Lawnmower Boy

Lady Nancy Astor

I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for this. Maybe the clothes reached for their waistband?

So. Kidding around with a fellow employee about the terrible way we (like everyone else) treat our underpaid, underscheduled young employees, something that's on my mind a lot due to the old folks home next door, which makes our clientele even more Niight of the Living Deadish than your average Canadian retail development. Judith, who has a young man out there in the workplace, walks by. I say, "But at least Judith's kid is making good money," or some such. (It was funnier, you had to be there, etc, etc.) Judith replies, in all seriousness, "He is. He has a profession." I asked the obvious question. "He's a truck driver. He paid $14,000 in tuition to go to truck driving school." (And, no, he's not actually working right now. He's "trying to start his own trucking company.") Burn it down. Burn it all down.

Referring to trigger alerts in that way is contrary to a corporate policy. I know the policy hasn't ever been mentioned to you, so I'm not going to reprimand you for it. I'm just going to call you into the office over the PA and then explain to you why you were lazy and stupid to say it, and why it shows that you can't be promoted. In front of my pet. Whom I will then praise for passing gas well.

What does it take to run a grocery store? -A Manager: check. Good old guy, but that line about how "this is the last Christmas I'm going to spend at work?" That might be a gentle hint that he's retiring soon. -An Assistant Manager. Non-union, with a "ten hour commitment." That is, he's supposed to be in the store for ten hours a day. Perhaps he even is --but the last shift I worked with him, he spent three hours in the store (working with night crew, not during open hours). Highlight: he fell off a ladder while trying to stock shelves. Since then, he's been off for ten days of vacation. When he called the store on Thursday to intimate that he might need an extra few days for familly emergency related reasons, the boss was all, like, "Sure, whatever. Take all the time you need. I'm here alone, and....Wait, the next part is the quiet part that I only say in my head." -A First Assistant, union man. Who was just off for three weeks on sick leave, came back for five days of work, and is now off for three weeks of vacation. Uhm, hi? -A Management Trainee, the next generation of retail management. He's just back from his latest annual progress review, in which he and the other three MTs for the District's twelve stores were called to account. (No, it's not just your math. Four is less than twelve. Management Trainees aren't exactly thick on the ground, any more.) So, anyway, you may be wondering about the whole "multiple annual progress reviews." Considering just how rigorous retail middle management actually is, I think that the cynic might suggest that the second annual performance review really ought to consist of the District Manager growling: "Are you wasting our time or yours?" That, it turns out, is correct. He is going to be moving on to a position in the company more suited to his capabilities. No more Management Trainee. --Me. So. Looking a little thin at the top. Trouble? Not a bit of it! Soon as young B_ graduates high school in June, he can be an assistant manager! Why, the year after that, the occupational safety guys will think that he's old enough to operate a garbage compactor on his own!

Work more harderer! Everything is your fault! It turns out that when I gave you 5 #1 priority jobs to do, and enough time to only get one done, you did the wrong three! Now clock out and do my job for me, so I can go home two hours early! ....Just thought I'd get a jump on the whole managing thing for you there.

I don't get it. I have to pay points for liking tall girls? Tho' I also like pixie cuts, so maybe buy it off with Lack of Elf Resistance?

That's the problem with the young folk today. No commitment.

No-one wants to buy anything any more. (It's the demographics, stupid!) So we cut, cut, cut, cut to make the profit targets. I could swear that we're in a deflationary spiral, except that the numbers say that we're not. Anyway, just read a bit on the Huffington Post about a retail outfit in Massachusetts that can't hire "qualified people" to write resupply orders at $15/hour.So it is automating ordering. Now, let the record show that computerised ordering doesn't work. It's been one train wreck after another, from Walmart's we-can-still-limp-along high out of stock situation, to Target Canada's epic meltdown. To get a sense of why it doesn't work, consider the case in our stores (which haven't even automated ordering yet, just picking), where for two weeks we didn't have any Hellman's mayonnaise on the shelf, in any of the approximately million flavours and sizes it comes in, because the computers up the supply chain weren't recognising the string "Hellman." Now it's happening with De Monte brand canned fruit.... Nominally, the solution is to cut down the range of price variations, hence data entry operations --get rid of sales, and we'll be fine! It's like the solution to a foot that gets sore when you walk on it is to cut it off....Except that it was Walmart's retreat from that policy that began the spiralling trend to logistical disaster in the industry in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church_(Disciples_of_Christ)

Plotter Foxbat is obvious, here. He's got equipment, and he's good at making up plots! But I'm going outside the box here: Lash is a plotter: a master planner on the battlefield of love! Powerhouse There can be only one! Bulldozer! BULLDOZER! Scientist My first thought was El Sauriano, but he's only your go-to guy for crimes involving dinosaurs, and (allegedly) there are other kinds of crimes in the world. It's not a world I want to live in, mind you, but there you go. That leaves ...Exo! Energy User That sounds dangerously practical, but, we ask, and the universe provides. Orion is the thief of . . . power rings. A Noose Or, as the team would put it, a wet blanket. Someone who just doesn't get the genius of a plan to, say, kidnap the Empire State Building and hold it for ransom. No, wait. That's been done. Anyway, the noose. The nerd. The uncool, stick-in-the-mud one, always making sarcastic comments: Mechassassin!

Nuh-uh. It should use advanced IT features to achieve a 30% reduction in staffing while hitting a solid 110% gain in the Security Analysis Defence (SAD) metrics as set out by RebelStar Consultants according to Deployment Overall Organisation Deterrence Obligated Order 3000 (DOODOO 3000) in order to progress Ontarget Management Goals (OMG). Going forwards towards tfullfilling he Imperial Space Navy's Fully Integrated eXcellence Enterprise Directive (FIXED), our goal should be to implement 25% improved heat venting of central reactors through larger exhaust ports, while securing the local threat envirionment through proactive engagement of high vallue targets. To that end, RebelStar Consultants recommends a development schedule envisioning deployment in a Fiscal+10 annual framework following field trials in Fiscal +5 against some of the more expendable planets, with cost overruns address by budget escalators in Fiscal +3, +6 and +8. In the unlikely event that, due to revisiting the field trial objectives in the programme revue of Fiscal +6, Rebelstar Consultants recommends direct transitioning to production of the Death Star V2 Flight II, with envisioned deployment in Fiscal +20. RebelStar's invoice is in the mail. Along with PDFS of the SAD, DOODOO 3000 and FIXED protocols, per our contract with the Imperial Space Navy. You might want to allocate a few TB of storage for the documents.

The October Horse The Dioscuri

Welp, I promised. Went to the library and looked at interesting books --one day is a little short to dive into Journal of Roman Studies on the subject. Lost a research day, more-or-less, but that's my fault. Though Markdoc owes me for forcing me to focus and substantiate my loosey-goosey opinions with his constructive and useful criticism, the rotter! So: (i) Is there something like the Mesta in ancient Italy? Ans: No: the geography is wrong (it's not a blocky penninsula with a large central plateau. It's an elongated peninsula with a T-bone skeleton of mountains). Also, the Mesta is an early modern phenomena depending on the early modern state, finances, and international trade. ii) Are there drove paths in Italy? Ans: There certainly are now, due to long-distance transhumance. As far as we know, these originated in early medieval, perhaps even sub-Roman times when regional church communities began to organise long-distance movements between summer and winter pasture. With some potential exceptions. The exception of interest here is the valley of the Tiber river, on which the city of Rome stands as the lowest fording place, and below which the estuarine marches of the Tiber blend into the more geologically complicated Pontine Marshes, forming a barrier of movement through the coastal lowlands, such that "all roads leading to Rome." Specifically, the roads that I am thinking of here are the "ancient" ones (following the somewhat loosey-goosey argument of Alexandre Grandazzi, [The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History Trans. Jane Marie Todd [[ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999]]], 78--9), the Via Latina and the Via Salaria. The Via Salaria is famous as the one by which the herds of the Samnites were supplied from the salt deposits at Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, and Grandazzi's argument purports to show that the Via Latina was the spur by which the Latins brought their herds down to the coast. Now, the key issue here is that while Grandazzi takes it for granted that it was the herds that were moved, some other formulations imply that salt was brought to the herds in the heights. I would take this cautionary more seriously were it not for the presence of extensive lowland marshes, not only the salt marshes of the Tiber mouth and the Pontine Marshes, but marshes found inland in the valleys of Latium, which were drained in the 300s BC. The most effective way of exploiting the biotic productivity of lowland marshes is as pasturage, salt marshes such as those found in estuaries being particularly valuable, and this is an ecosystem better exploited by catle than by sheep and goats, although certainly widely used by the latter, notably in England. For this reason I am inclined to grant Grandazzi's authority. But I would say that, wouldn't I, because I only have to cite him to close the book on the argument that there was a cattle drove path leading (through) Rome! iii) Was the Via Flaminia, which crossed Italy southwest-northeast at an angle to the Via Salaria a drove path? This might seem lie a subsidiary argument at this point, but, damnit, I speed read Guy Bradley, (Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era ((Oxford: OUP, 2000)) yesterday, and I'm going to inflict it on you guys. Umbria is the region served by the first leg of the Via Flaminia. It is the only inland region of Italy, this being a pretty hard thing to be, given the shape of Italy, though in ancient times it had an Adriatic coastline, and perhaps even extended across the Po Valley to the Julian Alps, per Herodotus. Some 40% of Umbria's land area is in the Appenines above 500m, good pasture land. As Cicero says in On Divination, the Umbrians are as skilled at augury as the Arabians, Cilicians and Phrygians, as they, like them, were “chiefly engaged in the rearing of cattle, and so they are constantly wandering over the plains and mountains in winter and summer.” Again, some caution is warranted. We have every reason to think that the agrarian economy of Italy was changing rapidly in the second and first centuries BC, and a lifestyle which Cicero might have seen as primordial may in reality have been quite a recent development. You will note in the Wikipedia article (but, oddly, not in Bradley), that pollen studies suggest that the highland forests were significantly thinned in just this period. What Bradley does have to tell us, by skillfully integrating archaeology, inscription, and sparse ancient history, is that Umbria, often seen as a unitary region of "civilised" city states in counter-distinction to primitive pastoral tribes such as the Samnintes, was anything but. The consolildation of settlement on known centres is a phenomena of the Final Bronze Age (c. 1000BC) at the earliest, and these are secondary centres, mostly located at the 500m contour between closely proximinal upland pasture and lowland plain --particularly suitable locations for transhumant grazing where a low-level political order could govern the transition. The traditional cities of Umbria are much later developments, and even the drainage of the lowland marshes is later than in Latium, coming after the Roman conquest, in the 200s-100s BC. The Umbrian political identity before this was more particular, local, and lacked clear "ethnic" identity. It might even be said to be tribal, although you can digress as long as you wish into the way that Classical authorities constructed political identity at this point. We do not always have the archaeological data we would like to reconstruct ancient Umbria, but we do have(231--3) a full field full field survey of the basin of the Grubbio, the region around the city of Iguvium. This shows a substantial influx of population, or of intensification of use in the middle of the first century BC, both indicated and dated by extensive scatters of Roman Republic black-slip pottery. Yet vegetation analysis suggests a much more gradual intensification of agricultural use of the region going back to the early Iron Age. It is the imported pottery that is at issue, and it is best interpreted as evidence of a long-range trade in this period than before –or, apparently, after. That is, in this particular period, market-oriented production was bringing more pottery to this region. Along with this market-oriented intensification of exploitation in the valley bottoms, Bradley assumes that there must have been an intensification of exploitation in the pastures above --although presumably people didn't drag their fine, market-bought pottery up there! (This is where Bradley introduces the Cicero quote which I have already filched, and the pollen studies will slot in here as well.) Moving right along, we have the main driver of research into the agrarian economy of late Republican Italy, the ever-tendentious population question. Luk de Ligt is a great poponent of the "low count" position. (Luk de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy, 225BC—AD 100 ((Cambridge: CUP, 2012)). To summarise: (155—6) Assuming a heavy demographic impact from the Second Punic War, the spread of agrarian slavery may be explaind by a shortage of free labourers after about 167. When we hear mention of freedmen rowers in the fleet, for lack of proletarians, who are now in the legions. It is supposed that this is not because of a shortage of freeborn poor farmers, but because they were not interested in working the land of others (280), while the rich preferred slaves as workers for a number of reasons, including because they cannot be called up for military service. This structural imbalance of demand needed rectification, but not because of population declines. In the mean time, small farmers could make use of spare time not spent cultivating their small farms by taking other jobs, such as muleteering (hugely important to the Roman urban economy), construction and the like. (272—3) Another way of getting at rural population densities for de Ligt’s purposes is to look at theories of geographical distribution of market-oriented agricultural production, about which I need not bore you except to note the peripheral zone of intensive stock raising, attested in Italy for Apulia and Lucania and anchored on Cato on agriculture. (275) Moving into the back country, as it were, de Ligt seeks explanations for apparent high population densities in certain rural areas, as picked up in field surveys, by explaining them as the pushing out of market-oriented production. De Ligt is satisfied that “a highly integrated market system centred on Rome” existed. Per models of market-oriented production systems focussed on a central metropolis, we expect to see bands of specialisation, including dairying and horticulture (I would add, and feed lots) closest to the city; arboriculture in the next zone, then arable, finally a distant zone of stock raising. This is, as you might imagine, where I fit the distant-yet-market-oriented exploitation of the bottom land and associated upland pastures of the Grubbio. This is where (Umbrian) stock was raised for the Roman market. Finally, we move on to the question of the Roman cavalry. Here I dip into military history, which leaves me with some trepidation. "Internal" historical inquiries are in grave danger of being captured by enthusiasts and specialists, and military history is one of these fields. However, Jeremiah B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic: Cavalry Combat and Elite Reputations in the middle and late Republic (London and New York: Routledge,. 2002) seems reasonably solid. McCall points out that In the earliest days of the Republic, the elite Romans who voted in the prestigious eighteen equestrian centuries received horses subsidised by the state and served in the army as equites equo publico. As well, wealthy citizens who could afford to provide their own horses fought as equites equis suis. McCall wishes to argue that the EES was extensively used, as against some authors. He points to Cato’s grandfather, who was compensated for the loss of five horses in cavalry service. (2—3) I would be more convinced if we did not have two distinct strata of evidence. The EEP are identified by writing about cult. They were involved in the Procession of the Dioscuri, for example.When we turn to military contexts, authors who are also our only source for the military census tell us about equites usually without distinction. McCall's attempts to prove its existence also leave me with some faint doubt about the “equestrian census.”It isn't a serious doubt --I am sure that the first eighteen equestrian centuries existed!-- but I do have to point out a lacuna in our evidence. (7) Note also the inference that the equites were each accompanied by two servants. There are so many holes in this that I could --but I will here note the very faint possibility that he elite Roman knight was supported by a mounted servant. This is not an unknown thing in other contexts, but I do not want to refight the argument over armed servants, as I'd probably lose. So there was a noble cavalry. At the same time, we need to note that the equites, while Roman citizens, were "local notables." In the retrospective vision of Livy and Polybius, they were the aristocracy of provincial towns, with their social outlook and culture homongenised by participation in Roman life. However, looking to the evidence that the urbanisation of Italy was far later and less complete than these authors give us the impression of it being, we should take a more guarded view of their actual social environment. Anyway, we know that the Roman citizen cavalry disappeared. From 300 to 100, a citizen cavalry contingent was attached to each field army, and to allied cavalry as well. These were increasingly supplemented by other cavalry recruited from states outside of Italy. When? A fragment of Dio Cassius indicates citizen cavalry in Spain in c 140BC. Italian allied cavalry at least served in the Jugurthine War (112—05), and citizen cavalry against the Cimbri in 102. But in 50, Caesar went to Gaul with no citizen cavalry at all (101), and had 10,000 Gallic cavalry with him in the Civil Wars, no roman citizen cavalry at all. Yet Pompey seems to have had 7000 Roman and Italian cavalry, the “flower of Italy.” Perhaps this reflects the social classes from which Pompey drew his support? McCall sees this as an anachornism, but he seems to me overly fixed on the idea that the Roman citizen cavalry was formally abolished at some point. To be fair, he is dealing with a tradition that Marius did this. Like other recent authors writing on Marius' putative army reforms, McCall is skeptical, but his need for a specific date drives him to look to the Social Wars. In 88, we have the first definitive evidence of a Roman army without any citizen cavalry at all –Sulla’s 6 legions. And when he returned to Rome to enact his proscription, he had the same 6 legions –and 6000 horse, recruited from somewhere. The final answer to McCall's question? New forms of prestige service in staffs, in command, are becoming available and sucking up all the eligible youth. (Plus business, advocacy, politics, estate management) Well, okay. But how well do we understand this story, really? Finally, not really looking for deep insight, I picked up a book that had piqued my attention (and linked above) --Sullivan's Crisis of Rome: The Jugurthine and Northern Wars and the Rise of Marius. Unexpectedly to me, Sullivan ends his book not with a discussion of North African or North European barbarians at the turn of the 100s BC, or of the legendary figure of Marius, first great patron of the Julius Caesars, but the clan of the Metelli. How did five Metelli come to be consuls in such a short time. How did two Metelli come to celebrate triumphs on a single day? The point here isn't that there is some deep answer to their apparent dominance of the politics of the Roman Republic at the time of the rise of Marius. It is that we do not know anything about it. This weird mystery comes into focus for me in the context of Marius's army reforms, and, in particular, his recruitmentn of an army without reference to property qualifications. This is often presented as unprecededented, when in fact it is not. There is even a constitutional expedient, the tumultus Galliae (pardon my Latin). If the Gauls are in sight, everyone is free to join up. There was, incidentally, and to tie this tenuously back to the beginning of this particular thread drift, a tumultus proclaimed during the Pyrrhic War. Whatever we can say about the Roman army that fought Pyrrhus so effectively, it was not raised by property class, and there is no reason to think that it was the socially exclusive levee en masse of the eighteen equestrian centuries. So, finally, are there poor stud farmers, mule-breeders, horsebreakers in late Republican Italy? This I haven't proven yet --I have some lines of inquiry to follow up on. I should think that reconstructed faunal assemblages will tell the tale when I follow up on the archaeological literature. But this is more than enough for now!

Whereas I'm fascinated by the small details, short distances, and internal trade. The embassy to China, which may or may not have been official, might have come via the Plain of Jars, a famous ancient route about which, in spite of its fame, we know all too little. Just as, inside the Empire, we have surprisingly little information about the usage of the Alpine passes. The Brenner Pass, for example, seems to have been used as an east-west route until Septimius Severus completed the north-south connection. That's three centuries after the route was in use! Ditto the Roman Saharan trade, which seems to have flourished within the Sahara without reaching across it, even though gold fields, which probably came into use in Byzantine times, were available just beyond. The forests, mountains, passes, oasses and fishing grounds of the Roman Empire are likely to have been under-utilised in general. But what did it mean, politically, culturally, economically and socially, for them to come into use? Why was full exploitation so often delayed until the period immediately after the fall of the Empire? Was the Roman governmental structure holding it back? (A libertarian would say, "of course," but there is also reason to think that the full Alpwirtschaft or commercial fishery was only possible in a regulated market, so that in certain ways, the "barbaric" sub-Roman period must have been more effectively regulated. (It's not a big leap here to think that it was the Church that was crucial here, of course.)

http://www.eater.com/2015/3/13/8208185/all-ranch-dressing-restaurant-st-louis

If anyone's interested in where this thread drift/hijack is going, it is going to Tuesday, my next library day. That said, some points at the head. i) Did the Romans tax livestock movements? Ans: We don't know, but we think so. The tax would be the foricularum, it would be levied along the routes (perhaps a strong interpretation of the traditional customs barrier on the Via Flaminia a few miles from Rome, but we'll go with that now, and there is more evidence to be considered), but payment might be deferred at interest. This is the argument of R. E. Palmer, and, of course, falls under the skeptic's scrutiny for lacking the kind of definitive statement of its purpose that we have for the auricularum and the tax on urine. (Which strikes one as a Roman author amusing hiimself, as important an industrial product as urine was.) ii) Did they have customs dues for livestock? A slightly different question than above, in that it pushes the resolution to the state frontiers (for now). Ans: A tentative yes, in that we have tariffs for Eastern Desert stations where toll rates for animals are given. It's in interpreting the spirit of this, and its application to the rest of the Empire, where skepticism has its proper place. The literature has jumped from this evidence to a full-throated interpretation of the Fosstum Africae as a customs-levying barrier in the interior of Roman North Africa. iii) Does this idea of customs/tariff/excise stations extend into the Empire? Answer: there are reasons to suspect that it does. First, we have definitive information that customs dues were levied at the boundaries of provinces. The precise mechanism here would be, according to Jerome France, the Quadrigesima Galliarum. In one case specifically cited by France, the customs were levied along a route, notably along the routes over the Alps between Germany and Italy. The question of what was taxed at these state-sanctioned highway robbery sites remains open for the moment. iv) Was livestock from outside the city sold at Rome? Ans: yes, at the Forum Boarium. It remains, however, to be shown that the cattle were brought any great distance. v) Is there a reason to be all speculative like this? Ans: Yes, the Economics, attributed in antiquity to Aristotle, describes the tax regimes of various kinds of ancient states. Pseudo-Aristotle identifies the "satrapal state" as deriving its revenues from: "land, from peculiar products, from merchandise, from taxes, from cattle, from all other resources." Here is an extended conversation about which allusively-discussed Seleucid taxes might have been levied on cattle, which on pasture. Seleucia is not Rome, but the notion of Rome as a "satrapal" state that for some reason opted not to levy excise taxes on livestock is beginning to get to the point where the onus on the skeptic is to prove the negative. vi) Have we got to the point where we can argue that, in the Roman imperial period, a livestock tax was levied at Aquiliea and then collected upon sale at Rome? That would be an impressive example of state organisation? Ans: We have not. It remains an attractive speculation. vii) Have we got to the point where we can argue that such a hypothetical system is descended from one which, in earlier ages, levied a tax on cattle from Bologna a few miles from Rome at a customs barrier on the Via Flaminia in the Third Century BCE? Ans: We have not. It remains an attractive speculation. See you all next Wednesday!

Aha! The Scheidel pdf. Brief summary: the population of Roman Italy might have been 8 million, or 20. Many very good scholars have argued either side of the case. Here is all the arguments ever. As you can see, you can go either way. More work is needed, because this is a very important subject to study. (It was 8.)

Since I seem to be pissing away another good writing morning on procrastination and distractions, I'll keep this brief. We know from Dio Cassio that there was a 3--5% customs tax levied on goods moved across Roman provincial boundaries. With specific reference to the problem of Aurelian's Roman walls and their odd (or, alternatively, quite intentional) mapping onto the Roman customs boundary, R. E. A. Palmer went looking, in a 1980 article, for evidence for the collection of those taxes on goods. (JSTOR link here. I think. It may come up with some kind of denial of service. Here, have a copy-pasted bibliographic link: Customs on Market Goods Imported into the City of Rome R. E. A. Palmer Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome Vol. 36, The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History (1980), pp. 217-233 ) Palmer concluded that a tax on livestock, the foricularum, was levied by stopping animals in pens at boundaries on major highways leading into the city of Rome, pens (and taxes) which probably date to Augustus' censorships, at least. The existence of such pens in the vicinity of Rome is at the moment based on literary evidence. However, the argument that frontier fortifications, notably a line in the interior of North Africa, but even famous works such as Hadrian's Walls, were about "customs and passport control," says Eric Birley, quoted by David Breeze, 202. This then calls our attention to the curious works around Aquileia,*& a crucial control point on the northeastern routes out of Italy, perhaps with a pre-Roman history as the centre through which "Hallstatt" trade reached Italy. (For extra craziness, imagine it as lying on the road by which Etruscan reached Tuscany, even though to do so we have to throw out our one concrete piece of evidence that Etruscan had to reach Italy at all, which says that it sprung from a maritime colony.) That digression aside, the system of works around Aquiliea includes enclosures that seem to conform to the needs of a taxing pen. I'm going to throw you here to the Petrokovits article, because it has the virtue of being online, although a quick scan didn't turn up anything in Friulia. Those interested in proving that I'm blowing smoke out of my butt (which in fairness should include me, of course), might want to check out Stephen Johnson's trainspotter's guide to Roman military fortifications, a 32 year-old book from an obscure publisher that isn't on the Internet because reasons, although Bernie Bachrach's book about Charlemagine's campaigns in the area and their use of late Roman fortifications is. Fortunately, Bachrach is a great discussion of the Roman roads over the low passes of the eastern Alps into Friulia and their early Medievial strategic significance. So, in summary, a customs tax seems to have been levied on Roman frontiers, precisely to extract tax revenues from the profits of pastoral peoples, at the provincial boundaries of Italy, where presumably barriers at the foot of Alpine passes indicates trans-Alpine (long distance enough by my reckoning) livestock drives, and at the customs barrier of Rome, which latter, at least, date to the late Republic at least. As for the "high" estimate of late Republican Roman population, I can only urge the closest attention to Scheidel's contribution to Debating Roman Demography. *Works, for example, like this. &Also see.

Uhm, guys? This thing with bright colours being out of fashion? I'm, uhm, I'm trying to think of a way of suggesting that someone around here might not be as fashion forward as he thinks. Aargh! It slipped out anyway! I knew I should have taken diplomacy classes!

This comment is dead to me! Obviously the show can only succeed if Comet the Super-Horse turns into Supergirl's boyfriend, and she flies around in a miniskirt showing off her belly button and her cleavage window while being 15 and hiding in an orphanage while her own cousin exploits her. I mean, it may sound disturbing and creepy when I put it that way, but canon is canon.

Those are armoured men! A Nineteenth century heavy cavalryman was at least as heavily loaded as a medieval knight, and he rode a horse just like the ones in that video.

I'm amazed at how much time I wasted on this thread last week. But it's a new week, so I can waste more! (I have a justification here, in that I think that this puzzling episode of the Third Century Crisis may be better explained as a cattle drive gone wrong than as a barbarian invasion. In case anyone's interested. Sorry about linking to myself. The episode seems bizarrely obscue on the Worldwide Web.) i) "The Romans started out as hill dwellers. . ." Uhm, yes, in the sense that the nucleus of the later Roman city is a settlement on the Palatine Hill, insofar as we can tell, archaeologically speaking, subject to recent work. No, in the sense that this is a reference (I apologise for being so disagreeable if it's not) to the Livy/Virgil picture of Rome's origins at Alba Longa. Hill towns in general are not to be projected into the deep Italian past. Archaeology shows little sign that Latium's fundi(Plural of fundus? Me not know Latin!) of the uplands had nucleated into towns at the time that Rome's development overtook them and imposed a pattern of villa development. The replacement of villas as rural centres by towns is a medieval phenomena that has its roots in the immediate post-Roman "sub-Roman" era. I cannot do better than Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages as a jumping-off point for those interested in the period, although of course it is no longer cutting edge, and, who knows, might even have been completely supplanted and overturned by now! The Wikipedia formulation that the people of Latium "started out in the hills" and then moved down into the plains seeking better agricultural land will serve for describing how population growth coincided and interacted with the draining of low-lying land. I don't particularly want to get into the argument about whether the drainage was driven by population growth, or allowed it here, because the last thing this thread needs is a further hijacking around Malthusian versus non-Malthusian theories of growth in agricultural economies. ii) "...And shepherds." This is stadial anthropology again: hunter-gatherers>shepherds>farmers>modern man! Google isn't delivering a "preview" of Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History today (although it is showing all the torrents for some reason). So here's a brief book review. As the very brief discussion of transhumant pastoralism in Latium following 264 in my handy edition makes clear, pastoralism is not an early stage of evolutionary development. In fact, it depends more heavily on the market than subsistence agriculture. Our authors may be going a bit far in the direction of speculation when they imply that it is the late Roman Republic's economic dynamism that is forcing ovicaprine production into the nooks and crannies of the Appennines, but let's take their authority as the latest word anyway. Sheep and goat production for the Roman market is ongoing and intensifying in the Late Republic. You may need an academia.edu membership to download this report, and I am being lazy in summarising only one, anyway, but the takeaway is that sheep and goats, and not pigs or cattle, represent the major source of the surprisingly large amount of meat consumed in the late Republic. Though the butchering remains strongly suggest that upper-class Romans mainly ate the better cuts of pork. iii) The demographic history of the late Republic is also very interesting, and currently up in the air. It does not make a great deal of sense (except in terms of the old "Ancients versus Moderns" debate of the late Seventeenth Century) to argue that the Italian population of the late Republic was higher than the medieval population. Not only do we have plenty of evidence that the Italian agricultural economy had become more productive, beginning, with respect to long distance vertical transhumance of equids and cattle, in precisely the sub-Roman period, but the Romans had hardly even begun to settle the bottom of the Po plain! If you like reading historians arguing about arguing, Walter Scheidel's introduction to the edited collection, Debating Roman Demography is available online in toto at Google Books. If you want to cut to the chase, Dr. Scheidel has, or used to have, a pdf up on the Intertubes somewhere summarising his chapter in Debating Roman Demography that you may or may not be able to get at from Google Books. It's moot, because the guys at Livescience have done an awesome job of boiling the essential debate over the population figures of the Augustan census reported in his gestae down to a paragraph. iv) It is, of course, impossible to argue that long distance livestock cattle drives played much of a role in the economic history of Rome. The taxation evidence (which is entangled in the history of Aurelian's new city walls) is only good for showing that some animals were so used, and the faunal evidence suggests that it was sheep and goats. The social history, on the other hand... Because it is unquestionable that there were livestock drives bringing large numbers of animals long distances to Rome. Our literary evidence for the Roman economy is frustratingly sparse, because it was written by and for the senatorial elite, and they didn't care about that stuff. But when it comes to stuff that they did care about, like organising games out of their own pocket as one of the liturgies of consular office, that's another matter entirely! We tend to think of the regular Roman sacred games exclusively in terms of gladiatorial contests, beast fights and chariot races, but they were actually scenes of votive offerings and feasting as well. Barbecue! Again, when we read of Senators spending enormous amounts to bring in animals for the pleasure of the Roman populace, the imagination goes to those beast fights. I'm not even going to guess what proportion of the money that one late senator complains that he has spent on throwing a games went to beef cattle for sacrifice/feasting as oppposed to beast fights, but I will post a link to this weird little essay. Aurochs and elk in the arena. Who knew? v) Now: those itinerant gauchos. The claim that I want to make is that those Jugunthi of 264AD, who were encountered near Milan and Augsburg on either side of what seems to have been a winter quarters in the Alps, were precisely "itinerant gauchos." It will be noted by keen historical minds that 264AD is, uhm, not "the Roman Republic." Not the "early" Republic (280BC), not the "middle" republic (105BC), not the "late" Republic (60BC). You'll notice that I'm using somewhat eclectic definitions of "early" Republic in particular. You will encounter, in readings on this subject, confident assertions about historical events in Roman republican history going back to 400BC. Fie on that, fie, I say! The sources will not support it! I demand that we see, in particular, the "Gallic invasion" of 400BC as non-history! Well, actually, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that a guy named Brennus led an army of Sennones to sack Rome, and that the Sennones were a people of the ager Gallicus, hence "Gauls." That strikes me as legitimate popular history. Where I think we go wrong is in assuming that the "Gauls" who lived up in the nooks and the crannies of the Appenines necessarily had anything to do with the "Celts" and "Gauls" of late Roman history. Deconstruct the lot, I say: Livy is writing an ancient history --of Brennus and of Marius-- for the purposes of his patron, the Emperor Augustus. The key points here are the Pyrrhan campaign, the Second Punic War, and Marius's army reforms. In the former, a Roman citizen cavalry formed from the equestrian classes did a perfectly serviceable job, as Markdoc points out. Nothing wrong with the Roman cavalry here, in relation to that of Pyrrhus. In the second, the Roman cavalry doesn't seem to have performed so well, although we can have a screaming argument about just how and why, and, indeed, over just how many of the 6000 "Roman" cavalry at the Battle of Cannae were actually "Italic allies," in the absence of information from our sources, and in the light of what we think we know of the demographic history of the early Republic. Just for the record, I'm all in favour of problematising every number we get from the Battle of Cannae. They may or may not be accurate, but they ought to be the subjects of research, and not data points from which to develop our arguments. Was the problem that the Roman cavalry was outnumbered? That it fought poorly? That it was light cavalry up against heavy? All valid beginnings for interesting speculation that really needs better sources than we have to be resolved --IMHO. In the third, a petulant Marius, needing an army to "save Rome," and not being allowed to raise one by legitimate methods, decides to call up "slaves and gladiators, etc." That's a literary topoi, that is. It means that Marius isn't being allowed to perform a classic citizen call-up, and responds by taking recruits from outside the census classifications. There's a whole lot of questions about Roman politics embedded in this conversation. The one takeaway that I want to extract is that from here on in, the cavalry that serves the Roman armies is looking "mercenary," that is, it is being recruited from walk-ins with the relevant equestrian skills. Gauchos? Gallic/Germanic chieftains and their retinues? Probably both --I'm seeing the social boundaries here as fluid, and poor young horsemen as negotiating this transition. (Unless horses were herding themselves andn breaking themselves, I decline to believe that there were no young working horsemen, although I am willing to accept that there weren't many.) So what happened in the stages between 280, 220, and 105 BC? I say, put the Italian countryside into flux, admit that we don't know what we don't know. By all means, exclude the possibility of systematic long-distance movements of livestock between Rome and marginal pastures. That certainly came later. But when a Senator wanted to offer a hecatomb of spotless oxen to Jupiter-the-Ambitious-Politician, they had to be got to Rome somehow. There is no particular reason not to think that they were being raised in pastures around Bologna, and were driven to Rome by people called "Gauls," of the tribe of the Boii. It's what the city name means! As to whether such young men fought with the equites at Asculum, well, if you have a highly idealised vision of the early Republic, then there is no question that the equites were the wealthiest citizens of Rome doing their patriotic duty. "Then hew down the bridge, Sir Consul/With all the speed ye may/While I with two others beside me/Will hold the foe at bay." I memorised huge swathes of that poem once. I'm a lot more cynical now.