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WoodrowSkillson posted:They were going to have them read commercials before the gladiator fights as well, and it other places, since that is what the Romans really did. They nixed it because it felt too modern and they were worried it would be too jarring for viewers. They cut that out of Gladiator for that reason. Famous gladiators did product placement and endorsements and all the same advertising poo poo modern athletes do, but they didn't think anyone would buy it. E: On the mercy topic, the Romans had a similar idea, and it's a common thing in a lot of cultures. If you surrender as soon as we show up, you're treated well. If you resist, we will kill/enslave all of you. It's for entirely logical and practical reasons. Sieges/assaults of cities are hard, even for a powerful army, and no one wants to do them unless they have no choice. So, getting the word out that surrendering as soon as the Romans show up is a really good idea helps out because more people will surrender, making Rome's job a lot easier. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Oct 18, 2013 |
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Oct 18, 2013 15:33
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Godholio posted:One of my favorite things about that show (and I loved that show) was the commercials in the news. Yeah, I enjoyed the dejected look that he'd get on his face whenever he'd have to read a commercial. I heard they were going to cast him for a minor role in Game of Thrones (that fat merchant that hosts Daenerys in the beginning), but it didn't happen for reasons that I can't recall. It would have been nice to see him again.
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Oct 18, 2013 15:59
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Omg they killed off Caesar! Never watching Rome again!
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Oct 18, 2013 16:17
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Dude spoiler alert. God drat.
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Oct 18, 2013 16:23
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Actually while we're talking about the HBO show, was Mark Antony really that much of a oval office in real life? The actor who plays him does such a fantastic job making that character so disgusting, I'm wondering how much of that is based in history.
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Oct 18, 2013 16:37
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He was a pretty big dick, yeah. Infamously corrupt and Caesar removed him from administrative duties because he kept having soldiers violently put down any issues that cropped up. If you believe Plutarch, he knew about Caesar's assassination in advance because he was approached as part of the plot. He didn't join but didn't warn Caesar, either.
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Oct 18, 2013 16:46
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Antony comes off (in history) as a loutish egomaniac. He was always a prick. Proclaiming himself the avatar of a god just made it worse.
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Oct 18, 2013 16:59
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Of course it is tough to separate the truth from the propaganda with regard to Antonius because he lost. Lost badly.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:04
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Antony is one of the best things about that show, and it really captures what we at least are told he was like. It's too bad HBO's Rome cost them so much, or we might have had a chance to see an Antony miniseries. Edit: Cicero's Philippics were written before Antony lost, so it's not just the winners/writers of the history books talking about what Antony was like. homullus fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Oct 18, 2013 |
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Oct 18, 2013 17:09
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homullus posted:Antony is one of the best things about that show, and it really captures what we at least are told he was like. It's too bad HBO's Rome cost them so much, or we might have had a chance to see an Antony miniseries. Yeah, when I first watched the show, I was disappointed that the battle scenes were mostly so truncated. Then I remembered "oh right, it would probably have cost 8 billion dollars to film that" and was ok with their method because it isn't really an action show.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:15
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Well I mean that was Cicero. Of course he hated him.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:27
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It's very hard to know these sorts of things ever. I think it's fair to say that someone in Antony's position, who did what he did, was probably a dick.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:40
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Makes you wonder how much of the tone in which latter historians described him was laid out by Cicero. It would be entertaining to think that it was this character assassination that cost Cicero his life that defines Marcus Antonius to this day.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:47
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Nenonen posted:It would be entertaining to think that it was this character assassination that cost Cicero his life that defines Marcus Antonius to this day. I would bet this happens way more often than anyone realizes, especially the further back you go and consequently, fewer sources you have. And the worst part is we'll never know.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:49
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Yeah, it's an interesting thing about ancient history. Like if we had a time machine and went back to check it out firsthand, how much of it would be mindblowingly wrong? Or the opposite--if they had time machines and checked out our histories of them, how much of it would be hilarious? Like if the USA had a civil war today, and Tea Party won, and people thousands of years from now could only read about how corrupt and awful Obama was.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:52
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I think we've talked about it before. My personal view is our picture of Rome is, in the broad strokes, accurate. There is a poo poo-ton of missing detail, which you could count as wrong but we really just know nothing so we can't make any strong claims. And there would be a lot of parts where we know stuff but we get some bits wrong. But I don't think you'd take a time machine to Rome and be completely confused, it would be recognizable to you as what we believe it to be. You'd just find a lot of issues as you dug into things. I suspect. Obviously another thing we'll never be able to know. It also depends on what specifically you're talking about. If we have a thing, and there are four surviving written sources about the thing that all generally agree, and we find archaeological evidence that agrees with the written sources, we can feel confident that we're right about the thing. When it's just archaeology without writing, or a single source, it's trickier.
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Oct 18, 2013 17:58
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We can't even agree on what is happening today.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:01
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Ainsley McTree posted:Yeah, it's an interesting thing about ancient history. Like if we had a time machine and went back to check it out firsthand, how much of it would be mindblowingly wrong? Or the opposite--if they had time machines and checked out our histories of them, how much of it would be hilarious? Maybe, but 150 years on, I'm amazed at much respect there still is for the old CSA.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:06
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I think you'd get about the same if you went to a grand library and at random picked up some books written about their lifetime by people involved in politics during the last few hundred years, and used them to write the overall political history of that era. Okay, you might pick Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf or something of that sort, but just as likely you'd hit Churchill's memoirs. At the very least, most of your picks would try to address certain major issues of that time and try to twist them so they were favourable to the author's ideology, leaving it to the historian to interpret what is left unsaid.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:12
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I enjoyed Cathleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and anyone who likes good historical fiction should read them. It starts with Gaius Marius, Sulla and their initial alliance and expedition in Africa against Jugurtha, and ends with Augustus becoming, well, Augustus. In between are a few thousand pages of fun drama. One downside is the author makes Caesar out to be this end-all-be-all good person when really he was probably kind of a power-hungry dick.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:16
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PittTheElder posted:Maybe, but 150 years on, I'm amazed at much respect there still is for the old CSA. Yeah, the 'lost cause' myth started right away and people still take it seriously.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:23
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I'm sure there were still Samnites well into Augustus' reign that were like "the South shall rise again  "
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Oct 18, 2013 18:37
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euphronius posted:We can't even agree on what is happening today. And neither could they. 
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Oct 18, 2013 19:52
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Ainsley McTree posted:Yeah, it's an interesting thing about ancient history. Like if we had a time machine and went back to check it out firsthand, how much of it would be mindblowingly wrong? Or the opposite--if they had time machines and checked out our histories of them, how much of it would be hilarious? I agree that we probably have a good idea what happened back then, though some stuff has been distorted by bias, mudslinging, and lack of evidence that we'll never find 
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Oct 18, 2013 22:50
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If Suetonius isnt gospel truth I dont want to live in this world 
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Oct 18, 2013 22:55
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At least with the Greeks and Romans we have a lot of attributed personal writings, even if the writing, collection, and preservation of those writings were all affected by political biases, inaccuracies, and the random vagaries of time. There are a lot of Egyptian pharaohs whose literal dead bodies and material possessions we've found and identified, but since they didn't leave behind something like Julius Caesar's Commentaries, or Trajan's correspondence with Pliny the Younger, or Julian's snippy and passive aggressive Misopogon, or whatever, in certain ways they'll always be much more unknowable than a lot of Roman historical figures.
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Oct 18, 2013 22:57
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VanSandman posted:I enjoyed Cathleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and anyone who likes good historical fiction should read them. It starts with Gaius Marius, Sulla and their initial alliance and expedition in Africa against Jugurtha, and ends with Augustus becoming, well, Augustus. In between are a few thousand pages of fun drama. One downside is the author makes Caesar out to be this end-all-be-all good person when really he was probably kind of a power-hungry dick. Well he was at least a prodigy, regardless. That tends to make people admire you from afar. Whether he was a power-hungry dick is questionable; the Senate did outlaw him basically because they were worried about his political popularity. You can see the whole Caesar dust-up as yet another constitutional crisis of the Republic, where the Senate tries or is induced to take back lawful acts that in a modern republic they would not be allowed to because it causes things like this. Caesar is just doing what Marius and Sulla did 30 years earlier, and he does it much more gently. Sulla is seen as a dictator who saved the Republic from itself because he lived long enough to retire. Caesar was dictator-for-life, the same title Sulla had, for only a short time before he was murdered. He didn't live long enough to do what Sulla did and we don't know what he really intended. Comparing Caesar to the Marian Terror and Sulla's dictatorship, you might draw the conclusion that Caesar's error was not being tyrannical enough. The Senate was too dead and its remaining members too terrified to have murdered Marius or Sulla.
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Oct 19, 2013 03:08
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Here is a question people here may know - because I can't find a Classics thread. The rare book dealership I used to work at (there's an A/T thread about it that I started almost three years ago and subsequently fizzled out) is asking me if I could translate 14 pages of 16th century Latin for them, since I am a PhD student in Classics and their Latin is more, as they put it, "casual" than mine. How much should I charge? I'm seeing online translation rates of $0.10-0.20 per word, but 14 pages single-spaced would be at least 2000 words (maybe more like 4000? the .pdf they sent doesn't have OCR) and I am not sure I could charge $300 for this, or that they would pay that much given that this is a quasi-favor, but they asked me how much I would charge so I assume they want to pay me. Anyone here been in this position? How did you figure it out, if so?
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Oct 19, 2013 04:41
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Apollodorus posted:Here is a question people here may know - because I can't find a Classics thread. SAL might be able to help you more. e: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2868373 These folks.
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Oct 19, 2013 04:48
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I have like a dozen posts in that thread, too....I forgot it was on a different sub-forum. 
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Oct 19, 2013 05:00
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VanSandman posted:I enjoyed Cathleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and anyone who likes good historical fiction should read them. It starts with Gaius Marius, Sulla and their initial alliance and expedition in Africa against Jugurtha, and ends with Augustus becoming, well, Augustus. In between are a few thousand pages of fun drama. One downside is the author makes Caesar out to be this end-all-be-all good person when really he was probably kind of a power-hungry dick. I really enjoyed those books too, and they were a great "intro" to the period, but you ain't kidding about her love for Caesar - he's basically treated as a living God who can do no wrong. It's quite disappointing since she quite nicely shifted Marius from mostly sympathetic and competent but unfairly overlooked because of his lack of "class", to the "First Man in Rome", to a raving, senile old man whose obsession with the Consulship was responsible for havoc, death and destruction.
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Oct 19, 2013 06:37
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How much do we know about the non-alcoholic drinks in Rome? Usually we only here about the wines (and that beer was considered barbaric/ungenteel) but how much do we know about milk/juices?
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Oct 19, 2013 13:34
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Without proper refrigeration milk goes bad really fast unless you make something out of it (cheese, yogurt etc), so my guess is fresh milk was something few people drank.
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Oct 19, 2013 18:25
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Juice also goes bad very fast, though at least most fruit will keep a while intact once off the plant. It took until the 1800s for pasteurization processes to be implemented for fruit juices to allow true long term storage and shipment.
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Oct 19, 2013 18:59
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Alekanderu posted:Without proper refrigeration milk goes bad really fast unless you make something out of it (cheese, yogurt etc), so my guess is fresh milk was something few people drank. I do know the Romans viewed the cow for the most part as simply a way of making leather. They didn't much eat steaks or drink cow milk. Butter was also an unknown to them.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:22
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VanSandman posted:I do know the Romans viewed the cow for the most part as simply a way of making leather. They didn't much eat steaks or drink cow milk. Butter was also an unknown to them. Is there a reason they didn't eat the meat? It seems weird that they'd kill a cow for the leather but ignore all the meat.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:37
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That really does seem weird. Cows are great because they provide milk and manual labor while alive, and translate to a fairly large amount of meat, bone and leather when butchered. Neglecting any of the features seems pretty wasteful.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:52
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You can use a carcass of such a large animal for alot of things. Leather is just one part, you can use its sinew. Leftovers of hide, sinew and bone can be cooked to awesome glue. The horn is useful too. Aaaaand, ofc it would be really weird to just dump all the meat. e: I'm really silly to just think of the dead animal. A cow is so much more useful when it's alive. Btw, e.g. I didn't know how old chickens could get. My wife's grandma had one that reached the ripe age of 13 years. It layed eggs until it dropped dead. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 19:54
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veekie posted:That really does seem weird. Cows are great because they provide milk and manual labor while alive, and translate to a fairly large amount of meat, bone and leather when butchered. Neglecting any of the features seems pretty wasteful. According to Wiki, Romans were more into pork than beef, along with seafood and fowl. Seems to be a matter of preference than anything else, as meat preservation techniques (primarily salting) were certainly known.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:57
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Is this a case of the upper classes not eating beef, and thus we don't hear about eating beef because it's something that only poor rural farmers would eat? It seems incredibly unlikely that the meat wouldn't be eaten, unless it was being prepared for export.
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Oct 19, 2013 20:19
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