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Will2Powa posted: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. This is hugely off-topic, so sorry for that. I don't think Frank Miller's personal beliefs really matter here. Starship Troopers the book might've been Robert Heinlein fellating fascism, but Starship Troopers the film was satirizing that very same concept. In interpreting the movie 300, it's important to note how the story is framed: namely, it's a movie about a dude telling other dudes a story just before they march into battle. The filmography is super stylized, as opposed to being "gritty" and "realistic". The guy telling the story is often times relating events that he had no way of witnessing. These are all signs that basically say "this dude is making poo poo up!" Why would a genuine propaganda piece be framed like that?
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Oct 4, 2012 12:34
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verybad posted:This is hugely off-topic, so sorry for that. :mod hat: Why yes, yes it is. Please don't continue. Roman history: Just a short note because I'm supposed to be doing class prep  Late Antiquity has gone through a bit of a renaissance lately ( ), and people seem to be doing a lot of that. Also more generally in the past thirty-forty years there's been a push to do better representing the subelite people, so women and conquered peoples and the poor etc. The question of how to talk about cultural change under the Roman empire is also pretty fraught. Mostly I only know the recent work on stuff I'm working on so I apologize for not having details in general. (e: If you're curious, you can try looking through recent programs for the American Philological Association and the American Institute of Archaeology conference and see what's been on the program, but the selection process for those is notoriously ineffable so ymmv)One thing that's surprising/weird is how little archaeology and ancient history do interact. I think that's changing but an awful lot of history is based on ancient literary sources with an occasional reference to an inscription and little else in terms of material evidence :/ Eggplant Wizard fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 13:44
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Oh yeah. Like all of history, Roman history is trying to get away from just being the narrative of emperors and elites. And even in the time I've been into it I've seen a lot more attention paid to late antiquity/the early "dark ages". Basically trying to revise that whole CLASSICAL WORLD ENDED. MEDIEVAL HORROR BEGAN. poo poo from older historians into something more realistic, and going with the general history trend of trying to avoid so many clear breaks and talk more in terms of transitions.
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Oct 4, 2012 13:47
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Yeah, something I've always noticed, from a pop history perspective, is that classical life is always described from a certain social status. Domestic life always implies the existence of servants to help maintain the household. In other words, only the narratives of those that can afford slaves/servants and read/write get preserved. If you can't, well, no one cares about you in the future. You see this even in relatively modern history of England and America, where the stories are told from relatively prosperous households.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:25
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To be fair to historians it's not all their fault. The vast majority of surviving written material is from the upper classes. There's just not much to go on to describe the life of your average Gaius. Serious effort is being put into gathering those scraps of writing and archaeological evidence to get a better picture of it, but in all likelihood it will never be as rich as the perspective we can get on someone like Cicero.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:32
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You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt?
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Oct 4, 2012 16:18
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Beamed posted:You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt? The writings from the Roman/Greek era are mostly defined by what managed to survive 1500+ years of mistreatment. I can't imagine that the Byzantine mooks would have been too interested in copying heretical "barbarian" works of literature after they defeated the Vandals.
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Oct 4, 2012 17:04
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Beamed posted:You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt? We have what we have due to luck and monks, basically. Anything likely to be either destroyed or offensive/uninteresting to a monk simply was at a huge disadvantage, and post-Roman records fall into both categories for the most part. What we do have from that era was - surprise! - mostly written by bishops and such to begin with. Even major works like Livy's histories didn't make it through the Middle Ages intact, so the Gothic stuff had almost no chance. It's hard to overstate the sheer amount of written material that existed in the classical world and we possess a tiny fraction of it. Studying Roman history gets kind of depressing sometimes because of this, at least for me. One or two guys will be the only primary sources about particular situation or year or whatever and it's obvious that they've left something out or misanalyzed the situation or whatever because their explanation doesn't make much sense, but we simply don't have anything to help us get around that. That being said, as archaeology becomes more technically sophisticated I think it's pretty likely we'll find some libraries with works we had no idea even existed in them, and hopefully some hole-filling historical works too.
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Oct 5, 2012 06:35
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Also while the Germans did Romanize heavily, it didn't happen all at once or evenly. Germans had no writing tradition at all, so it seems like it took some time for it to be adopted. And when it was, it was by a fairly narrow band of society. It's likely that none of the German successor kingdoms produced the sheer quantity of work that the Romans did. It's part of the transition to the medieval level of literacy from the far more literate classical world.
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Oct 5, 2012 07:13
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Beamed posted:You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt? Non-sequitor, but barbarian-literacy related... - It's believed to be reproductions of a 6th century translation, but that still makes it the oldest example of native, written Gothic. As a side-note, listening to it being read is kind of funny if you have any sort of knowledge of Scandinavian languages or old norse!
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Oct 5, 2012 08:19
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Now that Libya & maybe Algeria are opening up, maybe there will be another Nag Hammadi type of find in the desert. Best place for preserving scrolls. I seem to recall reading that there are tons of untranslted clay tablets in Iraq, too. Wonder how many more paradigm-shattering revelations are in there, hidden amongst the payroll stubs and ancient 1040s?
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Oct 5, 2012 16:21
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Grand Fromage posted: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. I've heard of this a few times, do you know how far along they are with their efforts to read the scrolls? Any updates on the work people are doing to scan old books and parchments that wretched Christian fanatics wrote over? The idea that any one of these days we could discover the works of the lost cyclical poets, or the fifth and fourth century bc philosophers and historians, is very exciting. I don't understand why there aren't governments dedicating a significant part of their budget to developing these technologies and projects, or why there aren't massive not-for-profits soliciting millions of donations to fund it. We are talking about priceless treasures that are literally right in our hands, just waiting for us to read them, yet people still pay for children to kick over buckets of paint and call it art, for shame. I remember talking to a Classics professor years ago who told me there are huge numbers of fragments from the ancient world just sitting around waiting to be worked on and published. This needs to be an election issue, where is the Classicist lobby pushing for people to do the right thing and rescue the thoughts and deeds of all those ancient people. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 6, 2012 00:26
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Agesilaus posted:I've heard of this a few times, do you know how far along they are with their efforts to read the scrolls? Any updates on the work people are doing to scan old books and parchments that wretched Christian fanatics wrote over? The idea that any one of these days we could discover the works of the lost cyclical poets, or the fifth and fourth century bc philosophers and historians, is very exciting. I don't know how far along they are but people are definitely working with some of the texts. A lot of it is stuff by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, but I know that someone is working on making a text of book 5 of Ennius' Annales which is super exciting for me. Italy and Greece and Europe as a whole aren't in great financial shape at the moment to say the least, so they've had to cut back, but in general they do try to care for their antiquities. The problem is that this stuff is literally everywhere. I knew an Italian guy (in his 20's, even) who has a collection of ancient pottery sherds he just picked up on the field where he played soccer with his friends as a kid. That made me  but yeah. One of the reasons there's such a problem with looting of ancient sites, especially Etruscan tombs in Italy, is that the government simply can't devote the resources to getting to the sites first. The tombaroli (tomb robbers I guess) are also really good at finding the sites now, so they'll often get to places we don't even know about necessarily.
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Oct 6, 2012 00:56
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It's hard to overstate just how much stuff is in Italy and Greece. If you dig like a house foundation somewhere there's a good chance you'll find something. I'm not sure where the scanning is, I haven't heard anything about it recently. I know they've proven it will work but I don't think they've refined the techniques enough to start reading them all. E: Also there's a ridiculous amount of undiscovered stuff even in places like Rome and Athens. I'd bet the majority is still buried. Problem is there's like, a giant city on top of it so you can't just go dig up everything. But I think sometimes people imagine to find new Roman material we have to go out into the deep desert or fringes of the empire. It's not true at all; big finds are still frequently uncovered in Rome itself. Pompeii is very extensively excavated and a solid 25% of it is still buried, not to be touched until it can be preserved properly (unlike the rest of the city  )
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 03:29
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Eggplant Wizard posted:Also more generally in the past thirty-forty years there's been a push to do better representing the subelite people, so women and conquered peoples and the poor etc. The question of how to talk about cultural change under the Roman empire is also pretty fraught. Really? In every course I've done there's certainly a lecture or two on women, in a sort of tokenistic way, but I haven't come across much, whether outside the lecture theatre or in it, that's to do with the poor or the conquered. Roman history seems to be one of the few areas that has largely resisted representing the 'subelite', which presumably is because the vast majority of our written sources are by the elite. Have you got any links to papers on JSTOR or something like that? I'd be interested in reading them.
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Oct 6, 2012 06:08
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Well, for one thing Gauls just weren't discussed before, except as they related to Romans. Lately there have been attempts to rehabilitate their image, point out that Gaul was a civilization in its own right with cities and roads and culture, not the land of savages the Romans portrayed it as. But then Gauls didn't have writing and the Romans obliterated their culture so getting much of a picture is very difficult.
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Oct 6, 2012 06:12
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Grand Fromage posted:Pompeii is very extensively excavated and a solid 25% of it is still buried, not to be touched until it can be preserved properly This is a question I've always wondered about. When a large site is discovered and left buried until it can properly be preserved (or excavated without destroying significant samples such as organic matter for dating/pollen analysis etc), when do archaeologists decide they can now properly preserve it without knowing what technologies will be available in future? Is it just a case of limiting trench sizes to a small % of the site per year on the assumption that archaeological technology will advance at a similar rate? How is that all determined? Captain Postal fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Oct 6, 2012 |
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Oct 6, 2012 07:07
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It's mostly a vague hope for money/technology. Like right now most of Pompeii is being slowly destroyed because the Italian government can't pay to maintain it. In a place like the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, they're not going to dig until they think the technology exists to ensure its preservation. I don't think there's any kind of specific set of criteria or anything.
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Oct 6, 2012 07:21
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One of the bad things that springs from the old emphasis on Western Roman history as a story of elites and emperors is an emphasis on the incursions of barbarians as the primary engine of collapse as opposed to the decline of civil society in the larger cities and the growth of latifundiae in the countryside. Is there a good book or essay or anything about the direct transition between the latifundia and the manorial estate?
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Oct 6, 2012 10:09
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In perhaps Gaul, Spain, or Northern Italy, where there was more continuity than the outlying areas.
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Oct 6, 2012 10:11
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Octy posted:Really? In every course I've done there's certainly a lecture or two on women, in a sort of tokenistic way, but I haven't come across much, whether outside the lecture theatre or in it, that's to do with the poor or the conquered. Roman history seems to be one of the few areas that has largely resisted representing the 'subelite', which presumably is because the vast majority of our written sources are by the elite. Courses are always going to be behind research. Partly it's a pain in the rear end to try to integrate that kind of material if you don't personally work with it on a regular basis. There isn't that much, simply put, and a lot of the discussion is rather theoretical. Try the journal Arethusa. It tends to be more postmodern, although it's also more philological than historical. You might also have better luck looking at archaeological publications than historical because they are more oriented towards working with material evidence, which is all we have for subelites. Even that sort of evidence tends to be from elites because they owned/built more and nicer things, and "hey here's some coarseware" isn't very exciting article material. I don't have anything in particular to suggest unfortunately.
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Oct 6, 2012 15:56
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I can't for the life of me remember if this has been mentioned, but what do you actual experts think of Ian Hughes' recent book on Flavius Stilicho, or even about Stilicho himself? Personally I think he's one of the most fascinating figures of the Later Western Empire. I ask because I've always had a fascination with the collapse of the de jure Western Empire. And yes, I'm keeping the continuities between East and West and between Late Roman and German and so on, though honestly I think the argument for continuity plays down the importance of what happened in the West during the fifth century perhaps just a touch. Although he strawmans pretty hard in places, I think Bryan Ward-Perkins makes a point that there was a marked societal collapse in the West, if his interpretation of the collapse of trading networks and literacy is correct, and God alone knows it might not be.
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Oct 6, 2012 20:56
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Grand Fromage posted:Well, for one thing Gauls just weren't discussed before, except as they related to Romans. Lately there have been attempts to rehabilitate their image, point out that Gaul was a civilization in its own right with cities and roads and culture, not the land of savages the Romans portrayed it as. But then Gauls didn't have writing and the Romans obliterated their culture so getting much of a picture is very difficult. Some tribes had their own Italic-derived alphabet, and a hundred or so Gaulish words are known. It is estimated that there are a hundred or so words of Gaulish origin in modern French. The same can be said for languages such as Thracian. For Thracian in particular, a comparative technique of comparing words which appear in Balkan Slavic languages that are also in Greek or Albanian is used to reconstruct words. There is also some Greek script-written material. SecurityManKillJoy fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Oct 7, 2012 |
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Oct 7, 2012 09:45
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They certainly could learn to write, but none of that was before Romans started poking around. There's no literary tradition to draw on, nothing written by Gauls we can read to see what they thought of themselves. I would guess most/all of those were the Gauls living in northern Italy too but that's only a guess. Finding some kind of cache of books written by a literate Gaul about his own people would be one of the greatest finds of all time. I am curious if you know any of the words thought to be from their language, I don't know any.
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Oct 7, 2012 09:52
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I ask because I've always had a fascination with the collapse of the de jure Western Empire. And yes, I'm keeping the continuities between East and West and between Late Roman and German and so on, though honestly I think the argument for continuity plays down the importance of what happened in the West during the fifth century perhaps just a touch. Although he strawmans pretty hard in places, I think Bryan Ward-Perkins makes a point that there was a marked societal collapse in the West, if his interpretation of the collapse of trading networks and literacy is correct, and God alone knows it might not be.
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Oct 7, 2012 15:45
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Some definitely go too far, but it's still instructive to see a different perspective. There was a societal collapse in the west, but there was also a lot of continuity and the medieval period is unfairly maligned by post-Enlightenment history and thinking. Both exist. I've always been annoyed by the tendency for many historians to go to extremes. Usually the truth lies nearer the middle on these things. The Gauls were not barbarians, they had a civilization in every sense of the term, but they also just weren't as sophisticated as the Romans. Insisting it has to be one or the other is dumb.
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Oct 7, 2012 15:52
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Did the emperors ever tax the temples? Even non-Roman temples in non-Latin provinces like Hellas, Egypt, Palestine etc? I'm under the impression that this didn't happen because politicians didn't want to jinx themselves so they'd rather offer huge sacrifices and fund construction of new temples to keep the deities (and the clergy) satisfied. Then again the temptation of emptying the temple coffers must have been great during times of crises. Also, when cities like Jerusalem were sacked, how much loot & slaves could the emperor expect to receive for himself and how much went to line the pockets of the generals and legionnaires?
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Oct 7, 2012 16:01
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Grand Fromage posted:In a place like the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, they're not going to dig until they think the technology exists to ensure its preservation. There's also the fact that that tomb is filled with still working booby traps.
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Oct 7, 2012 18:51
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No way of knowing if that's true without an excavation. There are high mercury levels in the soil above the tomb, which suggests the stories about what's inside it might not be bullshit. If that report isn't bullshit, anyway--history in Asia gets so mangled by nationalism and pride it's often hard to say. E: Not to say history isn't political in other places but it's taken to an extreme here. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 00:03
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Grand Fromage posted:No way of knowing if that's true without an excavation. There are high mercury levels in the soil above the tomb, which suggests the stories about what's inside it might not be bullshit. If that report isn't bullshit, anyway--history in Asia gets so mangled by nationalism and pride it's often hard to say. The original source documents for the mercury claim (Sima Qian) are actually pretty reliable. Sima Qian spent a lot of time doing actual onsite research for his history- a bit of a first for the time. Of course, he had his own moral agenda (history and moral teachings are unified in Chinese historiography), but detail stuff like that, especially recent things, he would definitely not be making up. I fully believe that the map of China with its mercury pool is down there waiting.
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Oct 8, 2012 03:34
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achillesforever6 posted:] Beyond the fact that Christianity and and Christian myth influenced the creation of Islam, the prevailing sense is that Greek thought played a much stronger influence on Islamic life than Roman thinking, especially in the development of theology (see al-Mutazila). There are some theories that Roman law served the basis for early Islamic law but really the strongest pole of influence on Islam came from Persia which was wholly incorporated into the early Muslim Empire. If Constatinople fell during the Ummayad era I think we would have seen a "Roman Islam" develop that would have competed against Persian thinking. Of course when Anatolia did fall, the Turks did try to maintain themselves as continuing in the Roman tradition by naming their Sultunate "Rome" and Mehmet named himself "Caesar" but this is political history. Though I think interesting trivia for the Latin speakers is that the opening and most important verse of the Quran, al-Fatiha, has a term taken straight from Latin: sirat (the right path) from the Latin strata. az jan jananam fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 04:43
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The history channel is apparently having a "Caligula, 1,400 days of terror" thing coming up. Given how the channel has been in the past few years, can we expect it's going to be Suetonius on steroids
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Oct 8, 2012 05:21
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Amused to Death posted:The history channel is apparently having a "Caligula, 1,400 days of terror" thing coming up. Given how the channel has been in the past few years, can we expect it's going to be Suetonius on steroids  Can't wait to watch this with a bottle of whiskey and bile.  Barto posted:The original source documents for the mercury claim (Sima Qian) are actually pretty reliable. I haven't read him yet, I just usually assume ancient historians making grand claims are full of poo poo until proven otherwise. It's a good basic policy. It's the point I made earlier about not taking primary sources at face value. We have the written claim about a map of China with flowing mercury for water. Okay, that's not impossible but it sounds a bit nuts. Then we do some testing and find that there are unusual amounts of mercury in the soil above the tomb. It doesn't prove it, but now that story looks much more likely to be true. Having the archaeology and the written sources working together is how we really get to the truth in ancient history.
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Oct 8, 2012 06:31
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What's this about a mercury map of China? I tried googling it and got literal maps of mercury production in China.
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Oct 8, 2012 06:44
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There's a bit in the legend of what's in the tomb of the first Chinese emperor that includes a gigantic map of China laid out on the floor, with rivers of mercury.
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Oct 8, 2012 06:49
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First off, my thanks to everyone involved in this topic- it's been really enlightening, and as a Roman fanboy, a lot of fun to read  Amused to Death posted:The history channel is apparently having a "Caligula, 1,400 days of terror" thing coming up. Given how the channel has been in the past few years, can we expect it's going to be Suetonius on steroids Can't wait for this to reach Malaysia and I can finally have a reason to drink heavily  Moist von Lipwig posted:What's this about a mercury map of China? I tried googling it and got literal maps of mercury production in China. Emperor Qin wasn't exactly a model of mental stability, so when he died, it was said he was buried in the middle of a scale model of his empire, with bodies of mercury representing bodies of water (mercury being held as a mystical material in ancient China).
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Oct 8, 2012 06:54
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Oh right, he was the one who died from eating all the Mercury pills, right? Thanks guys.
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Oct 8, 2012 07:41
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Talking about Gaul etc "In Our Time" had a podcast about the Druids on the 20th of September which you can still download. It goes a bit into why the Druids weren't really into written records. I just had a quick glance at the article on the Gaulish Language on Wikipedia and to keep in the theme of the thread: Wikipedia posted:A number of short inscriptions are found on spindle whorls and are among the most recent finds in the Gaulish language. Spindle whorls were apparently given to young girls by their suitors and bear such inscriptions as: Moist von Lipwig posted:Oh right, he was the one who died from eating all the Mercury pills, right? Thanks guys. Yeah, also hence him not being that stable towards the end. Mad hatters and all.
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Oct 8, 2012 10:55
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Oh right, he was the one who died from eating all the Mercury pills, right? Thanks guys. No, those were mostly Tang emperors. 700 years later or so.
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Oct 8, 2012 15:50
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Amused to Death posted:The history channel is apparently having a "Caligula, 1,400 days of terror" thing coming up. Given how the channel has been in the past few years, can we expect it's going to be Suetonius on steroids Does anything the history channel broadcasts ever even slightly adhere to reality? ...sigh
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Oct 8, 2012 15:52
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