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WoodrowSkillson posted:What debatable claims are you talking about specifically? You started this by saying that "our vision of Caeser is mostly a creation of Octavian/Agustus." That implies a whole lot. I thought I did give examples. The idea that Caesar was accomplished something unique doesn't hold water. His accomplishments look very much like those of a number of other general/politicians who lived at the same time and rapidly followed each other in power. Yet you keep coming across the idea that he was unique and special - even declared divine - and did things that had never been done before. I'm not aware that there was a particular political goal behind the Aeneid, though it is certainly the most famous work Augustus paid for. But I think it's clear his greatest propaganda success was turning Cleopatra into a seductress. I don't know how to link images from Google, but look at her coins (the only contemporary representations we have). I don't want to drop into a cycle where we talk past each other while the rest of the thread wishes we'd just shut up, so I'll throw in some trivia: we may actually have a sample of Cleopatra's handwriting. It's a papyrus giving one of Mark Anthony's buddies special tax breaks in Egypt. It's written by a scribe but signed by somebody else, not with a name, but with a Greek word which translates as "Do it" or "Make it so." There was only one person who could approve that....
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Aug 17, 2013 07:18
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Caesar conquered Gaul which was a pretty drat big deal - sections had been taken and ruled by the Romans but there were large sections that had remained completely independent and unconquered, and Caesar defeated every last single one of them and turned all of Gaul into Roman territory, then did the unthinkable and actually crossed into German territory as part of an incredibly effective scare tactic to keep the Germanic tribes in line. Marius had defeated invading Germanic tribes in the past and saved the Republic, but Caesar went one better by proving that their territory wasn't unassailable or a supernatural zone of terror. For the Romans, Germania was a big scary place across the Rhine that you left alone and hoped no raiding tribes ever emerged from - Caesar established at least the idea that the Romans could and would take the fight to the Germans themselves if they felt like it. Then you have to consider his insane feats of engineering, which were remarkable but not unique in design but utterly incredible in terms of the speed and efficiency in which he executed them. The two walls he put up at Alesia still boggle my mind even to this day, as do the competing walls he attempted against Pompey at Dyrrhachium. Then after he defeated Pompey he proceeds to Egypt and gets involved in a war there, secures Cleopatra on the throne, defeats the last of his Roman enemies and confounds all expectations and accusations of his lust for glory and power by forgiving all those who stood against them AND securing most of them highly desirable positions of power and influence in his new Rome. The things he got his men to do, the speed in which he got them to do it, often without pay or food (when Pompey found out what Caesar's army was subsisting on he ordered the samples destroyed in case word got out that they were facing inhuman beings of infinite resolve) go to show what a hugely loved and respected figure he was. This is a guy who once convinced an army in mutiny over being sent to war without having been paid for the wars they'd already fought to give up their mutiny and join up with him anyway because they realized he was going to do it without them anyway and they couldn't bear the idea of being left behind (or even worse, not being considered Caesar's "fellow soldiers" anymore). Edit: What I'm saying is that Caesar was a guy who stood out. His contemporaries knew him well whether they loved him or loathed him - he was a guy who made a huge impact. He left behind his own propaganda that future generations would thrill over, and did things that massively changed the nature of one of the most powerful and long-lasting empires in history (especially for those in the West). Yeah Augustus pushed for him to be named a God to help his own cause, but Augustus' propaganda was mostly designed to establish his own credibility and appeal. Caesar didn't need the benefit of Augustus' propaganda, Augustus needed the help of Caesar's. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Aug 17, 2013 |
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Aug 17, 2013 07:53
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Jerusalem posted:Augustus' propaganda was mostly designed to establish his own credibility and appeal. ... Augustus needed the help of Caesar's. But really, the things you're talking about are perfectly good reasons for why Caesar may have been a big deal around the time of his death. The question is, how did his name get stuck for millennia? He certainly wasn't the greatest or most important Roman conqueror. The only thing that's truly unique about him from what I can tell is the key role he played in ending the Republic, and maybe writing books about himself that millions of school kids would later read (Gallia omnis est divisa in partes tres ...)
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Aug 17, 2013 10:32
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Cingulate posted:I think that's been the claim all along. It's the school kid part. Caesar became a story as well known to the educated as George Washington is to an American child, as many of the common Latin texts which are read during education are from the fall of the Republic era.
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Aug 17, 2013 17:08
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We can probably summarize it with that Latin was the language for the educated until not very long ago and Caesar's text where he gets to talk about himself was one of the Latin works to learn?
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Aug 17, 2013 17:14
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Jazerus posted:It's the school kid part. Caesar became a story as well known to the educated as George Washington is to an American child, as many of the common Latin texts which are read during education are from the fall of the Republic era. It's easy to forget that Latin was a standard part of American education at least into the '50s, later in some places. My Dad went to high school in the '40s and read Caesar as standard curriculum. I believe he said the Gallic Wars amounted to most of his Latin II class - and this was at a little high school in rural southern Michigan.
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Aug 17, 2013 20:26
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So I finally got around to watching I, Claudius and all I can say is Wow  , the number of people who died prematurely in the Imperial family truly is spectacular and while I know that it is fiction based on history but it seems to be way too many deaths to simply be coincidences. So I wonder are there any sources that indicate that Augustus got suspicious after the early deaths of Marcellus,Gaius and Lucius?
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Aug 18, 2013 01:50
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Deteriorata posted:It's easy to forget that Latin was a standard part of American education at least into the '50s, later in some places. My Dad went to high school in the '40s and read Caesar as standard curriculum. I believe he said the Gallic Wars amounted to most of his Latin II class - and this was at a little high school in rural southern Michigan. In places with high Catholic presence it's still a thing today. My old roommate went to a Catholic high school and had Latin every year he was there, though I think it was an elective.
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Aug 18, 2013 18:31
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Lord Tywin posted:So I finally got around to watching I, Claudius and all I can say is Wow I've not seen I, Claudius (to my eternal shame) so I don't know how this was portrayed in that. But, while the idea of ancient mortality and expected life length is skewed by child mortality rates, it was still a dangerous time to be alive. People got sick and died a lot. Anything you can cure with antibiotics now would basically be a cage match between your immune system and the disease. Surgery and general medical knowledge, while awesome for the time, was still a million miles behind what we know now. So people getting sick or having an unlucky accident and kicking the bucket early was certainly a common thing. I seem to remember that of Augustus's preferred heirs they didn't all die in quick succession, there were some large gaps between them. You can never rule out foul play, especially during this period of Roman history but I get the feeling at least the majority of these deaths were natural and Octavian was just a bit cursed (or rather the people he picked to follow him were). It was Livia
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Aug 18, 2013 19:05
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How did ancient peoples view and treat cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?
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Aug 18, 2013 19:11
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karl fungus posted:How did ancient peoples view and treat cancer, heart disease, and diabetes? Well, there wasn't adult onset diabetes, since sugar wasn't such a huge part,of the diet. Child diabetes was essentially fatal. Same with heart attacks. Although they were less common, to.. Cancer probably had folk remedies and such, but we still can barely treat it now...
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Aug 18, 2013 21:19
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karl fungus posted:How did ancient peoples view and treat cancer, heart disease, and diabetes? Poorly. They didn't really know what cancer was, aside from a tumorous growth, and I remember reading their methods for treating it were exactly as ineffective as you'd expect.
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Aug 18, 2013 21:52
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:I've not seen I, Claudius (to my eternal shame) so I don't know how this was portrayed in that. But, while the idea of ancient mortality and expected life length is skewed by child mortality rates, it was still a dangerous time to be alive. People got sick and died a lot. Anything you can cure with antibiotics now would basically be a cage match between your immune system and the disease. Surgery and general medical knowledge, while awesome for the time, was still a million miles behind what we know now. Hell, a number of Emperors - the tippity-tip top of the quality of life pyramid - died of dysentery, something that rarely affects us nowadays and is considered a minor illness when it does. There's a certain weird sense of justice to the idea of the so-called representative of God, here to lord it over everybody in the empire, dying of the shits.
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Aug 18, 2013 22:01
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I once heard a doctor say "It's taken incredible medical advances to have people die of stress."
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Aug 18, 2013 22:42
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Jerusalem posted:Hell, a number of Emperors - the tippity-tip top of the quality of life pyramid - died of dysentery, something that rarely affects us nowadays and is considered a minor illness when it does. Just so it's clear 'rarely affects us' is entirely true of developed nations, but people in developing nations often get quite sick from dysentery. This cuts down on productivity and the ability to earn a livelihood for millions and it still tends to kill more than 100,000 people a year.
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Aug 18, 2013 22:45
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cafel posted:Just so it's clear 'rarely affects us' is entirely true of developed nations, but people in developing nations often get quite sick from dysentery. This cuts down on productivity and the ability to earn a livelihood for millions and it still tends to kill more than 100,000 people a year. Oh absolutely, though again for the time I was talking about, the Emperors were the heads of what would have been considered THE "developed nation" of their time. From a western-centric point of view, anyway. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 18, 2013 |
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Aug 18, 2013 22:53
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In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, the author mentioned that Egyptian records on cancer noted "there is no cure" and Hippocrates later recommended "remote sympathy" as a treatment. There were probably a bunch of desperate people who tried Steve Jobs style alternative medicine to cure cancer, but it appears that in the ancient/classical era the conventional wisdom of the medical professional class concluded it was a death sentence.
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Aug 19, 2013 00:04
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Hogge Wild posted:
That person's not riding or wrestling it. Look at the way they're gripping the snout. Also stabbing the poo poo out of its neck / shoulder. I think it's interesting or it probably means something that the scorpion is attacking the junk, the dog goes for the throat, and the snake is I guess trying to drink the blood or get to the knife wound.
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Aug 19, 2013 00:45
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Deteriorata posted:It's easy to forget that Latin was a standard part of American education at least into the '50s, later in some places. My Dad went to high school in the '40s and read Caesar as standard curriculum. I believe he said the Gallic Wars amounted to most of his Latin II class - and this was at a little high school in rural southern Michigan. De Bello Gallico is still the standard text for high school Latin II today - I went to a school that offered it as a language and that has not changed at all. Namarrgon posted:We can probably summarize it with that Latin was the language for the educated until not very long ago and Caesar's text where he gets to talk about himself was one of the Latin works to learn? Not just Caesar, but Cicero and other figures from the fall of the Republic (and the early Empire). In many ways that story is the central feature of basic Latin education. Caesar, as one of the major players in the era, pops up all over the place in, for example, Cicero's orations on the Catiline Conspiracy and the trial of Clodius for sexual/religious impropriety. Lord Tywin posted:So I finally got around to watching I, Claudius and all I can say is Wow Clearly it was all Livia. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 00:51
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Actually now that I've thought about it, I'm curious what caused the shift in personal hygiene standards in the West after the fall of Rome? Europe seems to have gone from bath-obsessed under Rome to not giving a gently caress/never bathing for the next 1000+ years or so. Was it the rise of the barbarians and the formation of their own empires? Simply the lack of adequate plumbing after all the Roman stuff fell apart/broke down/was destroyed?
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Aug 19, 2013 01:42
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sullat posted:Well, there wasn't adult onset diabetes, since sugar wasn't such a huge part,of the diet. Child diabetes was essentially fatal. Same with heart attacks. Although they were less common, to.. Cancer probably had folk remedies and such, but we still can barely treat it now... Adult onset diabetes existed - it does not only come from stuffing your face with sugar for years on end!
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Aug 19, 2013 03:59
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Jerusalem posted:Actually now that I've thought about it, I'm curious what caused the shift in personal hygiene standards in the West after the fall of Rome? Europe seems to have gone from bath-obsessed under Rome to not giving a gently caress/never bathing for the next 1000+ years or so. Was it the rise of the barbarians and the formation of their own empires? Simply the lack of adequate plumbing after all the Roman stuff fell apart/broke down/was destroyed? People in the middle ages bathed, it's a misconception that they didn't. There was some Church backlash against the "un-Christianness" of public bathhouses and the prostitution, etc. that occurred at them but that varied from place to place and time to time. Standards of hygiene did fall to an extent since the elaborate and sophisticated Roman bathhouses broke down, but it never fell to the "once a year bath" that Renaissance writers try to make you believe in. It became largely a function of class since a hot bath was expensive and a cold bath isn't pleasant, so the poor did not bathe quite as often as they had when the Roman bathhouses still operated. Guys who were writing as the Renaissance got into full swing really played up how lovely the medieval period was compared to the classical period because they often had academic and personal axes to grind. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 06:19
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Would there be a linguistic connection between Greek and Roman suffixes like -oulos -> -alus? The languages share some things but considering the length of the cultural interplay I don't purport to know which has the original and which has the loan words. Romans were  over Greek poo poo for a while, but then Rome took over the peninsula for several hundred years. Is there a migration theory regarding the Italian peninsula being populated by Greeks/some common ancestor? Or are those similarities merely an effect of the relationship between the two as it progressed through time?
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Aug 19, 2013 16:26
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The Entire Universe posted:Would there be a linguistic connection between Greek and Roman suffixes like -oulos -> -alus? The languages share some things but considering the length of the cultural interplay I don't purport to know which has the original and which has the loan words. Romans were Care to explain what the suffixes mean first? Everyone who might have an answer for you isn't a classicist. As for the bolded, you do realise that Latin and Greek are related languages, right? Without knowing the meaning of your examples (Wiktionary didn't give anything) I can't say whether these are a common Indo-European reflex or a loan. Jazerus posted:People in the middle ages bathed, it's a misconception that they didn't. There was some Church backlash against the "un-Christianness" of public bathhouses and the prostitution, etc. that occurred at them but that varied from place to place and time to time. Standards of hygiene did fall to an extent since the elaborate and sophisticated Roman bathhouses broke down, but it never fell to the "once a year bath" that Renaissance writers try to make you believe in. It became largely a function of class since a hot bath was expensive and a cold bath isn't pleasant, so the poor did not bathe quite as often as they had when the Roman bathhouses still operated. The thing about Western Europeans not bathing is a post-medieval thing too. Like the stuff about the aristocrats just using more and more perfume instead of bathing, and Russian visitors being horrified by the smell of people.
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Aug 19, 2013 17:03
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The Entire Universe posted:Would there be a linguistic connection between Greek and Roman suffixes like -oulos -> -alus? The languages share some things but considering the length of the cultural interplay I don't purport to know which has the original and which has the loan words. Romans were Well, your question is kind of general so it's hard to give a specific answer, but there's this: - As Ras Het said, Greek and Latin are both Indo-European languages, so yes, they will obviously share many cognates (different words with common ancestors). For example, a lot of 'basic' words that start with an H (a spiritus on the vowel, since Greek script doesn't have a character that represents H by itself) in Greek, start with an S in Latin (e.g. hepta, hyper > septem, super). - There were, in fact, several Greek colonies in South Italy, most notably Syracusae. - Some Greek words may have entered Latin through Etruscan. For example, Herakles becomes Hercules in Latin, but 'Hercle!' ('By Hercules' or 'poo poo!') comes from Etruscan, that notably didn't allow for a great deal of vowels in between its consonants. Whether a Latin word that looks suspiciously like a Greek one is a loanwords or a cognate is a case by case thing. However, if a word in Latin for some reason has a Z, K, Y or CH, chances are it's a loanword. There are almost no indiginous Latin words that have those letters.
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Aug 19, 2013 19:01
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Jazerus posted:People in the middle ages bathed, it's a misconception that they didn't. There was some Church backlash against the "un-Christianness" of public bathhouses and the prostitution, etc. that occurred at them but that varied from place to place and time to time. Standards of hygiene did fall to an extent since the elaborate and sophisticated Roman bathhouses broke down, but it never fell to the "once a year bath" that Renaissance writers try to make you believe in. It became largely a function of class since a hot bath was expensive and a cold bath isn't pleasant, so the poor did not bathe quite as often as they had when the Roman bathhouses still operated. There's that one Arabic author who talked about Rus Viking hygiene with some distaste, and I know there was one record of an English(?) commentator complaining that the Norse, because they had better hygiene, were seducing all of the local girls. Can't remember the details though...
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Aug 19, 2013 20:22
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the JJ posted:There's that one Arabic author who talked about Rus Viking hygiene with some distaste, and I know there was one record of an English(?) commentator complaining that the Norse, because they had better hygiene, were seducing all of the local girls. Can't remember the details though... The Arabs during the golden age had a Roman standard of hygiene, so I'm sure bathing once a week seemed positively barbaric, but it's still much better than the popular perception of medieval bathing. The Norse were pretty dedicated to hygiene from what we can tell, but not necessarily due to bathing frequency. They also brushed their teeth and cleaned their ears often, which might well have been uncommon in England - I'm no expert on medieval bathing, just relaying what I've always heard from medievalists.
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Aug 19, 2013 21:22
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The Entire Universe posted:Is there a migration theory regarding the Italian peninsula being populated by Greeks/some common ancestor?
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Aug 20, 2013 00:24
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Cingulate posted:I think that's been the claim all along.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:47
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Jazerus posted:The Arabs during the golden age had a Roman standard of hygiene, so I'm sure bathing once a week seemed positively barbaric, but it's still much better than the popular perception of medieval bathing. The Norse were pretty dedicated to hygiene from what we can tell, but not necessarily due to bathing frequency. They also brushed their teeth and cleaned their ears often, which might well have been uncommon in England - I'm no expert on medieval bathing, just relaying what I've always heard from medievalists. In some cases, unhygienic habits - if they did exist - were caused by superstition. The Polish plait is one such notorious example.
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Aug 20, 2013 07:57
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achillesforever6 posted:It also helps that the books that Caesar wrote were purposely done in a simplistic way that anyone who knew basic Latin could understand. Personally I just find the story of Julius Caesar extremely inspiring and enthralling of how a man could rise to power so quickly and effectively. I envy his ambition and tact; he was also at least not a complete dick sans genocide of the Gauls and actually gave a poo poo about the common people.
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Aug 20, 2013 09:16
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Well if you are not saying it was worse in the Principate then what are you arguing? That the Republic was inherently better?
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Aug 20, 2013 09:55
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That the final destruction of the Republic, which was a largely undemocratic oligarchy of the richest among Roman citizens, has a lot to do with Caesar and was a bad thing. One man rule lead to a lot of bad things. Caesar cynically courted the people and supposedly acted in their interests but despotism wasn't in the end actually in the interests of the people. A better way would have been a Republic that grew more democratic as time went by. But that's a complete and total pipe dream for so many reasons. I should probably cool it with the Falernian.
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Aug 20, 2013 11:18
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The Principate worked for nearly 100 years after Caesar until Nero really got going, unless you count Tiberius causing trouble on his island as a empirewide negative. Yeah he was not helping, but the average Roman could care less what he was up too and the government worked under him. It then worked great again for another 100 years until Commodus. Really until the crisis of the third century, the Principate worked pretty drat well compared to basically any other government form in history.
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Aug 20, 2013 11:36
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I am taking issue with the assumed fact that a democratic system is automatically 'better' than a despotic one. Especially if in the same paragraph you repeat that there are no real measurable pros or cons for the common people. To be fair I also really only focus on the common people because gently caress the senators, really. I'm not too concerned if a rich patrician had slightly less to say under an imperator than under two consuls if there was no real difference for a thousand commoners.
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Aug 20, 2013 11:43
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Hogge Wild posted:
That's the tauroctony, which is a Mithraic mysteries thing.
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Aug 20, 2013 12:50
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Is it wrong that I watched the first episode of I, Claudius and felt completely bored? Maybe it's just because I don't subscribe to the "Livia did it" theory.
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Aug 20, 2013 14:02
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It's a bit of a tough watch, different TV era. Especially after watching Rome. But try to stick with it, it is fun and there's Brian Blessed and Patrick Stewart with hair and poo poo.
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Aug 20, 2013 14:09
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Yeah, there's certainly a culture/production clash going from Rome to I, Claudius. A couple of things kept nagging at me: -Augustus' portrayal. Rome's influence is certainly huge here since Rome portrays him as a cold, logical monster (which seems to be mostly historically accurate). Brian Blessed, while showing off some of Augustus's political savvy, isn't really the calculating figure (but still, Brian Blessed). -Agrippa was cast too old. I get why (they got the best actor they could) but he should be about the same age as Augustus. -Patrick Stewart never had hair. Ever.
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Aug 20, 2013 15:17
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Don't think of it as tv, just think of it like a play. Brian Blessed and Patrick Stewart are fun but the best performance really is John Hurt as Caligula.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:03
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