|
The Vatican is awe-inspiring and amazing. I would not miss it.
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 16:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 18:48 |
|
|
The ancient part of Rome is fairly small and easy to walk around. Everywhere is touristy, but it's touristy for good reason so don't feel bad. The Forum, don't skip the Altar of Caesar or Trajan's Column. The Pantheon. The Capitoline Museum. The Vatican Museum. The Vatican is much larger... I don't know which I'd recommend over the other. Go early, there's a huge line. The Capitoline is less crowded. The Colosseum. Also you can get a single ticket that gets you into a lot of these sites and lets you skip the lines, always do that. Augustus' tomb is cool and there's a nice little museum next to it. It's also close to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was Hadrian's tomb originally. And the bridge in front of it is original Roman construction and still in use. The Baths of Caracalla are cool too. There's so much to see I don't know how to even cut it down but those are solid highlights. All these things are fairly close to one another, which is handy. The only thing I'd suggest skipping is the Circus Maximus. You can see it from the top of the Palatine Hill and there's no reason to go down there, there's literally nothing left. Admire the large hole in the ground for a few seconds and go back into the imperial palace. I would also highly suggest just wandering aimlessly across the city, if you have the time.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 16:53
|
|
|
I'm super enjoying this thread; thanks for all the effort in posts. I'm very new to the subject (I've read overview articles in Wikipedia and the like, but nothing substantive) and would like a good book to dig into (my dumb searching has turned up way too many answers that look reasonable). Specifically, I'd love a "highlight reel" type book covering the glory days of Rome - big events, who's who, and the basic factors of what happened and why. Can someone recommend a good one? (Apologies, as I'm sure this has been asked before - but in my sampling of the thread I haven't bumped into it).
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 17:00
|
|
|
Oh and I didn't ignore the Elgin Marbles question, it's just a can of worms I really don't want to pollute the thread with. I think we have a higher caliber of poster here in SA history threads but that discussion is like catnip for assholes. All I will say on the topic in general is museums are the best place to preserve artifacts and I think taking things out of museums because of what assholes did centuries ago sets a bad precedent. And living in East Asia has confirmed my belief that people in general need to make a concerted effort to get over poo poo that people's long-dead ancestors did to other people's long-dead ancestors. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:06 on May 2, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 17:04
|
|
|
Syracuse is Greek and Dokdo is Korean 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 17:12
|
|
|
AdjectiveNoun posted: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. Well in large part, there wasn't rigorous city planning in the first place for most building. Cities tended to be built up with little direction, and often the only time a plan wider in scope then "I want to build a block of housing/shops" would happen would be in the aftermath of some kind of catastrophe that wiped out an already-built area. And there weren't really laws that would restrict people from encroaching on previous built things, if no one else stopped you from doing it. Obviously if what you were doing upset someone with power, then they'd "politely ask you" to stop what you were doing, but otherwise it was kinda free game.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 17:18
|
|
|
euphronius posted:The Vatican is awe-inspiring and amazing. I would not miss it. It really is. St. Peter's might just be the most beautiful building in the world.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 18:23
|
|
|
Yeah, make sure you get to the Vatican. It's crowded, but the only part that's crowded to the point of it really hampering enjoyment is the Sistine Chapel. Try to arrive early in the day, though. And its museum is great, and goes all through Italian history; plenty of Roman and even Etruscan stuff, not just Renaissance and Medieval. Also definitely seconding the "wander Rome" thing. There are actually all sorts of (cat infested) ruins just scattered about the city in nice little parks.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 18:34
|
|
|
AdjectiveNoun posted: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. It's probably worth remembering that, throughout this period, urban life was very much a minority experience, and (although most people in towns weren't rich) it was the life of the elite. The urban elite depend economically on the wealth created by the rural majority, so that once it began to be a problem to do that, because trade was being disrupted by civil wars and invasions, it got increasingly difficult to sustain it. Taxation was also crucial here. A lot of what you're talking about was public property sustained by public money, so as the central Roman government gradually lost control of parts of the empire, it lost its tax base and couldn't pay for the public buildings. You then get the transistion from Roman provinces to "barbarian" kingdoms whose rulers either didn't have the money to keep up towns of the same kind because they weren't running a huge and wealthy empire any more or just didn't share the Roman cultural tradition as to what a town should be like, or both. "Economic decline" may sound a bit pat, but a lot of these things do come down to money, and the rest come down to culture.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2013 19:38
|
|
|
General Panic posted:You then get the transistion from Roman provinces to "barbarian" kingdoms whose rulers either didn't have the money to keep up towns of the same kind because they weren't running a huge and wealthy empire any more or just didn't share the Roman cultural tradition as to what a town should be like, or both. Some of the later "barbarian" rulers also let certain towns deteriorate on purpose. The Frankish move from Trier to Metz has been theorized to have been to emphasize the shift from a Roman past to a Frankish present. Trier still would have been a pretty Roman place at it's core, and it's possible that Metz would have been easier to highlight as a "Frankish" city.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2013 00:01
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
In the forum, be sure to pick up an audioguide. It costs five euros, but it's really the only way to know what you're looking at since they've taken down most of the signage. Skip the Baths of Domitian by the Termini station, they're incredibly boring and the ones by Caracalla are more interesting. Unfortunately Nero's Domus Aurea was closed when I was there, and I think it's going to be closed forever due to water damage. The Largo Argentina forum is close by the Vittorio Emmanuele monument, and that's where Caesar was assassinated. It also hosts a cat sanctuary.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2013 23:02
|
|
|
Were the ancient Romans aware of Latin as a language in the same way that we view languages? Like, were they aware of its grammatical rules in a formal sense and did they have things like dictionaries? Did they have anyone in charge of maintaining the integrity of the language, like some modern European countries do?
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 01:35
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Were the ancient Romans aware of Latin as a language in the same way that we view languages? Like, were they aware of its grammatical rules in a formal sense and did they have things like dictionaries? Did they have anyone in charge of maintaining the integrity of the language, like some modern European countries do? The Latin that you normally see is considered the high-register version of the language. Basically the formal speech used by the upper-classes. Generally, Latin was standardized mostly by people referencing spellings in major works. Latin was also influenced heavily by rhetoric schools and grammarians like Quintillian. Than being said, I have seen a few spelling differences between versions of the Aeneid. So in some sense, Latin before the Medieval period was more like English. There are a lot of formalizations, but they are done in the context of past works.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 02:06
|
|
|
I just learned in the History of Rome podcast about the first sack of Rome (which is utterly fascinating for the stalemate that took place) and how nearly all of the written records of that earlier period were completely destroyed. I am curious though, surely there were enough people alive in the aftermath to make new records of what happened while the memories were still fairly fresh/the oral history became warped by the passage of time? Were the Romans of the time just too busy rebuilding the city/fighting off armies trying to take advantage etc to put back together a comprehensive history, or did it just not even enter their heads to bother?
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 02:43
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:I just learned in the History of Rome podcast about the first sack of Rome (which is utterly fascinating for the stalemate that took place) and how nearly all of the written records of that earlier period were completely destroyed. I am curious though, surely there were enough people alive in the aftermath to make new records of what happened while the memories were still fairly fresh/the oral history became warped by the passage of time? Were the Romans of the time just too busy rebuilding the city/fighting off armies trying to take advantage etc to put back together a comprehensive history, or did it just not even enter their heads to bother? Well they did put together histories, but they'd be in the limited narrative mode of the time. Today's historians don't have access to the vast array of writing that allows us to compile the more authoritative understanding that History of Rome represents. We only know about what has survived - and that leaves massive gaps in our knowledge.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 03:45
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Were the ancient Romans aware of Latin as a language in the same way that we view languages? Like, were they aware of its grammatical rules in a formal sense and did they have things like dictionaries? Did they have anyone in charge of maintaining the integrity of the language, like some modern European countries do? To understand the ancient Roman idea of Latin as a language, you have to understand how Romans were educated. By around the middle Republic area at the latest (Cato the elder railed against it*), when a young man from a well-off family was old enough to do so, the family would hire a tutor to read the classics over and over again until the style was absorbed. For example, for pretty much the entire period of the empire, Cicero was held up as the absolute ideal for a Roman rhetorician. This form of learning stands in marked contrast to linguistics today, and you can compare it to being taught that writers and politicians should compose and speak as close as possible to the works of Shakespeare. The idea of a language adapting and changing over time is a relatively modern notion. Now, this is a good way to keep the language "pure", as a social norm (for the upper classes) rather than a legal authority like the Academie Francaise. But people all over the Latin-speaking areas had their own vernacular dialects and daily speech that changed over time. So though wags in the capitol would make fun of an emperor from the provinces like Septimius Severus who spoke their Latin with a distinct Punic accent, for the vast majority of people in the provinces who never ventured far from their home town, they continued to speak the language of their family and neighbors and probably never gave a second thought to how they did it. * But Cato was a hypocrite in this regard. He had his sons educated in the "traditional" Roman way - which was more or less trade apprenticeship - but he was a classically trained orator whose use of Greek showed he was well-trained in the classics.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 11:39
|
|
|
Do we have any grammars from Greek/Roman antiquity? Who was the Panini of those cultures?
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 14:49
|
|
|
QCIC posted:Do we have any grammars from Greek/Roman antiquity? Who was the Panini of those cultures? I don't think that there is a direct equivalent to Panini for Greek/Latin -- possibly you could count the entire school of Alexandrian grammarians on the Greek side. And yes, there are a couple of extant (at least in fragments) grammars. The oldest extant Greek grammar that I know of is Dionysus Thrax's (although there is a lot of dispute over whether this it is actually written by him) Art of Grammar (Τέχνη Γραμματική). On the Latin side, you could probably count Varro's "On the Latin Language" as a grammar -- although the sections that we have of it are more about etymology than anything else. His view of grammar seems to be that it should be interpreted from the language itself rather than dictated. At the very least, he shows a very similar awareness of things like grammatical case and declension. A more relevant, albeit later grammar is Aelius Donatus' 'Ars Grammatica' (specifically the section called 'Ars Minor') where he outlines, among other things, the 8 parts of speech. My understanding is that it was widely used as a teaching grammar in the Middle Ages and is written in a question/answer format.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2013 17:48
|
|
|
Troubadour posted:
Don't mean to derail but I see this bandied about as fact far too often for comfort: l'Académie française is indeed the acting authority on the language but its rulings are advisory only. It has no legal authority whatsoever, and there's no language police ready to whack you over the head if you use the wrong tense, nor will you be fined for poor syntax or incarcerated for treason if you use a foreign word. For all its pomp the Académie isn't that different from the Oxford English Dictionary editor's staff. As opposed to say Icelandic, which has about zero loan-words. It's the law. Content: Petronius posted:Emi ergo nunc puero aliquot libra rubricata, quia volo illum ad domusiónem áliquid de iure gustare. Habet haec res panem. Nam litteris satis inquinatus est. From the Banquet of Trimalchio. Trimalchio is a freedman who through hard work and perseverance has attained power and wealth, but alas not breeding as made clear here. Now, I don't know Latin nearly well enough to snort at the numerous grammatical and stylistical errors Trimalchio is guilty of in the above quote, but one thing stands out even to me: áliquid de iure and the use of a preposition. This is something you see in all (?) modern Romance language, but not ever in classical Latin. It does however hint at the possibility that such sentence structures had become more common place among the wider populace by the 1st century AD.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2013 13:42
|
|
|
quote:nor will you be fined for poor syntax or incarcerated for treason if you use a foreign word We spend a lot of time dealing with language laws for our Quebec offices. You might not get put in prison for using English where there should be French, but your business can be fined to oblivion. Maybe they don't do this in France proper right now (I don't know) but it's definitely not out of the question that they'd enforce language with laws if they felt they needed to.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2013 17:39
|
|
|
jmzero posted:We spend a lot of time dealing with language laws for our Quebec offices. You might not get put in prison for using English where there should be French, but your business can be fined to oblivion. Québec is Québec. It's not a French colony, département, territory or dominion or anything. No particular economic ties to France, and only limited cultural exchange. Whatever the legal-linguistic situation is in Québec it has nothing to do with the Académie francaise. quote:Maybe they don't do this in France proper right now (I don't know) but it's definitely not out of the question that they'd enforce language with laws if they felt they needed to. Snort, no. Believe me that will never happen, you obviously don't know the French. I repeat, the AF has no legal power, nor is it a bulwark safeguarding the purity of the French language, it is merely advisory organ and as such one of several in Europe. Derail over?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2013 21:56
|
|
|
Mr Havafap posted:Snort, no. Believe me that will never happen, you obviously don't know the French. Like Quebec, French law requires that commercial signage and government documents be conducted in French, or include a French version. This is not particularly notable - most countries with an official language have something similar. Even the United States, which does not have an official language at the federal level, has laws mandating that government documents be offered in the local languages that are most popularly spoken (i.e. Spanish in areas with a significant Spanish-speaking population). This is done to ensure that there is a language standard, and no one can be taken advantage of (for example by publishing a voter's guide in Latin in the areas that aren't likely to vote for the incumbent). While the Academie Francaise has no powers, it is the official lingual body and advisory board for what is considered the French language. If there was a civil case where the French court needed interpretation of whether an advertisement was properly in French or not, their opinion would weigh heavily with the court.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2013 22:44
|
|
|
How aware were people of or how did they understand profound changes around them? For instance, did people living through the Crisis of the Third Century feel that it was hitting the fan or that it was a temporary setback (that ended up going on and on)? Is there any hope of finding more reactions of pagan writer's to early Christianity? I know Celsus only survived because Origen block quotes in his rebuttel.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 04:54
|
|
|
It's hard to tell, but generally people aren't aware of it--or are only aware in a general sense, not in an analytic way--while it's happening. For instance, right now will probably be considered a profound period of change in the future, but the shape of that and how it will be viewed is basically impossible to tell. People likely speculated like we do but I'm not aware of anything that survives in written form.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 05:23
|
|
|
The criticism I've heard of the Academie Francaise is just that they refuse to acknowledge new words that have become commonly used. Although I suppose any language would look stingy next to English, the bastard language to end all bastard languages. This year the Oxford English Dictionary has added a slew of words including "braggadocious," "burrata," "cruft," "friend zone," and "blootered." Anyways, are there any good books on ancient nomadic societies? I've been having a devil of a time finding anything on them.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 09:43
|
|
|
How did they explain the long list of "Roman deity = Greek deity"? Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Hermes/Mercury. Unlikely dozens of deities in 2 separate pantheons from 2 cultures so close together evolved completely independent of each other, yet have so many similarities, in many cases differing only in name (or not even that: Apollo).
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 10:20
|
|
|
It wasn't even really a thing that needed an explanation -- the Romans appropriated them and were pretty conscious of that. The Roman foundation myth was in part that Aeneas, a Trojan prince, came over to Italy with his homeboys after the fall of Troy and founded a city that was a precursor to Rome. It wasn't a big stretch to imagine the Olympian cults coming with him.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 11:30
|
|
|
Nerdfest X posted:How did they explain the long list of "Roman deity = Greek deity"? Roman religion was like English language: they didn't so much borrow gods as pursue other pantheons down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for loose deities. (That sounds glib but it's really not; it's not even remotely a coincidence that the two pantheons overlapped so much, because a) Roman religion was incredibly syncretic, and b) the Romans loved Greek culture and stole it whenever possible, in this case borrowing the Greek gods and attaching them to local deities with vaguely-similar descriptions.)
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 11:31
|
|
|
The Roman gods predate the integration of Greek culture. The popular hypothesis is both pantheons are outgrowths of a much older religion, of which we have only scattered evidence. There are temples to an ancient goddess that appears to be a pre-Greek version of Hera. And in this religion the goddess seems to be primary, not the male gods. But there's nothing written and very little archaeological evidence found yet. However, the Roman gods go back to the Etruscans and earlier, before Greeks ever went to Italy. The resemblance of the pantheons also varies widely. Apollo is the same dude. Mars/Ares are absolutely not at all the same dude, despite both being the god of war and often considered equivalent by modern readers. Romans did also adopt foreign gods widely.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 12:59
|
|
|
The question about Roman=Greek religion seems to come up a lot. As Grand Fromage says, the correspondence between Roman and Greek deities was nowhere near as tight as it is sometimes portrayed. There was some equivalence in names and roles, i.e. Mars = Ares in a superficial sense, but as others have pointed out, Mars was in many ways a central god of the Roman mythos who represented a variety of positive (at least as they perceived it) aspects of Roman culture, while Ares was more of a bogeyman who represented the destructive, chaotic aspects of war. Also, as many posters have pointed out, Romans consciously adopted elements of others' religions. In Rome's early history, before they had as much exposure to the Greeks, the Archaic Triad of deities included Jupiter as the god of kings, Mars as the god of warriors, and Quirinus as the god of the people or of the state. As time went on, Quirinus became less important in active worship, but is reflected in the orders of official priesthood that persisted all the way to the principate. If you're interested, start with this article on Wikipedia and poke your way around from there. Wikipedia also has a pretty decent description of the priesthood structure, which usually only pops up in Julius Caesar's biography for casual students of Rome, and can be thought of as a fossil record of early Roman religion. Finally, remember that major gods, like Jupiter, Mars, or Minerva, would have had innumerable cult versions as distinguished by their epithets, in which various aspects of their personalities and function were emphasized. Sometimes this was syncretic, where a local god shoehorned into the Jupiter role would gain a mixed appellation -- for example, Jupiter Taranis was a Gaulish version of Jupiter based on the Celtic thunder god Taranis. Other times it was more ancient and represented ancient Roman aspects of the god's role, although these might be syncretic epithets whose origins are lost in the mists of time. There's a lot of academic work on the origins of Roman culture and religion, but like all academic work, there are various camps who disagree with each other and I'm not qualified to really judge who's right.  Basically, the easy 1-to-1 correlation between Roman and Greek deities is the product of lazy teaching on the part of modern learners, and is a gross oversimplification of actual Roman religion.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 14:03
|
|
|
In general the effort to make a Roman god equal to a Greek god is something that begins as an active effort in the Republican period (meaning that authors are involved)... and so similarities will be stressed by a particular author while differences will be elided (Ares versus Mars is a good example, as is Hera versus Juno or Ceres versus Demeter -- all of whom are starkly different). However, if you mean to talk about why they are so similar in 'origins' -- it is also worth noting that at an early date even talking about "Roman" versus "Greek" culture/gods is a problematic thing in a way that not many people think about. See, early 20th century anthropologists were super interested in the idea of 'cultural essences' -- that is to say the original and 'pure' culture of a people. Also it was widely held that 'true' religion was originally highly moral, abstract, and free from ritual -- influenced strongly by early German Protestant scholars who believed that Catholic style 'ritual' was a debased form of religion (like many scholars, reflecting their personal biases more than any approximation of reality). So, the only way that you could get back to this 'pure' culture was by stripping away three things: (1)all of the foreign elements that contaminated it, (2) the sterilization of 'true religiosity' by a growing obsession with priestly ritualism and (3) the alienation of an urban society from what was originally a rural, family based worship. This view of later Roman religion as a 'debased' or corrupted by Greek/foreign influences was hugely influential in early scholarship on Rome (after all, it had to be 'weak' if Christianity was able to overcome it) -- badly put, in order to find the true Roman culture, they thought you had to strip away the influences of the debased Greek religion and 'foreign' Eastern cults, while simultaneously stripping away all of the ritual nonsense that no one believed in. What was left was a sort of pure, hardworking, moral, agrarian but most importantly, truly Roman man. If that sounds a little bit like the Aryan philosophy that was the philosophical bedrock of Nazism -- there is a good reason -- because, essentially it was part of the same research movement (to be fair, I don't mean to pick on the Germans -- almost every European nation was very interested in the same sort of cultural exceptionalism and scholarship on the Indo-European or "Aryan" peoples was widely accepted prior to World War II... and after). Reputable scholars now aren't so much interested in tracing the 'origins' of a pure culture -- and so, it is easy to say that the 'Roman' gods were always in a state of dialogue with the 'Greek' gods... sometimes borrowing from each other, sometimes contrasting. Roman culture, like all cultures, is a constantly changing mixing pot of tons of influences. It is clear that even in Roman 'pre-history' they were something of a weird mix of Etruscan city state and Greek Italian colony. As J.Z. Smith said of comparisons -- it is not enough to say 'A is like B' but 'A is more like B than C with respect to D'. So, rather than saying what elements of Greek culture were there in Rome, it might be better to ask how Rome in the pre-Republican period was similar to Etruscan or Greek colonies in respect to the names of their gods (short answer: nobody knows!). (edited so that Hermes = Mercury... not Mars... because I shouldn't write posts when tired!) Also, as Grand Fromage and Lewd Mangabey have pointed out, when a Roman author (as opposed to a modern scholar) says that "Hermes = Mercury", this is never a neutral statement but rather a claim about something. In saying this, an author might be claiming that Rome is a part of the greater Greek world (Romans frequently felt their own arts were inferior to that of the Greeks and so they frequently overcompensated). Conversely, someone like Polybius might say that "Hermes = Mercury" to show that Rome is actually SUPERIOR to Greece and that 'Mercury' is closer to the 'true' origin of that god (and Hermes is a debased form). Or, if a Roman says "Hermes = Mercury" it may simply be a way to include foreign visitors and give them a reference point. This is not so different from a modern instructor saying 'Hermes = Mercury' as a way of giving students something that is easy to understand and filtering out the distracting (and frequently crazy) complications of Roman religion. Oh -- and if you are truly interested, the best book on the history of Roman religions is Beard, North, and Price's Religions of Rome -- Volume 1: A History. Although quite dense, it goes over what evidence actually exists for various periods of Roman Religion and examines, in detail, Rome's relationship with Greece. Also good is Feeney's Caesar's Calendar which, while discussing Caesar's standardization of the Roman calendar' goes over how even innocuous things like "how do I reference the date of something" are heavily nuanced claims about culture. DirkGently fucked around with this message at 22:05 on May 6, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 21:06
|
|
|
I like the post, but Mars where you presumably mean Mercury was getting very distracting by the end. 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 21:46
|
|
|
Sleep of Bronze posted:I like the post, but Mars where you presumably mean Mercury was getting very distracting by the end. How embarrassing -- let's just pretend I had a tiny seizure while writing the post and suffered some very specific brain damage!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2013 22:03
|
|
|
DirkGently posted:How embarrassing -- let's just pretend I had a tiny seizure while writing the post and suffered some very specific brain damage! We'll just chalk it up to mercury poisoning!
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2013 01:30
|
|
|
Are there any records of the last Roman pagans? I mean after Christianity became the state religion and paganism was outlawed, there must have been a century or two worth of holdouts. Do any specific records survive?
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2013 21:58
|
|
|
Julian the Apostate was the last pagan emperor in the early 360s. He attempted to bring back traditional Roman religion, but it didn't take. Our word "pagan" is derived from paganus, which is basically a hill person or country folk. Traditional Roman polytheism likely endured in the more rural areas of the empire for several generations after Constantine, but I don't have any specific examples.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 00:55
|
|
|
Christianity didn't actually become the state religion until right before the empire split, though, under Theodosius. I suppose Gibbon must have creamed himself over that.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 01:16
|
|
|
There were probably hardcore Roman pagans in rural areas for a long time. Like well into the middle ages. The church didn't really record the details of the paganism they were going after, unfortunately.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 01:52
|
|
|
AdjectiveNoun posted: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. Think Detroit. Once a city begins to decline, the process begins to snowball and affect major parts of the city that a few decades before seemed indestructible. The urban farming projects which grow crops on disused and overgrown properties in Detroit today are a good example of the kind of transition processes which would have been occurring as government resources dried up and tax collection became difficult. Grand Prize Winner posted:Are there any records of the last Roman pagans? I mean after Christianity became the state religion and paganism was outlawed, there must have been a century or two worth of holdouts. Do any specific records survive? There are stories of small pagan villages in the Appenines and really all around the former empire for hundreds of years, but little evidence for how long they resisted conversion - they understandably did not wish to draw much attention to themselves, so we have no idea when the very last pagan village fell to a plague or whatever. As far as I know though, Roman pagans were not really a high priority for either the nobility or the church after the fall of the west, anywhere - the pagans outside of Christian Europe were much more dangerous after all. It's important to understand, though, that conversion away from traditional Roman paganism was well underway by the time Christianity became a major religion in the empire. Mystery religions and other alternative to the state cults picked up a lot of converts during the Crisis of the Third Century, when traditional polytheism was perceived as having failed, so Roman paganism was already in a bit of a tight spot before Christianity was instated as the state religion.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 03:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 18:48 |
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:There were probably hardcore Roman pagans in rural areas for a long time. Like well into the middle ages. The church didn't really record the details of the paganism they were going after, unfortunately. The last people that we know worship the old Greek/Roman gods in any real way where in the hills in Peloponnese in the 11th century and even then it was more like a local cult. This came out of a recent (couple of years old) study in the area. Beyond that we have no real knowledge of when various religions ended their existences.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 03:57
|
|
