{"id":1725516,"date":"2022-11-06T18:30:05","date_gmt":"2022-11-06T23:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1725516"},"modified":"2022-11-06T18:30:24","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T23:30:24","slug":"roman-rebuttal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/roman-rebuttal\/","title":{"rendered":"Roman Rebuttal"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">4<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Froman-rebuttal%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1725516&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Now that yet another book (number 19, I think) has appeared to challenge my Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, first published in 1976 with several subsequent editions also in Hebrew, Chinese, and lesser languages\u2014and there is also a very critical <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Defence-in-depth_(Roman_military)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wiki entry<\/a>\u2014the time has come to confess how I came to write the book.<\/p>\n<p>With the profitable family factories in Italy still going strong and absolutely no interest in earning a living, after going to Israel as a war volunteer just in time for the 1967 war but left at loose ends by an ill-timed 1970 ceasefire, I responded to the invitation of two genteel and distinguished Johns Hopkins University professors to spend two years in the United States signed up as a graduate student while writing a dissertation, without any tiresome coursework or classes and with tuition paid and even a scholarship. At the time I was mostly interested in strategic nuclear weapons and had just published a booklet on &#8220;the strategic balance&#8221; that went beyond missile inventories to operationalize them, to see who would come out on top by attacking not cities but missile silos.<\/p>\n<p>On my first day visiting the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus I was stopped by a young professor who somehow knew I was the author of the aforementioned booklet, which evidently he disliked intensely (it was a tad cold-blooded about the end of the world). He sneered: &#8220;So I suppose you mean to write a dissertation on the research and development of the Minuteman ballistic missile?&#8221; No, I replied, my subject is\u2026 The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (stringing together the most resonant, most grandiloquent words I could think of).<\/p>\n<p>Now all that remained was to write the dissertation whose title I had just made up to respond to the sneer with a put-down. Because I had mostly studied analytical economics at the London School of Economics, all I had to start with were schoolboy memories of colorful emperors, but Latin I had studied in school, starting at age six because a wildly eccentric elementary school teacher in Palermo who was supposed to teach us Italian refused to do so (&#8220;you all speak Sicilian anyway&#8221;) and taught us Latin instead.<\/p>\n<p>Later when I ended up in a British boarding school, there was an ex-priest converted to Judaism who taught plangent church Latin, and a retired lieutenant colonel with a wooden leg (El<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that yet another book (number 19, I think) has appeared to challenge my Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, first published in 1976 with several subsequent editions also in Hebrew, Chinese, and lesser languages\u2014and there is also a very critical wiki entry\u2014the time has come to confess how I came to write the book.<br \/>\nThe post Roman Rebuttal appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1138,"featured_media":1725519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1725516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1725519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}