Are all former baseball players going to be in movies now? Should I start sending spec scripts to player agents?

Beats sinking your money into a video game.

teaming with former Major League Baseball player Mike Piazza to produce “Constantine.”

Tino Martinez was a decent player, but not really movie worthy.

Wow, as someone who specializes in the later Roman Empire, I don't know if I should be excited about one of the seminal figures of the ancient world finally getting some screen time, or cringing at the inevitable botch job that will be made of it. Hmmm...

Ralph Winter and Terry Botwick’s 1019 Entertainment are heading to ancient Rome

That's a neat trick.

But they already made this movie.... It wasn't very good except for that scene.

“The spread of Christianity during Constantine’s reign struck me as a huge turning point in human history and I think film is the best medium to capture such a significant moment.”

I think it was Gibbon who argued the spread of Christianity was the principle cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire. I hope that';s what Piazza is alluding to here.

Everyone loved Gladiator way more than I did. I expected to love it, generically love "Blood and Sandals" movies and the cast was good, but eh. A flaw in me I suspect.

Ah, Ancient Rome...when the Lions and Tigers always won!

"HGH Unchained"?

And Bears! Oh my!

I, for one, would find it very funny if somebody slips this dialogue to Piazza:

My taste includes both snails and oysters.

Though Piazza might actually like both snails and oysters, for all we know.

Wow, as someone who specializes in the later Roman Empire, I don't know if I should be excited about one of the seminal figures of the ancient world finally getting some screen time, or cringing at the inevitable botch job that will be made of it. Hmmm...

Excited. I do early Christianity and gender/sexuality, and even though there is basically nothing redeemable about the Da Vinci Code, it got lots of people interesting in the weird stuff that I study. Totally fun.

I think it was Gibbon who argued the spread of Christianity was the principle cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Which is a load of crap, for what it's worth. Gibbon's story of Christianity seems mostly to have been influenced by twin concerns - he saw a religion from the colonies taking over the center of the empire, which played on his fears of a world turned upside down if England let go of its colonies, and relatedly he was influenced by scientific race theory, and saw the spread of Christanity as part of a problematic "Semiticization" of the high Roman race. There's not a lot of history in that judgment.

There's not a lot of history in that judgment.

Then what is your explanation for the simultaneous occurrence of the Renaissance and the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire? Think it was a good thing the Church persecuted Galileo and other independent/critical thinkers? Or the obvious secular character of the Age of Reason and the great political/cultural strides that were made during that time? Have an alternative explanation for that?

Ralph Winter and Terry Botwick’s 1019 Entertainment are heading to ancient Rome and teaming with former Major League Baseball player Mike Piazza to produce “Constantine.”

Just when you thought Mike Piazza made so much money he could never go broke....

Then what is your explanation for the simultaneous occurrence of the Renaissance and the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire?

Totally different things that happened in a totally different world over a millennium later.

You are presuming a kind of strict continuity between the fractious and developing, mostly eastern, Constantinople- and Alexandria-based church of the period of late antiquity and the stable Roman-based church of the late medieval period that even the most conservative Catholic historian would reject.

9. RMc is a friend of Bosch Posted: February 20, 2013 at 09:04 AM (#4372431)
Ah, Ancient Rome...when the Lions and Tigers always won!

11. Publius Publicola Posted: February 20, 2013 at 09:04 AM (#4372433)
And Bears! Oh my!

I was recently reading a book about bears that made some comments about the typical results of these contests. Bears usually beat lions, a bear could beat multiple leopards, rhinos beat everybody, and bulls were beaten by everybody.

The most convincing two-sentence explanation for the "Fall of the Roman Empire" that I know (and SDeB, who is an actual expert, can correct me here) is that the high Roman Empire was something of a historical fluke, dependent on a completely unsustainable combination of imperial expansion and the exploitation of unfree labor. Once the ability to expand was exhausted, the Roman Empire ate itself from the inside, whittling away the rights and status of everyone but the .01% (gradually turning to a serf economy), which led to the institutions of the empire (the military and curial orders, heavily) no longer having the skilled and dedicated staffing they required. And without institutions, you don't have an empire.

I'm also very much objecting to your implicit description of the high Roman empire, which was built directly and indissociably on a vicious form of slavery (not that there's any other kind of slavey), as some sort of lost period of human freedom.

I was recently reading a book about bears that made some comments about the typical results of these contests. Bears usually beat lions, a bear could beat multiple leopards, rhinos beat everybody, and bulls were beaten by everybody.

I would not want to be the guy responsible for capturing and wrangling a rhino using Iron Age technology.

I was recently reading a book about bears that made some comments about the typical results of these contests. Bears usually beat lions, a bear could beat multiple leopards, rhinos beat everybody, and bulls were beaten by everybody.

Interesting. A couple of times I've driven through one of those wildlife parks, and the bears, lions (all cats, really), elephants, etc. are behind walls, but the rhinos are allowed to roam around with the ostriches, giraffes, zebras, and others. I was surprised at the time, but I guess it's because they're not carnivores? And I don't mean that I was surprised that they were allowed to be with the other animals, I was surprised that they could basically come right up to my car. I didn't really feel safe.

In addition to the factors that MCoA mentions, one must remember that the Roman Republic and Empire were obsessed with religion: the age of Augustus was not some kind of heyday of secular rationalism. As Denis Feeney and other classicists point out, it wasn't precisely what we'd think of as "religion," but a pervasive mix of cult rituals, propaganda, divination, social networking, and infrastructure (in the form of temple construction and public art). To some extent, the late emperors just replaced this system of state cults with another system, which had many of the same functions. Other historians (Greg Woolf is one) might argue that Christianity was different in the sense that one's identity as a Christian was more important than any allegiance to a state cult: Christianity was universal in aspiration, and theoretically egalitarian, and so did tend to loosen individuals' ties to the state apparatus. But the Byzantine Empire did go on to function for another thousand years with Christianity as its official state religion, so it's not like Christianity and empire were exactly incompatible.

The producers better hope they can get all their local seed money from Angels fans, because Piazza's comments about Vin Scully will make it hard for them to get funding from Los Angeles fans who bleed blue.

one must remember that the Roman Republic and Empire were obsessed with religion: the age of Augustus was not some kind of heyday of secular rationalism.

That's not the point though. It's the content of the Christian message - especially the radical notion of social justice and deliverance in the next world that dominated the early Christian movement - that was most threatening to Rome, not religion per se. Only uninformed Enlightenment historians saw Rome as some kind of home of secular oasis where rationality ruled. The goodish Rome died with the Gracchi.

I tend to agree with Gibbon that Christianity helped bring down the late-Empire Rome, and it's a damn good thing.

Also, very disappointed there hasn't been a Hadrian joke yet.

Are all former baseball players going to be in movies now?

There's a very old Tank McNamara that has a movie being pitched to Laurence Olivier. He wearily (warily?) asks how many football players are already cast. The response was something very close to -- Only three, we're talking class Larry.

#21 I heard one expert say that the rest of the animal world treats rhinos like the big guy with a hangover. (He was talking specifically of Black Rhinos)

And they have one standard response to being irritated or alarmed (both of which are seemingly easy to do). Charge and trample.

Interesting. A couple of times I've driven through one of those wildlife parks, and the bears, lions (all cats, really), elephants, etc. are behind walls, but the rhinos are allowed to roam around with the ostriches, giraffes, zebras, and others. I was surprised at the time, but I guess it's because they're not carnivores? And I don't mean that I was surprised that they were allowed to be with the other animals, I was surprised that they could basically come right up to my car. I didn't really feel safe.

If they were in a drive-thru safari park, they were almost certainly white rhinos. Although huge, white rhinos are relatively placid, although I wouldn't want to be around one that felt threatened. Black rhinos are critically endangered and have a reputation for being ill-tempered, aggressive, and prone to charging. At around 35mph.

If they were in a drive-thru safari park, they were almost certainly white rhinos. Although huge, white rhinos are relatively placid, although I wouldn't want to be around one that felt threatened. Black rhinos are critically endangered and have a reputation for being ill-tempered, aggressive, and prone to charging. At around 35mph.

Amidst the bazillion things you read online, I did recently see something about rhinos in general being basically the quickest wildlife path to death for a tourist wandering around where they shouldn't be doing so.

I, for one, find Colin Mcevedy's explanation at the end of the Atlas of Medieval History to be extremely illustrative as to the fall of the Roman Empire. There's a bunch of places where you can download it (if you don't own it - I still treasure my versions from like 1980 which my parents had bought in London).

Some quotes:

This brings us to a problem that can be considered
in more concrete terms; why did the
Western Empire fall when it did? The immediate
answer is, of course, the advance of the Huns,
which frightened the Germans into doing what
they had long had the capacity to do, for both in
numbers and in arms they were by then superior
to the legionaries who manned the frontiers. The
decline ir. the Empire's total population may have
been absolute or merely comparative to barbarian
increase. It may have been due to the fact that a
sizeable proportion of the masses were slaves
(slaves had a notoriously low reproduction rate).
8
or to a high death rate in the urban proletariat.
which must havc been decimated by endemic and
epidemic diseases. But whatever the extent or the
reason, the manpower situation of the Empire
certainly deteriorated I'is-a-vis the German, and
this deterioration was exaggerated by the specialization
of Roman society. While every adult male
German was a seasonal soldier, each Roman
legionary represented the defence effort of some
tens or even hundreds of civilians. Though professional
soldiery has advantages of discipline
and experience and can usually be relied on to
defeat several times their number of amateurs,
their capacity for doing so is heavily dependent on
their being well equipped, and it so happened that,
at the moment when sheer numbers were beginning
to tell against them, the legionaries found
that their methods and equipment were hopelessly
obsolete. The German soldier of the end of the
fourth century had a better sword made of better
steel, and the Goths had learnt the latest techniques
of cavalry warfare from the nomads of the
Russian steppe. The Romans were left dependent
on discipline and generalship, and when these
failed, as fail they must in the long run, on the
hiring of Germans to fight Germans. This last
could only be a stop-gap. for an indispensable
soldier will set up on his own if even his most
irresponsible demands are not met. In the end,
the Western Empire was destroyed by the arms of
the professional German soldiery that imperial
necessity had created.

And a little bit later:

The West soon
proved completely unable to pay its way. Once the
division of the Empire became a reality and the
West was deprived of the support of the far
wealthier, far more urbanized East. it collapsed
almost spontaneously. The East was just rich
enough to buy off invaders and hire guards.
Thus it survived ingloriously for a century and
by Justinian's time had rebuilt a native army on
new lines....

I n the West, taxation
killed the towns and trade and finally alienated
the rural population. The house was ready to fall
when someone knocked at the door.

...

To escape the rapacity of the Roman tax collector,
peasants in the later days of the Roman
Empire often put themselves under the protection
of the biggest of the local landowners. In return
for the title to the peasant's land, the landowner
guarded the civil interests of his client and as far
as possible shielded him from taxes. This seems a
hard bargain from the peasant's point of view, for
he surrendered his freehold and became a tenant
whom the landlord could evict at will; and it is a
tclling measure of the burden of taxation that in
the last century of the Western Empire the freeholding
peasantry voluntarily liquidated itself.

....

It will be seen that the great thing about feudalism
was its cheapness. Though the justice administered
within its framework was of a very
inferior sort it did protect the peasant at minimal
cost. Ultimately, the peasant depended on the
good nature of his baron, and one has to have
considerable faith in mankind to hope for a disinterested
decision when, for example, a rent
tribunal is composed entirely of landlords. But
the later history of the Roman Empire had proved
that justice can cost more than it is ????orth, and the
feudal system came as a relief to a povertystricken
Europe.

Everyone loved Gladiator way more than I did.

I think I remember reading somewhere that it's Bob Dole's favorite movie.

What's the matter with you people, we all know Rome fell because of the constant orgies everyone participated in. If you want to learn history watch the movies of Cecil B. DeMille.

I went to see Jared Diamond give a lecture when he was on his book tour for Collapse. I'm simplifying, but he basically says that deforestation and overpopulation caused the collapse of most great societies. But in the book he barely even mentions Rome, which is an embarrassing miss for a book on collapsed civilizations. I asked him what book I should read on Rome while he was signing my book, and he said, "Uhhhh, Gibbon is the classic of course." Basically that tells me that he didn't even investigate the fall of Rome at all.

What's the matter with you people, we all know Rome fell because of the constant orgies everyone participated in.

If that's falling, I don't ever want to stand up!

Colin McEevedy obviously knows more than I do about this, but I do have an opinion regarding Constantine. He seems to have done two very important things. One was to realize that the Roman Empire in the West had become untenable - it cost more to defend than it produced in Gross National Product. That certainly did not help the Western Roman Empire's struggles. He also called the Council of Nicea (sp?), where he got all the Christian bishops together to work out a single, formal, Christianity for the Empire. He found that, although the bishops as a whole agreed on practically nothing, the big split was between two factions. The Hierarchical Christians, wanted a solid church hierarchy and a Bible that told you that the hierarchy was the only way to heaven. That group eventually became the Catholics. The other faction, the Gnostics, believed that an individual man could connect to God on his own and didn't need no hierarchy. Well, Constantine was an emperor. And if you're an emperor, which version are you going to choose? Why the one that supports your political hierarchy with its own, instead of leaving Christianity up the the individual, who may be difficult to control.

The breakup of the Holy Roman Empire (or, rather, its transmogrification into the Habsburg Empire), was, I think largely caused by the desire of German-speaking people to have their own nation, like France and England were starting to do. This rolled miserably down the road of history until the Franco-Prussian War, WWI and WWII finally established that Germany was to be allowed to become a country. The French were involved because they were aware that, if the German-speaking peoples got a country of their own, it would be the dominant economic power in Europe, a position which France held and coveted. I've even been willing to call the three wars I listed above as "The War of German Independence." The continuity of this is seen in watching Hitler's first conquests. He first took on Austria, which was largely German-speaking, and which, apparently, welcomed him, not knowing what was in store. Then he put in a claim to that part of Czechoslovakia (sp?) that was German-speaking. The French and English did nothing but bluster because these were reasonable claims for Germany to make, and they didn't know what kind of sociopath they were dealing with. It's when Hitler finally goes after Poland that the French and English realize that he is not willing to limit his country to its linguistic borders, but was yet another world-conqueror.

So, I don't really think of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to be a result of religion, but the result of Europe finally settling down into nations, largely based on language. On the other hand, real historians know a lot more about this than I do. - Brock Hanke

I don't think Rome really colllapsed like more middle eastern empires. It just changed owners and slowly fractionated.

Anyway, the fall of Rome is fascinating to me. I love the idea of the barbarians taking over this city that was the most important in the world 200 years ago, now it's depopulated and falling apart but still has these weird traditions and an elite that probably thinks they're still the most important people in the world, and the barbarians start dressing in purple robes and demand entrance to the nice dining clubs and the Senate and whatever. And within another few hundred years you get people that look up at the ruins of the Coliseum and they don't really know how it was built or what it was for. That transition is crazy, and I imagine that it was long and slow and weird. I read a book somewhat about this, The Inheritance of Rome, but it was too academic for me to make it through.

34, I think McEvedy passed away, FWIW.

In any case, I didn't want to quote EVERYTHING, but he does go on about the Eastern Empire, so you should read that, too (and he talks about this in his Atlas of Ancient History, too).

In regards this line

It's when Hitler finally goes after Poland that the French and English realize that he is not willing to limit his country to its linguistic borders, but was yet another world-conqueror

, most people forget that after the Munich accord, Hitler annexed pretty much the non-Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

THAT's what first moved Anglo-French public opinion against Hitler, and turned Poland (and its security) into the issue that it became(so the realization of what Hitler was doing came a few months earlier than you think).

The most convincing two-sentence explanation for the "Fall of the Roman Empire" that I know (and SDeB, who is an actual expert, can correct me here) is that the high Roman Empire was something of a historical fluke, dependent on a completely unsustainable combination of imperial expansion and the exploitation of unfree labor. Once the ability to expand was exhausted, the Roman Empire ate itself from the inside, whittling away the rights and status of everyone but the .01% (gradually turning to a serf economy), which led to the institutions of the empire (the military and curial orders, heavily) no longer having the skilled and dedicated staffing they required. And without institutions, you don't have an empire.


My guess is that it was a population crash of some sort. The fact that the Republic could lose 75,000 troops at Cannae, and replace them, and keep fighting, while 200 years later the whole Empire couldn't replace Varus' 3 legions (~20-30,000 men) lost in Germany, is telling.

I think a combination of the Roman conquest, mass enslavement,cheap Egyptian grain displacing the peasantry, urbanization, and probably a climate change, caused a dramatic fall in population available to the Romans.

It also explains the Emperors' continual obsession with laws to force Romans to marry and have children.

Once the ability to expand was exhausted, the Roman Empire ate itself from the inside,

But didn't this take hundreds of years? Wikipedia says the empire's greatest extent was under Trajan.

38, I'm fairly sure that I read once that the population center of the Mediterranean world was in Italy during Rome's heyday, but by the time when the Germanic tribes were knocking on Rome's door, that population center was no longer in Italy.

My guess is that it was a population crash of some sort. The fact that the Republic could lose 75,000 troops at Cannae, and replace them, and keep fighting, while 200 years later the whole Empire couldn't replace Varus' 3 legions (~20-30,000 men) lost in Germany, is telling.

There's lots of other data to support this thesis. Shipwrecks peaks in the first or second century CE and decline sharply. The ice core data shows a big drop in air pollution. Volume of animal bones in the soil peaks in the second century. Papyrological evidence shows that the price of land in Roman Egypt dropped while wages rose in the 3rd century.

However, every single decline of an ancient empire involves a population decline. Pre-capitalist societies had no capacity for cascading population growth based on improvements in productivity, so every rise-and-decline story is a population story.

But didn't this take hundreds of years? Wikipedia says the empire's greatest extent was under Trajan.

Yes.

I don't buy the internal rot argument. Rome was only destroyed by the Germans and Huns and Bulgars and Slavs over-running their borders.

Given the resources the Empire should have had, if it was as populous and rich as in 100 BC, those incursions should have been easy to deal with. They had dealt with the Gauls and Germans many times before. Yet, by the time of Adrianople, the Empire could only field a force of ~15-20,000 for a critical battle. And, many incursions weren't even opposed.

The fall of Rome makes no sense unless population and wealth were down remarkably by the 3rd and 4th century.

I would not want to be the guy responsible for capturing and wrangling a rhino using Iron Age technology.

I assume they killed the adults, and took their young. Not that I have any idea, but that's what I would do.

Amidst the bazillion things you read online, I did recently see something about rhinos in general being basically the quickest wildlife path to death for a tourist wandering around where they shouldn't be doing so.

You sure you aren't confusing it with hippos?

Once the ability to expand was exhausted, the Roman Empire ate itself from the inside,

But didn't this take hundreds of years? Wikipedia says the empire's greatest extent was under Trajan.

So, the real "decline" of the Roman empire happened in the 3rd century CE. This was a period from which we have excpetionally little evidence, material or textual, compared to the surrounding centuries. People weren't building things, they weren't writing things. It was an empire in heavy decline.

The 4th century actually sees economic growth in the empire that hadn't been there previously. The growth, though, never got close to returning to the peaks of the high empire. The shift toward a serf economy seems to have made a difference, to some degree, though I really don't know this history well enough to say. This didn't last, though.

Maybe Piazza can star in the remake of "Caligula"

You sure you aren't confusing it with hippos?

You know what, I think you are correct.

i live by the rhino creed.

I think it was Gibbon who argued the spread of Christianity was the principle cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

When he wasn't pitching for the '60s Pirates? Oh, you meant Edward Gibbon, not Joe Gibbon....oopsie, my bad.

You sure you aren't confusing it with hippos?

It's hippos from what I've seen suggested online -- at least among wild mammals. Otherwise, probably mosquitoes.

Just when you thought Mike Piazza made so much money he could never go broke....

My first thought exactly. Although someone pointed out in another thread that Piazza comes from a very wealthy family even before baseball.

The 4th century actually sees economic growth in the empire that hadn't been there previously

Greg Woolf (again) cites the odd phenomenon of wealthy, elite Romans moving to the countryside, and consequent urban decay, in the 4th and 5th centuries. It's an interesting idea: not so much that society really collapsed, as that its internal centers shifted, and the evidence it left behind (as you note) dwindled, and populations fell (the country not being able to sustain them as the more highly urbanized early empire did. Life went on, though: fortunes were made, dynasties flourished, peoples moved hither and yon: there was just no cohesive imperial network any more, in many senses.