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Now I'm imagining Roman Ron Pauls railing against the monetary system. I suppose if anyone in the ancient world could make fiat currency work, it's Rome.
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Dec 6, 2012 15:26
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It didn't work that well, part of why the economy was so hosed up. They introduced a new actual gold coin called a solidus later on and that helped stabilize things. I don't think any gold coins were ever pure gold, since gold is so soft. I think it's always alloyed. So it's not really debased at first, but once the alloy is 95% copper or whatever towards the end you've made your money worthless. Barter makes a big comeback in late antiquity. Roman coins were also used pretty widely outside the empire, at least during the time when the currency was stable. Sort of like how you can sometimes spend dollars or Euros instead of local currency in developing countries.
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Dec 6, 2012 15:30
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Kaal posted:Weigh-scales, for one. And officially stamping the coins was the first attempt at preventing counterfeiting - forgers would have to replicate the stamp, or avoid ruining it when debasing real currency. And of course by imposing the death penalty for forgers. There was a counterfeiter who became emperor, though. Wasn't a bad one, either, despite being illeterate and epileptic.
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Dec 6, 2012 16:18
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Eggplant Wizard posted:One of my students' papers argued that the Britons adopted Roman coinage because it was pure gold & silver So what was British currency pre-Roman invasion? Precious metal coinage, but were they as finely stamped as near-Eastern/Mediterranean coins? Was minting a state endeavor?
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Dec 6, 2012 19:53
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unlike British coins. (He'd been confused because I'd talked about how sometimes votive objects are base metals very thinly coated in silver or gold so they looked richer, and he extrapolated that to all British coinage).
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ptk posted:So what was British currency pre-Roman invasion? Precious metal coinage, but were they as finely stamped as near-Eastern/Mediterranean coins? Was minting a state endeavor? Britain didn't really have coinage til the mid-first century BC, when they adopted it on basis of coins they encountered in trade with Gauls. There are early British coins that are based on 4th century BC coins of Philip II of Macedon that look pretty sweet (see below). It's obviously quite abstract,* but the on on the left is a highly stylized take on Philip's head, and the one on the right is a horse.  Look on WildWinds for Celtic coins and you can see a bunch. Coin of the Corieltauvi cf. a coin of Philip  & some others  Coin of Epaticcus of the Atrebates  Coin of Tasciovanus of the Catuvellauni Before about 100 BC there was some intercourse between Britain and the rest of Europe for sure, but it really picked up after that. They didn't do coinage before though... Trade was probably mostly in kind or metalwork like jewelry or arms. e: sweet imgur is back * It's not that they couldn't recognize the shapes on the coin. Abstract designs favoring lines, circles, and curves in reasonably symmetric arrangement is what they did. "Naturalistic" art of people, animals, or plants was adopted slowly over time. There was some limited use of it from the mid-1st millenium BC I believe, and yes they got it from the Mediterranean via Gaul, but we don't have too much materia evidence from this period. Again, after 100 BC they start picking up more foreign themes, and once the Romans conquer Britain there's figural art all over. Often you can still see Celtic elements in it though which is super cool. e some more: Oh yeah, re: state endeavor. No. There were some larger groups of peoples who clung together and had leaders and such, but there weren't really cities or "states" in the Mediterranean sense. Non-urbanized, scattered but dense settlement, undifferentiated agriculture (especially grain, of which they produced a surplus, hence population density). Eggplant Wizard fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Dec 6, 2012 |
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Dec 6, 2012 20:00
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sullat posted:There was a counterfeiter who became emperor, though. Wasn't a bad one, either, despite being illeterate and epileptic. Since Greece is on-topic now, it's also worth mentioning that the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was exiled from the city of his birth for, amongst other things, debasing the currency. Everyone was at it! Someone once reminded Diogenes that his own people had sentenced him to exile. "Yes, and I sentenced them to staying home," he is supposed to have replied. The guy, according to his biographers anyway, was something of a master of  .Most famously, Alexander the Great once met him and asked Diogenes what he (Alexander) could do for him. "Stand out of my light", replied Diogenes.
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Dec 6, 2012 20:52
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Coinage sperging: One of the few non-Greek sources we have on the Persian empire are some bureaucratic records on clay that got buried and preserved when Alexander burned Perispolis to the ground. http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/oip92.pdf Among many interesting things (like fairly widespread use of female laborers and even *gasp* women in supervisory positions drawing the same pay as their male counterparts!), the records cover the transition from payment in kind to payment in silver coins. Kinda cool.
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Dec 6, 2012 22:38
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Did the Spartans actually breed themselves out of existence? I saw some numbers that placed the number of Spartiates at 9,000 around the time of the Second Persian War and at 1,100 by Leuctra. Wikipedia didn't help so much either. Is this an accepted figure? How could such a small majority manage to suppress all those helots (helot-slaughtering season notwithstanding)? Also, what was the state of Sparta under the Roman empire? Tourist attraction? Ah, and how has Lysander not gotten an HBO drama to his name yet?
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Dec 6, 2012 23:28
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ScottP posted:Did the Spartans actually breed themselves out of existence? I saw some numbers that placed the number of Spartiates at 9,000 around the time of the Second Persian War and at 1,100 by Leuctra. Wikipedia didn't help so much either. Is this an accepted figure? How could such a small majority manage to suppress all those helots (helot-slaughtering season notwithstanding)? No. The main issue was that the land estates increasing came under control of fewer Spartan families, children that could not(usually do to financial restrictions) be enrolled in the agoge, were essentially kicked out of the spartiate class. During the early 3rd century it was around 700, there was attempts by more ambitious kings to rectify this, first under Agis IV who tried to take back all the land and redivide it up amongst the Spartiate class and the Perioec, but this caused the ephors and the nobility to have a poo poo fit, and he was killed. Move along a few years and Kleomenes III takes the throne. During his reign he persues a campaign against Archaen leauge, which he is succesful in, most of the nobility was also present during this. During a break, he returned back to Sparte with some of his mercenaries and cleaned house, killing most of the ephors. He insituited the reforms that Agis IV had started redividing up the land amongst the citizens and adding some Perioeci to the mix to make up for decreased numbers and cancelled all debts. Archaen leauge meanwhile started asking Antigonid Makedonia for help against Sparte which had greatly improved in its general postion of power. Klemomenes III had been getting funds the Ptolemaic empire, but they cut them off. To improve his position militarily, due to the fact that Macedon was heading south to help the Archaens, the offer for freedom was given to any Helot that could pay 5 drachmas, around 2000 or so Helots took the offer and Kleomenes had them and the citizen body(which was around 4000 strong) trained as phalangites. During the battle of Sellassia the entire citizen body and the freed helots was practically annihilated and Kleomenes fled to Egypt where he died. After this Nabis came along he continued with the reforms, this time kicking out most of the remaining Spartiatae class and he started freeing large numbers of helots and making them citizens, though the system of serfdom still remained. Nabis eventually was killed due to coming into conflict with just about every power in the region as well as Rome. The exiled spartiatae complained to the Romans and were reinstated, probably undoing everything that had been done.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:33
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ScottP posted:Ah, and how has Lysander not gotten an HBO drama to his name yet? Not enough boobs, probably. Alcibiades on the other hand, would be something.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:36
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I have a couple of questions. Firstly, who made Rome's maps? Were there people whose job it was to do that? Did the legion support staff include a cartographer? A few ancient maps have been posted - one by a Ptolemy of some description from memory, but in that case, I doubt he would've personally mapped coastlines. Also, on a more historiographical note, when one says the "early 5th century BC", are they talking chronologically or numerically? Which is to say, does that refer to the 590's BC or the 510's BC? And to those ancient historians here, did it take awhile to wrap your head around the backwards counting of years BC? Thanks for the answers on Islam a few pages back, and more generally for this thread - it's well and truly reignited a passion for Rome I'd let go. Even buying some books. Great job everyone.
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Dec 7, 2012 12:58
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Could anyone give me an idea about how food was collected from rural areas in the ancient world and then distributed in the cities? Were they appropriated purely via taxes and tithes or were they purchased freely from the producers somehow? I've read a lot about the social structures of the ancient world and a common theme seems to be one of general antipathy between the cities (who viewed rural areas as bastions of dissent and rabble-rousing) and the rural areas (who viewed the cities as engaging in exploitative economic practices that resulted in widespread poverty and literal slavery). I know that Solon's reforms in Greece were predominantly in response to this issue, and I'm familiar with similar policies of agrarian reform in the Bible (specifically the Book of Deuteronomy, but elsewhere as well). I guess my question is, rhetoric aside, how did the collection and distribution of agricultural produce really work in the ancient world? Mitthrawnuruodo posted:Also, on a more historiographical note, when one says the "early 5th century BC", are they talking chronologically or numerically? Which is to say, does that refer to the 590's BC or the 510's BC? And to those ancient historians here, did it take awhile to wrap your head around the backwards counting of years BC? 490s. 
Blurred fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 15:59
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I just wanted to thank GF and everyone contributing for this amazing thread. It took me three weeks slacking off at work to read the whole thing and it's been a wild ride. In the meantime, I've watched the HBO Series and absorbed numerous podcasts. I also find it impossible to play anything but the Romans in Civ V, since starting this thread. Legions are the poo poo, son! Voted 5, went hog wild =)
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Dec 7, 2012 16:08
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Oh and I just want to return to the Jesus discussion from a bit earlier. (I know the mod put a moratorium on this discussion, but this is also related to historicism in general.) When examining the ancient world, almost every historical judgement is one of probabilities. Our sources are often fragmentary, and almost always ideologically compromised. The study of ancient history isn't simply about determining what did and did not certainly happen, but rather assembling the available evidence - with a critical eye - to determine what the most likely of the available explanations might be. Even topics for which we have a wealth of evidence - both literary and archaeological - can find themselves heavily contested in academia for the simple reason that the evidence can often lend itself, with equal credibility, to two very different conclusions. The task of the historian is generally not simply to survey that which can be claimed to be incontestably true (for, when it comes to ancient history, that amounts to very little) but rather to draw inferences from the available data and attempt to sketch some probable historical narrative to account for it. If it were merely about the brute collation of incontestable fact, the study of ancient history would be very boring indeed. When it comes to Jesus, it is undeniably true that the uncontested evidence surrounding the historical figure is very meagre indeed. The extra-Biblical evidence is confined to a couple of passages in Josephus and Tacitus, and it goes without saying that the gospel authors can be viewed as more interested in writing theology than in writing history. Simply stating this fact, though, as though that's as far as our mind should be willing to inquire into the matter, is to abandon the most interesting part of doing history. That the evidence we have is scarce and compromised goes without saying: the real question is, what do we do with it? What kind of explanations can we draw from what little is available to us? The trouble with those who treat Jesus as a purely mythical construction is that they aren't really able to account for the historical circumstances that might have led to such a belief emerging and being propagated: this is where the importance of history as narrative becomes clear. The "mythicists" simply refuse to go any further with their analysis than "the evidence is scant". The real question, though, is how did the belief in some "Jesus" - a Davidic messiah and teacher - emerge if not for the reason that a man existed who claimed to be (at least) each of these things? Where did the sayings material come from, and why was it all attached to some being with an everyday name like "Jesus"? Where did the biographical information come from, particularly those aspects of it that - a priori - appear to be distinctly inconvenient in a theological sense? If Paul believed Jesus was a purely heavenly being, why did he not explicitly say so? When Mark wrote a history which situated this heavenly being in a very specific geographical and historical context, what was his motivation? The most probable answer to all these questions is that there really was a teacher in Palestine, circa 30AD, named Jesus. The only mythicist I'm familiar with who has attempted to tackle these problems (and I give him my grudging credit for this) is a man named Earl Doherty who set out his hypothesis in this book. I must preface this with the not insignificant admission that I haven't actually read the book, the I am familiar with the broad arguments. Essentially, for the Jesus mythicist argument to work, Doherty has to assume that all Christianity originated with St. Paul, who believed in a messianic heavenly being by the rather prosaic name of "Jesus" (typically angels and other heavenly beings in Judaism were given distinctly theophoric names, but that's a minor point). When he wrote about this Jesus being "crucified" or "buried" or any other number of distinctly earthly references, he actually imagined all of it taking place in some sub-lunar dimension somewhere in the sky. The fact that not a single person in history has ever understood Paul's letters in such a sense is apparently beyond Doherty's concern. The fact that there were apparently others who arrived at a belief in Jesus before Paul (he says so explicitly in 1 Cor 15:3-11) must also be difficult to account for, but I'm sure a contrived explanation for this has been offered somewhere in Doherty's account. Next, for some reason, Mark came along and historicised this divine being of Jesus, placing him in a historical context in the form of a Greek epic. Why he did so - and why this perception of Jesus as a flesh and blood human being become almost instantly normative - begs for a compelling explanation. And so on and so on - I don't wish to labour my point. The fact is that competing explanations to the hypothesis that Jesus was an actual historical being realy on far more fantastic and contrived explanations than the original hypothesis does. Plainly much of the gospel material cannot be treated seriously as historical fact, and some quality critical scholarship is required to sort the historical wheat from the mythological chaff (I've presented some possible methods to this end here on my blog). Nonetheless, at the present time, the "Jesus as historical figure" hypothesis remains - to my knowledge - the only one to credibly and parsimoniously make sense of all the available data. Arguments against the historicity of Jesus could be applied just as accurately to Socrates, Hannibal and a whole host of other ancient figures. Blurred fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 16:55
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Blurred posted:
I just want to point out here, "Jesus" comes from the name that the Greek-speaking Christian community assigned to him. As such, it comes from Latin Iesus which came from the Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and that was a hellenization of the Aramaic/Hebrew ישוע (Yēšûă‘). And that name was a post-Exilic modification of the Hebrew יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yĕhōšuă‘, Joshua) under influence from Aramaic. And those names, ישוע and יְהוֹשֻׁעַ were both very common names in the area at the time so it would be unlikely there wasn't a guy if not a whole bunch of guys with that name in that area and time period. "Christ" of course was never his name in his life time, since that was from a title that Greek Christians assigned to him a century or so on. That we refer to the name Jesus today, instead of Joshua or Yeshua: that comes from the domineering effect of first Greek and then Roman culture on the whole religion. The whole circumstances around how "just another bizarre Eastern mystery cult" came to dominate first Greek and then Roman culture is fascinating honestly. It'd even been attempted before by one or two emperors.
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Dec 7, 2012 18:01
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Just to let you know, there's an all-new anthropology thread in SAL so now you can have a place to talk about your archaeological questions as well as why Knossos was so awesome. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3521383
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Dec 7, 2012 18:02
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Your point is valid. Putting aside your point Blurred is correct generally in the assumptions made about a historical "Jesus" figure. I am trained as an anthropologist and straight up my opinion, speaking from that background, is that all religions (save for a few) are based in reality just as much as many other myths are. FG spoke on this a long time ago at the beginning of this glorious thread. Edit: I mean that the myths were based on something sorta real that no longer is factually represented, haha. Read that after I posted and realized I just validated all world religions. Bringing it back around...lets look at Roman and Carthaginian city founding. Are the links to the myths outright wrong? Not exactly. The key is to find some of the truth in the myth and verify as much as possible with real data from the site. Not easy but doable in many cases (Anything in mesoamerica would be relevant). Romulus and his brother, real? Maybe not but likely there were a group of elders or strong men who helped build the early community. Carthage, built by It would be important and fair to point out that you cannot judge Christian works with the fine toothed comb of religious bias. It is no different than how we must look at all cultures writings. We have to be objective as we can or else we are no better than the ancient writers who poo poo on their enemies and love their friends. Generally, the kinds of pseudo-intellectual statements I have read on here about Christianity are only taking away from the rich vibrancy of Roman history which really sucks. Anyways, my wanking is done. Questions! FG, I am still a little confused about Roman law. Could you tell me a little more about how municipal law was enforced and handed down? I am vaguely aware of the magistrates Rome used but other than that it seems like law enforcement a pretty open thing that hinges on the attitudes of locals rather than national or regional sets of laws. I am also interested how Roman and English Common Law are similar in regards to you previous statement that western and Roman law are close. As well, how was commerce protected? Were merchants given guards? How did rich merchants defend their property and did the law defend them as well? Paulywallywalrus fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 18:51
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Paulywallywalrus posted:As well, how was commerce protected? Were merchants given guards? How did rich merchants defend their property and did the law defend them as well? I'm not GF but I'll run out and try to catch this one. Commerce had surprisingly modern protection, legally speaking, but enforcement as always was spotty and growing worse the further you got from the civilized lands of the Med. Mercenary guards were a legitmate line of work all through Roman society, whether hiring them to protect you or beat someone else's rear end. Lex Plautia was passed to actually forbid people from hiring thugs to go beat the poo poo out of other senators and magistrates. The Civil War Period was actually a hot bed of financial law creation. I said before Julius Caesar pretty much created commercial & bankruptcy law, by which I meant debtor law. In fact his uncle, Publius Rutilius Rufus, created or revived the idea of a lien attaching to property, giving creditors a chance to recover some losses. And another man of the same period, Servilius Glaucia, helped lay the foundations of fraudulent transfer law. They had arbitration specialists for landlords. So they had legal remedies and courts to grant them, but as ever, enforcement was the primary issue. That was handled by clientelae, more often than not. Street justice. Of the three people I just mentioned, everyone knows how Caesar died. But Rutilius dies in exile after having all his assets stripped, because he stood up to the publicani tax collectors. Servilius Glaucia dies by suicide after bashing in the head of his opponent in an election for consul. Romans had great ideas about the law but concepts of enforcement and general conduct were pretty wild west.
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Dec 7, 2012 19:31
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physeter posted:I'm not GF but I'll run out and try to catch this one. Commerce had surprisingly modern protection, legally speaking, but enforcement as always was spotty and growing worse the further you got from the civilized lands of the Med. Mercenary guards were a legitmate line of work all through Roman society, whether hiring them to protect you or beat someone else's rear end. Lex Plautia was passed to actually forbid people from hiring thugs to go beat the poo poo out of other senators and magistrates. The Civil War Period was actually a hot bed of financial law creation. I said before Julius Caesar pretty much created commercial & bankruptcy law, by which I meant debtor law. In fact his uncle, Publius Rutilius Rufus, created or revived the idea of a lien attaching to property, giving creditors a chance to recover some losses. And another man of the same period, Servilius Glaucia, helped lay the foundations of fraudulent transfer law. They had arbitration specialists for landlords. I assume this was true of Naval commerce as well? One of things that I always imagine being a headache is Rome protecting all those merchant vessels. Was it the same with them too; just hire guards to work on the ships or was it more that the crew was just as much pirates as the pirates were?
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Dec 7, 2012 21:19
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Paulywallywalrus posted:I assume this was true of Naval commerce as well? One of things that I always imagine being a headache is Rome protecting all those merchant vessels. Was it the same with them too; just hire guards to work on the ships or was it more that the crew was just as much pirates as the pirates were? Piracy was a serious problem until the late Republic and then essentially nonexistent on the Mediterranean for the rest of the life of the unified Empire. Once the Mediterranean was a "Roman lake", pirates had nowhere to hide. Of course, pirates were still a problem in distant foreign trade, but that wasn't a state matter most of the time.
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Dec 8, 2012 00:02
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It's been mentioned earlier that soldiers, gladiators, and the wealthy had access to good medical care. I'm curious about this because "conventional wisdom" I've heard for a long time was that before modern medicine, any deep wound made a crapshoot of whether you'd die from peritonitis. Do we know anything of how Romans actually practiced medicine beyond, say, the works of Galen? I read that when Cato the Younger botched his suicide attempt, the attitude of others seemed to be "Oh yeah, he didn't actually tear open his intestines, we could patch that up" but he insisted on tearing his own guts out with his bare hands. I wonder how Romans would have treated such a wound.
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Dec 8, 2012 07:02
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Roman (and most ancient) medicine was amazing at treating injury. They could set broken bones, and surgeons could suture traumatic lacerations. Galen also had a good idea of sterilization and the importance of good nutrition and hygiene. These factors helped reduce the mortality from infection, but given the lack of effective antibiotics at that time, it was a significant risk. Disease on the other hand was still a bit of a crap shoot. They had some herbal remedies, some effective, some not so much. But the big problem was they had no fundamental understanding of disease processes. Diagnoses were what we call symptoms today, i.e. "fever" instead of the underlying pathology, i.e. "influenza". That made it hard for physicians at the time to know what treatments to prescribe, since a lot of different disease processes could masquerade with the same symptoms. You need to keep in mind that the ancients had a different standard of care than in modern society. When you go to a modern operating room, the expectation is that you survive the surgery with minimal complications. In ancient times, surgery was seen as an experimental (and expensive) last ditch effort to save one's life - fantastic if it worked, and if it didn't... well, we gave it our best shot!
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Dec 8, 2012 07:14
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When the principate starts up, do we hear any dissenting senators/magistrates? The only people I've heard of that spoke out against Augustus were satirists who were angry over his taking their wives to be redistributed as political favors.
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Dec 8, 2012 07:41
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INTJ Mastermind posted:Disease on the other hand was still a bit of a crap shoot. They had some herbal remedies, some effective, some not so much. But the big problem was they had no fundamental understanding of disease processes. Diagnoses were what we call symptoms today, i.e. "fever" instead of the underlying pathology, i.e. "influenza". That made it hard for physicians at the time to know what treatments to prescribe, since a lot of different disease processes could masquerade with the same symptoms.
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Dec 8, 2012 07:55
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achillesforever6 posted:Is that why Malaria is called that since they didn't understand that mosquitoes transmitted the disease? Yep. A common thread in a lot of Roman medicine is they were aware of practical sides of things but not underlying causes. For example, there was an understanding that if you wash out a wound with hot alcohol, it's much less likely to get infected. They didn't have any idea why, but they had observed it working and were aware it was a good idea. I remember reading some speculation by ancient writers that sort of vaguely shows thinking along the lines of germ theory, but it wasn't developed. Kind of like how Greeks/Indians came up with a very general vague idea of atomic theory. Disease was very poorly understood. Wounds were bad news before real understanding of antiseptics, but of the pre-modern world your best chance was with a Roman doctor (who was probably Greek). A little more on the commerce thing, generally there wasn't that much of a banditry problem inside the empire. It depends on the period, but if we're talking like 100 AD you could probably walk from Britain to Syria without any trouble. Law enforcement was very spotty and there was never any kind of coordinated empire-wide system. Generally the local nobility handled it through their system of clients and employees, there were also some police forces in a few cities, the urban cohorts, and if there were military nearby the army would take care of some of it. You could also hire thugs anywhere! The legal system was very well developed once you got into court but the part prior to the courtroom was problematic. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Dec 8, 2012 |
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Dec 8, 2012 08:02
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On Wednesday I was having a conversation with my father, who was a classics major and worked on excavations in Athens in the early 80's, in the Greek area of the University of Pennsylvania museum. His idea was a travelling exhibit of ancient Greek and Roman coinage that reflects the politics of the time in which it was minted, i.e coinage as propaganda. Do you all think there's enough examples out there to make a compelling show? Would you attend such an exhibit?
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Dec 8, 2012 10:22
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Grand Fromage posted:Law enforcement was very spotty and there was never any kind of coordinated empire-wide system. Generally the local nobility handled it through their system of clients and employees, there were also some police forces in a few cities, the urban cohorts, and if there were military nearby the army would take care of some of it. You could also hire thugs anywhere! It's also worth remembering that most people, even in large cities, lived in fairly tight-knit communities where everyone knew everyone else. Undoubtedly, a lot of petty stuff was dealt with informally at a local level (i.e. if there was a series of thefts, local people would have a good idea of the likely suspects and if the thief carried on with it, they'd risk being beaten up by a bunch of outraged victims.)
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Dec 8, 2012 12:10
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cheerfullydrab posted:On Wednesday I was having a conversation with my father, who was a classics major and worked on excavations in Athens in the early 80's, in the Greek area of the University of Pennsylvania museum. His idea was a travelling exhibit of ancient Greek and Roman coinage that reflects the politics of the time in which it was minted, i.e coinage as propaganda. Do you all think there's enough examples out there to make a compelling show? Would you attend such an exhibit? I think there's enough there. The Julio-Claudians are the only coinage I'm familiar with and there's a fair amount there that as you say reflects the politics of the time. I'm sure the same is true with the Flavians/Nerva-Antonine's etc. Whether it would make an exhibit by itself I'm not sure.
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Dec 8, 2012 13:19
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Grand Fromage posted:Kind of like how Greeks/Indians came up with a very general vague idea of atomic theory. I'm curious about this. What exactly did they come up with?
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Dec 8, 2012 13:42
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To Chi Ka posted:I'm curious about this. What exactly did they come up with? That there was some sort of fundamental, indivisible unit of matter, which the Greeks called atoms. These atoms combine and create all the things we see in the world. The Greek and Indian versions of this are very similar, so there's some debate on if they came up with the idea independently or not.
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Dec 8, 2012 14:00
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cheerfullydrab posted:On Wednesday I was having a conversation with my father, who was a classics major and worked on excavations in Athens in the early 80's, in the Greek area of the University of Pennsylvania museum. His idea was a travelling exhibit of ancient Greek and Roman coinage that reflects the politics of the time in which it was minted, i.e coinage as propaganda. Do you all think there's enough examples out there to make a compelling show? Would you attend such an exhibit? Part of my studies involved coins as propaganda during the Severans. I think virtually all coins are propaganda, so there would be plenty to make a compelling show.
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Dec 8, 2012 15:01
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Grand Fromage posted:That there was some sort of fundamental, indivisible unit of matter, which the Greeks called atoms. These atoms combine and create all the things we see in the world. Do you know more about the Indian version? The wiki article doesn't even state anything beyond "oh and they came up with it in India too". Is there any prominent philosopher that came up with it over there?
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Dec 8, 2012 16:36
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Coin exhibit would totally work. Coins were a primary means of distributing political messages, would be no problem to put together an exhibition about it.Pimpmust posted:Do you know more about the Indian version? The wiki article doesn't even state anything beyond "oh and they came up with it in India too". Is there any prominent philosopher that came up with it over there? I don't know anything about it other than it existed and they're supposed to be so similar that it makes a lot of scholars believe it was invented in one place and went to the other. Which one invented it being a matter of further debate.
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Dec 8, 2012 16:45
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QCIC posted:When the principate starts up, do we hear any dissenting senators/magistrates? The only people I've heard of that spoke out against Augustus were satirists who were angry over his taking their wives to be redistributed as political favors. Weren't lots of Senators murdered during Augustus & Anthony's seizure of the empire? Dissenters, suspected dissenters, and potential dissenters were killed off by soldiers or the mobs.
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Dec 8, 2012 17:11
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To Chi Ka posted:I'm curious about this. What exactly did they come up with? The ancient Epicureans were hardcore materialists, and if you're looking for further reading, Lucretius's "The Nature of Things" talks at length about it. The quick version is everything in the world comes about through the interaction of atoms, which are the smallest possible unit of matter, with void, which is empty space. Just to give you an example of how Lucretius tends to think, his argument here is along the lines of "well, okay, consider fish, if the water was perfectly made up of atoms, it would be solid and movement would be impossible, so atoms can't be perfectly tightly packed, which means there has to be a void". (I mention this in particular because other ancient natural philosophers, notably Aristotle, absolutely loving hated the idea of a void. They also hated the idea of an infinite universe, which Epicureans also argued for. A lot of Epicurean arguments were based on what could reasonably be seen as an early attempt at a scientific method - it's all based on looking at physical behavior and working out how that behavior could be explained based on the hypothesis that atoms are involved. But this shouldn't necessarily be confused with science today - in antiquity, Epicureans were seen as the most dogmatic school of philosophy, because they tended to go live on communes with each other, only hang out with other Epicureans, and learn their philosophy through repeating their teacher's sayings. They also had basically no idea about electricity and magnetism, and there was never any push toward applying mathematics to the world. Epicureans also tended to use their atomic theory as an argument against religion, arguing that because nothing can be created out of nothing, all ideas like curses and magic and divine wrath were nonsense that only served to create anxiety and the fear of death in human beings, and Epicurean philosophy was the cure for it.
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Dec 8, 2012 23:34
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sullat posted:Weren't lots of Senators murdered during Augustus & Anthony's seizure of the empire? Dissenters, suspected dissenters, and potential dissenters were killed off by soldiers or the mobs. Only during the rise to power, once Augustus because Augustus and not Octavian, he wisely stopped the proscriptions and let his critics air their grievances publicly.
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Dec 8, 2012 23:39
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QCIC posted:When the principate starts up, do we hear any dissenting senators/magistrates? The only people I've heard of that spoke out against Augustus were satirists who were angry over his taking their wives to be redistributed as political favors. A significant group during Nero's dynasty was the so-called Stoic Opposition. Seneca (the younger) was the most famous member, though his nephew Lucan was also involved. This term refers to a principled intellectual opposition to the policies of Nero or, indeed, the entire notion of an emperor, made up of (as the name suggests) Stoic philosophers and writers, as well as philosophers of other schools in general. Some of them, like Seneca, (maybe) got tied up with the Pisonian Conspiracy around 64-65AD, which was a plot to kill Nero. In some cases, as with (as I believe) Seneca and Lucan, the formal charges were trumped up to get rid of people Nero didn't like because he knew they didn't like him. Lucan himself had a more personal disagreement with Nero--namely, Nero became extremely jealous of Lucan because Nero fancied himself a poet but Lucan was a genius (think of the movie Amadeus if Salieri had been the Emperor)--and eventually Lucan, having fallen out of the Emperor's favor and bitter as a result, got involved with the other Stoics and caught up with the Opposition, killing himself at age 26. It's so sad, he could have been a member of the 27 Club.
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Dec 9, 2012 00:27
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Tao Jones posted:The ancient Epicureans were hardcore materialists, and if you're looking for further reading, Lucretius's "The Nature of Things" talks at length about it. The quick version is everything in the world comes about through the interaction of atoms, which are the smallest possible unit of matter, with void, which is empty space. Just to give you an example of how Lucretius tends to think, his argument here is along the lines of "well, okay, consider fish, if the water was perfectly made up of atoms, it would be solid and movement would be impossible, so atoms can't be perfectly tightly packed, which means there has to be a void". (I mention this in particular because other ancient natural philosophers, notably Aristotle, absolutely loving hated the idea of a void. They also hated the idea of an infinite universe, which Epicureans also argued for. It's worth noting that Aristotle's arguments against the Democritean void are really solid; those arguments for it are even worse than the one you point to from Lucretius, which is clearly question-begging (since if someone rejects void, they should also reject atoms in favor of continuously divisible (but not divided) substances, and then have no problems with explaining local motion). Democritus's void is "nonbeing", except it "is". Aristotle doesn't have much trouble showing that this is incoherent gibberish. His arguments against actual infinities are no slouches, either; they held the day until Cantor, and still have defenders. More importantly, Aristotle put forth his arguments against the atomists in the context of motivating the study of nature by looking to nature (primarily in the middle books of his "Physics"). Democritus had taught that what exists is "atoms and void", and the rest is "opinion" (including all data of common sense and observation, which are explained away in the same armchair fashion that introduced atoms and void). Aristotle takes observation of nature seriously, and atomistic metaphysical hypotheses are of essentially no use in this. When, millennia later, "atoms" become a thing that chemists talk about, they're not doing so on the basis of a priori metaphysical speculations, and in fact are changing the meaning of the word: the chemists' "atoms" are not indivisible, they're just small and relatively free-floating. (This is why their atoms are eventually able to interact with one another and change: they have parts, which is exactly what the ancient "atoms" lacked.) Tao Jones posted:A lot of Epicurean arguments were based on what could reasonably be seen as an early attempt at a scientific method - it's all based on looking at physical behavior and working out how that behavior could be explained based on the hypothesis that atoms are involved. I think this is unfair to the rest of ancient natural philosophy: what makes the atomists distinctive is just this reliance of everything on a *hypothesis* of tiny indivisible substances, which is motivated by nothing but armchair speculation about "being" and "motion". Every school of ancient natural philosophy was interested in trying to explain how observable things change, but many of them tried to put as much of the burden as they could on other observable things: Why do animals sleep? Well, let's look at the way sleep functions in the life-cycle of those animals, and the way the organs of those animals change during sleeping and waking -- this is the method of Aristotle's De Somno. We can see where he's wrong because we can see where what he says doesn't agree with what can in fact be found by looking at animals. The atomists were, as you mention, dogmatic: their speculations rested on the dogmas of atoms and void, and if one doesn't want to accept those then they will get no further in atomism; Aristotle has much to teach those who want to reject his metaphysics, but the atomists... not so much. Either you accept their metaphysical speculations and find that they lead you to the sort of lifestyle they promote, or they will be of little use to you. quote:Epicureans also tended to use their atomic theory as an argument against religion, arguing that because nothing can be created out of nothing, all ideas like curses and magic and divine wrath were nonsense that only served to create anxiety and the fear of death in human beings, and Epicurean philosophy was the cure for it. This is ironic, given the later history of atomistic thinking: medieval corpuscularianism is largely developed in alchemical thought. The efforts to distill the powers of metals into super-strong artifacts, like the philosopher's stone, get explained by reference to observable properties of metals et al being due to tiny unobservable bodies which are the real causes of observable alchemical phenomena (the dissolution of substances in acids, the growth of crystal "trees", etc.), in ways that are clearly inspired by ancient atomism. Or so William Newman has argued, to my mind convincingly. (Caveat: I took a "history of science" class with Bill last year, and have signed up to take a class on "Renaissance Magic and Natural Philosophy" with him in the spring. But his arguments are apparently winning the day enough to get his views onto the Wikipedia page for "atomism".) So the opposition between "atomism" and "magic" is contingent -- which should tell you how good the Epicurean arguments about it are! Edit: For primary sources regarding Greek atomism, or anything else in ancient philosophy before Plato, this collection is the gold standard. It's really shocking to see how wildly metaphysical Democritean atomism really was, in context -- he's infinitely closer to Parmenides than to anything that looks like empirical science. Suenteus Po fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Dec 9, 2012 |
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Dec 9, 2012 00:28
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Suenteus Po posted:It's worth noting that Aristotle's arguments against the Democritean void are really solid; those arguments for it are even worse than the one you point to from Lucretius, which is clearly question-begging (since if someone rejects void, they should also reject atoms in favor of continuously divisible (but not divided) substances, and then have no problems with explaining local motion). Democritus's void is "nonbeing", except it "is". Aristotle doesn't have much trouble showing that this is incoherent gibberish. His arguments against actual infinities are no slouches, either; they held the day until Cantor, and still have defenders. Yeah, that's fair. As much as I like to make fun of Aristotle, he does present numerous good arguments - there's a reason most of his doctrines endured for two thousand years. quote:I think this is unfair to the rest of ancient natural philosophy: what makes the atomists distinctive is just this reliance of everything on a *hypothesis* of tiny indivisible substances, which is motivated by nothing but armchair speculation about "being" and "motion". Every school of ancient natural philosophy was interested in trying to explain how observable things change, but many of them tried to put as much of the burden as they could on other observable things: Why do animals sleep? Well, let's look at the way sleep functions in the life-cycle of those animals, and the way the organs of those animals change during sleeping and waking -- this is the method of Aristotle's De Somno. We can see where he's wrong because we can see where what he says doesn't agree with what can in fact be found by looking at animals. The atomists were, as you mention, dogmatic: their speculations rested on the dogmas of atoms and void, and if one doesn't want to accept those then they will get no further in atomism; Aristotle has much to teach those who want to reject his metaphysics, but the atomists... not so much. Either you accept their metaphysical speculations and find that they lead you to the sort of lifestyle they promote, or they will be of little use to you. I suppose what I more meant to get at is that the atomists reject the ideas of a formal or teleological cause that was favored by Aristotle in a way that's superficially similar to the approach of modern science. (For those who don't know, Aristotle posited that all events have four causes: matter, form, efficient, and final - so, for instance, if you wanted to answer "What caused this statue?", a complete answer would include the presence of the material it's made out of, the idea of such a statue's form, the presence of a sculptor, and the presence of some 'that-for-the-sake-of-which' that motivated the creation of the statue. If you wanted to answer "What caused this cat?", a complete answer would include the presence of cat meat, the idea that cats have a particular shape, the presence of a mommy cat and a daddy cat, and some 'that-for-the-sake-of-which' that is the Ultimate Reason why there are cats.) Epicurean atomists would reject the formal ("idea of...") cause and final ("that-for-the-sake-of-which") causes, and just say that this statue is the result of atoms that make up stone + sculptor hitting thing with hammer, and this cat is the result of atoms that make up cat meat + mommy cat/daddy cat sex. Given that a lot of time and energy would be spent by theologians trying to deal with the implications of formal and final causes, I tend to be more sympathetic toward the Epicureans than I am toward the Aristotelians. quote:This is ironic, given the later history of atomistic thinking: medieval corpuscularianism is largely developed in alchemical thought. The efforts to distill the powers of metals into super-strong artifacts, like the philosopher's stone, get explained by reference to observable properties of metals et al being due to tiny unobservable bodies which are the real causes of observable alchemical phenomena (the dissolution of substances in acids, the growth of crystal "trees", etc.), in ways that are clearly inspired by ancient atomism. Or so William Newman has argued, to my mind convincingly. (Caveat: I took a "history of science" class with Bill last year, and have signed up to take a class on "Renaissance Magic and Natural Philosophy" with him in the spring. But his arguments are apparently winning the day enough to get his views onto the Wikipedia page for "atomism".) So the opposition between "atomism" and "magic" is contingent -- which should tell you how good the Epicurean arguments about it are! I'll have to check that book out - most of my knowledge of ancient atomism comes from Lucretius, moreso than pre-Socratics. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Democritus was pretty wildly metaphysical. I also don't know much about how atomism changed in the medieval era, other than the Church being hostile to it (for obvious reasons) and destroying/suppressing the teachings.
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Dec 9, 2012 01:12
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I'm not sure it's really fair to lump Democritean Atomism in with Epicurean though, they themselves didn't really accept the idea that Void existed as some separate entity that both 'is' and 'is not' but that it provided a means of distinguishing between occupied and unoccupied space. It would also be worth pointing out that their atomism did allow for smaller divisions than atoms, while atoms were the smallest physical object space itself could be divided further into minima. This was what, sort of, allowed them to put forth a creation theory that avoided the first cause problem and so cut out the teleology. Hell I've read some takes on the Epicurean creation story* presents a proto-Quantum physics. Now I don't want to argue their atomism was analogous to modern science but it's a fascinating area of ancient philosophy simply because so many of the ideas they deal with seem to compare to modern science. There was certainly a rejection of common sense style observations but in part at least that's because of the explicit rejection of a teleological world view. Without imparting a causation and goal-orientation it permitted a more mechanistic world view that still answered some of the more pressing questions like Zeno's paradoxes. Combined with the generally chill message Epicureans have to preach there's certainly a lot there for modern readers to sympathise/empathise with and it can be very easy to read a lot of modern ideas into them that perhaps aren't there. *that in infinite space with infinite atoms falling downwards, one atom 'swerved' (that is moved a single minima) and collided with another atom leading to further collisions and the formation of conglomerations of matter and eventually creating planets, people and everything else. The swerve is the interesting part because since a minima is the smallest conceptual division, an atom can't be crossing any intermediary points in this. There's no point where it isn't either at it's starting point or it's ending point and so isn't movement in its true sense. Thus we don't need a cause to explain this movement. Admittedly I don't this is the strongest and definitely not the most straightforward part of Epicurean ideas.
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Dec 9, 2012 02:07
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