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M. Porcius Cato

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Everything posted by M. Porcius Cato

  1. None of the portraits posted above match the coin depictions of Caesar as well as the best-attested 'Tusculum' portrait of Caesar, which portrays the darling of Venus with his characteristic vulture neck and balding pate.
  2. I expressed my doubts on this identification when the announcement was first made. Here's another doubter too (Mary Beard), expressing my sentiment perfectly in "The face of Julius Caesar? Come off it!"
  3. M. Porcius Cato

    New Roman History Books (November 2009)

    Hard to believe a whole book could be written about the Lusitanian war...
  4. M. Porcius Cato

    Lustrum by Robert Harris

    Harris definitely portrays the whole Cicero -- brilliant and sometimes downright stupid, brave and sometimes utterly cowardly, heroic and sometimes just despicable. It's Cicero's better side that (rightfully) captures most of the limelight in Imperium, especially the prosecution of Verres, where Cicero's brilliance, bravery, and heroism were in full force. Yet, one of the more dramatic scenes in the first novel concerns the deep disappointment of an idealistic young Stoic who had supported Cicero and who witnessed with horror one of Cicero's particularly ugly Gaul-baiting speeches.
  5. M. Porcius Cato

    Hating gladiators less...

    Chariot racing and gladiatorial games had very similar histories, and the evidence is just too fragmentary and unreliable to know how they caught fire. They both originated with the Etruscans -- long before Roman written history began. Evidence of exhibition of either type of sport is spotty throughout the monarchical and republican eras -- although we know about some spectacular and peculiar games, we really have no idea how often the Circus Maximus was used for chariot racing, how often gladiatorial games were held for funereal rites, let alone how popular either sport was for any given year (since we can't compare the gross receipts for the two types of sports). Yes, they were both exhibited more frequently than ever as Augustus revived and cultivated many ancient festivals, such as the Secular Games -- but that doesn't really tell us much about how popular either sport was either.
  6. M. Porcius Cato

    Roman Population Theories

    I'm kind of curious too about this 'ritual hoard' idea. On the one hand, the Romans were such a hard-nosed punch of pragmatists that it just beggars belief to think that they buried coin hoards to appease some deity. And when they were pious (which they sometimes were), when did they ever show it by burying *money*? What would a god do with money? Stinking entrails -- that makes sense... but money??
  7. M. Porcius Cato

    Roman Population Theories

    One way of assessing the validity of the coin hoards as a proxy for political violence is to compare it to other proxies like prosopographical evidence. PP and I did a little study a while back looking at all the named victims of political violence in the literary sources, and I made a chart to illustrate the findings. Here's our chart (133 BCE - 44 BCE): Now here's the chart from PNAS (200BCE - 0 CE): The two sources--numismatic and prosopographic--align rather nicely. Note especially the two spikes surrounding the Marius/Sulla conflict (92-80) and Caesar's civil war (49-44). Moreover, the Italian hoards provide evidence of political turmoil (surround the Social War) that the prosopographical evidence neglects. In my view, the PNAS article was superb and is a model of what modern ancient history ought to be.
  8. M. Porcius Cato

    Lod Mosaic Footprints

    Actually, were they? Chattel slavery has a high mortality rate even for adults -- seems like this would be a wasteful use of child slaves.
  9. M. Porcius Cato

    Lod Mosaic Footprints

    Best I recall, it was sweeping around the farm, carrying things, and light housework. Also seem to recall that there was a special down-filled garment for children of this age so that if they fell over, the pillow-like dress would catch their fall. The point of this labor wasn't really to put them to much production as much as to prepare them for their later responsibilities.
  10. M. Porcius Cato

    Surnames of the Porcii

    Happy to repost it. I'll look at expanding it to include the other Porcii, but I'm a bit dubious whether the sources will tell us how they're all connected.
  11. M. Porcius Cato

    Lod Mosaic Footprints

    Child labor has existed for millenia and has only recently become a scandal of Dickensian proportions. Even as recently as John Locke's day, children began work as early as age 3. If anything were to be unusual about child labor in the Roman world, it would be that we don't see much more evidence of it than this one small footprint.
  12. M. Porcius Cato

    Surnames of the Porcii

    Thanks Nephele! This is wonderful -- I wonder if there are any connections between the Porcii Catones and other gens-mates. Also (and maybe I missed it in your article), Cato the Elder seemed to think that the Porcii were of Sabine origins, something he was strangely proud of, and also liked to think of M Curius Dentatus as having some sort of family connection. Did you come across anything like that in your sources?
  13. M. Porcius Cato

    Lustrum by Robert Harris

    Thanks for the update. Can't wait to read it! I loved both of Harris' Roman novels.
  14. M. Porcius Cato

    Surnames of the Livii

    Hooray!
  15. M. Porcius Cato

    Surnames of the Livii

    I always wondered about the origin of Drusus, so thanks for another wonderful installment Nephele! (Oh, and happy birthday!)
  16. M. Porcius Cato

    Decline of the Nobiles

    Nobiles ("the known") were the senators whose family-members had climbed the highest rungs of the cursus honorum. How many modern-day nobiles are in the US Senate? After the death of the nobile-st Senator, Ted Kennedy, somebody bothered to publish the results, and the results are good news for New Men like Nixon and Obama: US Senators with family-members in the Senate have never been lower. Check out THIS graph to see the dramatic fall from the 1st Congress to the 101st.
  17. M. Porcius Cato

    voting in Rome

    I think we can agree on two important points. First, when talking about the practice of Roman voting, it's important to clarify exactly when we're talking about because the laws changed over time as did Roman demographics. Second, English common terms (landowners, men of property, etc) do not map neatly onto English translations of Latin legal terms, and this can give rise to another source of confusion and needless argument. Broadly speaking, there were two major classes of voters: assidui (citizens whose wealth--as little as 2 iugera of land in some cases-- sufficed to oblige their service in the legions) and proletarii (citizens whose wealth only obliged their service as rowers in the navy). During the Hannibalic War, it is clear that the assidui vastly outnumbered the proletarii. The best evidence for this comes from Livy (24.11.5-9, 26.35.1-36.12; 36.3.4-6), who reports that the senate in 214 was forced to recruit slaves for rowing duty due to insufficient number of eligible proletarii, suggesting that no more than 20,000 proletarii were serving in that capacity. This figure suggests that the proletarii composed only 10% of the citizenry (see Rosenstein, op. cit.; see also Brunt's estimate of the citizen population being 285,000 at the outset of the Hannibalic War). During the late republic, the number of proletarii may have been greater, though it isn't clear. According to Cicero (admittedly given to exaggeration), a single century of proletarii in the comitia centuriata contained a majority of citizens in the reign of Servius Tullius, a statement which -- if it has any validity at all -- might reflect conditions in his own day. Thus, purely from a demographic perspective, it seems highly unlikely that the rural tribes were dominated by idle rich landlords with the luxury of traveling to Rome to vote--the vast majority of citizens had their own land, were eligible to vote, and had sufficient time to serve in the legions, view triumphs, vote in elections, watch trials like Cicero prosecuting Verres, and otherwise participate in civic life. Moreover, to the extent that rural assidui could not come to Rome, they had plenty of tribesmen living in Rome itself, where they should have been easily able to outvote the very few "rich landlords" who wanted their voices heard too.
  18. M. Porcius Cato

    voting in Rome

    Your two ideas--(1) that there was no such thing as a poor landowner and (2) that farming precluded the ability to travel to Rome to vote--simply doesn't jibe with primary sources on Roman farming practices. I can discuss these matters in some detail in another thread; here, I'll simply refer you to an excellent study on the matter, "Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic," by Nate Rosenstein. His study shows that subsistence farming (i.e., by families of poor landowners) was widespread throughout Italy (even during periods when it was thought to have been precluded by the rise of the latifundia), and the labor requirements of subsistence farming (being seasonal and shared by a family) did not conflict with participation in military and political service. Also, please refer back to the article by Ward (quoted above) regarding the enrollment of urban citizens in the rural tribes. The key point is not that urban citizens previously enrolled in urban tribes were permitted to switch; the point is that rural citizens previously enrolled in rural tribes remained in rural tribes even when they moved to the city for good and stopped farming. This is important for understanding politics in the late republic because by that point Rome's population had swelled with citizens enrolled in rural tribes (consider Cicero and Pompey as two vivid examples of many). Thus, in a tribal assembly in the late republic, rural assidui travelling to Rome to vote would have been outnumbered by the faces of their and their friends' urban relatives. In any case, the idea that the rural tribes were dominated by rich landowners simply doesn't receive any support in either the primary or secondary source material.
  19. M. Porcius Cato

    voting in Rome

    Leaving aside that Ward is only a secondary source, here's what he writes: At its origin, in the early fifth century B.C.,tribally organized voting was biased in favor of the rural men of property in the more numerous rural tribes. From the beginning, there were only four urban tribes, and the number of rural tribes was always greater. From 495 B.C. to 241 B.C. the number of rural tribes increased from 17 to 31, where it remained fixed thereafter. Therefore, the urban voters, who had only four tribal votes, were always outnumbered by the rural voters, no matter how few voted in each rural tribe. (p.109) ... In the middle Republic, the more numerous but poorer rural voters were at a distinct disadvantage in tribal assemblies. Then, in the late Republic, after an enormous influx of poor rural citizens into the urban center and its environs, where many of them seem to have retained registration in their rural tribes, poor urbanized voters in rural tribes could outweigh both the large and small landowners because they lived in Romewhere they could more easily vote. How easily a small number of urban residents registered in a rural tribe could determine the vote of that tribe is clear from the small percentage of citizens who actually voted. Ramsay MacMullen persuasively arguesthat only 2% of Roman citizens usually voted, which renders any notionof direct democracy nugatory.(p.111) Your summary of this was, "urban voters were easily outnumbered by the rural voters, no matter how few of them voted in each one of the 31 rural tribes, which were always controlled by the rich Landlords." But there is no evidence that the 31 rural tribes were controlled by rich landlords, and there is no claim of it in Ward's article. The closest phrase in Ward is "rural men of property", which should be taken literally -- that is, men who owned property (as opposed to slaves, women, migrant traders, etc) were eligible to vote in the rural tribes. Both in Ward's statement (and as a matter of law attested in primary source material), the rural tribes comprised freeborn small-holders (aka "peasants"), landlords, and--in the late republic--even the urban poor, who -- Ward points out -- could effectively dominate the rural tribes due to the timing and location of the elections, which were held on off-market days (i.e., when rural voters would be expected to come to Rome). Thus, far from supporting the idea that rural landlords dominated the tribal assembly or even their own rural tribes, Ward provides evidence that the opposite was true -- urban voters could enroll in the rural tribes and the timing of elections was biased to favor this urban mob. And, really, why should this come as a surprise? Had rural landowners *actually* controlled the tribal assembly, it would never have been possible to pass the various and sundry leges agrariae--some of which (like the lex Julia agraria de Campania) confiscated the lands of rural voters for the veterans of adventuring generals.
  20. M. Porcius Cato

    voting in Rome

  21. M. Porcius Cato

    voting in Rome

    What's the evidence that the rural tribes "were always controlled by the rich Landlords"? Isn't it just another instance of your general supposition that the rich control everything and that the poor people are perpetually downtrodden by them? Is there any thing in the source material that specifically supports this claim?
  22. I was always partial to THIS scene.
  23. M. Porcius Cato

    Surnames of the Servilii

    How much longer before we get to the Porcii? I can hardly wait!
  24. M. Porcius Cato

    Fertilized with white chalk

    Lime?
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