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Agesilaus posted:Movies like Troy, and really any American take on history, are terribly insulting to those involved. Oh what's that, Protesilaus? You were the first to land on the shore, not Achilles? Well this movie is called Troy, not Cypria, so we're just going to assign all the honour and glory to some other character and leave you out in the cold. Did you like the movie 300, lads? What's that, the movie failed to mention half the Greek city states that sent men to the pass? It's okay, we're not big on accuracy or good manners here in future. Hope you enjoy your rhinos and hand grenades. As for a question I was reading the Sandman comic that involved Augustus, was it true that Augustus banned theater and exiled actors? Plus was there a rumor that Julius Caesar raped Augustus?
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Sep 30, 2012 04:30
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Actors were seen as immoral and Augustus did a lot of moral reforming. I actually can't remember if they were banned or not.  There were always rumors that Octavian had gotten his favor with Caesar by way of sex. Nobody knows if it was true or not. From the way he was about ~*~moral integrity~*~ I suspect it was just a rumor. There wasn't anything about it being rape though, it was the same kind of thing like the rumors of Caesar loving around with King Nicomedes.
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Sep 30, 2012 04:35
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Yeah, those sorts of rumors tended to be kind of like Roman versions of "Obama is a Secret Muslim!"
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Sep 30, 2012 04:48
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Roman nobles loved making up lovely rumors about other nobles. And then you get people like Suetonius loving to write them down as history. Always have to take these things with several grains of salt when you're reading them. E: Hey we broke 2000 posts a page ago. 
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Sep 30, 2012 |
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Sep 30, 2012 04:53
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So was "Nero burned Rome" the Roman version of "Bush did 9/11" or is that a later rumor that everyone thinks is from the Roman era?
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Sep 30, 2012 07:03
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:So was "Nero burned Rome" the Roman version of "Bush did 9/11" or is that a later rumor that everyone thinks is from the Roman era? Pretty contemporary, I think. Tacitus and Suetonius both talk about it but they were writing some forty years later.
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Sep 30, 2012 07:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Roman nobles loved making up lovely rumors about other nobles. And then you get people like Suetonius loving to write them down as history. Always have to take these things with several grains of salt when you're reading them. Suetonius was basically the People Magazine of Rome, wasn't he?
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Sep 30, 2012 08:02
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Suetonius was basically the People Magazine of Rome, wasn't he? Somewhere between that and the Daily Mail.
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Sep 30, 2012 14:21
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Agesilaus posted:Movies like Troy, and really any American take on history, are terribly insulting to those involved. Oh what's that, Protesilaus? You were the first to land on the shore, not Achilles? Well this movie is called Troy, not Cypria, so we're just going to assign all the honour and glory to some other character and leave you out in the cold. Did you like the movie 300, lads? What's that, the movie failed to mention half the Greek city states that sent men to the pass? It's okay, we're not big on accuracy or good manners here in future. Hope you enjoy your rhinos and hand grenades. Oh honey. The Iliad isn't history and Protesilaus and Achilles weren't real people. re: theater. Rome had lots of different kinds of spectacles. The ones that get the most attention are the bloody things like gladiatorial games & beast fights & prisoners in the arenas with beasts and/or other prisoners forced to fight, kinda thing. They also had dramatic theater, of course, though the most vibrant period for Roman drama was about 215-100 BC and after that as far as we can tell they mostly just did revivals of the old stuff. There are exceptions of course, like Ovid wrote a Medea that we don't have, and Augustus was apparently writing an Ajax at one point. Seneca the Younger wrote a number of tragedies but there's some debate as to whether those would have been staged or just sorta line-read. There were performances of Greek plays in Greek probably, too. There's a reference to some kind of performance being done in Oscan (another Italic language that was almost dead at the time) even in the early 1st century AD. That was probably Atellan farce, from which mime (see below) probably developed. Atellan Farce in turn was an Oscan style from S. Italy that probably owed its origins to the influence of Greek comedy and phylax plays in the southern Italian Greek cities. The main forms of stage spectacle were things that don't leave much in the way of literary evidence. They were big on mime (= not our mime at all, more like farce, with stock characters and big fake phalluses and slapstick humor) and pantomime (= dancing & acting without speech, classier). In addition to these, probably the main form of literary circulation would have been readings by authors or actors, generally to a small group of friends, so there would have been poetry and historiography readings and stuff going on in certain circles. Oratorical performance was huge in Rome from early days, and after the Republic fell it became even more about performance than substance. The period called the Second Sophistic was a revival of intellectualism especially in the Greek part of the empire, but part of it was characterized by people doing declamations or whatever as public entertainment. This was going on from early days on street corners and stuff, too, and people would come to watch the speeches in the Senate even on political matters (legal cases were probably more exciting though). Other sorts of things you'd see would be essentially buskers: speakers, various sorts of medical or religious quackery, perhaps musicians, dancers, etc. Actors' status is something that changed a lot over time. Generally speaking they would be slaves or otherwise very lowborn and would work in companies. Some became famous and associated with the nobility on some level. In the late republic their reputation got worse and they seem to have been thought of as a category of the dregs of society, along with prostitutes. The thing is that a lot of them probably were farcical actors, and the women sometimes got naked in those shows, and yeah so they weren't the ones who hung with the nobility. Pantomime was big in the Augustan period though and I'm reasonably sure the performers were accepted to some degree (I mean, you wouldn't let anyone marry them, but it was fun to have one at your party). Augustus decorated his house with all kinds of theatrical motifs so I don't think he was super hard on actors. At least once all actors were expelled from Rome, but I don't remember when (Wikipedia suggests the 50's AD under Nero, who himself often performed to a captive audience). Anyway there are some  I can get more specific on something if anyone has questions but this is what I can tell you without 
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Sep 30, 2012 16:01
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So Roman Mime would be the roots of things like Italian Commedia dell'arte, with stock characters moving in exaggerated forms?
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Sep 30, 2012 18:42
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Mr. Maltose posted:So Roman Mime would be the roots of things like Italian Commedia dell'arte, with stock characters moving in exaggerated forms? Masked characters likely came out of medieval carnivals and the stock characters developed from medieval morality plays, though plots were adapted from traditional sources and classical works. Modern pantomime does descend from commedia dell'arte.
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Oct 1, 2012 00:20
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Mr. Maltose posted:So Roman Mime would be the roots of things like Italian Commedia dell'arte, with stock characters moving in exaggerated forms? If someone proved a definite link, I wouldn't be surprised, but what I'm gathering from Wikipedia is that that didn't start till the 16th century, which would be quite a long interlude. It may be more of a thing that happens when you only can have so many masks. Plus having stock characters makes things easier for audiences to understand without needing exposition or even necessarily speech. I dunno, anyway, well out of my time period 
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Oct 1, 2012 00:25
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Eggplant Wizard posted:If someone proved a definite link, I wouldn't be surprised, but what I'm gathering from Wikipedia is that that didn't start till the 16th century, which would be quite a long interlude. It may be more of a thing that happens when you only can have so many masks. Plus having stock characters makes things easier for audiences to understand without needing exposition or even necessarily speech. I dunno, anyway, well out of my time period Wikipedia is rather hesitant when people ascribe links between modern and ancient practices. I used to put up the link between Hippokleides and modern break dancing, but they kept rejecting it despite my citation to Herodotus.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:50
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sullat posted:
The Empire didn't really get rid of their navy till after the sack when it was too expensive. Up till the Battle of Manzikert the Empire was under a pretty massive resurgence. Under John I Tzimiskes they marched pretty much destroyed all Arab power in the middle east including taking Damascus and almost Jesusalem (he had to turn around and crush the Bulgarians. The real reason the eastern Empire never projected power beyond Italy was infighting. Despite what you might read, Venice paid tribute to the Empire till after the first Crusade.
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Oct 1, 2012 02:39
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How did their chain across the Golden Horn work, exactly? What kind of mechanism was in place for raising it or lowering it, and how effective was it in keeping enemy ships from landing?
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Oct 1, 2012 03:10
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There was some sort of machinery in the tower that raised it, but I don't think any of it survived. The Venetians were able to break the chain once, and a couple other times ships were pulled overland around it. I know the Rus did that once and were met with a wall of flamethrowers so that didn't really go well for them.
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Oct 1, 2012 03:35
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Hedera Helix posted:How did their chain across the Golden Horn work, exactly? What kind of mechanism was in place for raising it or lowering it, and how effective was it in keeping enemy ships from landing? Effective until the end. Mehmet II had to construct a massive road of greased logs across overland to roll his ships to the Golden Horn to circumvent it. Constantinople really was probably the hardest city to siege and conquer in all of history.
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Oct 1, 2012 11:20
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Just to break down Constantinople's defenses. Constantinople was a triangular city, with one side facing land and the other two on the water. Walls on all sides. On the water side, you had walls right at the shore, the harbor chain to keep ships from entering, and the Roman navy armed with flamethrowers. Good luck with that. On the land side, you have a multiple layer deep wall system. First there's a moat, sixty feet wide and thirty deep. At the inner edge of the moat is a wall about five feet tall just to slow you down. Next there's a sixty foot wide open area. Then you hit the outer wall, six feet thick and about thirty tall. There are towers all along it. After that is another open area, with archer towers to rain down death on you as you try to cross it. Then there's the inner wall, eighteen feet thick and forty feet high, with another series of towers tall enough to shoot at anyone all the way from the moat to the inner wall. This system was, quite simply, impenetrable. Literally nobody got in for a thousand years, other than the Fourth Crusade who were able to go through a gate that was either left open or opened by a traitor. In any case, actually attacking the walls? Impossible. Plenty of people tried and failed. The fortifications weren't defeated until the Ottomans, who built the largest cannon ever constructed in order to break them.
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Oct 1, 2012 11:35
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Grand Fromage posted:Just to break down Constantinople's defenses. I think that's seriously understating the efforts of the Fourth Crusade. They seized control of the tower on the other side of the Golden Horn and lowered the chain so that the Venetian ships could sail right up to the landward walls in that section of the city. Then they stormed the city from several points, including from the ships. This was aided by infighting between the Byzantines (they went through three emperors during the siege and sack, one of whom slipped away with the contents of the treasury). The "undefended gate" story I believe comes from 1453. Even after the huge cannon, the ships moved across the golden horn, the Turks still needed an open gate to enter the city... of course the outcome was never in doubt, and they were busy assaulting the city from several directions, so the significance isn't quite as dramatic. sullat fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 14:56
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Oh? I thought they rammed through the chain but the assaults didn't do much. Time to read. Fake edit: Yeah, you're right. The assaults on the land wall failed as usual but they were able to get over the sea walls after they got past the chain. So, the Theodosian Walls were the part of the defensive setup that was never successfully attacked.
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Oct 1, 2012 15:03
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How seriously did the Ottoman emperors take their claim of Kaysar-i-Rhum? Were they like 'oh yeah, our empire's totally a continuation of the Roman one, bros' or just 'heh, we're sitting on their old capital  .'edit: wait, the Ottoman empire lasted 'til 1918 so let's narrow that down to the first century of Ottoman emperors.
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Oct 1, 2012 18:04
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How seriously did the Ottoman emperors take their claim of Kaysar-i-Rhum? Were they like 'oh yeah, our empire's totally a continuation of the Roman one, bros' or just 'heh, we're sitting on their old capital I think you have to look at it through the way of medieval diplomacy. In the middle ages, if you were even a pig farmer with some ambitions, you would claim to be the rightful ruler of all Europe and beyond. Kings would casually claim the ownership of lands that they did not own, possibly even of nations that didn't actually exist (anymore) except as referenced in some old inaccurate chronicles. Old annals were studied for any flimsy excuse to make a claim over a neighbouring duchy, and if such evidence wasn't found then it would be forged. Purposes ranged from political disputes to extorting taxes to outright expansionism. Like some contemporary rap artists, the kings, emperors, tsars and sultans of the old days wore extravagant bling-bling to enforce their image as being nearly divine, and coined bombastic titles for themselves. When you were a lowly prince and received a letter starting with "We, the emperor, ruler of all lands, protector of all Christians, punisher of all wicked heathens, master of mustard etc." it was pretty clear who was the boss. It also enforced the status of the royal family because none of the competing houses or clans could claim to possess equal right to the throne.
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Oct 1, 2012 19:53
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Agesilaus posted:Wikipedia is rather hesitant when people ascribe links between modern and ancient practices. I used to put up the link between Hippokleides and modern break dancing, but they kept rejecting it despite my citation to Herodotus. Similarity of practice is not proof of a connection.  I really thought you might be a troll but I think you may actually be this deluded.e: Wikipedia also is super behind on ancient stuff. Most of the material I've seen draws from work that is now outdated... Eggplant Wizard fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 23:25
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Don't be a coward post your link between Hippokleides and break dancing.
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Oct 1, 2012 23:59
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Eggplant Wizard posted:e: Wikipedia also is super behind on ancient stuff. Most of the material I've seen draws from work that is now outdated... Wikipedia can be retarded. I recently read an article about a physicist who kept having his edits reverted by some basement dwelling sperglord editor because "I don't think you understand the authors work." He was the loving author.
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Oct 2, 2012 13:55
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Bum the Sad posted:Wikipedia can be retarded. I recently read an article about a physicist who kept having his edits reverted by some basement dwelling sperglord editor because "I don't think you understand the authors work." He was the loving author.
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Oct 2, 2012 15:05
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achillesforever6 posted:So like Old School were Rodney hired Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut and got a B for it? Bum the Sad fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Oct 2, 2012 |
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Oct 2, 2012 16:08
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achillesforever6 posted:So like Old School were Rodney hired Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut and got a B for it? The B was justified, any 'death of the author' interpretation would have been pretty weak.
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Oct 2, 2012 20:25
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Eggplant Wizard posted:Similarity of practice is not proof of a connection. It was tongue in cheek, obviously modern break dancers didn't look to Hippokleides in starting their practice. As to your comments about Protesilaus and Achilles, though, that's a more difficult question. To strip honour from cultural heroes, and figures that are or may be historical, is something that can be insulting and low class. I don't want to drag this thread down that path, but to just say "oh honey none of those people are real" isn't a satisfactory defence of modern cinema. As for the poster who mentioned that 300 was based on a graphical novel, that hardly helps because the disgrace simply began with the novel, and was perpetuated by the movie. It is a gross insult to write a important people out of the story, senselessly belittle some people who did actually make it into the script, and then assign glory and ideals in an ahistorical manner. Movies get a rating for violence and sexual themes, movies also need a rating for the script writer's ignorance and carelessness. Phobophilia posted:Don't be a coward post your link between Hippokleides and break dancing. Uh, it's not that I'm a coward, it's that there's only one famous story about Hippokleides and I named a source for it in my post. Hippokleides got drunk and danced on his head while trying to win a girl's hand in marriage. The father got upset and said he danced away the marriage, to which he responded famously "Hippokleides doesn't care." There are a few sources for the comment, Herodotus says it entered common language. e: okay thanks for the avatar I guess but nothing I've posted is particularly effeminate or gay so... Agesilaus fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Oct 3, 2012 |
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Oct 3, 2012 00:48
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Agesilaus posted:It was tongue in cheek, obviously modern break dancers didn't look to Hippokleides in starting their practice. within the same post posted:Uh, it's not that I'm a coward, it's that there's only one famous story about Hippokleides and I named a source for it in my post. Hippokleides got drunk and danced on his head while trying to win a girl's hand in marriage. The father got upset and said he danced away the marriage, to which he responded famously "Hippokleides doesn't care." There are a few sources for the comment, Herodotus says it entered common language. See, here's your real problem. Not that your disdain for 'the lower classes' and casual desire for a slave owning society aren't problematic. Not that you think the Iliad is 'historical.' Your real problem is that, by dint of happening in Greece 2000 years ago, anything is instantly better. Pop culture depiction of Homeric epics not 100% accurate? Low class! Vile and repulsive, a true breakdown of our civilization into baser forms! Ignorance! Insulting to mythological people who never existed! It strips away their  HONOUR!But ancient Greek people entertaining themselves? Oho, what cards. Mmyes, public drunkenness? So funny! quote:e: okay thanks for the avatar I guess but nothing I've posted is particularly effeminate or gay so... Hey Agesilos, how's Lysander doing? And don't tell me you and Xenophon never palled around. What I'm saying is that your avatar name is objectively homosexual. To be fair, aside from your implied desire to fellate Greek or Roman over the age of 2000, that's like the last thing I'd red text you for.
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Oct 3, 2012 02:05
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Bum the Sad posted:Wikipedia can be retarded. I recently read an article about a physicist who kept having his edits reverted by some basement dwelling sperglord editor because "I don't think you understand the authors work." He was the loving author. Yeah there's always that. I will say that I've found in general that the Roman history articles are okay. You should obviously be in Wikipedia Mode in your brain when you read but if you go look up a battle or something, it will probably not be a load of bullshit. In general. As to Ottoman claims I think nenonen is right, and as a subject I know nothing about I am clearly an authority. Rulers collected titles and having a claim on a title didn't necessarily mean anything. If you got the sultan alone and drunk I doubt he would have seriously considered himself Roman Emperor but maintaining the title was a prestige thing. If nothing else it was a little dig saying "I conquered your beloved empire, Europe".
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Oct 3, 2012 02:06
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The real defense for 300 is that it's not a dumb action flick, it's an entertaining film critiquing fascist propaganda and its popularity and acceptance in our culture. It's ahistorical for a reason. A "historical" retelling of the events would have completely different themes, and probably just be banal fascist propaganda. I can see why Agesilaus would find that appealing, though. 
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Oct 3, 2012 17:13
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah there's always that. I will say that I've found in general that the Roman history articles are okay. You should obviously be in Wikipedia Mode in your brain when you read but if you go look up a battle or something, it will probably not be a load of bullshit. I remember the old patrician article in particular listed a couple Valerii, and an Arab from the ~4th century AD, as helpful examples of the subject matter.
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Oct 3, 2012 18:33
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What was Romania (or the region that became it) like during the Roman and Byzantine periods?
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Oct 4, 2012 02:21
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karl fungus posted:What was Romania (or the region that became it) like during the Roman and Byzantine periods? Dacia. There was a great discussion based upon it in the first few pages (I believe).
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Oct 4, 2012 02:50
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Thank you, GF, as this thread (and the wikipedia pages it sent me scurrying to read) filled three otherwise worthless deskwarming days. My question, and I think it's probably more archaeology-related, is: What is going on in the field of Roman history today? Where's the leading edge of research, so to speak? What are people looking for/translating/speculating on? My background is in ~the sciences~ so I don't really know anything about how the field works. If this is a dumb question, I apologize!
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Oct 4, 2012 05:09
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One cool think about Romania is that Romanian is a Romance language like Spanish or French or Italian, though I doubt many people would group it with those languages.
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Oct 4, 2012 05:28
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euphronius posted:One cool think about Romania is that Romanian is a Romance language like Spanish or French or Italian, though I doubt many people would group it with those languages. Knew a Romanian guy at work who certainly did, in fact he said it wasn't too hard for him to puzzle out Italian.
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Oct 4, 2012 05:45
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verybad posted:The real defense for 300 is that it's not a dumb action flick, it's an entertaining film critiquing fascist propaganda and its popularity and acceptance in our culture. It's ahistorical for a reason. A "historical" retelling of the events would have completely different themes, and probably just be banal fascist propaganda. Are you sure that 300 is meant to be a critique of fascist propaganda and not fascist propaganda itself? Because I don't think you actually know who Frank Miller is if you really think the former.
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Oct 4, 2012 06:24
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Base Emitter posted:Knew a Romanian guy at work who certainly did, in fact he said it wasn't too hard for him to puzzle out Italian. Yeah Romanian is hella Romance. It's the closest major living language to Latin, though there are a few isolated languages around that are closer. Sardinian I think is one. Dacia was conquered by Trajan and then exploited to hell and back because of the large gold mines there. It flooded the empire with wealth. Once the gold mines were exhausted, it became a bit of a burden since it was on the wrong side of the Danube. Once border skirmishes became too much to handle it was abandoned. As you might guess, the Roman cultural influence was huge and persistent after they left, which is why they speak a Romance language and call it Romania to this day. Romania was a name for the entire empire originally. Onion Knight posted:My question, and I think it's probably more archaeology-related, is: Doing my best to make deskwarming productive. There are a few new things, not necessarily just Roman. One Roman specific one is trying to develop techniques to read the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri by scanning them in some sort of machine, rather than trying to unroll them and destroy them. That will likely have other uses later, reading badly degraded documents. Archaeology in general is making more use of ground penetrating radar and other sensor techniques to survey sites without digging. One of the inherent contradictions in archaeology is that excavating a site destroys it. If you do it carefully, you can record and preserve the information and learn quite a lot from it, but once the excavation is over you're left with a hole where there's nothing else to be learned and the elements are going to destroy everything. It's useful for tourism if it's preserved. But if you don't dig you can't learn anything, so it's considered worth the trade-off. However there are sites that aren't diggable for whatever reason. Or sites that you could excavate but don't want to risk it--the unexcavated parts of Pompeii, or the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in China are notable examples. So there's a lot of research into ways to use sensor techniques to look through the ground and survey the sites without actually digging anything. At the very least, it lets you target your digs better instead of just going in blind. Theoretically, it could someday allow an entire site to be explored without loving anything up. If I were able to pick anything in the field to work on I'd be excavating in Eastern Europe, which has gone largely unexplored between wars and communism and generally spending their money on food instead of archaeologists. Maritime archeology is also always a neglected area owing to how difficult it is.
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Oct 4, 2012 08:06
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