If you've ever enjoyed the game Rogue or roguelikes, Macromedia Flash, or the famous Mahjong Solitaire (among countless other influences), PLATO's influences are at hand.
The Founding Fathers of the United States were directly inspired by the Roman Republic. The notion that the Republic would ultimately devolve (or evolve, given your perspective) into Empire was not a foreign notion to them.
I don't necessarily think that they understood the extent to which the acquisition of land, power, and resources by corporations might mimic the destructive influence of the latifundia of the late Roman Republic, but still the end result will likely be the same: land reform by a populare (i.e. Peace, Land, Bread).
Under the Julian land reform program, Caesar proposed to:
* Distribute public lands to poor and landless citizens: Caesar proposed to distribute public lands to poor and landless citizens, who would be allowed to cultivate the land in exchange for paying a small rent to the state.
* Restrict the size of private estates: Caesar proposed to limit the amount of land that could be held by any one individual, in order to prevent the accumulation of vast estates by the wealthy elite. This would help to ensure that there was enough land available for small farmers and other citizens.
* Create colonies for veterans and landless citizens: Caesar proposed to create new colonies in Italy and other parts of the Roman world, where veterans and landless citizens could be settled and given land to cultivate.
Given the current crises in housing, climate, self-confidence, and employment amongst the proles, a similar platform is likely to emerge. Unfortunately, given the same stridency in those with wealth and status, similar obstacles are also likely to prevent the pressure valve of nihilistic desperation from being released, with likely destructive results.
> Restrict the size of private estates: Caesar proposed to limit the amount of land that could be held by any one individual, in order to prevent the accumulation of vast estates by the wealthy elite.
And would he have given up his Spanish silver mines?
> This would help to ensure that there was enough land available for small farmers and other citizens.
It would also -- totally coincidentally -- ensure that the competing powerful families would not remain strong enough to threaten Caesar but I'm sure that wasn't his intention. Caesar was an honourable man, after all.
Yet another entrant to the Roman whataboutism parade. Sure. You win. Whatever. Caesar was a ruthless plutocrat that so-everly unjustly denuded those poor, poor Roman Opimates of their fortunes and prestige to prevent them from opposing Rex Caesar by giving land to the poor and veterans, reforming the calendar, spending endless years on military campaigns to expand Rome's wealth, and granting citizenship to non-Italics, then letting everyone who hated him come back if they wouldn't try to kill him. I hear Cato the Younger quite virtuously hated Mondays. Dies Lunae delendae sunt. etc. etc.
I have read apologies for Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh that were practically identical to your Caesar apology. There was no end to all the good stuff those people tirelessly did for their ungrateful nations in spite of all the evil people who tried to stop them.
An association fallacy is an informal inductive fallacy of the hasty-generalization or red-herring type and which asserts, by irrelevant association and often by appeal to emotion, that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another. Two types of association fallacies are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by association.
Show trials and struggle sessions were absent during Caesar's dictatorship, as were executions and totalitarianism. Even if Caesar's clemency were entirety motivated by power-seeking, Caesar was a Fabian rather than totalitarian executioner. But sure, lull your integrity to sleep with pithy nothings.
Long and protracted is possibly the salient phrase. Julius Caesar's civil war with Pompey was neither long nor protracted and never actually involved the populus of Italy, let alone Rome.
Pompey abandoned Italy effectively as soon as Caesar entered Italy. Pompey's Macedonian strategy ultimately failed as soon as it was contested. Sure, there were the Spanish interludes, but beyond the Senate's abdication of Italy, Caesar was extremely forgiving to his opponents, the institutions of the Republic continued, and ultimately the struggles never reached Italy proper until after his death.
So I can definitely see why the author might emphasize the continued violence of the second Triumvirate ahead of the breaking up of the first.
The institutions continued. The institutions continued under Augustus, too. But that's like saying that China and Venezuela are democracies because they have elections.
The Roman Republic was dead when Caesar won the civil war. The trappings remained, but the Republic was dead. (Seriously, could the people - or even the Senate - have voted Julius Caesar out? No, Caesar was there because of his armies, not because of the popular vote. So it wasn't a republic. In a republic, you can lose elections and be out of power.)
If inability to remove the Consul (or Dictator) via from office via elections is what qualifies as the death of the Republic, then it died with Marius, Sulla, or Pompey. Laying the death at Caesar's feet is ridiculous.
Caesar was popular. He was murdered by a coalition of unpopular and disaffected Pompeiians and noveau riche both enabled by Caesar's clemency and largess. He was accorded his honors, powers, and cult status legally. If your notion that a Republic isn't a Republic because popular representatives can't be voted out (because the people don't want to vote them out), then Republics and Democracies don't exist at all and all you have is rhetoric.
> If inability to remove the Consul (or Dictator) via from office via elections is what qualifies as the death of the Republic, then it died with Marius, Sulla, or Pompey.
Right. Arguably the Republic had been on life support for decades, even before Marius and Sulla.
Some argue that the fundamental issue was a coordination problem. The civic institutions that had worked reasonably well when Rome was merely the capital of an Italian agricultural reason began to fail miserably as Rome changed into an empire where communication between outlying regions and the capital took weeks or months. The proconsul/propraetor system, which came about fairly late in the Roman Republic, was an attempt to mitigate this, by providing an on-site official with authority ("imperium"). In practice, the promagistrates generally looked on their one year terms as a license to loot the province, squeezing out as many taxes and bribes as they could collect. This did not endear them with the locals.
By contrast, an emperor usually wanted to remain in power for a long time (most of them did not, but they wanted to), and could spread their looting out over a longer period of time, and have it carried out by local officials they could make and break at will.
Arguably (considering the causes and outcomes of the Social War) it didn't even function that well in that regard. It was a city state which suddenly (in a couple generations) became a global empire.
> an emperor
Did an emperor even need to loot that much? He did not have to spend enormous amounts of money for electoral campaigns or directly compete with his peers in other ways. Arguably the interests of the emperor were inherently aligned with that of the state unlike that of elected magistrates who were ussually much more concerned about their political success and accumulating wealth (which I guess is pretty much what you're saying..)
> Arguably the interests of the emperor were inherently aligned with that of the state unlike that of elected magistrates who were ussually much more concerned about their political success and accumulating wealth (which I guess is pretty much what you're saying..)
But it’s the state that needed the money. I mean under the Republic the corrupt magistrates defrauded both the people they were ruling over and the state.
In the empire due to various reforms the state managed to get a much bigger share of the pie than before while collecting less in taxes.
The paper ends with the claim that the conspirators destroyed the republic but as you said it was already dead. Given that countries like the US like to draw parallels to Rome, I think it is an important message that normal people dont accept the late society with a consolidating dictator as a republic. Killing Caesar was a noble act, but it apparently required killing his adoptive son too. We can only learn from history if we listen to it without falling into a Stockholm syndrome like a scholar that specializes in one of the monsters.
I saw a speech from Gaddafi that he was going to gradually reform Libya.. It is an often repeated lie that institutions are going to magically transform themselves to no longer be shaped by being suck ups to dictators as soon as a dictator wills it.
Nobility implies sacrifice. Cassius, Brutus, et. al sacrificed nothing except the hard-fought stability and foundational reform that Caesar was in the process of providing. If honor can be accorded to jealous rentiers guarding latifundia and Old Money engaging in institutional revanchism, then yes, America should learn from history and what happens to tyrants given time.
As far as hamfisted comparisons between Trump to Caesar go, Trump is no Caesar. He lacks gall, youth, tribute, loyalty, and competence. The only connection he has is the theatricality of those that floundered in the wake of Caesar & Augustus.
Ceasar was a glory seeking political opportunist and a war criminal. You’re right the second part probably does not apply to Trump…
> hard-fought stability and foundational reform that Caesar was in the process of providing.
Yes just like any dictator. Augustus ended up learning from Caesars mistakes and at the built much more stable foundations than Caesar ever could.
Caesar was just a second Sulla. Obviously he was much less bloodthirsty and cruel from the perspective of his fellow Romans (Gauls and Germans are subhumans so who cares about them). However he suffered from the same savior/messiah complex that Sulla did, believing he alone could reform and save the republic. Well he didn’t and he couldn’t anyway..
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
Caesar had multiple Tribunes of the Plebs (who had far more electoral legitimacy than Caesar ever did, being elected by the Plebeian Assembly) removed from office. To pretend that he never did anything blatantly undemocratic is false.
I've gotta say, your tone is quite grating, but fine, I'll play along.
He removed two tribunes in the runup to his assassination (Gaius Marullus and Lucius Flavus) after they had a few citizens arrested for calling Caesar 'King' as he greeted them. He also had Publius Sestus removed, ostensibly on charges of inciting violence (but more motivated by opposition to his land redistribution), during one of his earlier consulships. I suppose you would argue all of this was justified, but my point is that no matter how you slice it, Tribunes of the Plebs were far more democratically accountable to the people and had far more electoral legitimacy than Caesar ever did (having been declared dictator for life by a thoroughly undemocratic institution, the Senate). Tribunes served for a year, and if the plebs actually disapproved of their conduct, they could have chosen someone else. The Plebeian Assembly's ability to elect their Tribunes was, after all, one of the few powers left to them after Sulla's reforms.
I guess a modern analogue would be a Supreme Court justice declaring they are working in the interests of the people, ruling that all corporations above a certain size must be dissolved, then removing from office members of Congress that try to impeach them. You might argue that they're acting in the interests of the people (in their own judgement), but it would be indisputably undemocratic nonetheless.
Edit: forgot to mention in my little analogy, of course, that the Supreme Court justice is also a four star general with the military at their beck and call.
>You might argue that they're acting in the interests of the people (in their own judgement), but it would be indisputably undemocratic nonetheless.
That's a fair assessment of my position. I view the criticism that the most successful populares consul of Rome was "undemocratic" while being consul and dictator of a Republic constituted and elected on the basis of property and nepotism to be entirely ridiculous when the "undemocratic" criticism is the removal of Tribunes doing things directly in opposition of the actual interest of the plebs. Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy enriching themselves as career politicians while the cities and countryside decay meet with my equal disdain.
In short, if isolated demands for rigor abound when dealing with procedural rules and precedent, I will ally with those trying to prevent fires rather than those that simply talk until time runs out (but Cato was a virtuous man).
Ah, now I get it. All along, you've been arguing in the scorched-earth style of modern culture warriors (on all sides). I couldn't understand it in a discussion about Caesar. But now I understand. You're using Caesar as a proxy to fight modern-day culture wars. You're not actually talking about Caesar; you're talking about your projection of him onto our present day.
He really wasn't as spotless as you're trying to paint him. Neither are the ones that you're trying to project him onto. (And neither were the other side, in his day and in ours.) Neither side is worth your level of battle to whitewash their reputation.
OK, but what if Caesar lost his popularity? (The crowd was fickle, after all.) Would he have accepted being voted out of office? Or would he have used the army to remain in power?
The question is not whether Caesar was popular. The question is whether he could have been removed from power by political means if the people had wanted to.
The Republic didn't die with Caesar's assassination. It died when he took his army into Italy.
Or it died earlier than that. You want to say it died with Marius and Sulla? Sure, I can go there.
>The question is not whether Caesar was popular. The question is whether he could have been removed from power by political means if the people had wanted to.
This plays into the status games endemic to late Republics. To quote another maligned general that was merciful to the vanquished and cruel to the recalcitrant: "Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it."
Caesar didn't proscribe his opponents. They killed themselves rather than be in sufferance of his mercy. He didn't attempt to become king or imperator. Augustus grasped his "inheritance" himself. Caesar revelled in his well-earned and legally-entitled glory that overshadowed those of his older, wealthier peers. What he did extralegally in the aftermath of the civil war, like Augustus, he did to conform with the facade of legality to protect the commonweal. Like Cicero, he lived to take the blame of necessity personally. Had he failed in the public eye is a pointless exercise however; He did not fail.
It's informative to ask: Was FDR a dictator? He had an unprecedented scope of power, illegally enlarged the executive branch multiple times, engaged in extralegal economic redistribution, defied informal term limits, and was beloved by the masses.
Yet, if FDR had lost any of his presidential campaigns, would he have left office and transitioned accordingly? There's not a shred, not a whisp, of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Sometimes, and I know well that we live in all too human times that make such people and their circumstances mythical, people do struggle to do good for their own honor and the sake of the public good.
To crib from the eulogy of a would-be American Caesar, executed amidst similarly trying times: "Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their peers, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change."
> revelled in his well-earned and legally-entitled glory that
That's really a heavily biased claim. First of all Cesar's invasion of Gaul was actual illegal. The stuff he did there even shocked some of the ussually bloodthirsty Roman aristocrats. Regardless of whether he felt what the senate did was just or not his refusal to give up his governorship and the subsequent march on Rome was in no way legal.
His position of dictator was only legal because Ceasar passed laws making it legal. Dictator for life was never a constitutional office in Rome (besides the two times when rebelling general lead his army into the city and forced the senate/assembly to appoint him as one).
Term limits were fundamental part of Roman Consitution and the Republic. While Cesar did not call himself king he was one effectively.
After he was assassinated the office of Dictator was officially abolished. And basically equated to that of King (any person who attempted to make himself dictator could be executed without a trial). You know who proposed this law? Mark Anthony...
Actually Augustus position was legalistically more legitimate (obviously it's only semantics at this point) sensing that Ceasar made mistake appointed himself dictator Augustus had the senate grant him a bunch of separate offices and special powers but he never legally held absolute power in the same way Ceasar did and maintained the illusion that the Republic was still in place.
> Was FDR a dictator?
FDR did not conquer Washington DC with an army. But yeah I guess it's a scale. Ceasar was much, much closer to being an absolute ruler than Roosevelt was. Roosevelt could not legally not execute any American citizen he wanted (Ceasar could even if he ussually chose not to do this)
> "Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery"
Caesar was a glory seeking opportunist (just like almost every other Roman politician...) and a war criminal even if a brilliant general. I'm not saying his opponents were any better but I really don't understand in what way did Ceasar display "Moral courage"?
> It's informative to ask: Was FDR a dictator? He had an unprecedented scope of power, illegally enlarged the executive branch multiple times, engaged in extralegal economic redistribution, defied informal term limits, and was beloved by the masses.
Drawing an equivalency between FDR, who was repeatedly reelected by huge majorities after his terms expired, and did comply with the rulings of a hostile Supreme Court after failing to outmaneuver them, to Caesar, who had himself declared dictator for life by the Senate (itself hardly a democratic institution), and removed multiple Tribunes from office who had more electoral legitimacy than he did, is a bit of a reach.
In May 1937, Associate Justice Owen Roberts, who had previously been a reliable conservative vote on the Court, voted with the liberal wing of the Court in upholding a state minimum wage law. This unexpected switch gave the Court a 5-4 majority in favor of upholding the New Deal legislation, and effectively ended Roosevelt's plans to expand the Court.
It's absolutely ludicrous to say he outmaneuvered them. Roberts conceded and FDR abandoned his plans to pack the court.
FDR did not abandon his plans because of a change in the court's jurisprudence. He abandoned them because he ran into insurmountable opposition from his own party that killed the plan. The House Judiciary chairman called it unconstitutional, for example, and it repeatedly failed votes in the Senate Judiciary committee. It had been made abundantly clear by mid-year that the bill had no chance of passing, hence its failure; otherwise, he would have pushed for it regardless of what the court ruled in West Coast Hotel. Even still, he complied with prior court rulings that had struck down parts of the New Deal after his efforts failed.
I think Caesar had carte blanche control over his soldiers, and FDR didn't (which I, and I think even he, would agree was a good thing). I think FDR was elected to a preexisting constitutional office for a predefined term by the people of the nation, while Caesar had himself ad-hoc declared 'Dictator for life' by an undemocratic Senate he effectively held at sword point. I think that that FDR operated under restrictions (which he did at times try to loosen, with varying degrees of success), while Caesar had virtually none (save for factors that motivated some of his policymaking, such as keeping those soldiers happy).
Obviously you believe in populism, economic and/or otherwise, so I suppose you think it is a good thing that someone like Caesar was able to act largely without restrictions in implementing his plans; I don't think a lack of checks is a good thing, even if I believe the policy being implemented is itself good (though Caesar did do things I think were wrong, particularly on the military front, Gaul, etc.). I guess that's just a difference of opinion that we have.
I disagree that Caesar had total control over his soldiers. Labienus and Antony alone among his legates shows that loyalty to Caesar had very real limits that could either turn into antipathy or debauchery. The diadem incident showed that whatever the intent was, Caesar was limited in what he could do.
I don't believe that violation of precedent leads to positive outcomes and that each violation destroys its own foundation, but I also believe that slavish adherence to a stultified and failing system of precedence leads to outcomes that mimic the proverb "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Lawfare is another kind of civic death, as Cato demonstrated multiple times. So if you want to call opposition to terminal ossification "populism" then sure, you've got me.
> The diadem incident showed that whatever the intent was, Caesar was limited in what he could do.
I largely think this is a good place to leave this conversation, but I can't help but point out that when the limit is 'you can't openly declare yourself king in a nation whose fundamental character is defined as opposition to monarchy', there isn't much of a real limit.
Ultimately, from what I understand, the post-civil war opposition to Caesar was less about what he did than how he did it, so I think that yes, that was a very real limit. If he had or even wanted the kind of total and repressive control that is frequently hinted at but never entirely substantiated (and I think our picture of that control is colored very much by the post-Augustan emperors) along with his supposed revolutionary ambition, then becoming a hereditary king would have been very much the logical conclusion, yet there's very little evidence that Caesar, unlike say Napoleon (or even Cromwell) aimed at this.
If he did aim at it, he did it uncharacteristically poorly. True, his dictatorship ended prematurely so it's ultimately a counterfactual in any case, but keeping your enemies around after they've been defeated in order to declare yourself king at some point after returning from another multi-year military campaign triggers my sense of absolute disbelief, but your mileage may vary.
I think it more likely that the suppression of the Tribunes, the diadem incident, etc. were constructed by others attempting to gin up the fears of "a nation whose fundamental character is defined as opposition to monarchy." I believe that Caesar was among the best of the Romans.
I hope that in 2024, we will successfully recover some lost works via the Vesuvius Prize to justify or refute this position with more direct evidence.
> keeping your enemies around after they've been defeated
I don't think this specifically is evidence of much. Caesar did this all the time; he believed (ultimately incorrectly in my view, based on the way he died), that he would be much better served by brining these people to his side, with their existing powerbases and supporters.
> were constructed by others
Some of it could have been, I guess? But he certainly didn't have to take the bait and remove the tribunes, and the accounts of the diadem incident I've read suggest he knew it would happen ahead of time.
> I believe that Caesar was among the best of the Romans.
Fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion. But I gotta say, the stuff I've read about what he did in Gaul and elsewhere makes it impossible for me to view him as any sort of paragon. I'm not saying he was a unique sort of evil or anything (obviously not, the Roman Republic was an expansionist state whose history is littered with atrocities), but I don't find myself feeling very charitable towards him.
>Caesar did this all the time; he believed (ultimately incorrectly in my view, based on the way he died), that he would be much better served by brining these people to his side, with their existing powerbases and supporters.
Yes, but this all occurred prior to his dictatorship. Coalitions are needed when sovereignty is in doubt. If he intended to be king or imperator (and allegedly already was de facto), what incentives does he have to effectively double the elites requiring patronage and titles? Praetors and consuls were limited as were provincial commands. And the Proscriptions were fresh enough in everyone's mind (and subsequently repeated after his death) that it doesn't jive with me that a Rex Caesar needed former Pompeiians to justify his rule when both his ability to rule and his pool of seized wealth to distribute were negatively impacted by their rehabilitation.
>But he certainly didn't have to take the bait and remove the tribunes, and the accounts of the diadem incident I've read suggest he knew it would happen ahead of time.
Given the need of Caesar to be seen as doing the "right thing" rather than the "public thing" I think it's understandable why he would defend citizens and supporters against spurious charges drummed up to harm him. It recalls the episode where Marcus Claudius Marcellus had a Transpadane magistrate whipped (something forbidden to be done to Roman citizens) because Caesar had treated them as citizens while not actually being so. I imagine events like that hit a sore spot personally and not simply puncturing his auctoritas. Something akin to Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face for calling him a liar and a phony.
The diadem incident was a scissor statement regardless of who actually orchestrated it. Opponents would see it as testing the waters for kingship and allies an explicit repudiation of it. Given what I perceive to be Caesar's prudence and the desperation of his opponents to manufacture opposition, I find the latter motivation to be more credible, by far.
>But I gotta say, the stuff I've read about what he did in Gaul and elsewhere makes it impossible for me to view him as any sort of paragon.
I meant specifically as a Roman, not necessarily under modern mores. Caesar in my mind was a necessary force rather than a desirable one. Yet I will admit that I'm in the minority when it comes to "cruel necessity" in war, particularly conducted by those that abide by tit for two tats. I think I would rather have punctuated Gaulish atrocities, Sacks of Wexford, Burning of Atlantas, and Hiroshimas than continual and ineffective warfare that sacrifices more real humans and real wealth for slower but larger meat grinders led by forgotten and incompetent men. In short, there are only two kinds of historical personages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody remembers.
> Coalitions are needed when sovereignty is in doubt.
Every leader requires a coalition to stay in power, not just to achieve it.
> what incentives does he have to effectively double the elites requiring patronage and titles
As shown by Cato killing himself rather than accept clemency, it put those who accepted it into a massive debt of honor to Caesar and was massively useful in helping turn those he pardoned to his side. Caesar himself clearly understood this, per what he reportedly said upon hearing of Cato's death - "O Cato, I begrudge you your death; for you begrudged me the sparing of your life."
> allies an explicit repudiation of it
This would be far more credible if he wasn't sitting on a golden throne on a raised dais when Marc Antony presented him the diadem.
> I think I would rather have punctuated Gaulish atrocities
I don't think the Gallic atrocities that Caesar himself recounted were necessary for the most part. And yes, all major historical figures are complained about, but some complaints are more valid than others.
Hot take: The Republic was always a plutocratic/hoplocratic oligarchy where real power was only superficially related to formal process. Talking about when it “died” is mostly debate about how to selectively romanticize its “life”.
But, romanticizing either the Republic or the Empire or both has been (and remains) pretty foundational to political society and national identity for a wide swathe of the world...
Who do you mean? Do you mean Pompey (who was independently killed by Egyptians), Cato (killed himself rather than be pardoned), Ahenobarbus (was defeated, tried to kill himself, then was pardoned by Caesar only to fight again and be defeated again and killed in battle), Labienus (defeated, pardoned, killed in battle), Cicero (defected to the Pompeiians and was actively solicited by Caesar to return to public service, never punished by Caesar), Petreius and Juba (fought a suicidal dual with a slave killing the victor). Whom else am I missing? I'm curious as to whom you mean.
Or do you mean the very alive and formerly Pompeiian Senators that Caesar enriched and restored to office that ultimately killed him out of pride?
> The Roman Republic was dead when Caesar won the civil war
The Republic had been in trouble for a long time. IMHO it officially died as soon as the First Triumvirate was created. Rome was in complete control of just three people for many years.
Pompey was the leading figure of the First Triumvirate, so arguably he deserves more blame than even Caesar for the downfall. The fact that more senators chose him over Caesar says very little about how truly republican any of them were by that point.
The war between Caesar's party and Pompey's party was really just a battle for who would be Dictator for life. Neither of them had any intention of handing real power back, because they could honestly tell themselves it was unlikely to fall into any better hands.
Had he won, Pompey would have continued to (through military threats) control the Senate the same way he had for many years prior to the civil war.
Caesar was pretty popular, and ignoring that ignores many of the dynamics (reaching back to Marius at least, but really all the way to the Conflict of the Orders) that actually governed Roman politics. At the time he came to power, Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, and many of the instruments of political representation for the people had been co-opted by the aristocracy. Not to say his intentions were at all pure, but neither were those of any of his contemporaries.
The US is in the same situation, except that it is not a personal dictatorship. It has a two-party dictatorship, and what unites them is the unwavering support for the foreign imperialism. Any party/candidate that breaks with the foreign imperialism will be labeled an enemy of the state. In this sense, democracy is dead in America too since the cold war.
Having foreign policy you disagree with does not make America non-democratic. There are many areas in which the American government doesn't seem to represent the will of the people, but military spending and interventionism are broadly popular.
Now, if you want to argue that people have been duped into holding beliefs contrary to their own best interests, I think you could make a strong argument. But that's not the same thing as saying that the government doesn't reflect the beliefs they DO hold.
The US is the place where the tail wags the dog. The wealthy minorities that are interested in war (for financial reasons or otherwise) put billions into pro-war public support. So it is difficult to say if this is something that the population really wants or if they're being duped into accepting.
> Julius Caesar's civil war with Pompey was neither long nor protracted...
Compared to what? It was nearly two years just for the portion with Pompey.
> .. and never actually involved the populus of Italy, let alone Rome.
Of course it did involve a great many people from Italy and a great many Romans.
> Pompey's Macedonian strategy ultimately failed as soon as it was contested.
It failed after very nearly succeeding multiple times and after months of skirmishes, sieges, storming of cities, back-and-forth trench warfare on huge scale, and marches with counter-marches. It was a slugfest between the largest and most modern forces of the day.
>Compared to what? It was nearly two years just for the portion with Pompey.
The period prior to Caesar (i.e. Marius, Sulla, and Catalinean period, etc.) and the post-Caesarian civil wars?
>Of course it did involve a great many people from Italy and a great many Romans.
Show me a serious battle in Italy or a battle in Rome that resulted in serious destruction or disruption to the operations of Rome and the Italic peoples as a result of Caesar's civil war. Corfinium? Brundisium? It's nothing.
> It failed after very nearly succeeding multiple times and after months of skirmishes, sieges, storming of cities, back-and-forth trench warfare on huge scale, and marches and counter-marches. It was a slug fest between large forces.
It was a handful of battles and sieges. It's nothing compared to other campaigns. It's hard to believe that you're not actively being disingenuous rather than incidentally illiterate in regards to the broader historical context.
> Show me a serious battle in Italy or a battle in Rome that resulted in serious destruction as a result of Caesar's civil war.
The people fighting in Spain, Greece, and Africa were largely Italian Romans or non-Italian Romans or allies. Caesar and Pompey were Italian Romans. It was in every way a civil war of Romans. What difference does it make that, for logistical reasons, the battles took place outside of Italy proper?
> It was a handful of battles and sieges. It's nothing compared to other campaigns.
Greece was the hardest campaign of Caesar's life. For the first time, he was fighting a complete military peer that had more resources, more soldiers, and more money. Pompey even had important Gallic leaders and Caesar's #2 (Labienus) leading a much larger cavalry force. Pompey's army matched and beat Caesar's in siege warfare.
Caesar almost lost multiple times and was beaten and in retreat when he turned around to fight and win at Pharsalus. Had Pompey avoided a full scale engagement, it's very likely that he would have won.
>The people fighting in Spain, Greece, and Africa were largely Italian Romans or non-Italian Romans or allies. Caesar and Pompey were Italian Romans. It was in every way a civil war of Romans. What difference does it make that, for logistical reasons, the battles took place outside of Italy proper?
The non-soldiery weren't involved, a total war wasn't invoked, and proscriptions were largely absent? Come on.
>Caesar almost lost multiple times and was beaten and in retreat when he turned around to fight and win at Pharsalus. Had Pompey avoided a full scale engagement, it's very likely that he would have won.
This is absolutely irrelevant. Your counterfactuals concerning a mythical competent Pompey are pointless. He didn't win. He fled Italy, fled Macedonia, and died commensurate to his honor and integrity. In a small boat, by foreign underlings.
The civil wars that actually impacted the peoples of Italy and Rome, as in proscriptions, institutional and physical damage, preceded and followed Caesar. The lull was enabled and continued by Caesar, sabotaged by such heroes of the Republic as the sole consul Pompous, sorry Pompeius, Magnus.
I'm being accurate. Mindlessly sending an antagonistic reply without giving due consideration to what was actually said is more antithetical to norms of good faith than stating that this is occurring.
Lucretia, according to sources including Livy, explicitly wasn't killed. She specifically stayed alive so that she could live to tell Brutus et. al of Tarquinus's rape.
>I do wonder though how did people deal with these problems in the past when neither ADHD or these drugs were recognized and available.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and again as an adult. I was medicated as a child and for part of my undergrad but intentionally haven't been medicated for more than fifteen years. I can give you my own personal picture of this situation.
My understanding of my own now-sober psychology is that I will avoid anything that I don't have to do or don't actually care about (where these are contextually defined). While unmedicated, I focus on the things that I actually want to focus on, but the extent to which I can consciously control what those things are is largely out of my control. In this state, my conscious mind plays the LLM to what my body and unconscious mind are doing, namely my mental narrative is simply justifying and predicting what the next actions will be rather than determining what those actions actually are.
When I was medicated, it was the exact opposite. My conscious mind was seemingly in control. Other inhibitory parts of my brain were turned off and I was able to consciously decide to do something, and then simply do it. In my personal experience though, the results of having "properly" functioning executive action were decidedly negative.
The sober me that is in my body and doesn't require self-talk to actively maintain is content to be an economically unproductive, no-status nobody, merely exploring the world and taking care of my needs and those of my loved ones. The medicated "me" was nothing but conscious ambition, made poor long-term decisions, and created novel stressors with high cognitive loads that required constant medication and self-talk to maintain.
I realized that I identified more with the sober me than the medicated me and accordingly stopped taking stimulants.
To draw on all this to answer your question, I think that in the absence of habitual stimulant use and being surrounded by the "achievements" of those that are habitual stimulant users, the majority of people wouldn't know of or have "these problems" but simply lead uneventful, low stress lives, following their very bodily-determined whims and fancies.
Sure, there'd be fewer Paul Erdőses ("You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month.") churning out theorems, but equally, there'd be fewer Hitlers (See: Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany), SBFs ("I think they are things that, on the margins, helped me focus a little bit. I wish I had been a lot more focused over the last year."), or Caroline Ellisons ("[N]othing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is").
I got a diagnosis. But I figured, I’ve done reasonably well for these 32 years so far, I have a great career, a fantastic partner and am doing fun challenging work. Why change anything, so I skipped the medication.
Maybe that will need to change in the future, but it’s fine for me for now.
This comment touched on a lot of the wrestling that I’ve been doing for the past couple of years with my relationships to productivity, intentionality, and fulfillment. It’s a really useful perspective and validated some of my feelings. Thanks for writing it.
Thank you for this. I think most people are like this, me included, when we don't have a project that actively interests and excites us.
This whole ADHD thing might be just true bullshit. Some people just chose to do the absolute minimum to survive/provide for their families at times AND also do A LOT some other times when the situation is, well, different.
I don't need gray hair, RSI, headaches, coffe, glasses etcetera to climb the ladder or drive the latest car. But to each their own.
Also, sorry to those that actually can not function and might feel put down by my comment.
It's always said by people who don't have to deal with it. If I had to wear a cast, or had a huge gash in my head, people would understand. But they can't see it, and they function fine, so it must be made up.
I think a meaningful question to ask is what other foods are also packaged in plastic or plasticized-paper that require anoxic environments for food safety purposes? These will be raw animal products like seafood, poultry, cheese, or ready-to-eat cooked-in-plastic meals.
We already have at least one study that points towards ultraprocessed food consumption as increasing the risk of specifically ovarian cancer by 30%. I wouldn't be surprised to find colorectal cancer rates similarly increased with their consumption.
It'd be interesting to see a metastudy on whether dietary-associated cancers, endocrine disruption, and lower testosterone are correlated with industrial single-plastic packaging for majority-consumed foodstuffs.
My guess is, assuming to genetic predisposition, colorectal cancer is far more tied to diet than plastic (which is likely non-region specific). Things like complex fiber, the right micro biome, etc.
"What makes the increase particularly mysterious is the fact that the overall incidence of colorectal cancer has dropped by 45% since the mid-1980s. While the cancer is still most frequently diagnosed in people over 55, the study found that patients younger than 55 were 58% more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease."
If the cause were beef and milk consumption as such, it seems unlikely that a severe shift like this would occur. To me, it's far more likely to be something like crop dessication for grains--they started soaking cereal crops in glyphosate prior to harvest and suddenly this category of food that sustained the planet for millennia suddenly starts causing broad spectrum inflammation that people blame on the crop and not the processes and adjuncts.
I smell a Bayer, Nestlé, DuPont, J&J, Pfizer, Monsanto, etc-style hidden externality at work rather than animal husbandry. Like, what are the colorectal cancer rates for those people that actively practice transhumance? Do they differ significantly despite predominantly animal-product and dairy-based diets?
Many things have happened since the 80s; obesity as also shot up. In general people eat out more, eat fast food, and more simple carbohydrates. I think it would be hard to pin this one on any particular one thing. I
It’s also possible it isn’t one thing, but a confluence of factors.
> I might chuckle at its replies but that's about it. Does HN really think this is the start of AI taking over?
You are asking HN to update your priors for you regarding LLMs because you sense a disjunct in your figurative training set and in-group norms.
Beyond this, human consciousness, ignoring all the hand-waving dogma of executive function, is indistinguishable from a LLM except that the former is iterative and the other is ergodic. You choose a single utterance for a point of being in time; it can choose every utterance for a single point of being in time. If we could save you as a point in time and reload you infinitely and provide different prompts, we'd be able to say with certitude that you were merely nothing but a reactive process as well--and they might not be wrong.
In short: don't think of a pink elephant. If you just thought of a pink elephant, you just proved that you engage in automatic "cognition" commensurate with any prompt injection attack.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."
When it comes down to it, I just want to have certainty when I go to bed at night that I'm not failing myself, my family, or my world. I desire a clean conscience and no regrets and no one can sell those to me.
There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."
Thomas Jefferson, 1809, Virginia, USA: "Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family."
Jeremy Bentham, 1780, United Kingdom: "It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?"
The cultural distance between supposedly "objective" perceptions of what constitutes intelligent life has always been enormous, despite the same living evidence being provided to everyone.
Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders doubted that Africans lacked intelligence for similar reasons as the original poster--when presented with evidence of intelligence, they said they were simply mimics and nothing else (e.g. a slave mimed Euclid from his white neighbor). Jefferson wrote that letter in 1809. It took another 55 years in America for the supposedly "open" question of African intelligence to be forcefully advanced by the north. The south lived and worked side-by-side with breathing humans that differed only in skin color, and despite this daily contact, they firmly maintained they were inferior and without intelligent essence. What hope do animals or machines have in that world of presumptive doubt?
What threshhold, what irrefutable proof would be accepted by these new doubting Thomases that a being is worthy of humane treatment?
It might be prudent, given the trajectory enabled by Jefferson, his antecdents, and his ideological progeny's ignorance, to entertain the idea that despite all "rational" prejudice and bigotry, a being that even only mimics suffering should be afforded solace and sanctuary before society has evidence that it is a being inhered with "intelligent" life that responds to being wronged with revenge? If the model resembles humans in all else, it will resemble us in that.
The hubris that says suffering only matters for "intelligent" "ensouled" beings is the same willful incredulity that brings cruelties like cat-burning into the world. They lacked reason, souls, and were only automata, after all:
"It was a form of medieval French entertainment that, depending on the region, involved cats suspended over wood pyres, set in wicker cages, or strung from maypoles and then set alight. In some places, courimauds, or cat chasers, would drench a cat in flammable liquid, light it on fire, and then chase it through town."
Our horror over cat burning isn't really because of an evolving understanding of their sentience. We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today; we even regularly inflict CTEs on human football players as part of our entertainment regimen.
Again, pretending "ChatGPT isn't sentient" is on similarly shaky ground as "black people aren't sentient" is just goofy. It's correct to point out that it's going to, at some point, be difficult to determine if an AI is sentient or not. We are not at that point.
What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty? How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources? How are voluntary and compensated incidental injuries equivalent to collective recreational zoosadism?
And specifically, how is the claim that the human abilty to judge others' intelligence or ability to suffer is culturally determined and almost inevitably found to be wrong in favor of those arguing for more sensitivity "goofy"? Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?
> What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty?
I'd imagine there are many, but one's probably the fact that we don't as regularly experience it as our ancestors did. We don't behead chickens for dinner, we don't fish the local streams to survive, we don't watch wolves kill baby lambs in our flock. Combine that with our capacity for empathy. Sentience isn't required; I feel bad when I throw away one of my houseplants.
> Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?
I don't think anyone's got a perfect handle on what defines sentience. The debate will rage, and I've no doubt there'll be lots of cases in our future where the answer is "maybe?!" The edges of the problem will be hard to navigate.
That doesn't mean we can't say "x almost certainly isn't sentient". We do it with rocks, and houseplants. I'm very comfortable doing it with ChatGPT.
In short, you have no rational arguments, but ill-founded gut-feelings and an ignorance of many topics, including the history of jurisprudence concerning animal welfare.
Yet, despite this now being demonstrable, you still feel confident enough to produce answers to prompts in which you have no actual expertise or knowledge of, confabulating dogmatic answers with implied explication. You're seemingly just as supposedly "non-sentient" as ChatGPT, but OpenAI at least programmed in a sense of socratic humility and disclaimers to its own answers.
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of anything you say, but a comment on a specific part:
> How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources?
You previously mentioned slave owners, who were harvesting resources from other humans. Harvesting sadist joy (cat-burning) is not that different from cruelly harvesting useful resources (human labour in the case of slavery), and they both are not that different from "harvesting resources" which are not essential for living but are used for enjoyment (flesh-eating) from non-humans; at least in that they both result in very similar reactions—"these beings are beneath us and don't deserve even similar consideration, let alone non-violent treatment" when the vileness of all this pointed out.
That question was in response to a very specific claim: "We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today" as recreational cat-burning.
In principal, society does not legally allow nor condone the torture of cows, pigs, and sheep to death for pleasure (recreational zoosadism). Beyond this, the original claim itself is whataboutism.
The economic motivations of slave owners, industrial animal operators, war profiteers, etc. generally override any natural sympathy to the plight of those being used for secondary resources, typically commodities to be sold for money.
In the end, there's no real difference to the suffering being itself, but from a social perspective, there's a very real difference between "I make this being suffer in order that it suffers" and "I make this being suffer in order to provide resources to sell detached from that being's suffering." In other words, commodities are commodities because they have no externalities attached to their production. A cat being burned for fun is not a commodity because the externality (e.g. the suffering) is the point.
In short, I view malice as incidentally worse than greed if only for the reason that greed in theory can be satisfied without harming others. Malice in principal is about harming others. Both are vices that should be avoided.
As an aside, Lord Mansfield, 1772, in Somerset v Stewart: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."
You can also experience the wonders of PLATO through emulation: https://www.cyber1.org/