Oof.

So, 1) there was no 'Greek republic' because 2) there was no united ancient Greek state and 3) Greek self government ended because of outside (Macedonian) conquest.

Also, 4) the Romans had a Senate too, famously...that doesn't seem to have helped...
...because 5) the reason the Roman Republic collapsed (in part, welcome to 'it's complicated') was that the Senate proved sometimes unable and frequently unwilling to rein in power magistrates or to hold them accountable for their dangerous and illegal actions.
Are there warnings from ancient history about excessive polarization? Absolutely.

But there are also lots of warnings about the dangers posed by ambitious men seeking power and by cowardly politicians too scared to restrain them.
Impeachment is not Scipio Nasica rushing out with a mob to kill Tiberius Gracchus. It is a constitutional process holding a corrupt executive responsible for his actions.

Had the Romans held a Nasica, a Marius, a Sulla accountable, they may well not have had a Caesar.
Anyway, Castor's ancient history is almost as bad as his lawyering.

Clearly they should have picked Pollux for the defense team instead.

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More from @BretDevereaux

10 Feb
It is really tricky to explain and even trickier to prove to readers who have perhaps not so much experience with different languages that just because a word X in foreign language is translated to word Y in English does not mean they represent precisely the same concept. 1/8
This apropos of arguing that English 'courage' isn't quite the same as Latin's fortis or virtus, or Greek's ἀνδρεία (or any other number of similarly translatable words), despite the fact that in a translation you will, of course, read 'courage' for those words. 2/8
So you end up arguing in circles because the retort comes back, "but these are all forms of courage."

But they're not! The Greeks didn't have modern English 'courage' in mind forming ἀνδρεία and senses of courage are non-overlapping. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
8 Feb
This is a good thread that I think nails the lottery nature of academia as a result of marketization, but as always I think it is then necessary to ask 'marketization in contrast to what?'

'System is bad' is true but alternatives must be considered to be useful. 1/25
So briefly, while organized university-like training existed first in East Asia and the Islamic world, the modern university's organization comes through the European tradition, where the universities were founded - often by kings - mostly to train priests. 2/25
(I am gliding over some complexity here, of course).

Moving into the early modern period, emergent European states (and later, their colonies) expand that model substantially. The model gets exported and adopted, even outside of the cultural context of its origin. 3/25
Read 25 tweets
8 Feb
Sometimes going back to writing or editing a formal piece of writing after working on the blog, I am really struck by how much of a useful crutch it can be to be able to drop into an informal, conversational register.
It just makes managing flow and sentence length so much easier if you can follow up a technical sentence by dropping into that conversational register where you can sum up the big complex idea with a few quick words and a joke.
By way of example, this long chunk would have been hard to write in an entirely formal register especially if I wanted it to be reasonably digestible.

So I have some big complex sentences (especially in the first paragraph), which are then summed up conversationally at the end. Image
Read 4 tweets
24 Jan
An interesting article over at @AncientWorldMag on the idea of 'states' in the ancient world: ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/state…

I think it both presents an interesting argument and a solid summation of scholarly perspectives on the question, but I don't quite buy the argument. 1/21
Hall's main point: that 'state'-ness is necessarily a fuzzy set is valid and well made. Was Rome a 'state' in 477 when the Fabii fell against Veii? Probably not.

The state is defined as an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force... 2/21
...for the Fabii to fight this way suggests that the Roman Republic itself didn't yet have that monopoly.

And of course even in the modern period we have developed terms to express some of the fuzziness of the 'state' set. We thus talk about 'failed states' for... 3/21
Read 21 tweets
21 Jan
I love the Aeginetan turtles! I always point these out whenever I am teaching Greek coinage.

So much better than owls.
For those playing along at home, because Greece in the Archaic and Classical period (when coinage was introduced to there from Anatolia) was split into a lot of little states, each state minted its own coins (on more-or-less similar weight standards) with their state emblem.
Athens had its owl (for Athena), Aegina a turtle, Thebes a Boeotian shield, Thera had dolphins. Little Silinus on Sicily had wheat (it was good farm country) and so on.
Read 7 tweets
20 Jan
Oh yeah, also shout out to Micah 4:4 getting into the inauguration, being quoted by Amanda Gorman (via George Washington (maybe also via the musical Hamilton, but it was famous before)) in her amazing poem (and what delivery!)
The full verse goes:
"Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken" (NIV)
In its context, the verse contemplates a future world at peace under God's rule.

But Washington, most famously in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, took the verse as an ideal for the American republic, where people of every stripe "shall sit...
Read 7 tweets

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