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BrainDance posted:I'm not well read on this but are you guys saying that the historians were trying less to write history, but to write news instead? It's less about the content and more about the presentation; the analogy to modern media was just to illustrate how they did business, not what they were writing about. A typical Roman writing about current events would slant them to favor the people he liked or wanted to like him; the same Roman writing about history would do the same thing. Herodotus is a weird example because in the modern age we'd be more likely to call him a folklorist than a historian. An awful lot of his stories are prefaced with "I can't personally vouch for this, but these guys say...". Like Tao Jones says, he was interested primarily in recording great deeds and stories told; it isn't until the middle books, about the Persian Wars, that he really gets into history proper, and even then it's largely anecdotal evidence, as I recall.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:18
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Mans posted:Were Roman soldiers given lands after they retired? How much did they receive? Did they get the right to use slaves? Did they get leaves or vacations? The Romans set up lots of "colonies" in the lands they conquered which were essentially new settlements made up largely of ex-soldiers and their families, so the short answer is that, yes, they often were, although we're not talking huge estates. Could they use slaves? If they could afford them, yes, like any free person. The idea of the colonies was that they were a way of bringing Roman civilisation to the provinces and they also had a security function - the settlers were expected to turn out and fight if any of the local tribes revolted. I don't know about military leave, I'm afraid.
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Nov 6, 2012 19:34
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Vigilance posted:
The books by Steven Saylor is pretty much this.
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Nov 6, 2012 21:00
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General Panic posted:The Romans set up lots of "colonies" in the lands they conquered which were essentially new settlements made up largely of ex-soldiers and their families, so the short answer is that, yes, they often were, although we're not talking huge estates. Could they use slaves? If they could afford them, yes, like any free person.
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Nov 6, 2012 21:03
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BrainDance posted:I'm not well read on this but are you guys saying that the historians were trying less to write history, but to write news instead? Yeah, back then if you wanted to make an history(story) book you'd have to convince people to buy it and since there were no academic graduates who had to devour history books you were left with writing history that attracted the eyes of the common people and that probably means no factual, unbiased tales about Caesar or about the Vandals. Also, go look up some historians from the 19th century. Go read some books made by "historians" of that time. It's quite possible to see some mentions of divine help, or saints giving nudges to their "chosen" people. History had a long road to travel before they reached today's level. You still have bias nowadays, but that will always be part of the human mind. General Panic posted:The Romans set up lots of "colonies" in the lands they conquered which were essentially new settlements made up largely of ex-soldiers and their families, so the short answer is that, yes, they often were, although we're not talking huge estates. Could they use slaves? If they could afford them, yes, like any free person. Clever girls, they retired the soldiers and granted them locations right near the "front" so that the retired soldiers would always be around as an impromptu reservists.
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Nov 6, 2012 22:47
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Emphasis on this paragraph for the history question.quote:These, however, are comparatively trivial matters and I set little store by them. I invite the reader's attention to the much more serious consideration of the king of lives our ancestors lived, of who were these men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome's power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of the modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid. He's flat out saying he's trying to give you a moral message. In what we'd consider objective history, no one's going to be talking about the moral decline or sickness of a society. Besesoth posted:To clarify, too: saying "it wouldn't have occurred to them" isn't, I think, intended to say "them thar Romans they was dumb", but that laudatory history or storytelling history was part of their culture, and it was just the way things were done. Yup. Trying to write unbiased facts didn't have any special cultural significance that would've made people think it was better than telling a story. We make a big distinction about that now; ancient people didn't. Better wording from me would have been more like who cares, not that no one had the idea. Komet posted:I should clarify that it isn't that I think Cincinnatus didn't exist, it's that over the centuries the story of him grew into a legend and tall tale akin to a moral parable of proper behavior for a Roman citizen, so in that respect, Cincinnatus, as we know him, is a fiction. This is a fair statement, Cincinnatus was one of the figures that represented the ideal Roman and was fictionalized in the history written about him.
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Nov 7, 2012 02:20
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How prolific was cross-cultural food sharing? I know a layman would not have had food from around the world at the snap of a finger like we more or less have in the first world in the modern era.
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Nov 8, 2012 04:37
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Related: did restaurants or food vendors exist in a way that we could recognize them today?
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Nov 8, 2012 10:26
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Absolutely. They were called a thermopolium, and were kind of the same idea as a fast food joint. There would be pre-made food in jars in the counter, plus wine and maybe other food available. I would post a picture but imgur is being a dick. Check the thermopolium wikipedia entry for one. There were always people outside arenas selling food on game day, and possibly people walking around the stands selling. Bakeries were communal since you wouldn't have an oven at home (unless rich). I would bet there were other kinds of restaurants/food vendors, considering how many people lived in apartments and wouldn't have had kitchens, but I don't know. Foodstuffs were always a high trade item but mostly things that didn't spoil. Wine, oils, spices. Given the empire's multicultural makeup and the constant incorporation of new peoples I'm sure there was a foreign food scene around, or that new stuff got added into Roman cuisine from wherever they went.
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Nov 8, 2012 10:48
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Grand Fromage posted:There were always people outside arenas selling food on game day, and possibly people walking around the stands selling. "DOOOOOOOOOORMOUSE! GETcha HONey-covered DOOOOOOOORMOUSE!" Traversing the stands at the stadium with a big sign over his head: "GLIS IN BACVLVM". ...sorry, I'm a little silly this morning.  Tangentially, I may have asked this before but I can't remember the answer: when I was studying in college, one of the texts my professor (who was a generally very learned but also very idiosyncratic man) used was Jérôme Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome". It seemed like a good text, but it's been close to a decade since I studied it in any sort of detail. Have any of the rest of you run across it? What are your thoughts on its quality and veracity?
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Nov 8, 2012 12:36
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I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? As another question there are a lot of stereotypes in Roman literature about Greeks and Barbarians, but how did they feel about the Parthians and their stubborn instance on not dying?
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Nov 8, 2012 16:26
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Josef bugman posted:I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? But to directly answer your question, what the Romans had to SAY about it, Pliny the Elder called it SCATinavia  and most everyone thought they were islands, probably with monsters. Traders and soldiers working the frontier had a better idea, obviously.Josef bugman posted:As another question there are a lot of stereotypes in Roman literature about Greeks and Barbarians, but how did they feel about the Parthians and their stubborn instance on not dying?
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Nov 8, 2012 17:28
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Josef bugman posted:I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? A bunch of the Roman military commanders were obsessed with conquering Persia so they could consider themselves equal with Alexander the Great: Crassus, Mark Anthony, Trajan, Julian, Valerian. Obviously Alexander's success was the exception rather than the rule, but all the cool* emperors thought that they could replicate his success. *And a bunch of others. sullat fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Nov 8, 2012 |
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Nov 8, 2012 20:34
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I am pretty sure I read in this thread that Octavian had Alexander the Great removed from his tomb so he could look on the body of a true king. I think they asked him if he wanted to check out the Ptolemies tomb but he said something like 'I wanted to see a king, not corpses.
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Nov 8, 2012 20:49
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Big Willy Style posted:I am pretty sure I read in this thread that Octavian had Alexander the Great removed from his tomb so he could look on the body of a true king. I think they asked him if he wanted to check out the Ptolemies tomb but he said something like 'I wanted to see a king, not corpses. Indeed, the quote is actually a couple of pages back. I know they kind of saw it as unattainable, but the way they demagogued the "Persians" (whichever dynasty happened to be in charge) has always interested me, I wish we knew a bit more about pre-history in that area "from the horses mouth" especially about Zorastrianism and the various mythologies. Its just a shame that there don't appear to be many sources for the info.
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Nov 8, 2012 21:17
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Josef bugman posted:Indeed, the quote is actually a couple of pages back. Yeah, the Parthians did not have the same kind of obsessional record keeping the Romans did, plus they were constantly fighting one another.
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Nov 8, 2012 21:24
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Yeah, the Parthians did not have the same kind of obsessional record keeping the Romans did, plus they were constantly fighting one another. I just wish we knew more, about all of the ancient peoples. As is everything we have has passed through the hands of Romans or the notoriously grubby hands of enlightenment era historians. I still can't get over how much of history has been disorted in the public mindset by people like Gibbon basically saying "the Greek empire doesn't count because it let  females into the mix".
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Nov 8, 2012 21:47
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Josef bugman posted:I just wish we knew more, about all of the ancient peoples. As is everything we have has passed through the hands of Romans or the notoriously grubby hands of enlightenment era historians. I still can't get over how much of history has been disorted in the public mindset by people like Gibbon basically saying "the Greek empire doesn't count because it let Frankly I'm curious what attitudes of current historians will be seen in a similar kind of light to in a century or two.
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Nov 8, 2012 23:53
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Here's a fun trivia question I was reminded of by the poster who was asking about Scandinavia. Who can guess what traveled along the route in red?
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Nov 9, 2012 00:27
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^Amber? Contemporaneous/near contemporaneous stuff: The Behistun Inscription is a historical account attributed to Darius I, interesting to read alongside Herodotus' piece on him. The Greeks showed up in Sanskrit epics pretty regularly, usually as a way to make wars seem more impressive, same as the Ethiopians in the Iliad. There were some translations of Greek and Roman astronomical works into Sanskrit which were pretty influential. Some of the Babylonian Chronicles cover Alexander and the Diadochoi. There are Georgian and Armenian chronicles and histories which treat on matters related to the Eastern Roman empire. edit: the end of Jordanes' Getica treats the recent defeat of the Goths sympathetically as a Romanized Goth. ptk fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Nov 9, 2012 |
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Nov 9, 2012 00:34
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cheerfullydrab posted:Here's a fun trivia question I was reminded of by the poster who was asking about Scandinavia. Who can guess what traveled along the route in red? Amber or fish
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Nov 9, 2012 00:51
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Besesoth posted:"DOOOOOOOOOORMOUSE! GETcha HONey-covered DOOOOOOOORMOUSE!" Traversing the stands at the stadium with a big sign over his head: "GLIS IN BACVLVM". Silly, yet probably accurate. Besesoth posted:Jérôme Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" I don't think I've read it so I can't comment. cheerfullydrab posted:Here's a fun trivia question I was reminded of by the poster who was asking about Scandinavia. Who can guess what traveled along the route in red? Looks like amber to me. I always thought it was weird that like 90% of the world's amber is all in that one little spot. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Nov 9, 2012 |
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Nov 9, 2012 01:02
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cheerfullydrab posted:Here's a fun trivia question I was reminded of by the poster who was asking about Scandinavia. Who can guess what traveled along the route in red? I'd guess slaves. Although really, they came from everywhere. But the Slav trad was pretty big.
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Nov 9, 2012 01:23
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sullat posted:I'd guess slaves. Although really, they came from everywhere. But the Slav trad was pretty big. Slavs as a slave people was later, in the early middle ages. Did the Romans actually import many of their slaves? I thought most were from conquering other people, and then criminals and such.
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Nov 9, 2012 01:39
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Slavs as a slave people was later, in the early middle ages. Did the Romans actually import many of their slaves? I thought most were from conquering other people, and then criminals and such.  Yes they did import them, in the sense that the conquering they were doing was pretty far from Rome for most of its history. Slaves were definitely a movable good. I don't think criminals were enslaved but I could be wrong.
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Nov 9, 2012 01:41
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It's amber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road
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Nov 9, 2012 03:46
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What did China get from its trade with the western world? I keep reading about how highly Rome valued silk, but I never see much of anything useful that the east got out of the deal.
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Nov 9, 2012 04:54
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SlothfulCobra posted:What did China get from its trade with the western world? I keep reading about how highly Rome valued silk, but I never see much of anything useful that the east got out of the deal. Shitloads of gold and silver. Also glass, but that was a limited luxury item (even moreso than silk). It was all about the giant piles of cash.
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Nov 9, 2012 04:56
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Mans posted:Weren't there a series of attempts at making Helenistic armies more mobile and agile? It's bizarre to think that things like the Thureophoroi and the Thorakites were actively frowned upon by the Helenistic states in favor of mass phalanx formations. From a logical point of view war was becoming more and more about flexibility and fluidity, and a 50k strong Macedonian army where at least ten thousand of them were of these new style would've been devastating against the Romans. I have meant to get involved in this bit of the thread for a while but I got busy. There is evidence of phalanx groups from Greece did operating with the legions up until about 500AD when the Empire's military did a massive reorganization. Not much is known about what they did but they only ever operated in the East so they may have been part of the guard legions in Dacia and the Syrian areas.
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Nov 9, 2012 17:47
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Besesoth posted:Tangentially, I may have asked this before but I can't remember the answer: when I was studying in college, one of the texts my professor (who was a generally very learned but also very idiosyncratic man) used was Jérôme Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome". It seemed like a good text, but it's been close to a decade since I studied it in any sort of detail. Have any of the rest of you run across it? What are your thoughts on its quality and veracity? I read it fairly recently. It's a decent general introduction to its subject, but old as hell now. The copy I read didn't have a date of publication but I don't think it can be more recent than the 1950s. So you're not exactly getting the latest research. Also, it's translated from the French, and every book I've ever read that was translated from French has a slightly weird quality to it, in terms of style. I think it may be that the French aren't embarrassed about writing in a slightly grandiose way and if you translate that straight into English, it sounds odd.
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Nov 9, 2012 20:34
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Josef bugman posted:I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? Scandinavia was also seen, especially in late antiquity once the Goths (who originated there, at least in their legends) were Romanized, as a "birthplace of nations" - an area similar to the Urals that produced the Huns, Mongols, etc. This was underlined, from a Roman perspective, by the tribes that Marius defeated migrating from that area as well. Basically, yeah, Scandinavia was an island probably full of monsters and nearly superhuman barbarians just waiting for an opportunity to ruin everyone's day. I assume a few Romans had probably been there and knew better, as with Ethiopia, but we don't have any evidence.
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Nov 10, 2012 01:55
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How much the Romans knew about astronomy? I read somewhere they could predict eclipses for one thing.
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Nov 10, 2012 08:59
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Astronomy had been pretty well-developed by the Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, and other ancient people. The main text for ancient astronomy is Ptolemy's Almagest, written around 150 AD. (Well, Ptolemy called it the 'mathematical syntaxis' or 'mathematical index'; Almagest is what the Arabs called it.) It's a little hard to lay out ancient astronomy, since it rests on incorrect premises and a lot of it is arcane unless you're really into geometry or astronomy. Greek astronomy rested on the premises of Aristotelian cosmology, which said that the Earth is the center of the universe, and all of the heavenly bodies move in perfect, circular motions. It turns out that you can actually do quite a lot with those premises, though! For a baseline of how ancient astronomy tended to proceed, imagine going outside at night and looking up - it may be hard to imagine what the night sky looks like in places where there's no light pollution, but you can see a lot of stars on a cloudless night if you're far away from civilization. With just your naked eye and your imagination, you can see that the stars all move in regular ways, as though they were affixed on the surface of a sphere with the earth at the center, and the sphere rotates around you in a regular way while you remain fixed. You can tell the stars all move in a regular way because they have particular spatial relationships to each other (constellations) and the whole constellation moves at once. But four or five stars don't quite obey this rule and just kind of wander around in a regular way, but one not apparently influenced by anything - so they're "wandering stars", or planets. (At the risk of belaboring this point, ancient astronomy's most advanced tool for inquiry about the heavens was pretty much the astrolabe. Part of Ptolemy's Almagest are a schematic for an armillary sphere, which is like an astrolabe inside of another astrolabe. The important thing to take-away here is that optics and the telescope were completely unknown here - using a telescope to look at the heavens was one of Galileo's great contributions.) So because you know that constellations move in regular ways and the planets move in fairly regular ones, you can start measuring relative positions at the same time each night. (Early astronomy was very much linked to early mathematics. This is why circles have 360 degrees, for instance, since ancient stargazers used the distance that the stars adjusted in a night as one degree.) Now, if you have hundreds and hundreds of years of recorded data about where things should be, you can make a pretty good map of the cosmos. But this model has some pretty serious conceptual problems. As I said, Ptolemy was pretty solidly married to the ideas of Aristotle. There are two main problems with the model - first, planets vary in brightness, which doesn't make sense if they're at a constant distance, and second, the movement of the planets involves retrograde motion. By retrograde motion, I mean - well, this gif does a better job of explaining it than my words:  The stars on the outside are the supposed sphere where all of the fixed stars hang out, the red dot is a planet like Venus, and the blue line is the path the planet would appear to take. Ptolemy's solution is also illustrated; he put the circular motion that the planet has to travel in around an imaginary point (the "epicycle"), which also moved in a perfect circle, thus avoiding contradicting Aristotle's doctrine of perfect circular motion. The system works pretty well if you don't think about the mathematical consequences too hard, though eventually you end up putting epicycles on other epicycles:  But again, it's not all insanity - from a practical standpoint, Ptolemy is accurate enough that you can go get a copy of it and (if you know what you're doing), use it to predict locations and phenomena like eclipses with accuracy. The errors involved are errors of cosmology more than errors of mathematics.
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Nov 10, 2012 09:49
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Jazerus posted:Basically, yeah, Scandinavia was an island probably full of monsters and nearly superhuman barbarians just waiting for an opportunity to ruin everyone's day. I assume a few Romans had probably been there and knew better, as with Ethiopia, but we don't have any evidence. It was mentioned before, but there might be some awesome stories of Roman traders who went China or Japan or something that are lost to history. The idea of a Roman merchant with some guards in Lorica Segmentata hocking glassware in Chang'an is pretty awesome. The reverse is also true, some Chinese merchant who went all the way to Britain or something but died on the way home or what have you. Its a fun fantasy, has anyone ever written a book about something like that?
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Nov 10, 2012 15:14
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I dunno any books but Romans definitely went to China, there are Chinese records of multiple instances. The first one is recorded as an official embassy, others might've been official or just merchants. There are no records of Chinese people making it to Rome, the closest they got was Parthia. I doubt Romans went any further than China, though their goods made it to Korea and Japan. Some day I do kind of want to write a wuxia novel about a Roman soldier who went to China as security for an embassy and was the only survivor of an ambush, then makes a life in China and eventually hunts down and kills the Chinese general who was responsible for the ambush. I need to read a whole lot more about Han dynasty China first.
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Nov 10, 2012 15:23
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Grand Fromage posted:I dunno any books but Romans definitely went to China, there are Chinese records of multiple instances. The first one is recorded as an official embassy, others might've been official or just merchants. There are no records of Chinese people making it to Rome, the closest they got was Parthia. I doubt Romans went any further than China, though their goods made it to Korea and Japan. Right, my idea was how far could someone have gone. For all we know some guy got to Japan, was broke because he could not sell anything, and then his ship sank on the way home. No history would record that, but given how huge the Roman and Chinese trade networks were, its totally plausible. Its fun to imagine that some of that glassware in Korea might have actually been sold personally by an overreaching Roman merchant. The last line of your story better be Roma Victor (Victrix).
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Nov 10, 2012 15:45
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Right, my idea was how far could someone have gone. For all we know some guy got to Japan, was broke because he could not sell anything, and then his ship sank on the way home. No history would record that, but given how huge the Roman and Chinese trade networks were, its totally plausible. Its fun to imagine that some of that glassware in Korea might have actually been sold personally by an overreaching Roman merchant. Yeah, it is cool to think about. There's no reason they couldn't have. I suspect they didn't because Korea and Japan aren't on the Roman world map. China is, as well as the Southeast Asia peninsula and India. They would've been able to get that information from people sailing the sea trade route around south Asia and up to China. I suspect if Korea and Japan were on the network, rather than a separate one of Chinese people selling to them, that they would've then appeared on the map in some form. But that's gathering a lot of assumptions out of thin threads, we don't have any idea one way or the other.
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Nov 10, 2012 15:50
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Grand Fromage posted:Some day I do kind of want to write a wuxia novel about a Roman soldier who went to China as security for an embassy and was the only survivor of an ambush, then makes a life in China and eventually hunts down and kills the Chinese general who was responsible for the ambush. I need to read a whole lot more about Han dynasty China first. There is the legend of the Roman legionnaires captured at Carrahae and sold as slaves or as mercenaries who ended up in Western China. Just a legend, of course, backed up by on;y a few slivers (probably misinterpreted) of evidence, but it makes for a good story. Another legend is that Byzantine monks stole the secret of silk-making from China and brought it back to Constantinople. Once again, it may be apocraphyl, but sericulture did begin in the Mediterranean about that time, so there may be a grain of truth.
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Nov 10, 2012 17:01
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sullat posted:Another legend is that Byzantine monks stole the secret of silk-making from China and brought it back to Constantinople. Once again, it may be apocraphyl, but sericulture did begin in the Mediterranean about that time, so there may be a grain of truth. That one's not a legend. Some parts might've been fabrication and there are a few different stories, but some guys who were monks or disguised as them definitely stole silkworms and techniques from the Chinese (a very carefully guarded Chinese state secret) and sold/gave them to the Romans during Justinian's reign. Either independently for profit or sent out by Justinian to do it. One of the great spy missions of history.
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Nov 10, 2012 17:04
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Grand Fromage posted:That one's not a legend. Some parts might've been fabrication and there are a few different stories, but some guys who were monks or disguised as them definitely stole silkworms and techniques from the Chinese (a very carefully guarded Chinese state secret) and sold/gave them to the Romans during Justinian's reign. Either independently for profit or sent out by Justinian to do it. One of the great spy missions of history. It was more then likely Nestorian monks who where fairly active in Asia even though we have next to no information on them. Mostly as we have very little real informational about Nestorian actives so it's pretty much "we know they existed, and we can guess this happened".
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Nov 12, 2012 00:30
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