"As a third and final action point, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed."

This has been common among many groups for a long time; I recall the GWB administration proposing a missile interceptor system based in Eastern Europe in the mid-oughts, and Democratic Party members in congress opposed it as 'provocative'. The (Liberal) Canadian government of the time opposed that as well as the Alaska based 'shield' as being 'aggressive'.

I suspect this has something to do with (politically self-identified) disempowered groups generally wanting to 'shoot down' initiatives, but the Trump administration seems to have a different motivation.

Most things which differ are not equivalent; pointing that out isn't helpful.

I cannot but wish you the same end as that of your nazi predecessors.

As for "false equivalence", you are not a Russian, so it is really not for you to speak.

This is what you wrote. You think the guy you've answered to is closer to doing Nazi things to the Russians by making this joke, than the Russians are to doing Nazi things to the Ukrainians by actually murdering them in the hundred thousands using bombs, missiles, guns, forced deportation and forced assimilation? You Gremlins really cannot take a joke. That's probably why you don't like to see a comedian as head of a sovereign state.

Genocide seemed to be part and parcel.

The usual approach of the time was enslavement and taxation. Because they were less effort and more reward.

As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.

I would suspect that a prosperous and thereby complex economy also has more resource to discover or document inscriptions. While they talk about researcher bias, they do not really mitigate this.

And yes, I searched the article and the extensive additional material.

Still a valuable contribution.

I know this wasn’t actually your point but I just wanted to add.

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/

I am trying to find links but can't right now. There are many cross cultural studies they have found the effects of social class systems and family economic advantages persist over centuries. A millennia isn't unbelievable to me.

I imagine it's a mix of both with strong geographic determinism tilting the scales for certain regions.

Another commenter mentioned the book under the comment you responded to.

I wrote about it here in #30 - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know

It is 35 metres high now, 20,000 or so m^2, after 1500 years, and composed of ancient pottery fragments (the trade went sharply down after the 5th century A.D.)

Caesar reports of a wall more than 20 km long, several meters high, with a canal in front of it, constructed by a legion or two, I don't remember now exactly, in two weeks time. Maybe an exaggeration, but..

And the real question for me, is how they managed to do the logistics, with just the Roman numbers.. So the economical complexity should not be such a surprise, I suppose.

Yes, they birthed and raised children.

As someone raising children, and having been a child myself, the erasure of children from the historical record by academics is far more egregious than ignoring what a fraction of women did.

It’s easy to project modern markets onto ancient empires. But proper capital market are just a break from ancient ways of thinking in ways that are surprising.