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What is the word λόγος and why is it significant? How did its meaning change over time?
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Nov 23, 2012 11:23
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Well, I guess I walked into it. λόγος (logos) is a Greek word that has a number of meanings, making it very difficult at times to translate well - it can mean a variety of things related to words and speech (word, expression, language, talk, speech, promise, conversation, story, fable, etc) as well as a variety of things related to thinking (thought, reasoning, ratio, account, analogy). It can also be used in a technical sense to indicate a geometric proportion. One of the most famous uses of it is in the Gospel of John, which you may be familiar with: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. The traditional translation of this is, of course - "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." But "word" is, as you can see, not the only possible translation here, and there could be quite a bit of theological implication there depending on which you chose to use. (Consider "In the beginning was the promise"; "In the beginning was the reasoning"; "In the beginning was the analogy" - all of these would lead to, I think, different interpretations of the gospel.) It is also used in a mystical sense in the works of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher known even in antiquity as "the obscure one" due to his favoring a number of words like λόγος which have a lot of ambiguity. Some modern philosophers, notably Martin Heidegger, have tried to expound on the word further, trying to find some sort of essential commonality between the disparate meanings. (Heidegger, for instance, suggests it might be a 'making manifest' or 'truth' or 'unconcealment' - of course, he is very complicated and I am doing a disservice by putting his notions so bluntly.)
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Nov 23, 2012 12:02
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My apologies Koramei, one mention of the word 'east' and my mind instantly raced to Hellenism. But on second thought there is a small yet interesting example of what you're looking for in the writings of Michael Psellos, one which in particular highlights the cultural dialogue between Rome and Greece. Psellos comments upon how the emperor Romanos III was a big fan of the writings of Marcus Aurelius, whose major work - the Meditations - were actually written in Greek.
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Nov 23, 2012 18:27
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Koramei posted:While things like the movements of people and languages, the origins of religious and cultural prejudices and so on can all be very useful today, what reason is there to learn that most legionaries actually wore chainmail instead of lorica segmentata, or who Cicero would be meeting in Brundisium on Sunday? It's also worth bearing in mind the evidence that's available. Cultural and religious changes are big and ill-defined, they take a long time and often happen to people who can't write or aren't in the habit of writing, so they often aren't well-recorded in literary sources. What prominent individuals get up to is more likely to be recorded, because it's easier to get a handle on, because they're prominent and because they themselves write things down or associate with writers. This is a tendency throughout history, and it's one of the reasons archeology doesn't just become redundant when you're dealing with literate societies.
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Nov 23, 2012 20:27
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Thanks for the answers guys. I phrased that third question much more abrasively than I meant; sorry if it came off as hostile. I'm quite interested in history as a hobby, and I got into an argument with someone recently of the merits of the study of antiquity, with them saying it was pretty pointless to worry about anything more than a few centuries old as being applicable to the modern day. And while I definitely think it's useful for seeing the origins of current cultural biases (in the introduction of Persian Fire the author talks about a professor that was a friend of his wanting to change a mandatory history course from the impacts of the third reich or something similar to a study about the crusades; they laughed at him, saying it was irrelevant to the modern day, and then 9/11 happened and that part of history suddenly became incredibly relevant again), and while this is more of a curiosity but still useful- ethnic and linguistic origins. But I had to concede that the majority of what we learn (at least at a high school level) is relatively useless knowledge- I have seen a shift from, say, what I see in textbooks from the 70s versus what we have now (which are still like twenty years old but hey) towards more general studies, but it is still mostly not terribly relevant. I understand that the reason there's so much more emphasis on random objects and such is because it's all we have; people wouldn't be able to see ethnic migrations or know for sure where certain people came from, but hell are they good at throwing crap on the ground. Still though, how is it useful to the majority of people, beyond "cool". I suppose if I ever went into film production I could make something historically accurate (and it has for sure dampened my enjoyment of historical movies), and for pub trivia I'm unmatched! And I get the merits of them for proper historians, after all much of our understanding is based on random crap that we dig up. But that's not something I, or very many people, will be able to do. I'm not sure I have a question as such, but I sort of wanted to vent my inability to argue in defense of my hobby. fake edit: wait actually that can sort of be a question! what do you all say to people that attack the study of ancient history? And an actual question: Can somebody go into depth about racism in the ancient world? Were people actually "colourblind"; i.e. are people even recorded as having different skin tones? (even without any racial connotations someone must have noticed that black-africans look pretty different to germans, for instance) Is it correct for me to say that racism is a pretty new thing? If so, roughly when was it starting? You guys have talked about it a bit with Romans and Greeks, but what about Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Chinese? Trade wasn't a local thing even in the bronze age; people must have had some connections. Also kind of specifically in this: I've heard Cleopatra described by Romans as a temptress from the east. What would east be? Was she considered Greek or Egyptian by the Romans? So say Doris of Argos seduced enough important Roman men to be considered a menace in the same way. Would she be just the same as Cleopatra of Egypt, or would she be considered much less exotic. Koramei fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Nov 25, 2012 |
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Nov 25, 2012 19:58
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Koramei posted:Thanks for the answers guys. I phrased that third question much more abrasively than I meant; sorry if it came off as hostile. I'm quite interested in history as a hobby, and I got into an argument with someone recently of the merits of the study of antiquity, with them saying it was pretty pointless to worry about anything more than a few centuries old as being applicable to the modern day. And while I definitely think it's useful for seeing the origins of current cultural biases (in the introduction of Persian Fire the author talks about a professor that was a friend of his wanting to change a mandatory history course from the impacts of the third reich or something similar to a study about the crusades; they laughed at him, saying it was irrelevant to the modern day, and then 9/11 happened and that part of history suddenly became incredibly relevant again), and while this is more of a curiosity but still useful- ethnic and linguistic origins. But I had to concede that the majority of what we learn (at least at a high school level) is relatively useless knowledge- I have seen a shift from, say, what I see in textbooks from the 70s versus what we have now (which are still like twenty years old but hey) towards more general studies, but it is still mostly not terribly relevant. I don't think it's that ancient people were less biased, just biased about different things. Culture and language were huge. Umm... race race race. I think at some point some Persian nobles get captured and the Greeks laugh at them because their skin is so pale (that is, they didn't work outside and so were soft and effeminate.) Also, a lot of the people in the Med look a lot a like. The Europeans hadn't had Scandinavian hordes running through. Oh, the Indian caste system is pretty dark skinned/light skinned, but that's a bit chicken and egg, since the highest castes were the foreign conquerors, so probably had more to do with that than racial theories of equality at first. I think Aristotle mentions something about darker skinned women and lighter skinned women being different in some way. And Cleopatra was a problem not because she was Easterner, per say, but because she was a royal power in her own right, and so pretty problematic if she picked up too much power.
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Nov 25, 2012 20:26
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Cleopatra was seen as being Greek, and Greece was often painted as a land of decadence and unmanly sensuality. Plutarch's Life of Antony is a big source for how Romans painted Cleopatra -- much of the plot there is how Cleopatra's influence turns Marc Antony from a square-jawed all-Roman tough guy to some guy who spent his time dressing up like the god Bacchus and losing himself in drug-fueled orgies even as Octavian's army is closing in. In Greek theory (ie, Aristotle), differences in skin tone, average height, appearance, and so on were seen as being the result of geographical features. Some authors have described this as being a kind of proto-racism. There isn't any explicit mention of an order of rank for various races as there would be in 19th-century racial science. This could mean that it didn't exist, or it could mean that it was so implicit that Aristotle didn't have to talk about it. Speaking only for myself, I think a lot of features of modern racism in the US and Europe came out of the need to justify black slavery. Ancient slavery had an entirely different underpinning to it, so I'm uncomfortable with applying the language of racism to ancient attitudes. (Consider that the Aeneid was partly written for political/'patriotic' purposes, and the thing that Virgil emphasizes most about the hated Carthaginians is that they were founded by a woman, not that they're from Africa or brown or believe in weird gods or anything like that.)
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Nov 25, 2012 20:30
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Tao Jones posted:Well, I guess I walked into it. How ambiguous would the use of λόγος have been to contemporaries? Obviously it was open to interpretation even then, but they would have had abetter idea of what he meant given that they had the cultural context, right? There are plenty of words in English that have a whole suite of meanings, but context both in and out of the text helps us narrow down which subset of meanings the author meant. I guess I'm asking how much meaning has been lost even when we have (close to) the original text, or even if we're able to gauge something like that.
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Nov 25, 2012 21:33
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Golden_Zucchini posted:How ambiguous would the use of λόγος have been to contemporaries? Obviously it was open to interpretation even then, but they would have had abetter idea of what he meant given that they had the cultural context, right? There are plenty of words in English that have a whole suite of meanings, but context both in and out of the text helps us narrow down which subset of meanings the author meant. I guess I'm asking how much meaning has been lost even when we have (close to) the original text, or even if we're able to gauge something like that. I don't know for certain. I think that you're right, people closer to the time would have had a better idea about the contexts and subtexts of words. In the case of a mystical work like the book of John, it can be hard enough to interpret the text even if you uncritically accept whatever English translation is given to you. (I mean, supposing you knew nothing of the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine that λόγος represents Christ), what would you even do with something like "...and the word was with God, and the word was God"? For instance, Heraclitus, who I mentioned in the post, survives only in fragments. Here's a few of the more opaque ones, with how I'd translate them: ἕν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα The wise is one only, and it is not willing and willing to be named 'Zeus'. βιός τῷ τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος ἔργον δὲ θάνατος Life is the name of the bow, even though its work is death. [This one involves a homonym; βίος can be a bow (the kind you shoot arrows with) or life (as in the English prefix bio-). I don't really know what Heraclitus might have been suggesting with this, other than "word can sound like other word, isn't that funny?" which seems unsatisfactory.] Another example, which might be a bit less rarefied a way of explaining the problem - there's a Greek word which the lexicon will tell you means 'to beget'; this word is used often in Oedipus the King, which has a lot of verbal irony and double-entendres in the original text. (Spoiler: the play's about a guy who 'begets' with his mom.) Like a lot of classical Greek philology, the lexicon came out of 18th-19th century England, and so in cases of words that might have sexual connotations, I think it could be bowdlerized. Would I be doing violence to the original by translating that word as 'to gently caress'? Without digging up an ancient Greek of Sophocles' day and asking him about the relative vulgarity of a certain term, I don't think I could really know. I suspect that if I existed in Heraclitus' time and place I would have a better understanding of what he was getting at by these and other things he wrote (and so with any author), but without that context, I don't feel like we have a way to completely gauge how faithfully we're representing an author. Issues like this seem to come up in translating even some relatively modern works in languages that are far more well known and that we have a lot more context for.
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Nov 25, 2012 23:05
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Koramei posted:fake edit: wait actually that can sort of be a question! what do you all say to people that attack the study of ancient history? I ignore them. Koramei posted:And an actual question: Can somebody go into depth about racism in the ancient world? Were people actually "colourblind"; i.e. are people even recorded as having different skin tones? The same impulse that creates racism existed, but the way people were categorized was much different. We think of it almost entirely as appearance. That didn't matter so much to the Romans; obviously they were aware of it but it wasn't a thing. Culture, language, customs, those were what set people apart. There weren't any black emperors because there weren't really any black people in the empire (other than migrants that surely were around), not because there was a racial issue. People still othered groups and were discriminatory, it's just that what we think of racism is a modern thing. Their version was different.
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Nov 26, 2012 01:35
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Back in ancient times, each individual civilization would probably have a much smaller gene pool than any modern one, which would mean that each society's individuals would look more like each other than we do now, and by contrast, outsiders would look even more different to ancient peoples. Combine that with the hatred of foreigners that is about as old as humanity itself, and that's ancient racism in a nutshell.
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Nov 26, 2012 01:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in ancient times, each individual civilization would probably have a much smaller gene pool than any modern one, which would mean that each society's individuals would look more like each other than we do now, and by contrast, outsiders would look even more different to ancient peoples. when you regard everyone as inferior who was not the descendent of about 100 senators at the time the last king was deposed, you include all other races by extension. It's about who your ancestors were and what they did. It follows that if you managed to do something but were an outsider, within a generation or two your descendents would likely be insiders.
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Nov 26, 2012 05:52
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I hope I never gave the impression that Romans weren't discriminatory assholes. They totally were. They just did it in a way that isn't at all comparable to modern ideas of racism.
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Nov 26, 2012 05:56
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Really, how often is your average Roman going to even see someone from all that far away and that different? I might not be giving them enough credit, but how often is a Roman farmer somewhere outside the city of Rome going to run into people from outside the general area? I imagine a lot of what we think of as racism today didn't exist because there wasnt much of an opportunity for it.
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Nov 26, 2012 07:14
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Grand Fromage posted:I hope I never gave the impression that Romans weren't discriminatory assholes. They totally were. They just did it in a way that isn't at all comparable to modern ideas of racism. It varied with time, though. Used to be that anyone that wasn't born inside the city of Rome was a dirty subhuman monster. And then again, there was a time when every free person in Roman Empire was a Roman by law.
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Nov 26, 2012 07:19
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BrainDance posted:Really, how often is your average Roman going to even see someone from all that far away and that different? A farmer? Probably not often. Someone living in a city like Rome or Alexandria would encounter it all the time. It was regional. Even in a major city in say, Gaul, it wouldn't be very common because there wasn't anyone going through there. Germans are about all you'd run into, at most. If you're in a city in the east, it's a lot more common. People in Constantinople, Palmyra, Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, etc etc would regularly encounter lots of different cultures and people from both within and outside the empire. Usually we're talking about urban populations, to be sure. Some farmer out in the Gallic countryside's life isn't that interesting--it, frankly, wasn't all that much different in 1500 BCE than it was in 1500 CE.
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Nov 26, 2012 07:25
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Its about Greece, rather than Rome, but has anyone read _Courtesans and Fishcakes_ by James Davidson. I really enjoyed it,and was compelled by his argument that sex in Athens was a lot more complicated, and a bit less homosexual than Foucault would have us believe, but I'd like to here what the pro's think.
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Nov 26, 2012 07:58
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WrathofKhan posted:...a bit less homosexual than Foucault would have us believe, but I'd like to here what the pro's think. I'm hardly a Foucault expert, but I am sure that Foucault thinks that homosexuality is a 19th-century production, and didn't exist in ancient Greece. The social categories that your dick-handling could fall under were different then. So if that's the caliber of the book's arguments, I am not impressed with it (based solely on this post).
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Nov 26, 2012 09:02
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I started watching this BBC documentary about Ancient Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTBgxV7B6yc And found that the idea of anyone else but Ciaran Hinds as Caesar just seems wrong. Sean Pertwee plays him a lot less regally, and more like James Purefoy's cocky Antony. It got me thinking that HBO's Rome really knocked it out of the park with their casting and characterisations in season 1. They've made it somewhat hard to go back and watch other interpretations. Did anyone else think that season 2 was a bit off though? The casting was still good, but something about Augustus didn't seem authentic, like he was portrayed as too spineless to have achieved the things he did. His rise to power was phenomenal and I thought the show really didn't get across the vast political acumen he must have had.
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Nov 26, 2012 10:50
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Grand Fromage posted:A farmer? Probably not often. Someone living in a city like Rome or Alexandria would encounter it all the time. It was regional. Even in a major city in say, Gaul, it wouldn't be very common because there wasn't anyone going through there. Germans are about all you'd run into, at most. If you're in a city in the east, it's a lot more common. People in Constantinople, Palmyra, Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, etc etc would regularly encounter lots of different cultures and people from both within and outside the empire. Then again the major roads would most likely see a great diversity of Legionnaires come through even if said road is in Gaul. Correspondence from Hadrian's wall got mentioned earlier in the thread and that showed how diverse their backgrounds were. Along a similar vein, retiring Legionnaires were given land. Did that lead to some immigration? Roman settlement policies is something I'm curious about. Munin fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 11:16
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Did Roman women let their tits hang out, like half of the time as they did in Spartacus? If so, was it because Roman culture was more focused in other parts? How much did the retired legionnaires get land, slaves, money etc? How did the legionnaires address superior officers?
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Nov 26, 2012 11:57
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DarkCrawler posted:It varied with time, though. I may well be wrong but I seem to remember that the general attitude was that as long as you were a Roman citizen (which obviously went for a lot of the European population), you wouldn't have a problem. Skin colour didn't really come into it. Saul Goode posted:I started watching this BBC documentary about Ancient Rome: The problem with Season 2 Augustus was that he got turned into the villain. In season 1, everyone was treated pretty sympathetically, with understandable motives for their actions (even Augustus). But in Season 2, he gets written as a cold personality who enjoys S&M sex and manipulates his own family for an advantage, and destroys any threat to his power.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:10
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As a good example of Roman racial outlook, they actually did have a "black"* emperor, Septimius Severus. But the only reason we know that is from circumstantial evidence, the Romans don't appear to have made a big deal out of it. Meanwhile, America elects a black president and it's a really good bet future historians will find plenty of OMG BLACK PRESIDENT in our historical record. * - Because the only surviving color representation of him is kind of ambiguous, his hair and those of his sons varies in sculpture. Saul Goode posted:And found that the idea of anyone else but Ciaran Hinds as Caesar just seems wrong. Sean Pertwee plays him a lot less regally, and more like James Purefoy's cocky Antony.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:19
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The Severans weren't black, that's from that weird fringe 70s thing that was trying to make every important person in history black. He was Italian/Libyan or possibly Italian/Punic. Probably darker than your average Roman but not black African at all.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:41
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Where's the birth certificate Septimius 
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Nov 26, 2012 14:58
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Philip the Arab was probably the least ethnically Roman emperor. I'll leave it to your ample imaginations what kind of background he had (spoiler: might've just been Roman immigrants to Arabia). Maximinus Thrax was Thracian. And Elagabalus was Syrian, I think.
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Nov 26, 2012 15:05
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Grand Fromage posted:A farmer? Probably not often. Someone living in a city like Rome or Alexandria would encounter it all the time. It was regional. Even in a major city in say, Gaul, it wouldn't be very common because there wasn't anyone going through there. Germans are about all you'd run into, at most. If you're in a city in the east, it's a lot more common. People in Constantinople, Palmyra, Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch, etc etc would regularly encounter lots of different cultures and people from both within and outside the empire. I guess I don't understand how urban Rome was. Your average Roman person, were they the farmers or were most people in the cities? I have more questions about this, but I'm sitting here and I cant seem to word it. So racism was different, but they were still prejudice. Is this because the modern concept of race wasn't a thing? I guess, why was it that way? I learned a bit about ancient Chinese racism, and it was pretty much "everyone outside of China are barbarian shitheads, they're barely human." I guess this was the case with Rome, but since so many different people from all over were citizens "Roman" is much less of a racial group than "Chinese"? I just cant imagine people not being racist, like a random person in Rome probably had some "all x people are y" thoughts but that wouldn't get necessarily written down or seen as important.. Maybe?
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Nov 26, 2012 15:42
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BrainDance posted:I guess I don't understand how urban Rome was. You are confusing concepts. They were not racist in the sense that we imagine today because 'race' as we use it (read; skin colour) is a pretty recent concept and so 'racism' is pretty new.. Like almost all people throughout all of (pre)history they were bigoted as gently caress, it was just more directed towards cultural/linguistic differences instead of skin tone.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:09
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I think much of modern racism came out of the fact that in Europe post-1492, there were two incompatible concepts simultaneously growing in force. First was the notion that divine right and aristocracy were a big sham and maybe everyone in society should have equal rights. Second was the notion that there was a whole new economic order out there with the discovery of America, and in order to maximize profits, there was a vast need for forced labor. So a new construct was needed to be able to say that some group of people all deserved equal rights, but some other group of people were inferior and needed to be 'educated' by being enslaved by their natural betters and forced to work on plantations. Language, culture, and religion were all non-starters for discrimination here, since you could always learn a new language or assimilate into a different culture or convert to a new religion, and constantly losing your labor force because they converted to Christianity or learned Spanish would be frustrating. But physical characteristics like skin color were great for this purpose, since nobody could change them and it would be easy to tell who was your equal and who was a slave at a quick glance. The ancients didn't really have this problem because they didn't have the idea that people were politically equal. Anybody might have ended up as anybody else's slave through some accident of fate, and metaphysics or theology had nothing to do with it. This seems to me to be a critical difference.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:30
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Because concepts of otherness didn't "map" onto skin color very well, in the Ancient Mediterranean. Today's modern racial concepts are the relics of that period of time right before and after the sudden explosion of European colonization. There's a discrete point in time where Europeans can point to a general area on the map, and identify it as Europe/Christendom, where the vast majority of people living there are at the same approximate technological/cultural level, and also happen to be the same approximate skin color. You can point to it, and say "White people are ______" and your generalization might actually be correct. Nearly everyone outside of it is "brown people", or other. (As an interesting aside, there's a wierd historical artifact of white people constantly looking for other white people in the world and never really finding them (see Mandan Indians, Ainu, etc.)). The Romans couldn't do that, really. They were mostly white to be sure, but they shared the same level of advancement with neighboring "brown people", with whom they were very familiar and often friendly. Any attempt to intellectually model a skin-color concept of sameness would fail immediately, since there was no way to rationalize it with the Celts and Germans living directly to the north, whom the Romans considered far more "other" than Egyptians or Punics. (As a further aside, Romans obsessed about nose shape over skin or hair color.) There's no general, positive feeling of identity with Europe in Roman culture. They were, and saw themselves, as a Mediterranean civilization. The Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea") was the center of their cultural world.
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Nov 26, 2012 16:51
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Suenteus Po posted:I'm hardly a Foucault expert, but I am sure that Foucault thinks that homosexuality is a 19th-century production, and didn't exist in ancient Greece. The social categories that your dick-handling could fall under were different then. So if that's the caliber of the book's arguments, I am not impressed with it (based solely on this post). Yeah, this (though I'm no Foucault expert either): Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. I, p. 43 in my edition posted:“We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized--Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual relations’ can stand as its date of birth--less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. Although I think this was actually covered in the first bit of the thread, insofar as having a young boy was a thing people did, and it would have been a fact people could use to discredit the person with the boy, but it didn't have the connotations it would now. EDIT: Although, in relation to that Davidson book, it wouldn't surprise me if Foucault did imply or explicitly claim somewhere that precisely because Ancient [BLANK] didn't have the social categories we had, they had tonnes of what we would call homosexual relations. DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Nov 26, 2012 |
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Nov 26, 2012 17:22
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BrainDance posted:I guess I don't understand how urban Rome was. The majority of the population was rural. It wasn't quite as extreme as in medieval society though. The empire at its height probably had a population of around 50 million, and at least a million of those were in Rome itself. Rome was the largest city in the world for some time, and the largest city in Europe until gently caress, the 1700s? 1800s? (E: Wikipedia puts London's population at 1.3 million in 1825. That's probably the first time you can say Rome is definitely overtaken by another European city) Another million in Alexandria, another million between Antioch and I dunno, Palmyra or something. It wasn't like 99% rural as would happen later. BrainDance posted:I learned a bit about ancient Chinese racism, and it was pretty much "everyone outside of China are barbarian shitheads, they're barely human." This is basically the way Greeks saw it. The Romans weren't quite as extreme. BrainDance posted:I guess this was the case with Rome, but since so many different people from all over were citizens "Roman" is much less of a racial group than "Chinese"? Yep. Anyone could be Roman. Even many noble families could trace a lineage to slaves. The multicultural nature of the empire and inclusiveness of Roman citizenship didn't lend itself to being exclusive in the same way people like the Greeks or Chinese were. Roman-ness was something anyone could achieve. In theory and ideology, anyway--obviously not everyone did. And it does depend on the time period. Early in the empire citizenship was only for people from Rome itself and they were kinda dickish about it. Later everyone in the empire is a citizen and the centers of power aren't even in Italy anymore, so it's a lot more multicultural. Then after the rise of Christianity it becomes wildly exclusive and racist, which (in my opinion) was a lot of why late antiquity went to hell in the west. Earlier Romans would've just incorporated the Germans into the empire, later ones were racist pricks and forced the Germans to fight. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 01:20
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Grand Fromage posted:Then after the rise of Christianity it becomes wildly exclusive and racist, which (in my opinion) was a lot of why late antiquity went to hell in the west. Earlier Romans would've just incorporated the Germans into the empire, later ones were racist pricks and forced the Germans to fight. I think if I had a gun to my head and had to pick only one reason why the western empire fell, it would be the treatment of the Goths. What could have been a huge tax base increase and military juggernaut was turned into a rampaging monster for no good reason. Treat them humanely and welcome them into the Empire, settle them on the border somewhere with legion protection, and suddenly the Alans and the Vandals are not as much of a powerhouse that can rampage through the Empire. Attila is still going to show up beyond some butterfly effect poo poo, but considering his defeat was the last hurrah of the west as it was, its hard to imagine a stronger, more unified west falling instead. Keep in mind I fully support the death by a thousand cuts reasoning and do not think being nice to the goths would have prevented the fall entirely, but a strong and loyal Goth military may have prevented the Vandal Kingdom, and that alone would have butterfly effected history like woah.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:02
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Grand Fromage posted:
I don't actually believe the Chinese and Greeks had similar views at all- in fact the Chinese attitude toward foreigners was quite similar to the Roman view. The important thing was being "熟" (cooked>civilized) and not "生" (raw>uncivilized). That changes from dynasty to dynasty since Chinese history is quite long and different regions and eras had different views points. However, considering The First Emperor, Li Bai, and Zheng He were non-Han, Turkish, and Islamic respectively, it's a difficult case to make that the Chinese were racist like the Greeks instead of bigoted like the Romans.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:09
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I think if I had a gun to my head and had to pick only one reason why the western empire fell, it would be the treatment of the Goths. What could have been a huge tax base increase and military juggernaut was turned into a rampaging monster for no good reason. Treat them humanely and welcome them into the Empire, settle them on the border somewhere with legion protection, and suddenly the Alans and the Vandals are not as much of a powerhouse that can rampage through the Empire. Attila is still going to show up beyond some butterfly effect poo poo, but considering his defeat was the last hurrah of the west as it was, its hard to imagine a stronger, more unified west falling instead.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:28
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Barto posted:I don't actually believe the Chinese and Greeks had similar views at all- in fact the Chinese attitude toward foreigners was quite similar to the Roman view. The important thing was being "熟" (cooked>civilized) and not "生" (raw>uncivilized). That changes from dynasty to dynasty since Chinese history is quite long and different regions and eras had different views points. However, considering The First Emperor, Li Bai, and Zheng He were non-Han, Turkish, and Islamic respectively, it's a difficult case to make that the Chinese were racist like the Greeks instead of bigoted like the Romans. I was more saying in terms of "We are the only civilization that matters and everyone else is a barbarian". Greeks viewed Greekness as their culture and language more than an ethnicity. The Romans considered themselves superior but they didn't think everyone who wasn't a Roman was some low barbarian. They always respected age, for one, which was part of why Egypt was well respected as a civilization.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:45
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I think they go together. It's like if the us never really integrated the Irish or Italians but they made up the majority of the army, you might see the airforce getting pissed and trying to replace the President. Its obviously an imperfect analogy but the combination of not accepting the Germanic tribes with them making up the majority of the military was a baaad combination.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:54
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Grand Fromage posted:Rome was the largest city in the world for some time, and the largest city in Europe until gently caress, the 1700s? 1800s? (E: Wikipedia puts London's population at 1.3 million in 1825. That's probably the first time you can say Rome is definitely overtaken by another European city) Rome's population plummeted from over a million to some tens of thousands during the 5th and 6th centuries, what with all the sacking going on and the breaking of the aqueducts during the Gothic War. Rome wouldn't reach a population of over 1,000,000 again until the late 18th/early 19th centuries. During most of the middle ages Constantinople was the largest city in Europe. It's pretty eerie thinking of this sprawling metropolis largely abandoned, with only 50,000 or so people left living there. That's part of why a lot of Roman ruins are in such horrible shape. Apart from normal weathering and lack of upkeep, locals would frequently cannibalize Roman structures for stone and other materials because they were so readily available and no one was using them.
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Nov 27, 2012 13:27
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TipTow posted:Rome's population plummeted from over a million to some tens of thousands during the 5th and 6th centuries, what with all the sacking going on and the breaking of the aqueducts during the Gothic War. Rome wouldn't reach a population of over 1,000,000 again until the late 18th/early 19th centuries. I'm pretty sure you misunderstood what I wrote. Check it out again.  TipTow posted:It's pretty eerie thinking of this sprawling metropolis largely abandoned, with only 50,000 or so people left living there. That's part of why a lot of Roman ruins are in such horrible shape. Apart from normal weathering and lack of upkeep, locals would frequently cannibalize Roman structures for stone and other materials because they were so readily available and no one was using them. There are some cool drawings of this, the Roman buildings overgrown and abandoned. Would've been very interesting to walk around Rome in around the year 1000. It's not hard to understand why it was popularly believed that civilization was gone and everything was downhill from the classical era when you were living among such things.
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Nov 27, 2012 13:37
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Halloween Jack posted:If the same happened to me, I would have to say that they never actually got the military under the control of the civilian leadership. The Air Force rebelling because General Welsh doesn't like Obama is not something we would ever think about happening. I'd like to hear what the resident experts think of this. I don't think that "civilian" leadership was even a concept that occured to them until, like, the Doukas emperors. Especially under an imperial system.
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Nov 27, 2012 16:33
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