Associate Professor, University at Albany SUNY
Greek and Roman History
PhD UC Berkeley
Italians were using Greek-style aspides to form close-order shield walls as coherent formations.
Written with great verve and infused with far more humor than one expects or deserves to find in a tome about Roman law.
Reposted by Kim L. Scheppele, John McLaren, Michael J. Taylor
Reposted by Michael J. Taylor, Greg O’Brien
They also get killed a lot.
But Roman voters--all former or future soldiers, vote to go to war virtually every year.
Its notable how the democracy typically chews up politicians and spits them out (Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, Themistokles, etc.), but Pericles rides the bronco until his timely death.
(my gentle critique of fiscal sociology in general is it ignores other ways of interacting with the state, especially military service)
Is Athens just like Norway, which has a ton of oil revenue but already had a democracy, and so was able to mobilize extractive revenues to fund a democratic socialist paradise?
The analogy would be Gulf autocracies who run on oil revenues, not taxes.
Conventional thinking is that democracy in general is closely linked with internal taxation. Taxpayers vote because they get taxed.