Michael Blowhard tells a moving story of being free from cancer after surviving cancer for five years. Read, please, and raise a glass.
Also on 2Blowhards, Friedrich posts on the innate sadism and nastiness of the Classical Romans. I never did quite understand why the culture that gave us the Colosseum is held up as a model of republican virtue. Quoting Rodney Stark : " [The Roman aristocrat and writer] Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. [The Roman historian] Tacitus charged that the Jewish teaching that is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” was but another of their “sinister and revolting” practices…"
2 comments:
Thanks for pointing that out, Steve. I really enjoyed that, expecially after recently reading Tom Holland's "Rubicon" which really gave an accurate portrait of what a thugocracy the Late Republic was.
I also enjoyed the post FvB had on Saturday 1/14/06 on Robert Fogel's "The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100" and the effect of nutrition and economics on the American Revolution. That book's now on my list.
For all the corruption at the top, someone was commanding each manciple in the army, laying out aqueducts with a few simple tools, making sure that the grain ships left Egypt on time, delivering the mail...
That's what impresses me about the Romans: not that Republic or Empire were as bad as they were, but that they worked, more or less, for as long as they did. A lot of unnamed and unremembered bureaucrats and functionaries did their jobs well enough for long enough.
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