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euphronius posted:I'm pretty sure only the aristocrats exposed less than perfect babies. You probably would have been a slightly inefficient Helot. I guess that's better than nothing, but who knows? I have a knack for music and might make for a decent entertainer if someone could figure out how the Greeks/Romans played their music. Speaking of which, does anyone know what ancient greek/roman music sounded like? I've run across a few obscure references like 'tune your lyre to the key of Jupiter' but that's of no help whatsoever.
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May 11, 2013 22:04
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There are videos of youtube on bands that try to create Roman music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLxv3IOfj5s This one is apparently a full album more dedicated to wind instruments.
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May 12, 2013 01:21
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Mach5 posted:I guess that's better than nothing, but who knows? I have a knack for music and might make for a decent entertainer if someone could figure out how the Greeks/Romans played their music. I've heard that maybe the modern modes (Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc) are descended from ancient music, but that specific songs or styles are a total mystery to us. I suppose through folk music one could suss out a very vague idea, but that's an extremely long shot. Folk instruments, though, do help us find out at least what the instruments of antiquity sounded like, and we know from art of the time what the instruments looked like. Essentially, though, we have no idea about what Western music sounded like (except for instrumentation) prior to the Middle Ages, IIRC.
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May 12, 2013 03:28
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NEED TOILET PAPER posted:I've heard that maybe the modern modes (Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc) are descended from ancient music, but that specific songs or styles are a total mystery to us. I suppose through folk music one could suss out a very vague idea, but that's an extremely long shot. Folk instruments, though, do help us find out at least what the instruments of antiquity sounded like, and we know from art of the time what the instruments looked like. Essentially, though, we have no idea about what Western music sounded like (except for instrumentation) prior to the Middle Ages, IIRC.
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May 12, 2013 04:13
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NEED TOILET PAPER posted:I've heard that maybe the modern modes (Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc) are descended from ancient music, but that specific songs or styles are a total mystery to us. I suppose through folk music one could suss out a very vague idea, but that's an extremely long shot. Folk instruments, though, do help us find out at least what the instruments of antiquity sounded like, and we know from art of the time what the instruments looked like. Essentially, though, we have no idea about what Western music sounded like (except for instrumentation) prior to the Middle Ages, IIRC. I don't know about Roman music (other than that it is discussed in Landa's 'Greek and Roman Music') but for ancient Greek music... believe it or not, there are actually a few scraps of musical notation that survive on papyrus fragments (and inscriptions) along with some ancient scholarly discussion of musical modes and ratios-- there are tons of unanswered questions about them (notably, I do not think that there is any timing or beat information) but some scholars/musicians have taken pretty decent stabs at recreating them with period instruments. The only book I have ever read on the subject is Martin West's Ancient Greek music which was alright, but there is also website -- here-- where the guy has midi versions of most of the surviving ancient songs (spoiler: they sound awful). DirkGently fucked around with this message at 05:08 on May 12, 2013 |
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May 12, 2013 05:03
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Amused to Death posted:There are videos of youtube on bands that try to create Roman music This 'feels' Roman to me, which makes me immediately distrust it. What's their methodology?
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May 12, 2013 08:34
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Grand Prize Winner posted:This 'feels' Roman to me, which makes me immediately distrust it. What's their methodology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaulia They are the best we're ever going to get, I imagine.
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May 12, 2013 11:56
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Looks like it sounds Roman because they've been making Roman movie soundtracks for a while.
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May 12, 2013 11:58
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Grand Fromage posted:Looks like it sounds Roman because they've been making Roman movie soundtracks for a while. I was rewatching HBO's Rome yesterday, and I could swear their music showed up in it a few times.
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May 12, 2013 12:00
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Barto posted:I was rewatching HBO's Rome yesterday, and I could swear their music showed up in it a few times. Wiki says you would be correct.
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May 12, 2013 15:47
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Thanks for correcting me guys, good to know we're not totally in the dark about Greek and Roman music  Content: what perception did Romans have of people from different parts of the Empire? For example, were there any qualities or stereotypes associated with Romans from Iberia, Illyria, etc?
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May 12, 2013 21:26
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It's worth mentioning that a major cause of death in childbirth pre-surgery used to be cephalopelvic disproportion (fetal head too big to pass through maternal pelvis). This was made more common by poor nutrition, growth disorders, and things like tuberclular deformities of the spine. There's solid evidence of a correlation between maternal height and maternal pelvis size, so an undernourished or overstressed population is going to have more small-pelvised women.
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May 12, 2013 22:10
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Star Man posted:If you were a man. The mortality rate for women was much higher because of the dangers involved with being pregnant and childbirth.
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May 12, 2013 22:32
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I've heard people say "We'd have had jet fighters by 1200 AD if Rome had never fallen/the library at Alexandria hadn't been burned." How true is that? How quickly did new technology tend to catch on in late antiquity (100BC-500AD)?
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May 12, 2013 22:36
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Thanks for the answers regarding lifespan, everybody. I'm a bit silly to be trying to assert something without actually knowing the details myself.Space Monster posted:I've heard people say "We'd have had jet fighters by 1200 AD if Rome had never fallen/the library at Alexandria hadn't been burned." I'm sure someone else can give a proper answer, but I think it's important to note that the technology we have today is not here through the minds of inventors alone- societal factors that take thousands of years to overcome, not to mention trade networks that were just not present in antiquity, are absolutely essential too. These aren't things that snap overnight, and the innovations and changes in thought produced by millions of people over centuries are more important than the innovations produced by a handful of dudes in one city. You can't just say what if the library hadn't burned and what if Rome hadn't fallen- it's not like someone flipped a switch that doomed the empire overnight, it was a whole slew of factors that accumulated over centuries, with perhaps the most important among them- climate change- being completely out of human control. The world in which the Roman Empire did not fall when it did would be a radically different world from our own in more ways than there just being jet fighters during the crusades.
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May 12, 2013 22:50
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The speed of overall technological advance wasn't any faster between Augustus and Maximinus Thrax than it was between 1000 and 1250.
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May 12, 2013 23:15
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Space Monster posted:I've heard people say "We'd have had jet fighters by 1200 AD if Rome had never fallen/the library at Alexandria hadn't been burned." Another example of this being BS is the reciprocating (i.e actually useful) steam engine. The processes required to make pistons are derived from the processes needed to make cannon, which required trade with china for gunpowder. Although that's a vast oversimplification. Scrolls on philosophy and geometry will only take you so far. The lost knowledge (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is more about "what they were thinking" than "what did they know"
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May 12, 2013 23:18
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Space Monster posted:I've heard people say "We'd have had jet fighters by 1200 AD if Rome had never fallen/the library at Alexandria hadn't been burned." A lot of technology wasn't possible without the gradual improvements in metalworking, mining, and so on that took centuries to happen. And the burning of the library or fall of Rome didn't really do anything at all to slow down those improvements that were neccesary for real technological progress to be made.
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May 12, 2013 23:33
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Arsenic Lupin posted:It's worth mentioning that a major cause of death in childbirth pre-surgery used to be cephalopelvic disproportion (fetal head too big to pass through maternal pelvis). This was made more common by poor nutrition, growth disorders, and things like tuberclular deformities of the spine. There's solid evidence of a correlation between maternal height and maternal pelvis size, so an undernourished or overstressed population is going to have more small-pelvised women. Oh definitely - the diet and health of the mother are very significant factors in a successful birth. Inadequate nutrition and vitamin deficiency can cause a lot of difficulties throughout a pregnancy. But the Romans were very healthy people - they were fed regularly, had clean water, and were fairly hygienic. I don't think that it was a problem that would be common place. Indeed, they may have had an advantage there, in that our contemporary struggle with obesity is causing endemic problems with high blood pressure and diabetes, which can complicate pregnancies. I think that on the whole, Roman women likely had moderately higher risks surviving childbirth than the modern woman - but good birthing practices and a society of younger and healthier mothers would have helped ensure a higher rate of success than one might expect.
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May 12, 2013 23:51
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NEED TOILET PAPER posted:Thanks for correcting me guys, good to know we're not totally in the dark about Greek and Roman music I can't really talk about broad scale perceptions (although they definitely had them about other provinces, especially against 'barbarians' from Gaul and Iberia) except the most general ones: Spartan women were known as the best courtesans (basically Roman Geisha), everyone from Thrace was a witch, people from Asia were soft and effeminate. As a side fact, Ovid portrays Roman Jews as a prosletyzing mob who were always bothering you on the way to the market, basically like agressive preachers on a college campus. Maybe it is not what you are looking for but, if you read the poems of Catullus you also will get some funny insights into Roman prejudices in general. Some tidbits: [Catullus 39] Spaniards (from Roman Spain) are always trying to show off their glistening white teeth, smiling even at a funeral -- which is odd, since everyone knows that they bleech their teeth with urine. [Catullus 37] We further learn that the Celt-Iberians are hairy, low class and (incidentally) having sex with Catullus' girl. [Catullus 84] Everyone knows that to speak with a Greek accent was the height of culture in late Republican Rome -- so some poor rustic yokels think they can mimic it by just adding 'h's to the beginning of all their words ('opportunity' becomes 'hopportunity', which is a pretty good translation of the pun 'commoda' becomes 'chommoda'). Technically they are just adding rough breathings to vowels (which was a thing you could do in Greek but is represented by an actual letter in Latin... well... most of the time anyway). DirkGently fucked around with this message at 00:23 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 00:19
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Install Gentoo posted:A lot of technology wasn't possible without the gradual improvements in metalworking, mining, and so on that took centuries to happen. And the burning of the library or fall of Rome didn't really do anything at all to slow down those improvements that were neccesary for real technological progress to be made. It also ignores that there was actually a lot of technological progress during the Middle Ages, it was not a stagnant dark age like it's been portrayed for so long. THAT SAID, in some hypothetical world where the empire remained strong and vibrant across Europe, I suspect there would've been earlier advancement. The Middle Ages were not a dark age but there was disruption. Rome's global trade network would've remained fully intact, for one thing. And there were technologies that were lost, like the steam engine and the mechanical computer. It's possible someone could've realized the potential there. But this discussion isn't far off the possibility of aliens showing up. I'd say it's nonsense but not entirely nonsense.
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May 13, 2013 01:32
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Also, despite the Romans' engineering prowess, I figure there would be be a certain limit to technological advancement without the invention of algebra, which (I believe) was an Arab invention, occurring outside of the Roman world.
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May 13, 2013 02:04
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HELLO THREAD READERS one of my more mathematically inclined friends informed me that it is actually line algebra I was talking about; they did not have college-level mathematics in 2000BC that said they did still have algebra so it's not like my point is moot 
Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Aug 3, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 02:13
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I think the theoretical "bump" we would have enjoyed had the library stood and Rome recovered and transitioned more gradually would is something like 50-200 years depending on the "what ifs" and the point of divergence from history. A world with a strong Western Roman Empire that resists the Arab conquest but does not in turn conquer them could have led to a worldwide golden age with Europe not being as isolated from Baghdad and never losing the classics. Having real links between Baghdad, Constantinople, Rome, and Chang'an would have legitimate potential to alter world history. The fall of the west did effectively isolate Europe from the intellectual advances in the Arab world and who knows what potential inventors or geniuses spent their lives translating the Bible instead of studying algebra in Baghdad. Enough advances were made that I do not think that stupid graph that claims we would have had cars and planes in 1600 is even remotely right, but a world where the industrial revolution happens in the 1700's or late 1600's is certainly plausible.
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May 13, 2013 02:14
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The idea of a constant intellectual exchange between Europe, the Middle East, and China is definitely the most likely way things could've been different. All three have examples of amazing advancements that were made and never capitalized on, either because no one knew how or no one saw the potential and they were ignored. Just because Romans treated steam engines as nothing more than a toy doesn't mean the Han would've done the same, for one example.
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May 13, 2013 02:31
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For serious though, my understanding of the steam engine situation was that people at the time it was first invented didn't have access to really high quality materials, and that this led to a disinterest in developing it. Steam engines even in the 1700s and 1800s were still prone to blowing out or losing pressure and they had much better metallurgy involved.
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May 13, 2013 03:11
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We don't know why no one was interested in developing it further. It just doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that it had the potential for bigger things. My pet theory has always been that slave societies have little incentive to work on labor-saving devices so they tend not to industrialize.
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May 13, 2013 03:22
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Grand Fromage posted:My pet theory has always been that slave societies have little incentive to work on labor-saving devices so they tend not to industrialize. I think that there's some meat to this theory, though the obvious counterpoint to be worked around would be Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
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May 13, 2013 03:29
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True, though that was probably the most major industrial development of the south and it was entirely to enhance the products of the slave economy. And, tend not to.  No rule is hard and fast. But there is clearly some reason why the south didn't and the north did, and the economy being based on slave agriculture is the only one that makes sense I think.Let's not get too far down that rabbit hole. I only bring it up because slavery is such a central component of the Roman economic world and the American south is what we're most familiar with in that regard. Though as we've talked about before, big differences between the two institutions. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 03:38 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 03:35
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Kaal posted:I think that there's some meat to this theory, though the obvious counterpoint to be worked around would be Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Nah, the cotton gin removed the main bottleneck to cotton production (and also had been around for a while, to boot), so adopting the cotton gin meant that slave plantation system could produce a lot more cotton then possible without it. And more cotton meant more cotton for industrial production, more acres brought under production, more money to prop up the new nation.
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May 13, 2013 03:45
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Grand Fromage posted:We don't know why no one was interested in developing it further. It just doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that it had the potential for bigger things. I think it's more that the related underlying technologies hadn't been developed yet. A functional steam engine requires a level of sophistication in metallurgy and fabrication that simply didn't exist in Roman times, and had no reason to exist for another millennium. It's easy to miss the huge number of interrelated and overlapping technologies needed to make even fairly primitive machinery operate reliably. A big factor in kicking off the industrial revolution in England was the amount of wood they were consuming. By the 18th century, they were genuinely starting to worry about running out. Then they found coal as a substitute. However, coal had to be dug out of the ground and transported, and thus the whole steam era grew out of that. That sort of pressure didn't exist for the Romans, and steam technology was the solution to a problem they never had.
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May 13, 2013 03:45
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Also, didn't the Roman Army use something akin to a production line to produce its armor and weapons? Or am I imagining that?
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May 13, 2013 03:46
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Yes, military equipment was mass produced. They also had large water powered factories for some purposes like milling grain. They definitely had some concepts resembling large scale industrial production but it didn't become generalized like it did during the Industrial Revolution.
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May 13, 2013 03:49
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And the impression that I'm getting was that it didn't spread because of lack of necessity and not-quite-there materials science. Is that correct? edit: gently caress, this post sounds like really douchy but that's not my intent, just can't phrase it better. vv: I fully agree with you, guess I'm just trying to puzzle out the forces that worked against industrialization when it kinda-sorta-if-you-squint-at-it seems like the basic idea was there. Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 08:02 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 03:55
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Those were probably two factors. It's really hard to tell why, we don't know much about it. And reducing it to any single reason is likely wrong.
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May 13, 2013 04:04
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"If Julian won..." is my favorite among the late-antiquity speculations. But there's the question of whether Byzantine Christianity would have spread to Western Europe if the Goths had not been converted.DirkGently posted:Maybe it is not what you are looking for but, if you read the poems of Catullus you also will get some funny insights into Roman prejudices in general. 43 also gives us some idea of what an urban Roman thought was attractive: "Greetings, girl with a not-so-small nose, not-pretty feet and not-dark eyes, not-long fingers and a not-dry mouth, who is not so eloquent of speech... are you what the provinicals call pretty?"
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May 13, 2013 04:13
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Grand Fromage posted:We don't know why no one was interested in developing it further. It just doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone that it had the potential for bigger things. Well the thing is that if you try to develop a steam engine further if your materials aren't good enough, you get a face full of steam and shredded wood/metal/etc. And that's a pretty big disincentive to keep mucking about with your steam engines.
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May 13, 2013 04:40
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Install Gentoo posted:Well the thing is that if you try to develop a steam engine further if your materials aren't good enough, you get a face full of steam and shredded wood/metal/etc. And that's a pretty big disincentive to keep mucking about with your steam engines. Iron technology, in particular, was never a priority for the Romans. They stuck with stone because it's what they knew. Iron was difficult to obtain, refine, cast, mill, and all the rest needed for using iron as a structural material, so they never bothered. If someone had developed, say, the Bessemer process in 100 AD, it might have become a useful metal for them. But again, the Bessemer process itself developed to solve a problem, one the Romans never encountered - making cannons, which you mentioned earlier. It gets back to technology developing as a way of solving problems. Societies that never face certain problems never have a need to develop a particular technology. The growth of technology is not some externally-driven imperative: it is haphazard and random, with a lot of happy accidents and mistakes. It's rather like evolution, actually.
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May 13, 2013 05:30
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Apologies if this has been addressed already, but what's the consensus on Legio IX Hispana? Was it broken to pieces in Britain? Did it continue to exist in some capacity, since senior officers appear in later actions? How often were legions disbanded or reconstituted in the Roman imperial era?
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May 13, 2013 05:54
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Just harking back to what the guy further up the page said about the loss of knowledge from antiquity, I have an interesting show for you about about how we've developed to the point where we have jet fighters and the entire modern world. James Burke's Connections- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOp-nz3lHg
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May 13, 2013 09:49
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