Talk:Cursus honorum
Huh?
Let's say I'm a user of Citizendium who wants to find out something about the cursus honorum. What I find is the following; I have the following questions (aside from wondering why a supposedly professional encyclopedia article is written in the second person, as if it were a guide to how I personally could become a Roman Dictator today in AD 2008).
"1. Qaestor: Minimum age: 31 he has to collect money (Quaerere means to seek, to collect Amount: 2 in the begining, 20 in the late republic"
When did Latin ever follow the letter "Q" with anything but a "u"? What happened to the punctuation in this "sentence"? What does "Amount" mean -- the number of gold coins the Qaestor (sic) had to collect -- in all, from each citizen, or what? Or what this how many Qaestors (sic) were appointed each year or other time period?
"2. Aedilus:Minimum age: 37 public games, distribution of food, police, fireman"
Did the Aedilus have to play in the public games and fight fires, or was he responsible for administering these functions?
"3. Praetor: minimum age: 41 judge and decides which cases are worth to do"
OK, I sort of understand this despite the non-idiomatic "worth to do."
"4. Consul: minimum age: 45 president of the senate, general"
Does this mean the consul was a general -- i.e., a senior military commander -- or that he had "general" responsibilities?
"5.Roman Dictator: 6 months and rather exceptional was given lot of power"
Does this mean that the person chosen as dictator had to be "rather exceptional" (and if so, in what way), or that it was "rather exceptional" that a dictator would be appointed? What, specifically, did his "lot of power" consist of? (And what does "6 months" mean? Presumably length of term of office, but it's placed where the minimum age of all the other offices is placed. I visualize a little bambino Mussolini with a lollipop in one hand and the fasces in the other....)
OK, I admit I'm being sarcastic here, but please. I recently had the pleasure of copyediting a serious scholarly article about the appointment of consuls in late antiquity, and there's plenty of fascinating detail about who could become a consul, what it meant to be a consul, what we can learn from the (often spotty) records of who was appointed consul, and how these many meanings of the consulship differed in different periods of history. Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to be a Classics author, much less an editor -- I was just proofreading that article, beating the footnotes into shape, and making sure that the Greek quotations didn't get typeset as Zapf Dingbats -- so I can only ask these questions that any other inquiring reader of Citizendium might want to ask, and hope that somebody will be able to answer them so that I don't have to go look up the cursus honorum at (shudder) That Other Place. Bruce M.Tindall 20:01, 11 September 2008 (CDT)