caius Populus" crucified his slave.
Anyway, here comes another curious account about a non-political crucifixion, this time affecting a Roman citizen (Suetonius; Galba 9,1):
" (Galba) crucified a man for poisoning his ward, whose property he was to inherit in case of his death; and when the man invoked the law and declared that he was a Roman citizen, Galba, pretending to lighten his punishment by some consolation and honour, ordered that a cross much higher than the rest and painted white be set up, and the man transferred to it."
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Well, all right; I'm willing to concede that my discussion of the sources isn't relevant to this conversation. However, I still maintain that the entire Caesar/crucifixion-of-the-pirates story isn't relevant because it wasn't state sanctioned.
Then, I'm willing to agree that we disagree.
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Sandy ash produced by a volcano that erupted 456,000 years ago might have helped a huge ancient Roman complex survive intact for nearly 2,000 years despite three earthquakes, according to research presented last week in Rome. X-ray analysis of a wall sample from the Trajan's Market ruins in Rome showed that the mortars used by ancient Romans contained stratlingite, a mineral known to strengthen modern cements. "It is the first time that stratlingite is recognized in ancient mortars," Lucrezia Ungaro, the Trajan Forum archaeological chief, told Discovery News. "This is amazing, and shows the technical expertise of Roman builders..."
...read the full article at the Discovery Channel
This seems like a quite creative explanation for the secret of the famous Roman cement; it would be interesting to check if there is additional confirmatory evidence for this thesis.
slave-master relations in Rome
in Romana Humanitas
Posted · Edited by sylla
Lex Aelia-Sentia, commented by Gaius (Institutiones, I, 84).
The child from a slave father was servile, even if the mother was born free.