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There's a nod at the idea in the Euthyphro, but neither Socrates nor Euthyphro seem interested in it to my recollection.
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Jun 13, 2013 14:30
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Giodo! posted:You could make an argument for this trend demonstrating the centrality of television/cinema to American culture, rather than focusing on vampires. We're decidedly not naming our children after famous generals or farm implements, but a popular TV/movie character can spawn a generation of Aryas or Bellas. I'm going to argue with myself here. Apparently "Major" as a boy's name is rising very rapidly in popularity, which is possibly attributable to the ongoing U.S. military ventures. Or to Catch-22 character Major Major Major Major.
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Jun 13, 2013 14:33
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Giodo! posted:I'm going to argue with myself here. Apparently "Major" as a boy's name is rising very rapidly in popularity, which is possibly attributable to the ongoing U.S. military ventures. Or to Catch-22 character Major Major Major Major. What would be interesting to know is which part of the population it's becoming popular among. I guess the sad thing about ancient societies is that we mostly have the names of the people who are in power. Question to the historians in the thread: Do we know any ancient cultures' popular common names? edit: Other than Rome, I guess.
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Jun 13, 2013 14:38
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Obdicut posted:Ancient religion question. This came up in another thread. In the Greek context, at least, gods were worshiped because they were powerful and worthy of reverence, not the other way around. It wouldn't make much sense to argue that if nobody worshiped Poseidon, there wouldn't be any more shipwrecks. The meaning of sacrifice is a very complicated question and I don't think it's possible to answer it in a definitive way that's agreed upon by scholars. But I don't think the Greeks thought their literal gods literally received the literal meat. I think the meaning of sacrifice was more about paying the obligation and, by so doing, placing yourself into a certain proper relationship with reality which you broke only at your peril; not so much because you wanted a good relationship with a specific divinity. A very imperfect analogy might be paying taxes; there's a way in which you could view it in quasi-mystical terms. You offer up some of your income because it's what political reality demands of you and by doing it you're put in a harmonious relationship with that reality. But more to the point, the reason you pay taxes is not because you think that by doing so, you'll have a special relationship with public servants or your representatives or the President. (Consider how absurd the "I pay your taxes, therefore you are compelled to let me out of this traffic ticket!" line of reasoning is.)
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Jun 13, 2013 15:13
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There are some traditions where sacrifices are very literal, but I don't think Greek or Roman religion was. It was more that you put forward the effort. And yeah it was taken as a given the gods existed and you worshiped them so they wouldn't decide to kick you in the nuts, not because they needed it. Remember that these gods are mostly gigantic assholes who also have divine power.
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Jun 13, 2013 15:18
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What stopped the Arabs from destroying the Byzantines, or at least conquering broad swathes of the old western Empire? Wouldn't Rome have been in a severely weakened state at the time?
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Jun 13, 2013 15:39
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The Roman army eventually stopped them, and the Roman navy stomped any attempt the Arabs made to assault on the water instead. The Arabs had a good run against them but the empire still had the most badass military in Europe for quite some time and were able to hold them off. Also eventually the Muslims began to split into factions and fight each other, which helped take the pressure off everyone else. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Jun 13, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2013 15:44
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Tao Jones posted:In the Greek context, at least, gods were worshiped because they were powerful and worthy of reverence, not the other way around. It wouldn't make much sense to argue that if nobody worshiped Poseidon, there wouldn't be any more shipwrecks. Grand Fromage posted:There are some traditions where sacrifices are very literal, but I don't think Greek or Roman religion was. It was more that you put forward the effort. Thanks. I wonder how the idea arrived, if it really did come from RPGs. I have a question about the sponsorship of public buildings. Was this done? What I mean by this is, like, here in the US at the new MOMA or whatever you'll see the plaque with the people who donate it. I feel that I've heard about occasional things like that in Rome, but was it similar to how it is now, that the wealthy would endow public buildings as a part of their way of demonstrating power and influence? Or were the things they funded more temporal, feasts, bread, etc?
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Jun 13, 2013 16:12
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It was absolutely done all the time. The front of the Pantheon is the best example: The text says Marcus Agrippa built this (paraphrased; I never learned Latin  )They did it in the exact same ways modern people do. Even in arenas there were ads around the inside walls and there were frequently carvings in front of seats saying that Senator Gaius Scrotus paid for the construction of these seats and this is the Gaius Scrotus seating area or whatever.
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Jun 13, 2013 16:21
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Grand Fromage posted:It was absolutely done all the time. The front of the Pantheon is the best example: It says Agrippa, who was consul three times, built it. I guess I'd assumed inscriptions like that meant they did so in their governmental function, the same way we have "Mayor Curley built this".
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Jun 13, 2013 17:33
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Of course, it's interesting to note that the inscription is technically lying - the Pantheon was rebuilt by Hadrian after Agrippa's was destroyed in a fire. Hadrian was nice enough to put Agrippa's name on the replacement though, perhaps because he had already stamped his own name on thousands of other buildings throughout the empire anyway.
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Jun 13, 2013 17:37
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karl fungus posted:What stopped the Arabs from destroying the Byzantines, or at least conquering broad swathes of the old western Empire? Wouldn't Rome have been in a severely weakened state at the time? Basically, they reached the limits that they could realistically expand to. They had constantinople under siege once or twice, but weren't able to crack those walls. Also, their navy was insufficiently fireproof. Still, they managed to seize Rhodes and Crete with it. After the battles of Tours and Talas they began concentrating on infighting over religious and temporal issues, and so didn't really have the wherewithal to launch dramatic conquests again until the Turks showed up and started overrunning Persia.
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Jun 13, 2013 19:08
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Third Murderer posted:Of course, it's interesting to note that the inscription is technically lying - the Pantheon was rebuilt by Hadrian after Agrippa's was destroyed in a fire. Hadrian was nice enough to put Agrippa's name on the replacement though, perhaps because he had already stamped his own name on thousands of other buildings throughout the empire anyway. And of course fate would have it that the Pantheon would be one of the most famous Roman structures still standing. 
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Jun 13, 2013 21:43
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Obdicut posted:It says Agrippa, who was consul three times, built it. I guess I'd assumed inscriptions like that meant they did so in their governmental function, the same way we have "Mayor Curley built this". Okay, so bad example. That one is like that, but there are other ones everywhere where a rich person paid for something and had inscriptions on it to boast. Pompey's theater was just out of his own pocket, I think. Public buildings prior to the principate were largely funded by wealthy patrons, and they got the credit for them. Eventually the emperors take over much of this function as the wealthy patron, so you get Vespasian's amphitheater and the like.
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Jun 14, 2013 01:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Okay, so bad example. The Via Appia is a good example of about which you speak.
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Jun 14, 2013 01:33
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Here's a probably dumb question inspired by Rome: Total War. At some point in the game, a little 'event' pop-up appears that says that this is the time when Rome kicked all the philosophers out of the city. What is this referring to? An actual event?
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Jun 14, 2013 12:03
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Obdicut posted:Here's a probably dumb question inspired by Rome: Total War. At some point in the game, a little 'event' pop-up appears that says that this is the time when Rome kicked all the philosophers out of the city. What is this referring to? An actual event? I'd be interested in this too, a little search only found a reference to a group of Athenian philosophers who'd traveled to Rome in 155 B.C being kicked out of the city for "introducing the younger generation to unnatural pleasures".
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Jun 14, 2013 12:08
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Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome around 90 AD, following a political fight that resulted in the execution of three aristocrats who had said mean things about the Imperial system, and the banishment of several other co-conspirators (as part of a general "reign of terror" by Domitian, who was not one of the good ones, as Emperors go). The opposition were known for their dedication to Stoic philosophy, and there had been Stoic-based opposition to Vespasian in the past, so Domitian decided to solve the problem by throwing all the bums out.
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Jun 14, 2013 12:59
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Obdicut posted:Ancient religion question. This came up in another thread. As far as I know it was invented by Harlan Ellison in the 60s. Was Attila the Hun a Christian? I thought he was, but someone called me on it and now I don't have a clue. I know he was called "the Scourge of God" (but not if he called himself that) and retreated from Rome after the Pope persuaded him not to attack it, but neither of those are definitive.
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Jun 14, 2013 14:02
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House Louse posted:As far as I know it was invented by Harlan Ellison in the 60s. I know this one, or rather, I know that it's unknown. There's very little written history from the Huns. We know almost nothing about their culture itself, much less their religion or attitude towards religion. And Atilla backed down not because the pope persuaded him but for logistical reasons.
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Jun 14, 2013 14:06
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Obdicut posted:And Atilla backed down not because the pope persuaded him but for logistical reasons. I'm pretty sure that's still up for debate.
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Jun 14, 2013 14:49
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Veeta posted:Thanks to the topography of the area, control of Antioch is of supreme importance to anyone wanting to march an army through Anatolia and into the Levant, or vice versa. The harbour in Antioch silted up combined with a change in trade routes from the Southern route where to the Northern route pretty much doomed the city.
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Jun 14, 2013 15:23
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Koramei posted:I'm pretty sure that's still up for debate. Sure. How about : There exists almost no evidence for the contention that Leo persuaded him, other than people writing about the time who had reason to support Leo. There is abundant evidence that the logistical situation was dire and that marching on Rome would have been incredibly risky for not a hell of a lot of reward.
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Jun 14, 2013 15:28
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Obdicut posted:I know this one, or rather, I know that it's unknown. There's very little written history from the Huns. We know almost nothing about their culture itself, much less their religion or attitude towards religion. Thanks. I was expecting it to be something like that.
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Jun 14, 2013 15:29
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If you can read Russian there is some interesting stuff on the Huns the Soviets dug up in the 70's and 80's. I don't think it's ever been translated.
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Jun 14, 2013 15:32
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Grand Fromage posted:The Roman army eventually stopped them, and the Roman navy stomped any attempt the Arabs made to assault on the water instead. The Arabs had a good run against them but the empire still had the most badass military in Europe for quite some time and were able to hold them off. Well, you can also look at that topographical map of Turkey posted earlier and get a pretty good answer why the Arabs didn't blitz to Constantinople. Not their kind of terrain, so to speak. They had less problems running all the way to Spain, and into France (but again, terrain issues and infighting put a hamper on things). There wasn't much stopping them as long as the terrain was land-connected and relatively flat.
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Jun 14, 2013 16:52
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What made the Arab army so good? (Apologies if this strays from Late Antiquity to Early Medieval) I know the Eastern Romans and Persians had bled each other white, but I'm having a hard time finding any good sources on what the Arab army was like, or how it was able to expand so quickly and seemingly effortlessly, especially when Arabia is hardly a huge population base to draw soldiers from.
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Jun 14, 2013 17:04
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AdjectiveNoun posted:What made the Arab army so good? (Apologies if this strays from Late Antiquity to Early Medieval) I know the Eastern Romans and Persians had bled each other white, but I'm having a hard time finding any good sources on what the Arab army was like, or how it was able to expand so quickly and seemingly effortlessly, especially when Arabia is hardly a huge population base to draw soldiers from. Unless I'm mistaken, areas such as Mesopotamia and Syria had massive populations.
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Jun 14, 2013 17:08
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Unless I'm mistaken, areas such as Mesopotamia and Syria had massive populations. Normally, but I believe that at the time of the Arab Conquests, they'd been depopulated as a result of the aforementioned Roman-Persian wars.
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Jun 14, 2013 17:12
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AdjectiveNoun posted:What made the Arab army so good? (Apologies if this strays from Late Antiquity to Early Medieval) I know the Eastern Romans and Persians had bled each other white, but I'm having a hard time finding any good sources on what the Arab army was like, or how it was able to expand so quickly and seemingly effortlessly, especially when Arabia is hardly a huge population base to draw soldiers from. I've seen a few references to Arab archers completely smoking their Persian counterparts - which is, like, pretty loving impressive considering that foot archers were one of the pillars of the Sassanid military. Also, bad generalship on the Persian side probably didn't help them much. Sassanid leadership could be comically terrible at times. As in, "the entirety of their cataphracts charged into a ditch and died" terrible. I wish I was exaggerating. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 18:30
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AdjectiveNoun posted:What made the Arab army so good? In the period of the early Arab conquests, I think it was probably similar to what made the Mongols and other nomadic peoples good. They were mobile, they were fast, they were used to operating in difficult terrain, they weren't bogged down with complicated logistic arrangements. Being representatives of a spreading religion would also have helped. If some tribe in a country they were aiming to conquer went over to Islam, that was more strength for them, although there were instances of Arab tribes that remained Christian but fought alongside the Muslim armies.
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Jun 14, 2013 18:51
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Pimpmust posted:Well, you can also look at that topographical map of Turkey posted earlier and get a pretty good answer why the Arabs didn't blitz to Constantinople. Not their kind of terrain, so to speak.
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Jun 14, 2013 18:56
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Seoinin posted:Also, bad generalship on the Persian side probably didn't help them much. Sassanid leadership could be comically terrible at times. As in, "the entirety of their cataphracts charged into a ditch and died" terrible. I wish I was exaggerating. Alright I have to hear this.
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Jun 14, 2013 18:56
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General Panic posted:In the period of the early Arab conquests, I think it was probably similar to what made the Mongols and other nomadic peoples good. They were mobile, they were fast, they were used to operating in difficult terrain, they weren't bogged down with complicated logistic arrangements. Were the Arabs nomadic? I thought they were based around oasis-cities, but still largely sedentary. Would explain a lot if that was the case, though. quote:Being representatives of a spreading religion would also have helped. If some tribe in a country they were aiming to conquer went over to Islam, that was more strength for them, although there were instances of Arab tribes that remained Christian but fought alongside the Muslim armies. A fair point but... this seems almost unheard of elsewhere in history. I can't think of another religious people that were able to convert former and potential foes so easily.
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Jun 14, 2013 19:14
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Sleep of Bronze posted:Alright I have to hear this. The Sassanids were fighting the Huns. The Huns, knowing the Sassanid cataphracts were arrogant as hell, dug a big ditch in a way were they would have a hard time seeing it until they fell in. The Huns rode out opposite and plinked a few arrows at the cataphracts before feigning a retreat. The cataphracts did what idiots on shiny horsies do and pursued, throwing the line into disorder. Then they ran into the ditch and fell in. The cataphracts behind landed on the ones in front and crushed them. Hundreds of the Persian professional military caste, including their general, got bushwhacked by a loving Looney Toons prank. e. whoops the 6000 number was from a later battle where Belisarius killed a pile of dudes with a trench. Even so, it's still hilarious. Funnier still is that the Sassanids reacted by going "eh. Fair play to the Huns!" then turned around and used the ditch idea against the Romans to similar effect. Heavy cavalry can be really loving dumb sometimes. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 19:14
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Sleep of Bronze posted:Alright I have to hear this. I haven't read about the "charging into ditches" thing, but miraculous comebacks and amazing tactics are the defining tropes of early Islamic traditions, so it is worth being a little bit sceptical about them. Most of them were written in the eighth century when they had already won and were more focused on increasing their families' prestige, hence their ancestors' amazing war-time feats. Of course, since we don't have anything better, they are probably usable to give us a barebones version of what happened, but definitely not as accurate accounts of how a battle happened. Edit: Oh, it's the story from Procopius, which opens up another can of worms... if there's one thing I've learnt from my degree, it's that Procopius is complicated and you can't really decide which part of what he wrote is accurate or just lies. AdjectiveNoun posted:What made the Arab army so good? (Apologies if this strays from Late Antiquity to Early Medieval) I know the Eastern Romans and Persians had bled each other white, but I'm having a hard time finding any good sources on what the Arab army was like, or how it was able to expand so quickly and seemingly effortlessly, especially when Arabia is hardly a huge population base to draw soldiers from. I don't think the Arab armies were particularly advanced, but it was just a case of there being many of them unified by a new religion against two weakened empires. The Arabs were everywhere in the Middle East at this stage, being the majority of the population of cities like Aleppo (iffy on Antioch, but possible as well!), not to mention being in charge of local border defence for centuries. I would suggest that part of the reason they succeeded was that they were used to the Byzantine/Persian way of war and so were able to beat them at their own game. Arabian society is also a tribal one, so all men were supposed to be capable of fighting in theory - meanwhile Byzantine towns only had a small local garrison and a common strategy was to resist for a while to get good terms, then surrender/make a cash payment, after all, what's the point of getting your cities destroyed? (By this stage a central field army was needed to respond to any incursions, which takes a long time to arrive...), so locally the Arabs most likely had a manpower advantage. The problem becomes bigger when the field army was destroyed... there's not much else the locals could do apart from surrender. As for the Arab armies themselves, there are no contemporary sources describing them, with only later Islamic ones going into any detail, so it is impossible to know for sure, but as I said, I doubt they had any significant military innovations or strategies that made them so good. It is probably just circumstances (I know, boring way to explain things). Basically every region they conquered were either undergoing civil war (Sassanid Persia, Armenia and Visigothic Spain), had weak centralised control after a long war (Syria and Palestine) or had internal political conflicts (Egypt and North Africa). When Constantinople was stronger again or when facing Charles Martel's Franks, the Arabs didn't do as well. Durokar fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 19:27
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AdjectiveNoun posted:What made the Arab army so good? (Apologies if this strays from Late Antiquity to Early Medieval) I know the Eastern Romans and Persians had bled each other white, but I'm having a hard time finding any good sources on what the Arab army was like, or how it was able to expand so quickly and seemingly effortlessly, especially when Arabia is hardly a huge population base to draw soldiers from. Seoinin posted:I've seen a few references to Arab archers completely smoking their Persian counterparts - which is, like, pretty loving impressive considering that foot archers were one of the pillars of the Sassanid military. I think I read a discussion about that quite some time ago on atarn.org. Just searched for the thread, but couldn't find it. So, as far as I can recall that the argument went, the parthians used hornbows, while there is ambiguity about the main type that the arabs used. I have seen references to quite long selfbows. The parthians had a larger form of the eastern scythian bow that would shoot quite heavy arrows. It is peculiar that there is so little information on the arab bows of that era to be found on the web. I have had the pleasure of reading a translation of "Saracen Archery" by Taybugha from the 1500s, but there was no mention of the form of the older bows. So, that doesn't tell us much about the actual weapons that were used back then. It's probably more reasonable as Seoinin pointed out to look to better leadership and organisation of the arabs as the reasons why the Sassanids lost that war than just a particular type of weapon that isn't so hugely different in function.
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Jun 14, 2013 20:40
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It's also worth mentioning that the Persians not only had just lost the 20 year war, but also were in the middle of a civil war as well. The Byzantines managed to puf together a big army, but made the classic mistake of fighting with a bottleneck to their rear. So when the retreat began, it turned into a panic at the bottleneck. Not that it mattered, since the Arabs had dudes waiting in ambush at the other side... But it was a massive defeat, with few survivors. As far as the siege of Constantinople went, the Arabs put it under siege several times but the Byzantines usually bribed barbarians to help drive them off.
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Jun 14, 2013 20:43
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The other notable thing about the loss was that I think Yarmouk was the only major battle in the Arab Conquests (at least in the part that involved Rome). It's an occasion where both sides raised huge armies, and wound up throwing them against each other; reading accounts of the lead up to the battle suggests that neither of them really wanted to fight that battle either, but the concentration of one forced the other to do the same. As it happened, the Arabs won the day, smashed the army, and it took the Romans a long, long time to recover, by which time Egypt and Syria had been lost to them, and then they never managed to win it back. Large pitched battles like that were super risky, and people avoided them if they could. That's why there are so few of them in the medieval time frame, and the ones we know are usually pretty famous. Much safer to play a conservative game of seigecraft and maneuver.
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Jun 14, 2013 21:33
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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More stuff about Greek naval names in Athens! Page 119 of "Lords of the Sea" "It was perhaps inevitable that Athenian men, who enjoyed thinking, talking, and joking about sex when they were not actually engaged in it, should have at times viewed sex organs and sex acts as extensions of their experiences at sea. A woman's vagina could be described as a kolpos or gulf, like the Corinthian and Saronic gulfs, where a happy seafarer could lose himself. As for the penis, a modest man could claim to have a kontos or boat pole, an average man a kope or oar between his legs, and a braggart a pedalion or steering oar. Inevitably too, the erection poking against an Athenian's tunic was referred to as his "ram." Sexual intercourse was likened to ramming encounters between triremes, but the men did not always take an active role. The popular Athenian sexual position in which the woman sat astride her partner gave her a chance to play the nautria or female rower, and row the man as if he were a boat. A man who mounted another man might claim to be boarding him, using the nautical term for a marine boarding a trireme. Sexual bouts with multiple partners were sometimes dubbed naumachiai or naval battles." Suddenly the reason a girl might be named "naval victory" becomes clearer 
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