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General Panic posted:The emperors also "reserved" a few small provinces for the knights (rich Romans who weren't quite rich or aristocratic enough for the Senate) - I suppose it was a way of letting them in on the action. Pontius Pilate in Judea, for instance, wasn't a senator, but a knight, and he wasn't a proconsul or even legate, but a procurator. It ended up as quite a complicated system. Egypt, which might have been the most important Roman province for a long time, was one of these. Adrian Goldsworthy postulates that it might have been a way for the emperors to keep ambitious senators from grabbing hold of Rome's grain supply and that way becoming Emperor themselves.
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Feb 8, 2013 19:16
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I'm rewatching Rome (in between Time Team episodes) and I've gotten curious - why do we keep finding things like pottery and kitchen things in the earth? You see them dig out a cup (for example) out of the ground and say "Yes this came from a Roman kitchen that was here" or something, so did they literally drop it on the floor and just leave it there until... they died? they left? I understand coins were buried for protection, dropped outside etc., it just seems odd that the same would happen to fairly large pots.
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Feb 8, 2013 20:19
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Well, as an example, I've moved fairly major distances in the US, and even with the help of a truck and friends to help load it, I've had to leave things behind each time because it's easier just to buy a new coffee machine or whatever when I arrive at the new place. I imagine the same was true in antiquity - things are heavy, and for some things it was probably far easier just to get new stuff, especially if you were moving with just what you could carry or fit on a donkey. Also, there was an A/T thread from a guy who investigated abandoned/dilapidated houses as part of his job, and it has some pictures of homes he'd investigated with all kinds of crap that had been left there by whoever lived there last. It wouldn't surprise me if two thousand years from now, some future archaeologist would be poking around the ruins of Detroit and being like "hm, yes, this Mr. Coffee came from an American kitchen..."
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Feb 8, 2013 20:31
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I suppose that makes sense. I just have this mental image of a Roman in 1st century Britain dropping a pot in the kitchen and going "gently caress picking that up" edit: pretty sure I saw a Chinese guy hanging out in front of the Senate in Rome 
EvilHawk fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Feb 8, 2013 |
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Feb 8, 2013 20:43
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EvilHawk posted:I suppose that makes sense. I just have this mental image of a Roman in 1st century Britain dropping a pot in the kitchen and going "gently caress picking that up" A ton of these things are actually found in the Roman equivalent of the trash can. Break a pot? Chuck it in the rubbish pile out back.
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Feb 8, 2013 21:04
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I don't remember the name but in modern Rome there's a hill more or less made from discarded pottery. They'd throw out pots, especially broken ones, like we throw away packaging, bottles and so on.
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Feb 8, 2013 22:10
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Strategic Tea posted:I don't remember the name but in modern Rome there's a hill more or less made from discarded pottery. They'd throw out pots, especially broken ones, like we throw away packaging, bottles and so on. Monte Testaccio.
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Feb 9, 2013 00:19
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Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its HeadWSJ posted:By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.
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Feb 9, 2013 01:12
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This is great. I love hearing about stuff like this.
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Feb 9, 2013 01:25
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Her youtube videos of the recreations, interesting stuff: http://www.youtube.com/user/jntvstp/videos
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Feb 9, 2013 02:08
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I find it interesting that male hairstyles progressively grow longer until about 200, at which point short and clean-shaven comes back into fashion.
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Feb 9, 2013 02:25
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QuoProQuid posted:I find it interesting that male hairstyles progressively grow longer until about 200, at which point short and clean-shaven comes back into fashion. And then mullets come into fashion. Truly it was the collapse of civilization.
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Feb 9, 2013 02:34
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This is the coolest poo poo, someone force a museum to fund her.
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Feb 9, 2013 05:57
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This is incredibly awesome. I love hearing stories like that. I hope she'll become the go-to person for people who want to get a wacky Roman hairstyle.
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Feb 9, 2013 09:58
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:I am far too amused by the poster for it. Oh hey, professor Tuck does a series of lectures on DVD for some company called The Great Courses. I got the visual exploration one for Christmas and have been really enjoying it. http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/professors/professor_detail.aspx?pid=367 He seems like a really nice guy too.
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Feb 9, 2013 16:49
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Dr. Tuck's the best, he's the only professor I still keep in regular contact with. We did some serious drinking in Italy. I love that story about the hairdresser; that kind of thing is awesome and very useful to boot. Experimental archaeology is a field that always sounds kind of dumb at first glance but is actually incredibly valuable. There was one big experiment where a medieval village was re-created, full of replicas of artifacts that had been found in villages but no one knew what they were. But once you lived in that environment, all these strange tools people couldn't parse in the lab became obviously useful and we learned a ton about village life. Side fact on hair styles, they're really useful in the principate era because women tended to copy the emperor's wife's hair. And we have lots of those empress portraits, so you can compare and use those to date other statues of women. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Feb 10, 2013 |
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Feb 10, 2013 04:13
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Dr Scoofles posted:Oh hey, professor Tuck does a series of lectures on DVD for some company called The Great Courses. I got the visual exploration one for Christmas and have been really enjoying it. Ah, thank you! He had mentioned his digital stuff, but I couldn't remember what it was.
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Feb 10, 2013 08:35
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Tao Jones posted:
Wow, that really does look awful, at least to modern eyes:  
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Feb 10, 2013 13:15
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That should have been popular in 1980s.
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Feb 10, 2013 13:26
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:
I thought they were skulls at first   
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Feb 10, 2013 15:16
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What did Germanic tribal "government" look like just prior to or during the invasions at the end of the Roman Empire? How do you organize the movement of an entire nation across thousands of miles through hostile territory? I was wondering how much of medieval social structures own their origin to Roman or Germanic systems. So far I have elective monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire for the Germans, and I guess monarchy in general. For the Romans I have the centralized bureaucratic Roman Church, but I'm not sure about much else. It's often said that feudalism had it's origins in late roman attempts to bind workers to their parents professions but I confess I don't follow why that leads to peasants tied to their land.
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Feb 11, 2013 06:53
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Squalid posted:What did Germanic tribal "government" look like just prior to or during the invasions at the end of the Roman Empire? How do you organize the movement of an entire nation across thousands of miles through hostile territory? I was wondering how much of medieval social structures own their origin to Roman or Germanic systems. So far I have elective monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire for the Germans, and I guess monarchy in general. For the Romans I have the centralized bureaucratic Roman Church, but I'm not sure about much else. It's often said that feudalism had it's origins in late roman attempts to bind workers to their parents professions but I confess I don't follow why that leads to peasants tied to their land. I am not qualified to answer your first question, but I can briefly summarize your last one. After the slave economy began to collapse, tenant farmers were the primary agricultural workers in the Empire. This was expensive but sustainable during wealthy times. However, the Crisis of the Third Century saw immense inflation and generally awful economic conditions, which lead to widespread bankruptcy among tenant farmers. Many of these guys "voluntarily" sold themselves and their descendants into proto-serfdom in order to stay alive. Some lucky people were able to buy out their contracts later and regain their freedom, but only a few decades later all tenant farmers were legally tied to the land. I believe Diocletian was the primary agent of change here, and later in his reign he did indeed bind workers to their parents' professions after he rationalized the economy; this was intended to maintain the proper balance of labor between professions. Serfdom was the status quo long before the fall of the West, as was the self-sufficient manor; late Roman manors still had more trade with the outside than medieval ones, though.
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Feb 11, 2013 16:51
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This may be discussed elsewhere in the thread, but if it was, I can't remember or find it. Can someone give a summary of all the various Roman titles? It just seems like there are so many, and I've never really seen a good explanation of how they all fit together. For example, you have the cursus honorum, going: Quaestor, Aedile, Praetor, Consul, and I guess Censor, although I did not realize that was part of the Cursus Honorum. You then have Propraetors and Proconsuls, which I understand are the equivalents of provincial Praetors and Consuls. But then you have legates, prefects, and procurators, which I think are all provincial positions, the Tribune of the Plebs, Senators, governors (which may just be a different term for the Propraetors and Proconsuls), Dictator and Master of Horse (during the Republic), Military Tribune, and probably a number of other political titles that I am forgetting. Then there are a whole bunch of religious titles, some of which (Pontifex Maximus for example) were absorbed into the Imperial title. As I said, I guess I'm wondering if someone could provide a brief summary of the various titles, what powers/responsibilities came along with them, and what the relationship between the various office holders was.
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Feb 13, 2013 22:50
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I know that a great deal of the culture of the Gallic and Gothic tribes during the time of the late Republic/early Empire is shrouded in mystery, but what do we know about their general quality of life? What kind of wealth could their elite class boast, compared to their Roman contemporaries?
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Feb 13, 2013 22:59
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Not My Leg posted:As I said, I guess I'm wondering if someone could provide a brief summary of the various titles, what powers/responsibilities came along with them, and what the relationship between the various office holders was. The Cursus Honorum was the sequence of offices in the career of a Roman politician. The purpose of the career was, in essence, to make sure that people in top positions had proven themselves to be competent in a wide variety of tasks and understood how the system worked. Something to note is offices had a minimum age attached; these changed from time to time, and being elected "in your year" (in the first year you were eligible) was a significant honor. Also, bear in mind that this system broke down in the final century of the Roman Republic and ultimately became meaningless under the Empire. The Caesars circumvented the republican system of offices quite effectively. Most titles remained as ceremonial or decorative offices, however. Senator was something of a catch-all title. Former members of any of these positions were automatically senators, while other people found worthy of membership could be added, provided they had a shitload of money. The system morphed over time to become more hierarchical, with ex-consuls being more important than ex-praetors, who were more important than ex-aediles, and so on. The first thing a young Roman on the make had to do was serve in the military for ten years, which would make him around 30 years old. At that point, he was eligible to stand for election as a quaestor, which was a financial guy - something like a treasurer or accountant. At 37, he was eligible to stand for election as an aedile. There were plebeian aediles and patrician aediles; they maintained temples and public buildings, organized games, resolved mercantile suits, and were in control of water and food supplies. At this level were the tribunes of the people, which were a special position created in the aftermath of civil unrest between the patricians and the plebeians. Tribunes had two major powers: first, by holy law they were considered to be sacrosanct and thus could not be attacked without seriously pissing off the gods. Second, they had the power to veto anything they thought was against the interests of the plebeians. Over time, tribunes acquired a few other powers to stand up for the people; they could convene emergency meetings of the Senate and arrest magistrates. However, they had a few special responsibilities also - they could never be more than an hour's journey away from Rome, their house had to be open at any hour to receive visitors, and a person could only ever serve as a tribune for a single term. (Perhaps amusingly, when Augustus laid the groundwork for the Empire, his title was, essentially, "tribune for life" and his not-reigning-years were counted in the style of "in the fifth year of his powers as tribune".) At 40 years old, someone who had served as an aedile could become a praetor, which was a magistracy responsible for maintaining public order and judging law cases. A prefect was a praetor-level office, but one which was created by special necessity or as positions to put people who had risen to this level but weren't going any higher. Propraetors were dudes who had once been praetors, were no longer an official praetor, but were still to be considered as if they were a praetor. (So, for instance, if you had been a praetor last year, and this year you were chosen as a governor, your official title was propraetor. You're not technically a praetor, but you have all of the powers of one.) At 43 years old, you were eligible for the big job - consul. There were two consuls a year, and each one could veto the other, so they had to agree on policy. In essence, consuls could interfere with anyone except a tribune, censor, or dictator and propose whatever they thought was best, but were subject to infighting or tribunal veto. The censor was a kind of weird mishmash of responsibilities. Originally the censor was in charge of the census, registering property and recording things helpful to the quaestors and consuls. Over time, this changed to include being largely responsible for financing and/or otherwise executing state projects, like roads and aqueducts, leasing out conquered territory, etc. Their famous power to regulate public morality was a later invention, coming out of the fact that they were responsible for classifying the population as part of their census duties. When this power developed, the censorship shifted from being a relatively junior position to one occupied by former consuls. Procurators were Imperial officials which were middle-management between the Emperor and the provinces which were under his direct control. The need for them came out of the fiction that Augustus was just "first among equals" in the Senate; no self-respecting quaestor would agree to serve under someone who was technically his equal. Procurators were not magistrates, but instead more like hired managers, often educated freedmen. Later emperors decided to replace propraetors with procurators, which they had more direct control over, and so the title "procurator" could mean a whole variety of things, from de facto governor to Imperial secretary. Dictators were appointed by the consults in times of serious crisis and not subject to the tribune's veto. Dictators could do whatever the gently caress they wanted for a term of six months. One of the stylings of the dictator was "master of the infantry"; the "master of horse" was the dictator's right-hand man. Dictatorships were sometimes used to solve constitutional crises or to oversee thorny elections, but by the end of the republic, were basically abolished in favor of a Senatorial power to declare a state of emergency and override a lot of the opposition to the consuls. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 14, 2013 |
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Feb 14, 2013 00:17
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Tao Jones posted:A Really Good Summary of Political Offices So, was a "Governor" an actual position separate from these positions, or is it just a catch all term for proconsuls/propraetors? I was always under the impression that becoming a "Governor" was the reward at the end of the long trek up the Cursus Honorum. You spend your life doing your duty in Rome, then you get to go out and spend a year raiding the wealth of one of the provinces.
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Feb 14, 2013 00:40
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Not My Leg posted:So, was a "Governor" an actual position separate from these positions, or is it just a catch all term for proconsuls/propraetors? I was always under the impression that becoming a "Governor" was the reward at the end of the long trek up the Cursus Honorum. You spend your life doing your duty in Rome, then you get to go out and spend a year raiding the wealth of one of the provinces. Governor was technically a job for a praetor, and not a separate title. My understanding, which may be incorrect, is that someone who at any point in the past had been a praetor was eligible for being chosen to govern a province. (There were lots of these offices for guys who'd risen to the level of praetor but were never going to be consul and now needed things to do.) If it so happened that we wanted to send Fulvius who was a praetor like ten years ago to govern, he'd be given the title propraetor.
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Feb 14, 2013 00:53
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In the republican period only Consuls and Praetors had the "power of command" (imperium) and could command legions. This was an important distinction between them and the other magistrates who had no imperium. If there were no consuls or praetors available, no one could technically lead a Roman legion. This became an issue as the (republican) empire expanded through out and out of Italy. Proconsuls and propraetors were created with imperium and appointed by the Senate and could command legions (typically in the provinces) though they were not actually elected magistrates (and thus not necessarily bound by the tight rules governing magistrates such as one year terms and a requirement to wait 10 years to hold the same post again). This was kind of an end-run around the Roman Constitution. This was an important invention to help the Senate manage the expanding empire as legions could be commanded even when the elected praetors and consuls were not available. It also lead to major problems later as proconsuls developed their own personal armies based on earning the allegiance of their legions, their relatively long terms, and their lucrative foreign conquests. Thus proconsuls lead to the problem the genius of the yearly consul sought to avoid - concentration of power in one man. * Dictators also had imperium, obviously, but were magistratus extraordinarius and quite rare. euphronius fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Feb 14, 2013 |
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Feb 14, 2013 01:07
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I think that's right. The cursus honorum's positions come before Rome has any territory to put a governor in, so once they begin acquiring territories it's obvious someone has to run them, and they invent a post but not a title that would gently caress up the system as it stood. The minimum ages here (and the rather elderly minimum age to serve on the Spartan council of elders) are further evidence of why that idea that everyone in the pre-modern era died in their 30s is nonsense, by the way. It's a good one to bring up if someone is arguing with you. You don't make a vital government position that you need to be 60 years old to occupy in a society where reaching 60 is near impossible.
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Feb 14, 2013 01:10
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euphronius posted:(and thus not necessarily bound by the tight rules governing magistrates such as one year terms and a requirement to wait 10 years to hold the same post again). This was kind of an end-run around the Roman Constitution. Keep in mind that the "Roman Constitution" was a series of consensus-derived traditions and not really anything written down. Once the senate decided to break with tradition and re-elect a magistrate, it tended to be done again and again. It's kind of like Andrew Jackson and the veto - the first 6 presidents used it really only when they considered a passed law to be unconstitutional, whereas Jackson used it as a policy tool and consequently more often than all the presidents before him combined. After him every president did the same. Even when Roman leaders tried to legislate a return to historical precedent like Sulla, the people who came after him reversed the laws in a quite short period of time. Actually talking about the senate as if it had all the power is, in itself, a relative novelty in the Roman republic. Laws were technically passed by one of several popular assemblies. It's just that the senate, which was made up largely of ex- and future military commanders, was tended to be consulted first during the period of heavy fighting that brought Rome to prominence in the Mediterranean area, and the senate's consults tended to be followed.
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Feb 14, 2013 08:34
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How did Roman voting work? I assume that they had quite a lot of logistical difficulties with it.
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Feb 14, 2013 12:16
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You know, I actually don't know the specifics. That seems like something I should know. The important part later is you had to physically be in Rome to vote or to run for office. This wasn't a problem for centuries, but once Rome ended up having an empire it became a serious issue, as you might imagine. I suspect it was like Athenian voting where you dropped tiles into jars for counting but I really can't remember ever reading about it.
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Feb 14, 2013 14:38
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Most constitutions are not written down, especially in classical times. Even in the USA our constitution is more than the written Constitution.
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Feb 14, 2013 14:43
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How about Legates? Where they also former Praetors who needed something to do?
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Feb 14, 2013 15:36
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Grand Fromage posted:I suspect it was like Athenian voting where you dropped tiles into jars for counting but I really can't remember ever reading about it. Sounds plausible for the Senate. In terms of the Comitia Centuriata, I think I recall - having divided into the centuries - further dividing into areas for a head-count from somewhere? Possibly Cicero mentions it in connection with his 'thwarting' Cataline's attempt at influencing elections by force (Cicero obviously needing to do this by turning up armed and with his own gang of thugs to enforce total impartiality).
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Feb 14, 2013 15:46
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I have a question about Roman military customs. Early on in the excellent History of Rome podcast, Mike Duncan details a very complex set of things that the Romans did to declare war on an enemy. It involved sacrifices, a waiting period (of around a month from memory?), and ended with a spear being ceremonially thrown from Roman territory into enemy territory. If anyone would like to post a description of that, that would be great - but my question is, for how long did the Romans do this? Was this standard practice for declaring war throughout the whole empire, once it started to get huge? And for that matter, how 'Roman' were Roman provinces?
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Feb 14, 2013 16:38
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Grand Fromage posted:You know, I actually don't know the specifics. That seems like something I should know. I think that the specific procedure for electing the consuls was that everyone who wanted to vote would go outside the city to one of the fields set aside for that purpose. Then you'd divide up by your "tribes", hash out who your tribe was gonna vote for (remember, it was one tribe, one vote), and then the people who were running the election would ask the tribe-bossman who they were gonna vote for. Naturally, the tribes were gerrymandered so that patrician tribes were smaller than the plebian tribes, so there were checks and balances against the power of the plebs with their "numbers". sullat fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Feb 14, 2013 |
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Feb 14, 2013 16:52
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The field for voting was the Campus Martius, about where the Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Augustus are now.
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Feb 14, 2013 16:56
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euphronius posted:The field for voting was the Campus Martius, about where the Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Augustus are now. Quite. Its 'outside-the-city'ness being retained symbolically for a long time after it was surrounded by Rome's sprawl and then even encroached on. Did it resultantly have some weird interaction with the pomerium, or does my memory deceive me?
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Feb 14, 2013 17:50
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Lord Tywin posted:How about Legates? Where they also former Praetors who needed something to do? Legate was also a praetor-level job, since they required the ability to command imperium. They were something like brigadier generals - generals, but not usually the head general in charge of an entire campaign. For reasons mysterious to me, "legatus" also became the word used for ambassadors, both Roman and foreign.
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Feb 14, 2013 19:10
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