The Million Mom March: What a crock!

And as a football fan, let me add my two cents to the ABC Monday Night Football debate: After a decade of listening to his show when I can (I do have classes to teach!), I think that Rush Limbaugh would make a terrific addition to the broadcast booth. He knows his stuff and in fact has a sharper command of hard-nosed sports strategy than did the often annoyingly self-intrusive Howard Cosell.

The cover story of the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly is a lengthy excerpt from Christina Hoff Sommers' book, "The War Against Boys," to be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Sommers debunks one flimsy study after another claiming that girls are oppressed by a male-dominated, sexist system. But her socko revelation is the shiftiness and shrinking from scholarly accountability of Harvard's Carol Gilligan, one of the queens of campus gender studies. No neutral observer could fail to be dismayed by Gilligan's evasive behavior as well as by Harvard's irresponsibility in impounding archival data.

On the vexed question of Caligula vs. Diocletian, Prof. Carl Johnson writes from the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver

The Roman emperor Caligula never made his horse Incitatus a consul. This is another academic myth (cf. Nero, the violin and the burning of Rome). In the two surviving sources Suetonius (LV. 3) and Cassius Dio (LIX 14.7), Caligula only plans to make the horse a consul, but does not in fact carry out this plan. Apparently this misconception began with Gladstone and Disraeli and mutual slanders. I hope this helps.

Thanks very much, Prof. Johnson. The tall tale about the senatorial promotion of Caligula's horse has become very widespread, as I pointed out, because of the popular public-television series based on Robert Graves' novel, "I, Claudius." Peter Bartl, writing from Rodenbach, Germany, contributes this about the emperor Diocletian:

Diocletian did reestablish the Roman Empire as something resembling a Hellenic monarchy, with himself -- and his three "colleagues", Maximian, Constantius and Galerius -- far removed from their subjects and with the Senate, indeed, reduced to irrelevance.

However, Diocletian was consolidating and strengthening trends rather than inventing them. The Roman Senate was continuously losing influence and status since the reign of Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211).

During the so-called period of "military anarchy" between Alexander Severus and Diocletian (A.D. 235-284) when emperors were constantly elevated and murdered by the soldiers, the Senate lost even its formal prerogative of appointing the emperor: The emperors recently appointed by the soldiers no longer bothered to ask the Senate to confirm their powers. At most, they wrote to merely inform the Senate of their appointment. There were periods when the Senate did recover some influence, but they were short-lived.

The decline of Roman traditions, I think, must be seen in the context of the loss of economic, military and political influence on the part of the traditional elites of Italian origin. It started when Septimius Severus became emperor -- the first for whom Latin was a foreign language, and whose family had strong eastern connections.

Thank you for that lucid overview, Mr. Bartl. I find nothing more fascinating or more pertinent to contemporary politics than study of those two huge transitional periods in the ancient Mediterranean world -- from the decline of Athens to the rise of Rome; and from the rise of Christianity to the decline of Rome and the interrelated rise of Byzantium at the dawn of the Middle Ages. Erron Silverstein has more troubling things to say about Diocletian:

Diocletian entirely changed the administrative structure of the Roman empire. He doubled the number of provinces (to stop any provincial governor from having enough military forces to mount a successful rebellion), and the bureaucracy mushroomed. The military was stronger than ever, resulting in the imposition of crushing taxes.

The Edict of Diocletian of A.D. 301 probably had more destructive force against the Roman Empire than the Visigoths or the Huns. It essentially froze prices, capped salaries and made jobs hereditary. This was enforced by a reign of terror that wasn't confined to Christian persecution. This destroyed the curial class in the provinces -- the city elite whose job it was to be the local administration.

Essentially, Diocletian was the Stalin of the third and fourth century. People fled to the countryside to escape forced conscription and the horrible taxes. As a natural consequence, the Senate was effectively neutered. Consuls were chosen, but they had little real power.

Diocletian destroyed many vestiges of Roman tradition (government, taxation, justice, commerce, and military) to make a super-state that would be easily recognizable to Mao, Hitler or Stalin. In part, the achievement of Diocletian was possible because of 50 years of civil war and chaos (starting after Maximinus Thrax and running through Probus) making people tolerate anything that was stable.

Next Page: Women's studies courses in excess are a solipsistic dead end

• View blog reactions