SOCL

That's beautiful! So, Eagle, my friend, you said I could come live with you, right?

Laugh now, Tofu, but in less than five days, I too will be enjoying the sun. Hell, I may just come and pelt you with lawn darts--err, I mean... ...no I don't.

Looks like a pretty good title in the spirit of other Knights of the Old Republic, but I'm concerned... When they start talking about re-imagining the Force and all of its facets just because of the new technology available, I can't help but scream "BLASPHEMY!" Okay, so after getting kicked out of the campus library for apparently having a "loud outburst", I've thought more about it, but still can't help but...cringe. Basically, this is what they did with the Force (midieffinchlorians!) in the prequels. I mean, the Force was only manipulated for combat purposes in the original trilogy by the bad guys: Vader and the Emperor. Then in all of the prequels we see the Jedi using it like some sort of built-in finger gun to unleash insane attacks on opponents. Why? Well, the technology. Maybe as I get older (and I'm not that old yet!) I become more nostalgic and stop enjoying all the rubbish they keep adding to Star Wars. Hell, I never thought I'd wish they'd stop printing Star Wars novels or would cringe at the sound of "George Lucas directing" in any combination, but it's the truth. This title just makes me worry even more about the franchise.

Paul, Truly sorry to hear about this. My thoughts are with you and your family, mate. I think I speak for the whole community when I say we're here for you--whatever you may need, let us know.

Then all the friction of car tires cause the layers of snow to form into nice, thick layers of ice, which are oh-so-fun to drive into lampposts on.

Oh, yeah, we use salt, but mostly for the sidewalks and driveways. The city provides much salt for the roads, but when they get lazy and don't plow the snow, they toss nasty amounts of sand on top of the snow--a useless action, really. It's supposed to snow tomorrow. Wish I had your weather, Eagle.

Not competing, mate. I already got a good lashing from Mitth for calling it ice. Even so, it took a pick-ax and shovel to cut through the five inches of ice in my backyard. Not a lot of snow, but more than I'd ever want to see again.

Here are a few pictures. The ones at the beginning of the album are obviously not snow-ridden, but the last few are. http://gmu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007693&l=5dd85&id=63700315

But SOCL, Marcus Aurelius was born on March 8th . EDIT:That was according to Wikipedia. I have found one source that marks it as April 26. I will continue to investigate (and by that I mean assume Wikipedia is wrong again, and simply go with the 26th. ) That would disappointing, especially since I've been boasting about that for years. I checked Wikipedia and it seems to say 26 April. I guess it all comes down to who decides they don't like what it says and what they want it to say.

I share a birthday with: -Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius -Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine -porn star "Dick Nastie" -William Shakespeare (or his date of baptism) and more I don't feel like typing.

I think, for the sake of clarity, we should do this as: day, month Or something like that as fellows on either side of the pond put the month and the day in different locations, depending on which side. 26 April

Empire of Dreams is the fourth, extra DVD in the Star Wars DVD box-set that was released three years ago.

Discussion concerning Roman history split to a new thread. You can locate it here: http://www.swrebellion.com/forums/posts3756-30.html

Going to split this where the conversation turned Roman. Classic scene, Jahled!

Had some snow recently, but it was the good kind--not iced over like an ice-skating rink. It's mostly melted now, and what remains will melt tomorrow as the temperature continues to climb. WOO!

I do believe Jahled hit on a very good point, though. Following their successes in conquest of the Second Punic War against the (in)famous Hannibal, the Roman military and political machine became completely inseparable. No longer could Rome function without exercising its power (Imperium Romanum: "Roman power") against other, weaker nations. By the time of the famous Julius Caesar, we see that the Republic has all but decayed into biding between the most powerful men in Rome supported by their individual factions. This is why, in move of true insight and intelligence, Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) realized that the Republic could no longer function as a government of senators and magistrates. Certainly, even whilst being princeps, Augustus maintained the look of a republican government, with himself in an "official" capacity as something a chief adviser to the government, while in truth he ran matters and told members of government how to behave and what to do, and this fact tells us Augustus knew better than anyone that had the Commonwealth attempted to return to Republic, it would have collapsed into civil war. Look at the pattern. Caius Marius and L. Cornelius Sulla have two civil wars for power in Rome, one after another, the first in which Marius wins, and, following his death, the second in which Sulla succeeds against the Marian faction. Sulla takes command of the Republic as dictator for life under the auspices of being "dictator for the constitutional welfare" of the Republic. In this sense, he was supposed to reform the government for the sake of making sure the sort of chaos of the last few years did happen again, and to some measure, he succeeded. In the process, though, Sulla employed the use of a proscription, wherein lists were publicly published of all those who were to be executed because Sulla (now called "Sulla Felix", or "Sulla the Lucky") deemed them a threat to the welfare of the Republic. There's a funny, though sickening, anecdote, actually, wherein a fellow who had been in the countryside during the time of Sulla's takeover returned to Rome and, out of curiosity, started reading the list and suddenly, to his own surprise, finds his name on it. Thinking this a mistake, he mentions it to a passer-by, who promptly pounces on him and kills the man, meaning that the passer-by got a portion of the man's wealth, while the State received the rest. What followed a time of without civil wars, but still a time of much turbulence with all the signs of decaying power. This seems to happen, though, to most governments which do not reform after four hundred years or so, which is about how long the Republic had existed without significant reform of the government. In any event, within a short time, and the constant voting of more and more pompous and ridiculous titles and honours to victorious generals by the Senate in hopes that by doing so they had appeased any appetite for civil war and total power. Even the famous Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus ("Pompey the Great") was among these men appeased, who was granted the title Magnus ("the Great") by Sulla and ratified by the rather weak-willed Senate. Pompey, because of his power, was granted the sole consulship, something that had never happened before. To give a quick background, the Roman government was run by two consuls who had veto power over one another in all matters of government in ruled, essentially, by consensus and, to some extent at the will of the tribunes of the people, but now, Pompey was so powerful and the Senate and Tribunes so weak, they feared he'd take his army and conquer Rome in the same way Sulla had (indeed, even Sulla feared that at one point!). They granted him the extraordinary magistracy of sole consul rather that all-out dictator because, in the words of Cato the Younger, "any form of government is better than no government at all!" And, of course, we all know the famous story about Caesar's bid for power against Pompey and his victory at Pharsalus. We then see the Romans take over Egypt and, due in part to Pompey's earlier conquests in the Near and Middle East, complete annexation of the eastern lands, making the lands further East client kingdoms (such as Armenia) with only Parthia as a rival in present-day Iran and western Iraq. Then Caesar is assassinated, leading to another string of civil wars, first between Antony and Octavian for power in Rome, then they reconcile their differences to make battle against Brutus, Cassius, and "Liberators" who'd assassinated Caesar. They defeat the "Liberator" army at Phillipi and divide the Empire in half, but it has become apparent that the Roman Empire (now blatantly called so despite still being nominally run as a Republic) cannot be ruled by a single person. Octavian and Antony go to war again, culminating in Octavian's takeover following Antony and Cleopatra's defeat at the Battle of Actium. Following that, Octavian runs the empire under the auspices of consul with tribunician power under the princeps administration, which eventually leads to his role as "senior adviser to government", or more simply "emperor". The point of all that being that had Octavian/Augustus not taken power as he did, the Roman Empire would have fallen apart into just one chaotic civil war after another. Indeed, the civil wars from the time of Marius and Sulla to the final one between Octavian and Antony were each closer and closer together (proportionally speaking), which is evidence enough at how matters would have continued. Indeed, the Year of the Four Emperors (69 CE) wherein the Empire went into civil war following the emperor Nero's death is evidence enough that the Roman Empire would never be run again without complete and total autocratic rule, all as Jahled had described: the Empire could not live without constant conquest, constant war, or, the alternative, autocratic rule by a single person. Not even the oligarchical rule by a bunch of old, upper-class men (i.e. the Senate) could sustain the Empire's needs by the time of Sulla's take over in 82 BCE! Even so, the Empire was also one of the best organized forms of government in the primitive world before the advent of the modern nation-state. It's problems and weaknesses only attest to the fact that it was too advanced for its time, trying to unite so many peoples and groups who otherwise had nothing in common. Indeed, nothing has come close to a peaceful rule (and by this I mean without or minimal civil war) until the modern-day European Union, and it would be far-fetched to even compare the two. On another note, I'd also like to point out that we think of as slavery and what was viewed as slavery in ancient antiquity was quite different. Slaves at the time were something akin to "body servants" or "indentured servants" of the modern era and not the same sort of slavery Americans commonly think of picking cotton in fields or whipped. Indeed, the "less valued" slaves could be beaten, but this was avoided and generally slaves were freed after a certain time, if not by their masters then by their own hand, usually in the form of purchasing their freedom (as slaves, interestingly, could make money). I'm not defending slavery in antiquity--not at all!--but it was vastly different to what we think of as slavery today. I could go into more detail about Roman slaves, but my hands hurt from typing and I have to get to class.

Thanks for the feedback, LaForge. Are you sure? I thought he is the son of Venus in Vergil's tale.After writing that, I started wondering and realized I might have messed up there somewhere. I would go get my copy of Aeneid, but...well, I didn't enjoy it. I may be wrong, though, on the Venus matter. I do know, however, that the Venus issue was intended to tie Julius Caesar and, by way of legal adoption, Augustus to the gods. Besides that, before Octavian became the emperor Augustus, he made Julius Caesar a god and, thus, advance his image by making himself the son of a god. Thus, rather than use a proper Roman name (since his legal name C. Julius Caesar, sometimes called Octavianus--thus the English "Octavian", due to adoption), he dubbed himself Imperator Caesar divi filus, which literally means "Victorious General Caesar, son of a god". It was literally the first time anyone has bestowed upon themselves Imperator ("victorious general") as a title rather than as name as in the past Imperator was only a temporary addition to a legal name bestowed upon generals for a triumph. A triumph is a parade given to a general to march through the city, which was quite popular among the soldiers and even more so among the people as the triumphal army usually tossed money and other prizes gained in battle and subsequent looting to the people. LaForge, I am in complete agreement with you about Aeneid. Not at all a good tale because, as you said, it was quite forced. Vergil was writing under the reign of Augustus, doing his very utmost to praise Augustus--it's thought that Vergil may even have been hired by the Imperial Court for the sake of authoring a story to connect Augustus to the great ancient stories. Besides, he also includes more connections and tries to make a far-reaching reason for the rival hatred between the Romans and Carthaginians in the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage. Then, of course, is Aeneas travel to Hades where he sees all the great rulers of Rome, among which is (surprise! surprise! ) Augustus. In truth, Aeneid was just a political story to praise and justify the actions of the Empire. If you read Augustus' memoirs (Res Gestae Augusti divi, a free, translated copy of which can be read here), you'll notice many, many, many similarities, namely how and by what reasons Augustus uses to defend his actions. Compare this to the reasons and logic Vergil uses to defend Rome's rise to power.

Ancient Egypt is, indeed, the most prominent example of societal and governmental change over time as they were so drastic. The only reason I get bored with Egypt after the arrival of Alexander the Great is that at that point it's no longer African-Egyptian, but has become a typical Hellenistic society run by Greek-speakers.

Actually, I thought only the UK version was Supremacy? My version, as well as others I saw in stores, is labelled Rebellion ... Meh, Tomato - tomato I guess You'd know better than I would, Krytos.

I remember I received one of those screamer files before in my email. The instructions said to turn up the volume to very loud and sit very close to the screen. At first I was bored because all there was to see were a kitchen table and chairs, and then suddenly a face appeared and screamed, all in something like a second or two, and then disappeared. I lit bit of me died that day.

Welcome, blah! Star Wars: Supremacy is the same game as Star Wars: Rebellion, it's merely the British/Australian title to the game. Make yourself at home!

Empire seems to be the most popular bit of study. Usually people either like the bit from Julius Caesar to Nero or from Vespasian to Marcus Aurelius, or (much later) Constantine, Domitian, and Theodosius. I'm a Republic fan, personally, and specialize in the Middle Republic Era to Late Republic (think Punic Wars to Civil Wars/Augustus). After that about 180 CE, I lose interest in European history until 1870 and the Franco-Prussian War through to the conclusion of the First World War. Interests in between are in Africa and Central Asia. Post-World War I...not much, just Latin America. Ancient Egypt is something of a challenge all on its own, but thank goodness for new and improved techniques in research and dating. Much more interest, personally, concerning Meroe and Ancient Nubia to the south of Egypt, the people who inspired Egypt. By ancient Egypt I assume you mean New Kingdom (Ramses era)?

I don't see a problem with that No, no, certainly not. It's merely the overwhelming attitude of the Romans to be rather fixated on the past. It's rather interesting when reading anything written by Romans. I could go on and on about some of the peculiarities of Roman writing. Please do It may not be a good idea. Tofu might commit ritual suicide from boredom...or simply out of spite. But if you insist. I'll try to make it brief. Oh and all politics and societal details I discuss are primarily about the Roman Republic (think from about 500 BC to about AD 1) unless otherwise explicitly stated. Read Homer's Iliad (and get an abridged version so you don't kill yourself over it and then blame me) and then read Vergil's Aeneid and you'll see what I'm talking about. Therein lies the Roman obsession with connecting themselves with the past and looking to the past the greatest moment of all time. Yesterday was better than today, so why should we look forward to tomorrow? It's one of the primary reasons Christianity wasn't so well accepted among many Romans: they didn't see a point to an afterlife since the beforelife had been so much better! In that same sense, it's that reason that Christianity caught on so well later in the Empire as people started seeing less and less to hope for. Indeed, the past was good, but who'd gone back there recently? No one. So, let's try to the make best of the future--though this feeling of "screw the present" persisted. Back to the point, Romans were rather obsessed with trying to make ties to all the great things that had happened. It wasn't enough that Romulus established the city of Rome after seeing some favorable omens, he had to be a son of Mars. And who was the mother? The daughter of the an Etruscan king. Well, it certainly wasn't enough to be descended from royalty, he had to be the descendant of Aeneas. Who's Aeneas? Oh, no one; he just happens to be a great (Trojan) hero from the Trojan War who escaped the sack of the city with the sacred sword of the Trojan kings. But that's not enough because he's the son of the goddess Venus! It goes on and on. On a related the matter, the story of Romulus being the founder of Rome existed for as long as memory. The story of him being a son of Mars, though, doesn't appear until much later in the record. And as for the whole Aeneas ordeal...well, that actually didn't appear until the First Century AD/CE! In other words, whenever the Romans wanted to praise themselves, they just added another bit to the story. Aeneas was a character Vergil took from Homer's Iliad in order to connect the Romans to the great ancient Greeks (not the same ancient Greeks, mind you, which Rome conquered in the Third Century BCE--they were considered a "bastard, barbarian race", "unworthy" of the older Greeks). And what about the bit about Aeneas being the son of Venus? Well, that was certainly never in the Aeneid. No, it wasn't. That was added later, much later, so as to explain how and why C. Julius Caesar (the dictator of fame stabbed to death in 44 BCE) could claim to be the legitimate descendant of Venus. The original story was rather fuzzy and had to do with Romulus, but it was later worked in to the greater story in Vergil's Aeneid. It should be noted, too, that the Romans really didn't care if the stories contradicted. I remember reading a letter written be a Greek teacher come to Rome who didn't understand how so many stories kept circulating, and yet they didn't seem to follow a logical order. When he consulted the priests, philosophers, and other learned men of Rome, they replied that while Greek stories were so simplistic that they seemed to make sense, Roman tales ("truths") make so much sense they appear contradictory to the "barbarian mind". Okay, so this idea of attaching yourself to the past is why Roman society, and politics especially, was so conservative, and by this I mean "conservative" in the oldest and most basic sense of the word: traditional, not very open to change. Indeed, in all acts of politics, a vote of "no" always outweighed any vote of "yes." So if the matter for vote came down to a tie within the Senate, those opposed won because change was considered bad. Again, it's the whole idea of why should we change the government? It's worked for hundreds of years before, why change it now? For that same reason, a single man in a certain position, could veto an entire bill! A consul was one of two chief executives of the Roman Republic's government (the "Commonwealth") and whatever one did, the other could veto with a single word (veto, which literally means "I forbid"), no questions asked. Sure, some people would be angry, but not so angry as you might expect because the old ways, the ways of yesterday are "safe". The same goes for a position called the Tribune of the Plebeians", who were between three and five in all and who represented the people in government. If anything happened which the Tribunes perceived to be unfavourable towards the people, they could just say no (and it only took one!) and that was that--no matter if the whole Senate and all the executives, including the two consuls, backed it! Certainly, tribunes normally perceived what was right for the people based on what certain wealthy Senators or factions desired to be favourable for the people, but that's another matter entirely. I may have got a little away from the point. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll be more than happy to give more. Believe it or not, this is very helpful for me as it allows me to exercise certain bits of knowledge I might otherwise forget in time, especially since I have no classes concerning ancient Rome this semester. Oh, and also, I'm not Grade-A expert on any of this! I may know more than the average bear, but not enough at all overrule or countermand what someone like, say, Connolly or Goldsworthy, might say, so my words are how I have learned and analyzed the information--it's not at all the "say all, end all."

Can we all agree that what works for one may not work or may not sit well with another? Democratic-Socialism works for the Scandinavian countries quite well, despite what we in the Further West may think of any form of socialism. In that same sense, Absolute Capitalism is what (independent) Hong Kong has more-or-less functioned on forever and it seems to work for them quite well. In the United States, democracy in the strictest sense of the word (what we term "direct democracy") isn't so much not good as it is not feasible--or at least wasn't and may still not be. Thus, a republican form of government exists here which serves the people quite well. I happen to be of any opinion that given the rise of information technology and the ease of accounting for many, many, many forms of data, a more direct form of democratic elections (i.e. without the electoral college) is now feasible, or should be within a short span of time. Does it seem realistic that this will happen? Not likely since radical change is difficult to carry out anywhere in the world, much less in a free democratic nation as large and populous as the USA. But then, capitalism has not worked in all places. Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States, has suffered greatly since the decline of the socialist-nationalist party (and please do not try to associate this with the nationalist-socialist approach of the Nazi Party--it's quite different and you I'm quite certain you all get my meaning) that following the Second World War. Where they socialist in the Marxist sense of the word? Of course not! They were socialist of the sense that we associate with popular Labour parties around the world, namely the United Kingdom. In Spanish, though, the word socialista does not carry nearly the same amount of stigma it carries in English, much less in the United States, but being a US territory, the socialist-nationalist party was put down and replaced by the Republican Party. Funny switch, wouldn't you say? But it's true! The aims of labour-style politics were dropped for the sake of the nationalism that the GOP offered Puerto Rico, and has it worked? Well, go to Puerto Rico and see for yourself. No, no it hasn't. Capitalism without independence does not work, not for a controlled territory. For the States, yes it does because they federalized, but Puerto Rico sits on the farthest orbit of the farthest reaches of the United States political periphery. Puerto Rico is now in the worst economic state of its entire existence. It's really a matter of necessity and timing. A form of socialism worked for the New Deal in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. I know, everyone hates to call it that word, but the fact is that it was a form of American Socialism. The government took direct control of most commercial and manufacturing industries in order to reinvigorate the economy. There was nothing bad about this, but would anyone stand for it today? I doubt even the Democrats, which are so often accused of being so far to the "left" (and in American politics, the left is somewhere just-right-of-centre for the rest of the world...), would stand for that much socialization--or if you prefer the modern term, "government contracting", today. Why? Bad timing. The United States is not in a situation where it is necessary or, more importantly in a democratic nation, wanted. I think that led to the approximate location I meant for it to lead...

I don't see a problem with that No, no, certainly not. It's merely the overwhelming attitude of the Romans to be rather fixated on the past. It's rather interesting when reading anything written by Romans. I could go on and on about some of the peculiarities of Roman writing.