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The Romans made it down the east coast of Africa to about Madagascar, at least. The east is easier, though. There aren't a lot of ancient history podcasts I listen to, my personal bunch right now is Byzantium, Hardcore History, the China History Podcast, Topics in Korean History, Russian Rulers, Short History of Japan, History of England, and Norman Centuries whenever he gets around to it.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:44
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Seoinin posted:So I've just finished up The History of Rome podcast and need something else to keep me sane at work. I've got the Byzantine History podcast on tap, but it's only like 20~ episodes at the moment and I'll clear it out in a week tops. As for Hardcore History, I've tried it but I just can't take it seriously because the guy's got this voice that makes him sound like he's about to start trying to tell me about chemtrails or bitcoins any second now. In Our Time has a lot of history and also soothing British voices. Believe it or not though SA actually has a podcast subforum where you might be able to find something.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:54
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euphronius posted:Just listen to the Rome podcast again. Well, Other ones, in no particular order: Try to listen to hardcore history again; I hate the voice of the presenter in every single podcast for the first half hour or so and then I get used to it. It's a very good series and chances are you'll grow to like him. BBC Radio 4 does a bunch of good ones- A History of the World in 100 Objects, presented by the director of the British Museum (and with a ton of high profile guests) is very interesting and informative, if it gives extremely broad strokes. In Our Time has a fairly meh presenter but the series is structured around what guests he brings on, and they often have clashing perspectives, which is quite interesting. Both cover a wide variety of time periods. At the end of History of Rome, the dude talked about 12 Byzantine Rulers, which is a full take on Byzantine history structured, obviously, around the rulers. It was generally pretty good but I noticed a few inaccuracies, and the presenter is extremely biased towards the Byzantine perspective ("Byzantium was the sole savior of the west against the cruel horrible Muslims  "). Still worth a listen I would say, especially since it's an underrepresented part of history. I think he's an actual historian too. That same presenter also did Norman Centuries, about, well, the Normans. In particular there's a lot about the Sicilian Kingdom. I have no idea how accurate most of it is since I didn't know jack about the Sicilian Kingdom before I listened to it, but the stuff about William and Hastings and stuff seems fine. Both this and his other one are fairly truncated though, but they're both about subjects I knew next to nothing about and it was a fine start. This podcast about the history of China has been getting mentioned here and in a few other places (come to think of it, it might always have been GF talking about it, but he probably knows a good podcast); I haven't listened to it yet but it looks extremely comprehensive like holy poo poo that will take me a long time to get through. Also The Ancient World Podcast has been getting talked about a bit in this thread. It's fairly fast paced, he brushes over a few events I think he should go into and focuses on some stuff I think he should brush over, but it's also good as a summary. I think he tries to fit too much into too small a podcast though, but I finally got a clear picture of the Bronze Age Collapse from it so it's worth listening to for that alone. I can look up links for them if you have trouble finding any of them, but I think they're mostly fairly easy to get. Also all on itunes. Hardcore history is the only one with a paywall, and it gives you a good selection of episodes for free. Koramei fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 02:02
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Koramei posted:This podcast about the history of China has been getting mentioned here and in a few other places (come to think of it, it might always have been GF talking about it, but he probably knows a good podcast); I haven't listened to it yet but it looks extremely comprehensive like holy poo poo that will take me a long time to get through. It is. I mainlined about 100 episodes in about two weeks. I don't recommend doing that. He also incorrectly states in a couple episodes that the Romans and Chinese never had any contact.
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 02:09
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Force your way through the first episode of the Fall of the Roman Republic Hardcore History, just do it.
WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 02:12
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Which British history podcast do you listen to GF? I tried one once but the guy sounded about 15 which put me off completely.Eggplant Wizard posted:In Our Time has a lot of history and also soothing British voices. Believe it or not though SA actually has a podcast subforum where you might be able to find something. He is so dull sounding! I can barely stand it. And wow, I always thought that was a music subforum so my eyes would just glaze over it in the index. I feel stupid now. Do we know much about the Minoans? How derivative was their culture of that of the greater Mediterranean at the time? In the Ancient World Podcast the dude seems to think they're their own thing; he even says they were one of the original sources of written language, but I always thought they weren't nearly so special. And do we know how much Mycenaean culture draws from the Minoans as opposed to their other neighbors, and classical Greece from Mycenaean as opposed to whatever else in the 500 year interim?
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Apr 30, 2013 02:33
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This is the one I meant: http://historyofengland.typepad.com/ It's not 100% off topic since the beginning is some discussion of the end of Roman rule, as you'd imagine.
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Apr 30, 2013 02:37
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Tao Jones posted:Plus, the entire fantastic adventures part of the Odyssey is a story-within-a-story where a guy whose entire heroic repertoire is 'tricky liar' is telling a story about himself to people whose help and treasure he desperately wants. So sly old Homer has another out here on the realism angle if you don't like the "it's magic" explanation. "Yes Alkinoos, I've bedded two goddesses and could totally call upon Athena to smite your pitiful kingdom. More silverware please." Eh maybe this discussion belongs in the classics thread but I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the character of Achilles. What exactly makes his downfall more tragic than Hector's? He, like the gods he imitates, is an impetuous teenager who is completely aloof to everything outside of his tiny worldview. He got his power from his goddess mother and didn't have to work for anything in his life. He doesn't admit his mistakes until the gods orchestrate exactly what he wants--for a king to supplicate him--and call out his daddy issues. On the other hand, Hector is a try-hard who puts his comrades in danger not for his personal glory but so that his loving family wouldn't be murdered, and moreover pulls a complete one-eighty when he realizes what a monster he became to that end. Since he never wanted to fight in the first place, he runs like a little girl from Achilles. He has his catharsis in death but no godlike glory. Achilles has his cake and eats it too--the unquestioning respect of his peers and the glory of death in battle, fighting like a god for fighting's sake. From the perspective of Achilles, the Iliad becomes too straightforward for a national epic. To him the war is just "a thing that happened," and it hardly mattered because he got his way in the end. Edit: I get that, since he lacks any kind of perspective, the death of Patroclus to him is extremely crushing. The problem is that it doesn't make him any less of a murderous psychopath. QCIC fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Apr 30, 2013 |
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Apr 30, 2013 05:00
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QCIC posted:"Yes Alkinoos, I've bedded two goddesses and could totally call upon Athena to smite your pitiful kingdom. More silverware please." Problem is, the ancient Greeks are not modern Europeans, ne? They don't agree with you and would totally not get what you're trying to say. Achilles is following his destiny- accepting the will of the gods and not fighting against it.
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Apr 30, 2013 05:14
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QCIC posted:"Yes Alkinoos, I've bedded two goddesses and could totally call upon Athena to smite your pitiful kingdom. More silverware please." I think that's a pretty good question to ask of the Iliad. I don't think that there's an immediate or obvious answer to it -- or, if there is, it might be like asking "in what way is Atlas Shrugged not a reprehensible book?" in that the answers might not make for polite conversation in all circles. I would quibble a bit with the description of Achilles never having to work for anything - the majority of the poem relates the time where there is a check on his untrammeled will, and it seems to be no good for anyone. With regard to that, I'd contend that he doesn't, in fact, get his way in the end: a king supplicates to him, sure, but it's Priam, the rather pathetic king who's about to be slaughtered -- not Agamemnon, the king who Achilles has an outstanding beef with. In fact -- is there a way in which the last book of the Iliad condemns Achilles, rather than redeems him? I mean, I think we moderns respond positively to that book, but I can't shake the feeling that we wouldn't get the same message from it without being primed with Christian values.
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Apr 30, 2013 06:06
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Tao Jones posted:I would quibble a bit with the description of Achilles never having to work for anything - the majority of the poem relates the time where there is a check on his untrammeled will, and it seems to be no good for anyone. With regard to that, I'd contend that he doesn't, in fact, get his way in the end: a king supplicates to him, sure, but it's Priam, the rather pathetic king who's about to be slaughtered -- not Agamemnon, the king who Achilles has an outstanding beef with. In fact -- is there a way in which the last book of the Iliad condemns Achilles, rather than redeems him? I mean, I think we moderns respond positively to that book, but I can't shake the feeling that we wouldn't get the same message from it without being primed with Christian values. Keep in mind his immediate reaction to Agamemnon's taking his prize: crying to his mother and threatening to go home. From that point on the story is set in motion by Apollo's support of the Trojans. I think that we could debate ad nauseam the reasons for Achilles' giving up Hector's body, but it's worth noting that we don't see him lament for calling doom upon the Greeks and Patroclus. The only twinge of humanity we see directly is his sympathy for a dying, inept father. What exactly Achilles wants and how he goes about getting it is another matter of deep inquiry, and I find myself reeling a bit to put all of the pieces together. You're getting into a bit of reverse causation with the assertion that Homer is fundamentally obscure because we can't understand the thought process of his culture. But didn't Homer's vision of virtue itself meld the Greek mindset more than anything else? And, of course, the Greeks were quick to impose their own values in their understanding of the poem, both in the form of literal additions to the text and veneration of particular heroes by particular groups. The sorts of character judgments we see as de rigueur for "Western European" literature are conspicuously absent in Homer.
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Apr 30, 2013 07:37
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QCIC posted:Keep in mind his immediate reaction to Agamemnon's taking his prize: crying to his mother and threatening to go home. From that point on the story is set in motion by Apollo's support of the Trojans. I think that we could debate ad nauseam the reasons for Achilles' giving up Hector's body, but it's worth noting that we don't see him lament for calling doom upon the Greeks and Patroclus. The only twinge of humanity we see directly is his sympathy for a dying, inept father. What exactly Achilles wants and how he goes about getting it is another matter of deep inquiry, and I find myself reeling a bit to put all of the pieces together. I didn't mean to suggest that we can't understand the thought process of Homer - just that our own thought processes can get in the way when we're trying to evaluate a character like Achilles. What I was more trying to convey is that I agree with you that Achilles is a problematic character (especially compared to Hector) and, if we judge him through a modern ethical lens, he's a pretty wicked character. But if he's supposed to be a character who embodies the highest virtues of a culture, then it seems to me we have two main ways to continue. We can judge that the culture itself venerated wicked things and that's that, or we can try to imagine what kind of mindset would be required to think that Achilles was a great hero - which might lead to a greater understanding or awareness of why we think differently today, or at least that there could be alternatives to our modern mode of thought. To my mind, trying to navigate between these two things is what reading the book as a modern person is all about. (So in essence I don't think I'm saying anything different than you -- there's a lot of pieces to put together and a lot of reeling necessary.) Also, to be fair to Achilles, his immediate reaction was to start to draw his sword intending to kill Agamemnon, but Hera and Athena intervene and prevent him from doing so -- which leads to his state of neither being able to honorably fight in Agamemnon's army nor honorably go home. Sulking isn't his first response.
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Apr 30, 2013 08:45
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From an entirely personal perspective, I think it is this huge question of honour and perceptions of what is permitted in its pursuit which makes Achilles' part of the story worthwhile or interesting or relateable. Agamemnon has been withholding what Achilles feels is his deserved share for some time, and then insults Achilles hideously and immediately. Prevented from killing him, Achilles cannot fight alongside Agamemnon without seeming to submit to this bastard, and cannot leave without unwarrantedly seeming a coward as Agamemnon has accused him of being. He comes up with a plan to demonstrate his puissance and force Agamemnon's submission as a way out. It's not a nice plan by any stretch, but this is a matter of honour over pleasantness. We might also get into shame-based cultures over guilt-based ones and note how that could affect perceptions of his action. Book 9 is this wonderful part in the story where I think you can make great arguments for either side, and that Homer isn't railroading your perception of the story (to use an entirely inappropriate metaphor). Agamemnon agrees to pay Achilles back hundreds of times over, seemingly fulfilling Achilles' desires, but not only does Achilles trust him on no level, he's moving beyond the very material bases of glory and honour as represented by shares of loot, into something more abstract. His pride has still been insulted, and offering mere goods as compensation is no longer enough. Or you can go with Achilles no longer giving a drat about honour at all, underlined by his willingness now to seem a coward by going home, and to give up all that potential glory of the Trojan War in exchange for a long life. I'm personally a bit wary of Achilles' stance on how much he loved Briseis, but that could well be a factor too. And love is something arguably more universal than the other precepts guiding Achilles, so it gets emphasised by a few modern interpretations (witness Troy). On the other side, the three heroes of the embassy find this whole thing bizarre and confusing - to them Agamemnon seems to have done everything necessary by their standards, and Achilles is being a stubborn - and likely greedy - pig. Even so, Achilles goes from a determination to leave come sunrise into a much less concrete stance perhaps showing that, despite his refusals and rebuttals, his speeches aren't everything to his actual feelings. And that lets you put even more spins on Achilles' feelings in this book, even up to suspecting that all the accusations then levelled at Achilles by the rest are totally true. Then we get to Patroclus, Achilles being persuaded to unbend enough that the Myrmidons are unleashed, still warning them to keep back so that Achilles can get his share of the glory, and Patroclus ignoring that to get himself killed. Achilles is brought back into the battle, but glory and honour are now far from his mind. Agamemnon submits and stays out of the way for most of the rest of the story, but Achilles can't and doesn't care. The remainder of the Iliad continues to show in great detail how Achilles steadfastly stands outside the values and ideas of his culture - and his gods! - now, with revenge and grief coming to dominate him to an extraordinary excess. And with the final two books, I think we fall back into cloudier areas of interpretation. Does Achilles' presidency of the funeral games and solving of the disputes therein, together with his return of Hector's body, indicate his rehabilitation into society? How much of that which set him apart does he still retain in the end - and is any of that to his credit? Lots of  on a personal interpretation. But what I tend to feel is that the Iliad challenges you to think on these matters of honour and, working especially with the way that the debate of Book 9 is shown, doesn't have a 100% clear answer. You aren't necessarily being guided along the tracks of seeing the main character's fall as being an empathisable tragedy (or even there being a 'fall' at all). If your conclusion is that Achilles' pride is unbearable, then that's a valid way of looking at the story.
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Apr 30, 2013 10:45
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Force your way through the first episode of the Fall of the Roman Republic Hardcore History, just do it. I can totally understand why people would find Dan Carlin's manic enthusiasm off-putting, but this is precisely the reason I adore his history podcasts. I bought his Punic Nightmares series the other day and was listening to it as I walked my dog. When he got around to describing the battle of Cannae I just had to stop and stand there, the image he was painting was so emotionally vivid that I was kind of stuck silly for a moment. Dan likes to digress and just wonder out loud what it was like on a personal, human level. I've read about the battle before and had looked at the formation diagrams but I'd never stopped to consider what it must have actually looked like up close and personal. Your really don't get that sort of evocative account from most historians (in particular my high school teachers, all of them) because it is their job to be level headed about things and stay on track. That said, I took a module on Medieval history in my first year of uni and the first lecture we had the professor brought a pumpkin onto the stage and started smashing it to pieces with a heavy sword. The people on the front row were spattered with pumpkin flesh and seeds, people were screaming and getting pissed off. After he had finished he swept his hair out of his eyes and rasped "Now image that was a human head." All history should be taught this way.
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Apr 30, 2013 14:42
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QCIC posted:Eh maybe this discussion belongs in the classics thread but I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the character of Achilles. What exactly makes his downfall more tragic than Hector's? He, like the gods he imitates, is an impetuous teenager who is completely aloof to everything outside of his tiny worldview. He got his power from his goddess mother and didn't have to work for anything in his life. QCIC posted:You're getting into a bit of reverse causation with the assertion that Homer is fundamentally obscure because we can't understand the thought process of his culture. But didn't Homer's vision of virtue itself meld the Greek mindset more than anything else? And, of course, the Greeks were quick to impose their own values in their understanding of the poem, both in the form of literal additions to the text and veneration of particular heroes by particular groups. The sorts of character judgments we see as de rigueur for "Western European" literature are conspicuously absent in Homer. Like, I find Romeo and Juliet to be a stupid, implausible story that's fed to teenagers because "It's about teenagers doing stupid teenager poo poo, so teenagers will like it," but I get that Shakespeare's audience let him get away with telling a compelling, character-driven version of an old poem. People are already asking why a serious film about a man fighting criminals in a rubber animal suit won dozens of critics' awards. Tao Jones posted:I didn't mean to suggest that we can't understand the thought process of Homer - just that our own thought processes can get in the way when we're trying to evaluate a character like Achilles. What I was more trying to convey is that I agree with you that Achilles is a problematic character (especially compared to Hector) and, if we judge him through a modern ethical lens, he's a pretty wicked character. But if he's supposed to be a character who embodies the highest virtues of a culture, then it seems to me we have two main ways to continue. We can judge that the culture itself venerated wicked things and that's that, or we can try to imagine what kind of mindset would be required to think that Achilles was a great hero - which might lead to a greater understanding or awareness of why we think differently today, or at least that there could be alternatives to our modern mode of thought. The Greek gods are really fascinating to me because they essentially behave in the ways you would expect from ordinary people given godlike power--every good and bad thing they do is magnified and has far-reaching consequences, and they squabble a lot.
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Apr 30, 2013 15:47
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PittTheElder posted:Quite so. Have you read Carthage Must Be Destroyed as well, out of curiousity? This was a great, great book.
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Apr 30, 2013 18:20
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Dr Scoofles posted:That said, I took a module on Medieval history in my first year of uni and the first lecture we had the professor brought a pumpkin onto the stage and started smashing it to pieces with a heavy sword. The people on the front row were spattered with pumpkin flesh and seeds, people were screaming and getting pissed off. After he had finished he swept his hair out of his eyes and rasped "Now image that was a human head." This would annoy the gently caress out of me, but I love history so much I read it for fun so that's me.
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Apr 30, 2013 18:48
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JaggyJagJag posted:This was a great, great book. It's fantastic. Though the book I turned around and read right after that was Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, which is an order of magnitude better, although it's essentially a textbook.
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Apr 30, 2013 22:49
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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This may be a bit off-topic, but what spurred the interest in the Roman empire and "Roman" aesthetics during the renaissance? Did they have to wait until the last vestiges of Rome proper died, or did Byzantine refugees have more Roman tastes?
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Apr 30, 2013 23:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:This may be a bit off-topic, but what spurred the interest in the Roman empire and "Roman" aesthetics during the renaissance? Did they have to wait until the last vestiges of Rome proper died, or did Byzantine refugees have more Roman tastes? One reason, anyway, was a sense of finally out-doing the Romans. Europe had spent close to a millennium living with reminders of how great things had been in the distant past, which made their current misery all the worse. Up through the Middle Ages, Rome had represented the epitome of all that was civilized - in art, science, technology, engineering, law, and everything else. Part of the ethos of the Renaissance was shaking that backward-looking worship of the past, once and for all. They at last felt they were the equals, if not the betters, of the Romans. Thus a big driving force in their aesthetics was showing that they could do "Rome" better than the Romans themselves did. That forward-thinking, "the future is going to be even better!" attitude drove much of the Renaissance and continues as a basis for our society today. I'm sure there were other factors in play but that was one.
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May 1, 2013 00:10
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Deteriorata posted:One reason, anyway, was a sense of finally out-doing the Romans. Europe had spent close to a millennium living with reminders of how great things had been in the distant past, which made their current misery all the worse. Up through the Middle Ages, Rome had represented the epitome of all that was civilized - in art, science, technology, engineering, law, and everything else. Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment.
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May 1, 2013 01:49
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Silver2195 posted:Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment. There are different perspectives. One views the Renaissance as a time of rebirth and progress based on the revival of Classical learning, the other considers it a pessimistic period where everyone is trying to recreate fallen glory rather than move forward. You can find evidence for both. I don't think there's a way to determine which is right, or that there even is a right. Both forces mattered. I have an ongoing beef with historians for having these opposing extreme views and parking themselves at one end or the other. It's almost always a combination of the two.
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May 1, 2013 02:03
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Silver2195 posted:Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment. I guess it depends on what period you're focusing on. The early Renaissance was certainly all about rediscovering the learning of the ancient world, but eventually they figured out they could go beyond the Ancients and create their own learning and culture. Thus "doing 'Rome' better than the Romans themselves did." They wanted to recreate the Roman age, but a better version of it in their own image. The transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture illustrates this. The Romans knew of the semicircular arch, but not the pointed arch - that was an innovation picked up from the Moors. A large part of the impetus in building the huge cathedrals was just to show what they could do - feats of architecture and engineering beyond anything even the Romans had been capable of.
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May 1, 2013 02:09
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Silver2195 posted:Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment. A lot of the Renaissance was about going back before Rome, to wisdom supposedly going back to Adam. The idea that history has upswings and downswings is easy to find in the renaissance; lots of "universal histories" get written then. Historical progress isn't an enlightenment invention; it's easy to find it throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for instance in Joachim of Fiore, or in Jewish messianism. This sort of progressive story is often tied to some sort of story of primal decline, but that's true of the englightenment, too (think of Rousseau). You can find a lot of this in medieval Islamic sources, too; that's where most of the Hermetic corpus comes from, and stories of historical progress and decline are intrinsic to hermeticism. Caveat: my background here is the history of science, not political history; but I'm positive that medieval Islam has notions of political progress in it, too.
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May 1, 2013 02:36
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There is discussion concerning what lies beyond the Straits of Gibraltar from the point of view of Rome or Greece, but what about the locals on that "side" of the known "universe". They did not have the same world view that those in educated Greece or Rome did. Before the Roman Empire "civilized" the European continent, how did other cultures see the world? Scandinavian peoples(Vikings) were ocean going peoples, but they did not know of the Middle East. What did they perceive to be what the landscape of the globe appear to be?
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May 1, 2013 03:03
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Nerdfest X posted:Scandinavian peoples(Vikings) were ocean going peoples, but they did not know of the Middle East. What do you mean? How could people trading with much of Europe and with a presence in the Caspian and Black Seas "not know of the Middle East"?
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May 1, 2013 04:25
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Ras Het posted:What do you mean? How could people trading with much of Europe and with a presence in the Caspian and Black Seas "not know of the Middle East"? Yeah that's not true at all. On top of the trade factor you also have the Varangian Guard, which was made up of Kievan Rus and other Scandinavian warriors, plenty of whom returned to Scandinavia after they got tired of serving the Byzantines/were dismissed. Harold Hardrada, the eventual king of Norway who was killed invading England in 1066 is one such example. He actually served as commander of the Varangian Guard and we know for a fact that he fought for the Byzantines in Asia Minor at the least. There are plenty of runestones that have been found in Denmark, Norway, etc. that tell stories of men who served in the Varangian guard, I believe the oldest dates back to 1006. Basically, they're going to go home and they're going to talk about where they were and what they saw which would contribute to Scandinavians at least being somewhat aware of the existence of the Middle East and the types of people who lived there. In the other direction, there's the writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th century Arab who traveled and wrote accounts of the Scandinavian people he visited. Jamwad Hilder fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 1, 2013 |
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May 1, 2013 04:41
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Ras Het posted:What do you mean? How could people trading with much of Europe and with a presence in the Caspian and Black Seas "not know of the Middle East"? I didn't word that correctly, sorry. What I meant was that traveling individuals from Scandinavian regions could encounter individuals from the Middle East, however there does not seem to be a large cultural exchange between them. The stay-at-home populous at large from a culture that utilized a less structured early-year schooling curriculum did not have a general understanding of what life was like for citizens from distant lands. Greek and Roman citizens were much more learned/aware of the world outside their immediate vicinity than other societies that had a less formal education system, like areas of the Scandinavian region. A true "Viking" might know of the peoples and ways of the Middle East, but a dirt-poor farmer's encounter with Middle Eastern culture was quite limited.
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May 1, 2013 06:13
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Thank you to all of you who recommended the History of Rome Podcast, I just started listening to it and figure I can get in 3-4 episodes a day on my way to and from work, and so far it's fascinating and wonderfully accessible. I laughed my rear end off at the way the last King of Rome (Lucius Tarquinius Superbus) was ousted. To dumb it down incredibly, they locked the door behind him while he was out and wouldn't let him back in 
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May 1, 2013 07:06
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Hey Tao Jones I posted some questions about SJC in the colleges thread if you care to check them out.Sleep of Bronze posted:Book 9 is this wonderful part in the story where I think you can make great arguments for either side, and that Homer isn't railroading your perception of the story (to use an entirely inappropriate metaphor). Agamemnon agrees to pay Achilles back hundreds of times over, seemingly fulfilling Achilles' desires, but not only does Achilles trust him on no level, he's moving beyond the very material bases of glory and honour as represented by shares of loot, into something more abstract. His pride has still been insulted, and offering mere goods as compensation is no longer enough. Or you can go with Achilles no longer giving a drat about honour at all, underlined by his willingness now to seem a coward by going home, and to give up all that potential glory of the Trojan War in exchange for a long life. I'm personally a bit wary of Achilles' stance on how much he loved Briseis, but that could well be a factor too. And love is something arguably more universal than the other precepts guiding Achilles, so it gets emphasised by a few modern interpretations (witness Troy). The point of divergence seems to be whether or not you think of Achilles as more like a human or a god. If you believe the former, you could certainly argue that he never actually cared about glory, that which the gods ordained for him but that he would not willingly take at the cost of his friends. Achilles is thus self-loathing, irrationally defending his honor and sending Patroclus into battle as part of what he believes to be his destiny of suffering. He's very much the half-breed, doomed to mortality but still "above" humans in birth and ability, finding refuge among neither group. All he can really do is what he was born to do, but he can't get no satisfaction. I know that that's an Oedipal complex away from a completely modernist analysis, but it's a step above waiving the severest of criticisms towards his character with the rationale that "the Greeks were just assholes." Compare Odysseus. He stays at the house of Circe for a year, and not only because his companions want to--they are the ones who eventually convince him to leave. He talks about the love for his homeland, of which he is king, not his wife or family. I don't think that Odysseus gave any more of a poo poo about Penelope than Achilles did about Briseis, but he had to have her because he's the king. And hey, he had really great manners towards his hosts, which to the average Greek might have made him a pretty good guy. Halloween Jack posted:The Greek gods are really fascinating to me because they essentially behave in the ways you would expect from ordinary people given godlike power--every good and bad thing they do is magnified and has far-reaching consequences, and they squabble a lot. From this fact, I think, is where most people get the idea that Achilles was trying to be a god. Immortality makes the Olympian gods accountable only to Zeus, and he has a more or less "anything goes" policy so long as he isn't particularly offended. In Iliad XX, the uselessness of the gods' physical combat is juxtaposed with the very real consequences of their quarrel on the battlefield. Unlike Achilles and the other warriors, they have the luxury of being able to stop whenever they want. That sort of remorselessness and detachment is what Achilles strove for, for it would have made him a perfect warrior and obviated his need to confront the realities of war as a human being. "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," and the gods are monsters.
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May 1, 2013 07:35
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PittTheElder posted:Quite so. Have you read Carthage Must Be Destroyed as well, out of curiousity? My copy just arrived, I'm pretty excited about reading it. Is there a goon recommended reading list for the thread?
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May 1, 2013 11:48
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quote:And hey, he had really great manners towards his hosts, which to the average Greek might have made him a pretty good guy. What is is with ancient cultures and codes of hospitality? I mean, modern people obviously agree that being a generous host and gracious guest are good things, but for the ancients, it seems like THE thing. Could anyone go into more detail about what being a good host/guest entailed, and what were the cultural reasons this was so important?
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May 1, 2013 15:24
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I personally believe it originated with scarcity of resources. By not being a good host, you could be literally condemning someone to death. I think this is why the cultures still famous for their hospitality tend to be in deserts. Berbers, for example. Part of it is also diplomatic. You don't harm guests/diplomats. If people break that rule, you can't have any kind of contact--there's no other solution in the ancient world than a visit. So it's in everyone's best interest to consider guests sacrosanct. I also think it's a religious scruple. Every religion has them and they're often different, hospitality was just a common one in the ancient world. Look at all the myths that involve a god in anonymous guise either rewarding a good host or punishing a bad one. As for what it entailed, it depends on the culture. I don't know enough detail to speak fully on them, but general things were that if someone ate your food, you could not harm them without angering the gods. If someone came to you in need, and you were capable of helping, people would hate you if you didn't do it. And you couldn't be stingy, you had to be overly generous--and the guest also had a duty to refuse to take advantage of you.
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May 1, 2013 15:34
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According to David Anthony in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language mentioned earlier in this thread (thanks for pointing that out, whoever it was, it was a fascinating read), there's also evidence that the host/guest relationship was particularly important in the culture that spoke Proto Indo-European. As cultures and languages often spread together, it would make sense for that importance to be a part of all the cultures influenced by PIE speakers, i.e. almost every ancient Eurasian culture north of the Fertile Crescent, from the Atlantic to the western Himalayas and on into western Mongolia. Specifically, he cites that "host" and "guest" come from the same PIE root *ghos-ti-. From this and other evidence he theorizes that this relationship was part of how they viewed themselves in relation to the gods and thus was also a model of how people should behave toward each other. As they encountered other cultures with different beliefs, this belief in the guest-host relationship became an identifying feature and a way of knowing who was part of your group and who wasn't. Thus, as the PIE speakers spread throughout Eurasia they spread the importance of guest-host with them.
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May 1, 2013 16:03
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Q: who rightfully owns the Parthenon frieze, metopes, and pedimental statues?
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May 2, 2013 14:32
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Grand Fromage posted:I personally believe it originated with scarcity of resources. By not being a good host, you could be literally condemning someone to death. I think this is why the cultures still famous for their hospitality tend to be in deserts. Berbers, for example. I'd go so far as to suggest these are formalizations of "food sharing", a common behavior in many mammalian species. Obviously the conduct pre-dates Antiquity and even the existence of humans. But I'd speculate it is the root of all diplomacy. Be great if someone who knows something about the zoological perspective would contribute.
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May 2, 2013 15:19
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Komet posted:Q: who rightfully owns the Parthenon frieze, metopes, and pedimental statues? Ugh. Define rightfully? By weight of 'we've had it for goddamn forever, gently caress off' the British government. By weight of 'national' treasure, the current Greek- ahahaha. Ha. sorry. Ahem. The weird cultural amalgamation that identifies with the ancient Greeks mostly by way of geographical accident, the Greek government. In my opinion, it is 'owned' by the British government, 'rightfully owned' by some 2000+ year old dead dude (and/or a polity that ceased to exist as a continuous entity I'd say probably around the Roman takeover if not earlier.) And they probably, as the old saying goes belong 'in a museum,' though specifically, in Athens in their proper context would be best. Though it'd be nice if it could go on tour like a lot of other museum bits. They are a bit big for that though. I do like, I must, the huge passive aggressive gently caress you that the empty displays in the Athenian Parthenon museum represent.
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May 2, 2013 15:44
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Possession is nine tenths of the law in this case.
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May 2, 2013 16:10
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What were the major reasons for the breakdown in City Planning during Late Antiquity? Every source I've looked at thus far just mumbles about 'social chaos, economic decline', but that seems pretty vague to explain how, for instance, big landmarks were abandoned, the main roads were encroached on chaotically, or common meeting places like the Baths/Gymnasia or Forums/Agoras/Big Open Squares disappeared.
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May 2, 2013 16:34
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I know there's a Euro travel thread, but i'm more interested in my History of Rome buddies opinions. I'm headed to Rome tomorrow, and will be spending 3 days there in a little two week European vacation with my wife. At least 1-2 days will be dedicated to Roman history (more the Empire/Republic history than Medieval is the plan), what can I absolutely not miss? We'll be in Rome proper, and can't really do day trips. Staying in the center of the city.
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May 2, 2013 16:41
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