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Sooo... worth reading I take it? I'd definitely read a biography of Obama if it was like that.
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 06:53 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 09:11 |
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Grand Fromage posted:My main professor/mentor/all around cool guy converted me to the side of people who say neither Caligula or Nero were insane I only ever took one proper Roman history class but I recall my professor had the same opinion. I got the impression that Nero in particular had the reputation he did because Tacitus trashed Nero to make political points, plus later various Christians talking up persecution stories.
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 06:54 |
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Nero I can see being a bit unhinged, but not a total madman. He did make an astounding number of bad decisions, and was hardly a paragon of restraint.
WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Sep 1, 2012 |
# ? Sep 1, 2012 07:03 |
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If you take the historical sensibilities of Washington Irving and merge them with the sensationalism of British tabloids, you get Suetonius. This is why so many books, TV shows, etc. use the guy as their primary or sole reference with no mention of the dubious nature of a lot of the poo poo the guy wrote down. He's the source of many myths, just like Washington Irving was. Suetonius is fun but he's just not someone whose accounts you should ever take as gospel truth.
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 07:43 |
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FreudianSlippers posted:Imagine if a couple of thousands years from now somehow enough of contemporary sources will get lost or muddled for future generations to be certain that the ancient president Barack HUSSEIN Obummer was a mad communist tyrant who set up death panels and ate dogs for dinner every night and played electric guitar while the forests burned. So basically what the Republicans say now?
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 16:18 |
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bean_shadow posted:So basically what the Republicans say now? That's the point. Imagine it's 2000 years from now and only Glenn Beck's books survived. You're going to have a totally hosed up view of this time, and that's analogous to what we're often dealing with in ancient history.
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 16:35 |
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Golden_Zucchini posted:It comes from Latin pompa (a procession) from the Greek pempein (to send). I suppose it's possible that the name Pompey is related to pompa, though. You sure? I have indistinct memories of Pompey being of Oscian descent and in Oscian the pom-syllable is equivalent of the Latin quin-, so Pompeius is more like Quintus, but I could be wrong of course. Great thread!
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 22:08 |
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cheerfullydrab posted:If you take the historical sensibilities of Washington Irving and merge them with the sensationalism of British tabloids, you get Suetonius. This is why so many books, TV shows, etc. use the guy as their primary or sole reference with no mention of the dubious nature of a lot of the poo poo the guy wrote down. He's the source of many myths, just like Washington Irving was. Suetonius is fun but he's just not someone whose accounts you should ever take as gospel truth. A lot of the Roman historians have similar problems. Livy, for example, is full of "ROME, gently caress YEAH!" and hardly objective about Hannibal or Scipio. Ancient historians generally just weren't as worried about objectivity or sources as modern ones would be - they primarily wanted to tell a good story. However, they are what we have to go on.
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# ? Sep 1, 2012 23:51 |
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Mr Havafap posted:You sure? I double checked, and pomp as in pompous does derive as I described above, but pom- as in the city of Pompeii (named for its five districts) comes from the Oscian as you said. I still don't have anything specific on Pompey, but I'd think the Oscian origin more likely than the Greek one. Edit: On further reseach it seems that Pompey's father was from an area that spoke an Osco-Umbrian language rather than a Latin or Greek language, so yeah, Pompey seems to be the Sabellian version of Quintus. Golden_Zucchini fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Sep 2, 2012 |
# ? Sep 2, 2012 01:13 |
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I'm currently trying to learn Latin, and today picked up Ovid's Metamorphoses (Loeb classical library)to help me with this and learn some Roman literature if nothing else. But having only read a few pages (of the English) already my mind has been blown. In the prologue Ovid talks about the formation, and the form, of the world. He writes that the world is divided up into five zones - two covered in snow and ice, one in the middle too hot to inhabit, and in between two temperate, inhabitable zones. He clearly means the poles, the equator and the bits inbetween. But how did he know south of the equator there were habitable lands? Everything I've read and heard suggests the Romans never went south of the Sahara and previously I had thought that was pretty much what they considered the end of the world. And how did Ovid know there was another icy region south of that again? Same chapter he writes 'above these all (ie, earth) he placed the liquid, weightless ether, which has naught of earthy dregs." [my itallics] That isn't a description of the vacuum of space...is it? mediadave fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Sep 2, 2012 |
# ? Sep 2, 2012 22:19 |
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Well, they could see things floating around up there. They knew five planets plus the sun and moon. Obviously they had no idea what they were, but they're visible. The original conception of the world is the further north you went, the colder it got until it was uninhabitable. Then the same south except with heat. I don't know where they got the idea of two habitable zones but it was probably a symmetry thing.
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# ? Sep 2, 2012 23:22 |
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Wouldn't there have been some limited contact with sub saharan tribes? The Romans explored pretty far along the western African coast, they had to have found out there was at least some people down there, even if it was totally not worth trying to find them.
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# ? Sep 2, 2012 23:26 |
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Nobody knows. There aren't any records of exploration beyond the Sahara or any contact with anyone past it. There's Ethiopia but Ethiopia is special and wouldn't have been included.
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# ? Sep 2, 2012 23:55 |
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Why's Ethiopia special? Because it was a centralized state? Because its royalty converted to Christianity too?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 00:37 |
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Ethiopia occupied a magical place in Roman culture. It was a mystical faraway land in the furthest reaches of the mysterious east (not south) where gold was so common it was used for chains and nails and iron was rare. Where men with dog heads roamed and ambrosia fell from heaven and all your dreams come true as soon as you think them. I made that part up but it's the gist of it. Ethiopia is more like Thule or the kingdom of Prester John than a real place, though it obviously was also a real place and they had contact and trade eventually.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 00:56 |
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Bitter Mushroom posted:What was social mobility like? Did any former slaves rise particularly high? Was there ever any kind of criticism of slavery?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 03:21 |
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Romans knew about China, right? I mean I know they did at a certain point because Justinian or whoever it was stole/acquired knowledge of the silk trade from the Chinese. So what did Romans think of the Chinese? Did they acquire any Chinese customs via trade/contact?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 04:12 |
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Vigilance posted:Romans knew about China, right? I mean I know they did at a certain point because Justinian or whoever it was stole/acquired knowledge of the silk trade from the Chinese. The wikipedia article on this subject is pretty exhaustive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations The gist of it is that, yeah, they were vaguely aware of each other and a few enterprising people even made it all the way to Rome/China, but they were so far apart and separated by a variety of unfriendly kingdoms (e.g. Parthia/Persia) that they never really interacted much face-to-face. The biggest impact the Chinese had on Roman culture was through the trade of silk, which became such a desirable luxury good that Roman men would complain that their wives were spending them into penury. Conversely, Roman glassware has been found as far as the island of Japan (and I believe in Korea as well).
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 04:42 |
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One of the various bits of Roman glass dug up from royal tombs in Korea. There was no trading of culture, there just wasn't enough contact. Buddhism did reach both places though. Somewhat more successful in one of them than the other.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 05:06 |
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Speaking of which, can I post this infuriatingly bad essay that I found posted on another forum?quote:Comparing the Ancient Empires of Rome and China
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 05:43 |
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I was going to take that apart but it was written by a twelve year old and literally everything about is terrible and wrong. I would be dead of starvation before I finished writing the line-by-line. Thank you though, I forgot what my life would be like if I were a history teacher.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 05:49 |
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mediadave posted:I'm currently trying to learn Latin, and today picked up Ovid's Metamorphoses (Loeb classical library)to help me with this and learn some Roman literature if nothing else. But having only read a few pages (of the English) already my mind has been blown. The ancients knew that the world was round, and Aristotelian physics held that fire was an element that was naturally drawn upward. (Look at smoke, it comes from fire so it must be fire, and it's drawn upward, so therefore...) So I don't think it's that big of a stretch for an ancient Roman to imagine that given coldplace to his north and hotplace to his south, there's logically another warmplace on the other side of it and another coldplace beyond that. Ether isn't a vacuum. It's an element in Aristotelian physics (air, water, fire, earth, ether/quintessence), and it's what the universe is made out of once you get out beyond the moon. Aristotle thought that the universe was basically a gigantic nested series of spheres, with our planet in the center. Our planet is comprised of fire, water, earth, and air. Water and earth are heavy elements, attracted downward (because if you drop them they fall) and fire and air are light elements, attracted heavenward. Our planet's sphere extends out to the moon, and everything beyond that is made of pure ether. The ether-sphere extends out to the stars, which Aristotle thought were all the same distance from earth (because go outside at night and look up - you don't really see any bigger or smaller stars, and if you look at it over time, the stars rotate in a fixed pattern all at the same speed, so therefore...), and beyond that sphere is the realm of the Prime Mover. That is to say, in ancient cosmology, "space" isn't a vacuum like we understand it, but instead, space is literally a sphere and it's literally made out of stuff that doesn't exist at all in the sublunary sphere. I think it's almost certain the Aristotelian picture of cosmology/physics was commonly known by educated people in Rome, and probably by everyday people who were at least curious enough about how the universe worked to ask an educated person.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 11:38 |
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Here's another good article on Roman-Chinese contacts, very detailed and complete - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/eastasia/romchin1.asp
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 14:30 |
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Grand Fromage posted:Nobody knows. There aren't any records of exploration beyond the Sahara or any contact with anyone past it. There's Ethiopia but Ethiopia is special and wouldn't have been included. Yes there are, just you don't look to the Romans for them. A learned Roman could have picked up a copy of Herodotus, for example, and read about people sailing around Africa. Many authors mentioned pygmies living far to the south. Romans had access to many books that are lost to us today, too.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 16:56 |
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Grand Fromage posted:
Yeah hence why Paris in the Trojan Cycle is probably the biggest pussy in all of classical mythology, something which the movie Troy got completely wrong.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 17:12 |
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achillesforever6 posted:Yeah hence why Paris in the Trojan Cycle is probably the biggest pussy in all of classical mythology, something which the movie Troy got completely wrong. Is there anything that Troy got right?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 17:23 |
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Agesilaus posted:Is there anything that Troy got right? The action movie formula?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 17:44 |
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An emphasis on masculine sexuality?
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 18:23 |
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cousins, totally cousins
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 18:34 |
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achillesforever6 posted:Weren't a lot of the Emperor's top aides usually were his former slaves? Yes, this was often the case. Probably the most well-known of them were Narcissus, Pallas and Callistas, who were Claudius' secretaries. Pallas and Callistas were in charge of finance and petitions to the Emperor respectively, and Narcissus was more or less his prime minister. The tradtional aristocracy centered on the Senate really hated these kind of upstarts, but they had to put up with them. Eventually, Hadrian gave into their pressure and reserved the very top jobs for members of the order of Equites. However, a lot of the slightly more junior posts were still occupied by freedmen even after that.
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# ? Sep 3, 2012 19:36 |
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Agesilaus posted:Yes there are, just you don't look to the Romans for them. A learned Roman could have picked up a copy of Herodotus, for example, and read about people sailing around Africa. Many authors mentioned pygmies living far to the south. Romans had access to many books that are lost to us today, too. I've never read that part of it, but unreliable is a mild term for Herodotus, especially the further you get from Greece. There aren't any reliable records and there's no archaeological evidence. That doesn't mean they didn't do it. Considering the vast amount of trade through the Red Sea and the lack of desert on the east coast, I'd be surprised if no one ever decided to take a right at Somalia and sail down the coast some. It's purely speculative, though, and clearly if people did do it, it didn't have much of an effect--didn't open up any noticeable trade or end up recorded in any surviving sources. I don't think there's been a lot of archaeology done along the east African coast, I wouldn't be surprised if a few Roman things turned up there someday when there is proper exploration. E: What part of Herodotus is it in, do you remember? I just did a search with an online copy and don't see anything about sailing around Africa. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Sep 4, 2012 |
# ? Sep 4, 2012 01:36 |
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Grand Fromage posted:E: What part of Herodotus is it in, do you remember? I just did a search with an online copy and don't see anything about sailing around Africa. I don't recall it in Herodotus, but the The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea indicates ports pretty far south in Africa and a general understanding (though it comes off as speculation) that eventually one could round the continent and go back up towards Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_Maris_Erythraei
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 01:47 |
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Pfirti86 posted:I don't recall it in Herodotus, but the The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea indicates ports pretty far south in Africa and a general understanding (though it comes off as speculation) that eventually one could round the continent and go back up towards Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_Maris_Erythraei Interesting. Looks like they did trade down there, I didn't know about these ports. I wonder how it fit into their conception of the world map. The dominant idea was that Africa was an island encircled by the world ocean, like Europe and Asia. So the concept of being able to circumnavigate it wouldn't have been strange to them.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 01:53 |
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Kind of off-topic, but Herodotus rules. My favorite "true story" is the one about the giant ants who dug up gold.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 02:42 |
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Grand Fromage posted:E: What part of Herodotus is it in, do you remember? I just did a search with an online copy and don't see anything about sailing around Africa. Book 4; the story is believable because the sailors who managed to circumnavigate Africa stated that the sun was on the right-hand side of their boat. At any rate, the story could be complete nonsense, but the Romans would still have it freely available to them if they wished to think about what was south of the Sahara.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 02:55 |
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quote:For my part I am astonished that men should ever have divided Libya, Asia, and Europe as they have, for they are exceedingly unequal. Europe extends the entire length of the other two, and for breadth will not even (as I think) bear to be compared to them. As for Libya, we know it to be washed on all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia. This discovery was first made by Necos, the Egyptian king, who on desisting from the canal which he had begun between the Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent to sea a number of ships manned by Phoenicians, with orders to make for the Pillars of Hercules, and return to Egypt through them, and by the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared- I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may- that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered. For anyone curious. The Erythraean Sea is the Red Sea/Indian Ocean, and the Pillars of Hercules is generally believed to be Gibraltar. Libya means all of Africa. It's not much but it's rather low on bullshit by Herodotus standards and there's no technical reason why they couldn't have done it, so who knows.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 03:01 |
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If the Romans ever did circumnavigate Africa it may have been like our moon shot, really cool but really expensive and ultimately, no money was made from it so we/they haven't done it since (this is not a condemnation of space exploration). Now this is reminding me of my favourite big red title 'ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT'
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 07:41 |
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If it were that they would've made a big deal out of it. Presumably there weren't any trade ports worth bothering with south of there or on the west coast.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 07:59 |
Moist von Lipwig posted:If the Romans ever did circumnavigate Africa it may have been like our moon shot, really cool but really expensive and ultimately, no money was made from it so we/they haven't done it since (this is not a condemnation of space exploration). You know I remember that title too, what was the story? There's that Roman instrument the tibia. It's pretty much two flutes + reeds, if I got it right. The question is, were the first ones traditionally made out of the tibia and fibula of an animal or something? Or did the bone get named after the instrument? Unrelated to Rome, but I seem to remember a scrap of a myth that has a "Death playing a flute made of human bones / some kind of evil dude with cannibal music" sort of trope going on, but I can't remember any other details. Anyone have a lead on that or know what I'm talking about? It is possible that the whole thing's some kind of hosed up figment of my imagination. I think it might be related to the general idea that music is a form of magic in some way, but I'm not really sure. e: google was way too eager to autocomplete "flute made from human bone" SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Sep 4, 2012 |
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 08:48 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 09:11 |
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The bone is named after the instrument, because someone thought it looked like it. Fibula means something like "safety pin", and it does resemble one somewhat.
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# ? Sep 4, 2012 16:18 |