I got back at midnight from Pittsburgh, where I spent three days visiting Carnegie Mellon University’s excellent Entertainment Technology Center. (CMU ETC)
I talked to the cool faculty there at the ETC and hung out with students. I also gave a speech on player-to-avatar relationships in games.
I had never been to Pittsburgh. Prior to the trip, I visualized it as a huge steel factory or something similarly industrial. Instead, I found the city picturesque. The trees were all bright yellow and red (which my Ethiopian cabbie said would only last 2 weeks), there were lots of interesting bridges, and the city was much hillier than I expected. The houses were quaint (and commonly less than a hundred grand, I’m told). To my eyes, Pittsburgh, PA looked like an idealized vision of the Northeast from countless movies.
I spent some time in Southside, which reminded me of Austin. We went to a good coffee shop called Beehive, and a restaurant that used to be a sidewalk cart called Cambodican. That part of town had a good vibe.
Another highlight included a super fun dinner at Monteray Bay, with faculty members Juleigh, Rebecca and Drew. I learned from the delightful ladies that Italian families up north have an extra oven in the basement (which I can only assume is not some sort of naughty metaphor…). I also attended an advanced screening of Flushed Away, which was pretty funny.
I happened to pass the CMU football team scrimmaging at night, which was really amusing. I cannot believe CMU has a football team. The guys on the field seemed like there were my size. Very different than UT football. (Not that I follow it anyway, but I never would have guessed that CMU would have a football team, in any case.)
I have to say that the ETC program seems excellent. It’s a masters degree aimed at leadership and technology as applied to entertainment media. Very cool, and the facility itself was amazing. The staff were fun and stimulating.
Some pics from the trip:
CMU Football, scrimmaging on a chilly night.
Me, in yet another cab.
A barge moving down one of the rivers, from a CMU conference room window.
Somehow, the wooden stick I was using to keep my living room sliding glass door closed got deeply wedged down into the doorjam while I was away in London. So this morning I tore the stick apart with tools, splintering it completely and getting it out of the way, so I could go out onto the patio with my dog, Star, to drink coffee. (In Austin, it’s finally cool in the mornings.)
Later, I went out to buy a new tension rod for the sliding glass door. I wanted to get one that was identical to the Masterlock rod on the sliding glass door in my bedroom.
I searched three stores: Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s. None of them had it, but all of them recommended the other stores on the list. Halfway through this wild goosechase, I asked myself for the hundredth time why I once again forgot step one, Google.
Back home, a little web searching revealed that these tension rods are called Dual Function Door Security Bars. I ordered one through Amazon, without leaving my couch or dealing with any sassy store personnel, and it’ll get here on Tuesday. Amazing.
Dual Function Door Security Bar
Yesterday, at the Game Developers’ Conference, my speech went well, I believe. But today was the perfect day here in London.
Woke up at midnight, due to jet lag. Ordered room service, pigged out and watched bad late night BBC tv with my lovely girlfriend. Got up late this morning and went for coffee. Sat in beautiful Green Park for a while, watching pigeons and Londoners.
Then managed to squeeze in a speech by (one of my heroes) Peter Molyneaux. Raised my hand and asked a few questions after Molyneux’s speech, then met with him for a while afterward and chatted.
This evening, my girlfriend and I went to ride on the London Eye, then walked to Westminster Abbey. We were both strangely moved while there, and lit candles for loved ones (…the departed, but also the living and troubled).
We’ve been burning up our three-day Tube passes today. We might head out for dinner later in the evening. London is one of my favorite cities. I’ve been here three times and each time it gets better. I could easily live in this place.
September 30, 2006
Pirates of the Mediterranean
By ROBERT HARRIS
IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.
The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.
Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”
Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”
What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.
But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.
“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”
Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.
Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.
But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.
Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.
An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.
In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.
It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.
It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.
The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.
Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”
