Guaporense

Alexander was probably straight. That's because he was hugely aggressive, and his military feats were the product of his aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is heavily influenced by hormone levels and hormone levels also influence sexual preference. Therefore, Alexander the Great was more manly than most men. And yes, there was such thing as gay and straight in ancient Greece, as there is today. Sexual preferences are not the product of culture. However culture can mask the sexual preferences of minorities, like gays and bisexuals. The notion that culture determines everything including sexual preferences doesn't stand on close scrutiny. It's the product of modern Marxian influence on social sciences. Oliver Stone is the product of this "leftist" influenced culture and his film about Alexander distorts reality in favor of this type of thinking.

Alexander the Great campaign in the area was a consolidation operation, where he consolidated his conquests. This can be compared in the 20th century with Germany's campaign's in Balkans and Greece, in WW2, when they consolidated their territory before trying to invade the Soviet Union. Though these campaigns can be compared to Alexander's campaigns involving the consolidation of Greece and northern territories, before the invasion of the Persian Empire.

The reduction in wars and piracy may have reduced the number of ships sunk, reducing the number of wrecks to be found later. However, there would be other factors favoring the earlier period: in the empire more ships carried marble for the construction of monuments, such ships would tend to be found more easily than ships carrying wheat. Therefore, these types of distortions would tend to favor both periods. We cannot say for sure how a graph with the distortions evened out would look. Also, the data looks like to be quite consistent over time, increasing and decreasing in a smooth way. However, other data, since there are 3 types of data presented in that graph, are strongly correlated with the shipwrecks data. So, only if all the data is distorted in favor of Augustus' age that you can claim that the shipwreck data is distorted by wars and piracy. This is a graph of the rates of change in the relevant variables: You can clearly see that their rate of growth followed a very sharp pattern: it started growing at near 1% a year in the early 3rd century BCE, and growth rates continually decreased, until by the late 4th century, the economy was collapsing. This data applies to both the shipwreck data and the lead pollution levels. Also, if you wish to have a very long run view of the shipwrecks data, I can post this one, from 2500 BCE to 1500 CE, 4000 years of maritime trade: It really shows the rise and decline of classical civilization. Also, in the middle ages, trade in the Mediterranean appear much smaller than Hellenistic and Roman times. Though that is partly explained by the fact that amphoras are much easier to spot than barrels when divers look out. Too bad that I don't have a long run lead pollution graph.

Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers. The bulk of the population was rural (maybe 80% or more) and I don't believe peasants can be called unskilled workers especially because they were rarely wage workers in preindustrial societies. They can more easily be described as tenants, small landowners, people with rights on community lands, long term skilled employees and a myriad other relations that created a very complicated rural system of land and labor relations before capitalism. Probably the only unskilled workers employed in farming were those used for occasional, larger projects or for seasonal work like harvest when the usual resources of labor were insufficient. The study exemplifies unskilled workers as " i.e. farm labourers, camel and mule drivers, water carriers, and sewer cleaners". With the exception of the farm laborers I mentioned above the other categories don't look large enough to have an impact. Slavery can reduce the price of labor because removes choice (for example many freeman could refuse to do a work like sewer cleaning pushing the wage up but a slave can be forced to do it) and because they can be kept at a subsistence minimum. Of course this must be correlated with the price of slaves and the ability to control them. The bulk of farm laborers were unskilled workers, because they didn't have much human capital invested. What is human capital? A skilled worker may know how to read, a unskilled don't. Human capital is the capital invested in education and courses. Workers would be skilled or not depending on their human capital invested. If they are wage laborers or tenants or small landholders, it doesn't matter according to this definition. They are workers as long as they are a part of the workforce, they don't need to be a part of the labor market. Which one of the two articles? Both are papers made by the leading authorities of Roman economic and social conditions in the world today. If you mention the second: "The Economy of the Early Roman Empire", well that article was produced based on work on a dozen different articles before, the author synthesized his findings into that paper. The sources for his data are in his sources at the end of the paper.

Another paper on the Economy of the Roman Empire is by the MIT economic historian, Peter Temin: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533006776526148 Very good paper, he concludes that Roman income levels were comparable to Europe around 1700 CE.

That's the Malthusian trap. The theory advanced in the paper linked above this post is that Roman incomes may have been higher in the earlier centuries, but population grew and decreased per capita incomes, reducing wages. Yes, I have verified that they are far lower than the purchasing power of wages in Pompey, for example. True, comparing wages in terms of silver across time is useless as the purchasing power of silver varies greatly. Though comparing wages in terms of silver across cities and countries at the same time-frame may yield interesting information. Better is a index of wages in terms of wheat. However we don't have detailed information for the Roman Empire as whole, but we have Roman Egypt and wages there were quite low, we also have good data for Ancient Athens, and wages in Athens were apparently higher than in any other place in the world before the industrial revolution, from places that we have sources. Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

Well, archaeological evidence suggests that the economic peak of the Roman Empire was during the reign of Augustus. One can even defend the thesis that by the second century AD the Empire was already economically weaker than before. By the fourth century, archaeological remains, specially data on the number of shipwrecks, suggests that the volume of trade in the mediterranean was way lower in the fourth century than in the firsts. The archaeological evidence supports the idea that the economic peak of ancient classical civilization was during the first century: Source: In Search for Roman Economic Growth, Walter Scheidel, 2008, Princeton/Stanford working papers on classics. By the 4th century, the classical civilization apparently declined to the same levels of the 3dr century BCE. The eastern started to decline even earlier, according to the author: "Thus, the notion of one-off growth is consistent with the fact that the most recent survey of datable shipwrecks from the eastern Mediterranean finds that wrecks from the last three centuries BCE (n=57) are almost twice as numerous as those from the first three centuries CE (n=32), suggesting that growth stalled even earlier in the East.", page 25 of the paper. In the west growth stalled in the first centuries, in the east it stalled even earlier, according to the archaeological evidence. Link for the paper: http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/060808.pdf

The wages in the price edict were lower than the real wages 300 years before. Also, they are wages in a price edict, they reflected not the actual conditions of the empire but the conditions that the emperors wished these prices to be. In effect, they wanted to reduce wages to stop inflation, that was the objective of this edict. So, one shouln't use these numbers thinking they represented the true average purchasing power of worker's wages, which were probably higher.

Priene is a site with very good evidences of houses. Look for papers describing this place.

The 17 to 1 outnumbering is always mythical Greek exaggeration. It is true that the Persians outnumbered the Greeks and had superior resources, but these discrepancies are too high to be true (or to be true and the Greeks winning simultaneously), partly because if the Greek army was quite substantial them the Persian army would be too large to be possible given the logistics of the time. I think that the battle was very important. Without Greek victory there, the outcome of the Persian invasion was still in doubt. But one has to remember that Greek cities under Persian rule also had developed and flourished culturally, so it would not be impossible for the Hellenic civilization to flower under Persian rule. It would represent a cost, though, in terms of tribute to the Empire. So it would flower with less power, and Athens would not be such great center that it was, because Athens emerged as the great center of Greece because of their little empire.

According to modern research the classical warm period spanned from 200 BCE to 100 CE, the period that corresponds to the greatest economic prosperity of classical civilization, according to the proxy economic data available from archaeological research. During this period incomes increased, while mortality rates decreased as the population had access to better food and sanitary conditions. After that there was a colling period, that reduced agricultural productivity and combined with increased population, meant a drastic decline in real per capita incomes. The empire became poorer in per capita terms, and this increased the difficulties in maintaining professional armed forces. Proxy data also support the thesis of a continuous decline in economic prosperity after the first century CE. However, I think that there also other important factors involved in the decline and fall of the roman empire. This process wasn't the product of only 1 factor. And yes, the barbarians weren't superpowerful tribes that managed to defeat the powerful Roman Empire: the classical civilization was much weaker in the 5th century than it was 300-400 years earlier, the barbarians only took advantage of the dying state of the empire. Other factors that I think were important to explain the fall of the empire: 1 - Inflation. High rates of inflation served to reduce the use of money as a means of exchange. Without money, civilization losses productivity due to increased transaction costs. 2 - Price controls. Instead of responding to the threat of inflation by curbing the increase in money supply, the authorities simply put price controls in effect. These price controls simply killed the markets for those goods, as the production costs rose with inflation of the money supply but the selling prices didn't increase, as they were frozen. 3 - Division into two empires. The division of the Roman Empire into two separate empires meant that the richer eastern half of the empire couldn't support the western half in times of emergency. Traditionally, the eastern provinces of the empire paid the taxes, while the western provinces consumed these taxes in the form of legions to protect the frontier, the British province was an example, it had 3 legions (nearly 10% of the Roman Army) but only 1% of the empire's population. With the division of the empire, the western half couldn't draw into the vast eastern resources anymore. The eastern half survived for many centuries more. 4 - Increased bureaucracy. The costs of increased bureaucracy in times when the empire had less resources than in their once glorious past were a cost the empire couldn't afford.

Anything that has a beginning has an end. Therefore intelligent romans could notice that their empire would end someday. However, in the first and second centuries, this possibility was remote and only applied for a distant future, like in 200-300 years.

These statistics are almost certainly wrong, as least regarding the provinces of the Roman Empire. They put Egypt with 4 million people and Turkey with 6 million, Italy has a lest minimalist figure of 7 million, with is the lower point for the estimates on the population of Italy. Greece doesn't register on the map, while it was one of the most densely populated regions in the world during classical times. Overall, since this work is based on Angus Maddison estimates, and his estimates tend to be low for classical times, so that if fits his whig view of history: as process of continuous growth in direction of the modern world. Maddison estimated the total population of the Roman Empire as 45 million people in the second century, the lowest estimate that has ever been produced for that time frame. Other less minimalistic estimates put the population of Italy at 12 million, the population of Egypt at 8 million, Turkey at 15 million, the population of the Empire at 70-90 million.

Well, during the Persian wars the Greek cities were able to defeat the Persians. Their political fragmentation didn't prevent their union against a common external threat. Versus Rome I think that if all Hellenistic kingdoms united they would probably defeat them. Considering that Rome in the 3rd and 2sc centuries BCE was much smaller than the combined set of the Greek kingdoms. I think that they didn't fight Rome with much "will", or gave everything they got. Maybe because Roman rule wasn't that bad. Anyway, there are many similarities between the process of political centralization for the Romans and for China, both involved the political unification of a civilization. For the case of Rome, it involved the unification of the mediterranean/classical civilization while the Qin unified all Chinese kingdoms. However, the Roman process was more complex, because it involved unifying lands that had more physical barriers of isolation, like oceans and mountains over a larger area, while China was a very compact and each kingdom was compressed into one another. However, this created a very competitive environment, were every kingdom fought for survival. Also, the Roman Empire was quite more significant historically, because in the case of China, the political unification was quite a matter of time: Since their civilization was spread by only 1-1,5 thousand kilometers, it was easier to conquer the place.

Were they really decadent? The Hellenistic world was probably the most advanced civilzation of the time. As for the ease at which they were beaten militarily by the Romans, there was something about the Macedonian system that made it exquisitely vulnerable to the Roman legions. Many of the late Hellenistic kingdoms still had great success against numerous opponents, but they fell apart against the Romans and were subject to wholesale slaughter. True, they were advanced but "weak". And while the hellenistic world was advanced, their military wasn't very good. At least compared to Rome and Carthage. I think that one important factor was the fact that the Romans mobilized a very large proportion of their population to the military, about 10-15% of the adult male population of Italy was in the military during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. I have read that all of the warring states in China mobilized their populations to the same extend as Rome. Maybe the other mediterranean powers didn't mobilize their populations to the military like Rome and the warring states.

Second to an essay in this book: Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford Studies in Early Empires) The Romans had a relatively easy process of conquering their enemies, compared to Qin, with faced enemies with more or less equal capabilities. Second to the essay, from the 3th century BCE onwards the only real enemy that Rome faced was Hannibal. After the second Punic war, the Romans pretty much had only time between them and the conquest of the mediterranean, their enemies were only weak barbarians and the decadent Hellenistic kingdoms with depended on mercenaries. While Qin had to gradually build up and develop military mobilization techniques to be able to muster the militaries capable of defeating their enemies, whose armies consisted of citizens, like the Romans. They had to fight on much ever terms against enemies of comparable size and power. Do you guys think that this was (remotely) true? I don't.

What interested me about ancient Rome was the ascent and decline process involved. It was something quite unique in history. Maybe only equaled with the iron dark age (between 1100 BCE and 800 BCE).