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Eggplant Wizard posted:... Cato's de Agricultura which is a bizarre agricultural manual cum almanac sorta thing. He was big on cabbage. And he has handy tips on how to handle your property and maximize profit! "Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." "When you see a snake skin, pick it up and put it away, so that you will not have to hunt for one when you need it."
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Oct 14, 2012 23:22
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Paxicon posted:"When you see a snake skin, pick it up and put it away, so that you will not have to hunt for one when you need it." What would you need a snakeskin for? Leather?
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Oct 14, 2012 23:35
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Moist von Lipwig posted:What would you need a snakeskin for? Leather? Just, you know.... In case you need it. Nothing weird or anything, man. Nothing sexual or anything. Cato isn't one of those creeps that collect snakeskins for SEXUAL reasons, he's a Censor you know. I have no clue, I just thought it was hilarious! I do know that snakeskins are a folk remedy against witchcraft in alot of european cultures, so maybe Cato ended up being cursed alot..?
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Oct 14, 2012 23:53
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Based on the rest of the work, I'd assume it's sometimes an ingredient in horrible medicinal recipes involving eating cabbage, pissing, pickling more cabbage in your urine, then eating/drinking/bathing in the mixture.
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Oct 15, 2012 00:30
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Wasn't it actually the lead in the pots that made it so tasty? It's going to be sweet no matter what, but apparently the lead gave the syrup a particular flavour that some Romans really liked. The lead wasn't necessary, though.
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Oct 15, 2012 00:42
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DarkCrawler posted:Were there lot of different roman breads and other baking stuff? I'd imagine eating would get pretty boring if they didn't vary it up, and with free grain (in the city of Rome, at the least) they would have had an incentive to switch stuff around? If you were poor you didn't have much of a choice. Also, something I've discovered from living in Korea is that our western desire (American desire at least; can't speak for everybody) for lots of food variety is a product of our immigrant-heavy culture, not a natural human thing. Most Koreans have no problem eating rice and kimchi for literally every meal and don't understand why westerners find it weird. So I suspect a Roman wouldn't mind eating the same thing every day as much as you might think--they didn't have any other experience, it was just the way things were. But there is a perception of people in the past just eating bowls of gruel and not giving a poo poo. It's a false perception--there are cooks and cuisine in every culture at all times. The problem is most people couldn't afford to be picky. Best as we can tell, most Romans who had the means to be able to care about cooking were big into fine dining and all the kinds of food experimentation and quality that we are today. Poor people did the best with what they had. A lot of what we consider gourmet stuff today originates in poor peasant recipes of turning crap into gold. Any stew you've ever had, for a common example. Grand Prize Winner posted:Which ingredients are gone? The only one I can think of is laser. Silphium is the big one that's literally gone. The grains and animals were also different since they've had another couple thousand years of selective breeding when we eat them now. Similar but not the same. This thread now has more posts than years in the history of the Roman state if we use the legendary 753 date as the beginning! 
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Oct 15, 2012 |
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Oct 15, 2012 01:13
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How did Roman cuisine change when the capital shifted to Constantinople, then? Did it? Modern greek is fuckin' delicious, so how much did it have to do with Eastern Roman cooking?
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Oct 15, 2012 01:41
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Since we're on the topic of food, did vegetarians or vegans exist in any period of Rome?
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Oct 15, 2012 01:54
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karl fungus posted:Since we're on the topic of food, did vegetarians or vegans exist in any period of Rome? Doubt it. That's a luxury of modern food abundance. The only possible exception I can think of would be religious restrictions like the super-strict Buddhists but Rome didn't have any that would do that. Most of the time peasants didn't have much in the way of meat available so their diet was vegetarian, but it wasn't by choice. I have no idea about late Roman food differences.
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Oct 15, 2012 01:59
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karl fungus posted:Since we're on the topic of food, did vegetarians or vegans exist in any period of Rome? Plutarch was a vegetarian, at least for a while. Pythagoreanism was a philosophical school which also advocated vegetarianism. I have sources for neither of those things. Veganism I would doubt.
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Oct 15, 2012 02:00
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I didn't know about Pythagoreanism, interesting. Same justification for it as Buddhism too, with the belief in soul reincarnation. So looks like it did exist but only among a tiny bunch of Greeks. Weirdo unmanly Greeks again. 
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Oct 15, 2012 02:04
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The Jains managed veganism around the same time period, though that was in India and therefore unrelated to the thread topic.
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Oct 15, 2012 03:23
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I believe that certain early Christians didn't consume meat, but mostly to avoid taking the risk of eating previously consecrated pagan temple sacrificial meats. Apparently said meats were often resold in markets, and some Christians felt it would make them unclean if consumed. That's something from Philip Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, iirc.
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Oct 15, 2012 03:40
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Grand Fromage posted:I didn't know about Pythagoreanism, interesting. Same justification for it as Buddhism too, with the belief in soul reincarnation. Seneca was a vegetarian, as were many prominent (Neo-)Platonists. It wasn't all religiously motivated either, Plutarch* and Porphyry defended it on ethical grounds. By all accounts, vegetarianism had much more robust philosphical defences in ancient Greece and Rome than it had in the Christian era up to the renaissance or even later. *and his "On the Eating of Flesh" or something like that remains possibly the most eloquent criticism of the barbarism of eating meat. e: You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of the slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the sap and juices of deadly wounds. Crept the raw hides, and with a bellowing sound Roared the dead limbs; the burning entrails groaned. This indeed is but a fiction and fancy; but the fare itself is truly monstrous and prodigious—that a man should have a stomach to creatures while they yet bellow, and that he should be giving directions which of things yet alive and speaking is fittest to make food of, and ordering the several manners of the seasoning and dressing them and serving them up to tables. You ought rather, in my opinion, to have enquired who first began this practice, than who of late times left it off. Sorry, I'm militant. Ras Het fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Oct 15, 2012 |
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Oct 15, 2012 03:55
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What was slavery like in Rome? I've heard that slavery in places like the Roman Empire was more "civilized" than it was in e.g. America circa 1840, but I have no idea if that's bullshit or not. Could slaves buy their freedom, or were they simply chattel? Were there any legal (or popular moral) restrictions on what could be done to slaves? Were slave families common broken up by sales? How much worse would the life of a slave be, compared to the life of a free peasant?
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Oct 15, 2012 05:09
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Suenteus Po posted:What was slavery like in Rome? I've heard that slavery in places like the Roman Empire was more "civilized" than it was in e.g. America circa 1840, but I have no idea if that's bullshit or not. We've covered this a bit, ctrl+f slave/slavery earlier for more posts. Short answer: yes, it was a lot more civilized. American slavery was one of the more brutal forms that ever existed. But short answers: Suenteus Po posted:Could slaves buy their freedom, Yes, and it was commonly granted by owners. So common that it was actually restricted later on because there was a fear of depleting the slave supply. Suenteus Po posted:were they simply chattel? No, though the life of say a slave miner still sucked plenty. Suenteus Po posted:Were there any legal (or popular moral) restrictions on what could be done to slaves? Yes, and the law became increasingly restrictive over time. Slaves got a lot of rights after the Servile Wars to try to keep that from happening again. Suenteus Po posted:Were slave families common broken up by sales? I believe breaking up families was specifically illegal. Suenteus Po posted:How much worse would the life of a slave be, compared to the life of a free peasant? Depends on the slave. An educated slave was better off than most free Romans. A plantation slave or laborer, it depended. Also depends what period, peasants later on begin getting tied to the land (welcome to serfdom) and aren't much better off than slaves. Life as a slave sucked but if you had to choose somewhere to be a slave, Rome was one of the better choices.
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Oct 15, 2012 05:19
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Grand Fromage posted:I didn't know about Pythagoreanism, interesting. Same justification for it as Buddhism too, with the belief in soul reincarnation. Pythagoras may have been a vegetarian, but he supposedly sacrificed 100 bulls to the gods in honor of his discovery of irrational numbers.
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Oct 15, 2012 05:20
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Suenteus Po posted:What was slavery like in Rome? I've heard that slavery in places like the Roman Empire was more "civilized" than it was in e.g. America circa 1840, but I have no idea if that's bullshit or not. Additionally, slaves who were manumitted became Freedmen and Freedwomen. They occupied a kind of liminal space in Roman society, but any children they had after becoming free were full citizens. Some Freedmen became ridiculously wealthy and powerful despite not having the full rights of citizenship.
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Oct 15, 2012 05:55
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sullat posted:Pythagoras may have been a vegetarian, but he supposedly sacrificed 100 bulls to the gods in honor of his discovery of irrational numbers. That's pretty funny actually, that's more beef than you could eat in 3 lifetimes.
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Oct 15, 2012 07:40
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sullat posted:Pythagoras may have been a vegetarian, but he supposedly sacrificed 100 bulls to the gods in honor of his discovery of irrational numbers.
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Oct 15, 2012 07:54
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Modern greek is fuckin' delicious, so how much did it have to do with Eastern Roman cooking? Modern Greek is pretty much modern Turkish.  And modern Turkish is a mix of so many things from Ottoman Empire that it's nuts to even think about it.Which brings me to the cuisine or Roman Empire - look at all the areas it incorporated, the rich people must have eaten like Gods with all the mixes and matches it brought in. I heard that rich Romans used to puke between every course just so they could stuff themselves some more, is this true?
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Oct 15, 2012 14:22
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DarkCrawler posted:I heard that rich Romans used to puke between every course just so they could stuff themselves some more, is this true? It may have happened like it may have happened in any nation but it was not normal and Romans would have probably thought it was disgusting and immoral. The Romans get portrayed as sinful and immoral by early Christian writers (polemicists) but they were not particularly hedonistic.
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Oct 15, 2012 14:25
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But my orgies!
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Oct 15, 2012 14:32
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Skellyscribe posted:Additionally, slaves who were manumitted became Freedmen and Freedwomen. They occupied a kind of liminal space in Roman society, but any children they had after becoming free were full citizens. Some Freedmen became ridiculously wealthy and powerful despite not having the full rights of citizenship. IIRC it has partially to do with the fact that they did occupy a bit of a liminal space. The well educated slaves were often the ones manages the estates of the Roman aristocracy. That gave them a lot of experience and contacts (and the opportunity to make some money on the side) which meant that they could amass a pretty good pile of money. Once they managed to buy themselves free, or were manumitted, they didn't have a stigma in associating with the trades etc which people of higher social status did. That said it was obviously drat rare and if you talk about the general slave experience then that is not it. Is that correct?
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Oct 15, 2012 14:37
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Morholt posted:This is probably false, he refused to believe in them and exiled the discipline that proved their existence. Let's be clear here. Pythagoras was probably not a real dude either. DarkCrawler posted:But my orgies! If it makes you feel better, there really is a structure called a vomitorium. Okay it means essentially "exit corridor" and was how people filed out of the theater but I wanted to make you dream again Munin posted:IIRC it has partially to do with the fact that they did occupy a bit of a liminal space. The well educated slaves were often the ones manages the estates of the Roman aristocracy. That gave them a lot of experience and contacts (and the opportunity to make some money on the side) which meant that they could amass a pretty good pile of money. Once they managed to buy themselves free, or were manumitted, they didn't have a stigma in associating with the trades etc which people of higher social status did. That said it was obviously drat rare and if you talk about the general slave experience then that is not it. That sounds about right. Slaves in general definitely did have it better under the Romans than under Americans, but please do keep in mind that the vast majority of them would have had pretty lovely lives. Farm laborers and galley slaves etc. The ones who worked in the baths come to mind- so you know hypocausts?  Bet it was cozy in there right under tons of concrete and brick bending down and shoveling wood into searing heat for hours and hours and hours and
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Oct 15, 2012 15:22
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Behold! the decadent vomitorium in all its hedonistic and prurient glory!
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Oct 15, 2012 15:25
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euphronius posted:Behold! the decadent vomitorium in all its hedonistic and prurient glory! Best post in the thread right here.
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Oct 15, 2012 15:35
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euphronius posted:Behold! the decadent vomitorium in all its hedonistic and prurient glory!  NSWF much?!
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Oct 15, 2012 16:05
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The galley slave is also a myth I believe, or at least was invented only later Galley rowers in Antiquity were paid professionals
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Oct 15, 2012 17:26
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Fornadan posted:The galley slave is also a myth I believe, or at least was invented only later Who were often slaves. But yeah, it was a skilled labor sort of job, especially on military triremes, so beating the rowers to make them work faster was pretty much right out.
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Oct 15, 2012 17:42
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Grand Fromage posted:We've covered this a bit, ctrl+f slave/slavery earlier for more posts. Short answer: yes, it was a lot more civilized. American slavery was one of the more brutal forms that ever existed. The policies of manumission and the allowing of slave families guaranteed the eventual collapse of the slave system in Rome when conquests slowed and reduced the flow of slaves into the system. The excess of slaves first allowed landholders to grab vast estates worked with slaves and force small-scale free farmers off the land then when the supply dried up created massive economic instability and led to the establishment of serfdom to make up for it. It actually bears mentioning that before and during the time of the revolution aristocratic Americans were spectacular classicists. They had the example of Rome to see how a system of slavery was likely to collapse over time and the American chattel system with its horrors (the breakup of families, the criminalization of literacy, the regular shuffling around of slaves, routine beatings regardless of fault, the enslavement of any descendent of slaves no matter how far removed including the offspring of the regularized rape of house slaves, the use of religious stricture to make manumission into an 'evil' act, etc etc) was explicitly designed to avoid the 'problems' in the Roman system that allowed the servile wars to occur, let Roman slaveowners see their slaves as human beings and guaranteed its eventual end through demographic reality.
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Oct 15, 2012 19:09
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Again, a) the slave galley was not common in Greco-Roman culture, if it existed at all, and b) galleys weren't civilian ships anyway. There was no commodity in the ancient world that could justify a crack rowing team of hundreds of men, slaves or otherwise. Only trips like Sicily-Italy, where the run is short, would you have seen the possibility for commercially successful slave galleys. Even then, it's dubious. When it's not grain harvesting season what are you going to do with your hundreds of rowers that just spent 2 months pushing grain from Sicily to Italy proper? You own them, they need food, housing, etc. You've got to carry them now until next season. But paid rowers? Not your problem, see them next year. Roman slave galley is 99% Hollywood myth. Their ships and economy just didn't support the model. And that's not to say slaves didn't work in maritime commerce, of course. But the idea of a hundred poor wretches being whipped to a drumbeat is a concept from further along in history, not Greco-Roman Antiquity.
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Oct 15, 2012 19:29
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physeter posted:But the idea of a hundred poor wretches being whipped to a drumbeat is a concept from further along in history, not Greco-Roman Antiquity. What time period and culture is it from then? What changed to make the model viable?
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Oct 15, 2012 20:26
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Munin posted:What time period and culture is it from then? What changed to make the model viable? It's from the Late Medieval-era. All the major powers did it, though France is particularly notorious for it. And it's mostly just a size thing - as galleys got bigger it became more economical to keep slaves. A Roman trireme might have 180 rowers, whereas one of Richelieu's galleys would have 500. Another major factor was that Roman galleys tended to be beached regularly to keep them dry - this allowed them to move quickly over the water and ram enemy ships. But the advent of gunpowder ended that practice, which meant that galley slaves could easily be kept aboard the ship.
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Oct 15, 2012 21:12
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Wait why did gunpowder end the practice?
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Oct 15, 2012 21:53
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Fighting ships did not say near to shore because on shore would be giant gently caress-off guns.
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Oct 15, 2012 21:57
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Wait why did gunpowder end the practice? Properly constructed coastal fortifications were basically impervious to any attempt at attack from the sea from the proliferation of cannons until the 19th century.
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Oct 15, 2012 22:25
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Kaal posted:It's from the Late Medieval-era. All the major powers did it, though France is particularly notorious for it. And it's mostly just a size thing - as galleys got bigger it became more economical to keep slaves. A Roman trireme might have 180 rowers, whereas one of Richelieu's galleys would have 500. Another major factor was that Roman galleys tended to be beached regularly to keep them dry - this allowed them to move quickly over the water and ram enemy ships. But the advent of gunpowder ended that practice, which meant that galley slaves could easily be kept aboard the ship. Yes exactly, it was the model for some Islamic powers as well, the Barbary Corsairs and the Turkish Janissaries. Europeans used them as dumping grounds for unwanted minorities....criminals and Protestants typically. But again these are military and para-military ships. Places like Egypt and Turkey never had a problem with a militarized slave class running around. The Mamluks and Janissaries perfected the concept, really. But that was anathema to the Greco-Roman mindset. In fact, the few times in history where the Romans did enlist slaves (at least as infantry), they made a point of manumitting them right before conscription. This happened most often in the case of gladiators, but I know Marcus Aurelius' army had a crapload of former slaves in it. Economically galleys were never really a sustainable model for commerce. Using one is like using an F-18 for commerce; unless you're moving a sack of diamonds or an hiv cure, it's not going to be a moneymaker.
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Oct 15, 2012 22:44
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Wait why did gunpowder end the practice? I'm not sure I'd agree with the other folks about the impact of shore batteries. But gunpowder meant that galleys no longer rammed each other and therefore didn't need to be beached and dried either. There was some movement toward this even during antiquity with the building of large quinqueremes that relied on catapults and marines, but it took gunpowder to engender a seismic shift away from ramming.
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Oct 15, 2012 22:56
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Grand Fromage posted: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. To follow, there are a large number of computer scientists working broadly in the field of humanities, and many of them have gravitated to classical studies more specifically. There are a vast number of 3D reconstructions of ancient sites, but the academic applications for these vary wildly. My opinion is that most reconstructions are simply for the sake of making a pretty model for illustrative purposes, but I have seen a variety of light and accoustic simulation projects, excluding my own. The pioneer of this methodology was Simon Ellis, who published a paper on sunlight simulation in a 3D reconstruction of a Roman villa in the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference in 1994. He has followed up with similar simulations of other Roman villas. Simulation of natural and artificial light in architecture is very important for contextualizing the environment of the structure, especially with respect to experiencing how artworks appeared in their original spaces. The use of 3D technologies in archaeology extends well beyond architectural reconstructions. Laser scans can produce models at such an extremely high accuracy that tool marks are visible, revealing to scholars the methods a sculptor used to create a statue, for example. Fragments of paint from a statue of Caligula at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts enabled scholars to pose several hypothetical reconstructions of the statue. (see http://www.slideshare.net/dirdim/direct-dimensions-3dscansandmodelscaligula and http://virginiamuseum.blogspot.com/2011/11/caligula-3-d-man-myth-emperor.html) There are also a handful of optical recognition projects. The best known of these is the Forma Urbis project (http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/), which originated at Stanford almost a decade ago. More matches were made by the computer algorithms than had been made by any other single person in the last four centuries. Several computer scientists in Vienna have been working for years in pattern recognition in Roman coins in aid in die studies. There's much work remaining to be done in this. Die studies are painstakingly long. In theory, it may be possible for a computer to produce the same results as a human (with a margin for error) in a fraction of the time--days of processing instead of months or years. These coin recognition algorithms are geared toward interpretation of photographs of coins rather than 3D models of coins. This is because the reflectivity of the metal causes problems with laser scanners. This is where CT scanning comes in. CT scanning is going to revolutionize archaeology. It is a non-invasive method for seeing inside small objects (1 cubic meter) which otherwise would be destroyed by archaeologists AND far less expensively (once you have access to a scanner, of course). One can look inside a burial without destroying it. One can look inside a pot to see and identify all of the coins (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRmq0_l1a4k) and their arrangement. The arrangement is important for establishing context. Were coins placed in all at once hurriedly or over time (i.e., votive offerings)? One can even see inside coins to evaluate their material content (solid silver, bronze core with silver wash [debased coinage], etc.). CT scanning can be used generate 3D models of objects without the stitching and post-processing required by laser scans, and reflectivity of the object is irrelevant. The technological edge of the field includes information scientists as much as computer scientists. Classical studies is moving swiftly toward linked open data, with one of the big players, the British Museum, exposing their collection in RDF and CIDOC-CRM. It will be possible one day to get all coins, papyri, epigraphy, literary references, etc. from Ephesus through Pelagios (http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api/places/http%3A%2F%2Fpleiades.stoa.org%2Fplaces%2F599612). We'll see the eventual digitization of many reference works vital to the field: Roman Imperial Coinage, Roman Republican Coinage, LIMC, and others.
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