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These portraits are great. Though the people look photoshopped if you know what I mean.
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Nov 1, 2013 18:59
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homullus posted:Also, most Roman ruins are just foundations, so you're not missing as much. The best stuff is almost all in Italy. Plenty of stuff in Asia Minor and North Africa (Leptis Magna, Sbeitla, Carthage, Thuburbo Maius, Ephesus and on and on.) These days some caution is warranted but there's lots of great sites.
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Nov 1, 2013 19:49
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It's a really good example of the strength of Augustus' propaganda that Cleopatra is still considered by many to have been a great beauty (with maybe slightly too large a nose). I imagine it was easier to swallow all her accomplishments as being the result of her seducing Roman men to do the work for her as opposed to her - a woman! - being intelligent and formidable in her own right.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:27
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Grand Fromage posted:It also usually takes a lot of inbreeding to cause issues. The Ptolemies weren't around all that long. I forget where but I think I vaguely remember that the Ptolemies didn't exactly sleep with each other, but the marriages were symbolic of the Pharaonic brother/sister marriages. You're married to your sister but like, obviously you're having kids with some concubines.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:41
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I'm interested in learning more about Alexander the Great. Is there a particularly excellent biography that's both accessible (read: possibly borderline pop-lit while still historically accurate) and comprehensive? I'm interested in both his life, and also what happened to his empire after he died, with a focus on the characters involved in that, too. I feel like I remember someone mentioning one earlier in the thread but the name escapes me... E: was it Philip Freeman's? Ainsley McTree fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 07:49
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There's no faking the maternal lineage though.
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Nov 2, 2013 08:08
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Modus Operandi posted:Openly gay relationships were frowned upon. Hadrian was a pretty good emperor but there was always a lot of grumbling about his teenage boy toy. There were jokes about Julius Caeser being the gay lover of the King of Bythnia. I mentioned Elgabalus already but he was very open and flamboyant even referring to himself as a Queen and taking up with a chariot driver. I thought the romans saw gay relations as a form of dominance. For example it was perfectly fine for an emperor to have sex with a man so long as it was him in the dominant position. If I remember correctly it wasn't frowned upon so long as they where dominant and the relation didn't take precedence over the wife though I may be mistaken with the greeks, correct me if I'm wrong.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:35
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Presumably if you didn't go on so badly that you weren't producing heirs it was cool.
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Nov 2, 2013 16:02
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Thrasophius posted:I thought the romans saw gay relations as a form of dominance. For example it was perfectly fine for an emperor to have sex with a man so long as it was him in the dominant position. Love in general seems to be a weird topic for ancient Romans. I'm thinking around Republic/Principate era but if you were crazy about your wife you were the object of some ridicule and probably thought to be kind of a pansy. If I remember right, even Pompey got some poo poo because he actually was affectionate with his wife and genuinely cared for her. This is all upper class stuff though, so I really can't say what the worldview of average Romans would be. My point though was that stoicism was a big ideal in Roman character, so if having actual feelings towards your wife was considered gauche, running around with young boyfriends similarly would be considered decadent even though Romans didn't have a gay/straight binary.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:37
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the jizz taxi posted:IIRC it was actually illegal to rape slaves. Not that I imagine it didn't happen, of course, as sexual abuse goes hand in hand with economic exploitation. I get the impression that slave-rape was actually pretty institutionalized. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Puer_delicatus and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Rape_and_the_law: quote:The rape of a slave could be prosecuted only as damage to her owner's property, under the Lex Aquilia. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 23:16
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Thrasophius posted:I thought the romans saw gay relations as a form of dominance. For example it was perfectly fine for an emperor to have sex with a man so long as it was him in the dominant position. Wasn't it considered pretty sensible and desirable for a young man to be "introduced" to sex by an older man, so long as it was kept on the down-low and nobody flaunted the relationship in public?
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Nov 3, 2013 01:56
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Jerusalem posted:Wasn't it considered pretty sensible and desirable for a young man to be "introduced" to sex by an older man, so long as it was kept on the down-low and nobody flaunted the relationship in public? Nah, a freeborn Roman man couldn't acceptably be a bottom, and sex with a freeborn boy who hadn't yet performed the adulthood passage rites was illegal and thought horrific on many levels. You had slaves and prostitutes for that. Having a female prostitute introduce a kid to sex was fine though.
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Nov 3, 2013 02:04
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Jerusalem posted:Wasn't it considered pretty sensible and desirable for a young man to be "introduced" to sex by an older man, so long as it was kept on the down-low and nobody flaunted the relationship in public? That's more or less the argument that Pausanias makes in Plato's Symposium about the virtues of Athenian pederasty, though he couches it in terms of young men becoming wise and virtuous as a result of having sex with wise and virtuous older men. Presumably that was an attitude held by some in the Athens of Plato's day -- I don't know if it survived and traveled to Rome. e: And for clarity, he's referring to what we'd call an adolescent, a young man who's beginning to grow a beard; not a child. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 02:12
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Jerusalem posted:Wasn't it considered pretty sensible and desirable for a young man to be "introduced" to sex by an older man, so long as it was kept on the down-low and nobody flaunted the relationship in public? Thems the Greeks, as others have said. The Romans were fairly prudish, comparatively. Well, they didn't make pederasty a civic virtue at least. VanSandman fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 02:31
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Yeah, the Romans weren't big on pederasty/"mentoring" relationships, but they didn't really frown on gay sex either. When Caesar was accused of being the lover of the King of Bithnyia (probably butchered the spelling, but I'm on my phone), it wasn't necessarily the fact that it was a homosexual relationship that made it scandalous, it was that Caesar was in the receiving role. To the Romans, it was ok to have homosexual affairs as long as you were in the "dominant" (aka penetrating) role.
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Nov 3, 2013 02:42
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Do note that the Romans considered it somewhat strange for a man to exclusively prefer either sex. For example, Ovid is unique among major Roman poets in that his love poems are exclusively about women, or about men loving women and vice versa. Conversely IIRC Hadrian got a bit of a bad rep for appearing in public with his teen boy lover. Marriage was very important to Roman society, so while it was expected that the dude would go around loving other dudes, in terms of personal relationship his marriage should be and would be the main thing in the public eye. "Gay" and "straight" aren't very meaningful categories, the Roman cultural expectation for men was what we would call bisexuality. e: the Wiki article on Roman sexuality is gigantic and awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome
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Nov 3, 2013 02:54
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Ras Het posted:Having a female prostitute introduce a kid to sex was fine though. Like father, like son.
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Nov 3, 2013 03:56
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Are there any more examples of mosaic artists "signing" their work? One of my favorite little bits of Roman history is this little bit at a mosaic at the Roman palace in Fishbourne England. I just like that while we have no idea who this guy was we can still look at his art here hundreds of years later and he signed it in the most adorable way possible. Roman England rules just in general. Hadrian's Wall, the Vindolanda tablets, the legion museum in Caerleon. All so cool! Best part of my England trip a few years ago.
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Nov 3, 2013 16:04
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Are we going to get any more China updates? I really enjoyed reading those.
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Nov 4, 2013 01:24
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Sorry I've been slacking off too much at work the last couple weeks. I have grading to catch up on and midterm tests to prepare. Feel free to ask questions though. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 02:31
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Hey guys, could someone tell me about Sparta? They're pop culture's idea of the perfect hypermilitarised society but they never wound up going on any Alexander-style conquests. Why not? And what wound up happening to them and that martial culture?
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Nov 4, 2013 07:49
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No force projection abilities. They terrorized Attica and rarely if ever got outside their little corner of the world. Their lack of logistic ability omes back to their terrible domestic policies.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:01
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Arglebargle III posted:No force projection abilities. They terrorized Attica and rarely if ever got outside their little corner of the world. Their lack of logistic ability omes back to their terrible domestic policies. Didn't they also have constant helot uprisings? Actually, reading up on them a bit more, you would not have wanted to be a helot. The Spartans were assholes.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:06
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The only reason anyone even remembers Sparta today is because they were an Athenian boogeyman during Athens golden age.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:08
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Well they also beat the Athenians, so they're remembered for that.Octy posted:Didn't they also have constant helot uprisings? Actually, reading up on them a bit more, you would not have wanted to be a helot. The Spartans were assholes. Yeah that's what I meant. They may have been ~elite~ but without numbers (because of a citizen army with strict requirements) or any ability to go on extended campaign (because of a society so pressurized that it risks exploding when the army leaves) they never had a shot at empire. Insert your favorite quote about how logistics are the most important thing.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:56
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Thanqol posted:Hey guys, could someone tell me about Sparta? They're pop culture's idea of the perfect hypermilitarised society but they never wound up going on any Alexander-style conquests. Why not? And what wound up happening to them and that martial culture? They were just one city, and nobody wanted to be a part of their system because it was built on the back on the rest of Laconia. The Spartan system is that citizens get beaten and trained from birth to be tough dudes, and do nothing in their lives besides wait around to go to war or pillage their own land. This is because like 80% of the population of the Spartan state are slaves, and they do all of the labour that you would expect from a functioning state, while Spartan citizens are mostly around to beat the poo poo out of the helot slaves if they try anything. Every Autumn, young Spartans were expected to go out into the country and murder helots. There were other people within the state as well, and they couldn't get away with pulling that poo poo if they conquered new lands, but nobody in Greece really liked them. Also, they weren't really that great. Really none of the Greek City-states were, but Sparta gets this massive dick-sucking from the Romans, who were also all about wars, without the administrative incompetence. Sparta won the Peloponnesian war, which is the pinnacle of their success. It's a city-state sort of hegemony, where you get to talk a lot of poo poo and maybe get some favourable deals. Then 30 years after that, they get trounced by the Thebans, and they go back to Southern Peloponnesia for a while. Greece descends back into squabbling shortly after. Suddenly, bumblefuck Macedonia starts to give no poo poo starts expanding under Philip II. He dies, Alexander comes up and does his thing. He razes Thebes (A little much), and subjugates Attica, and then proceeds onto Persia. Sparta is ignored. There's that little smug little anecdote about the Spartans being all "If." at the idea of a Macedonian invasion, but that's pretty much bs. It would have been more work than it was worth, and the Spartans weren't running any invasions soon. Sparta at some point had machinations about invading Persia proper. I would love to see how people would have spun that inevitable disaster. Arglebargle III posted:Yeah that's what I meant. They may have been ~elite~ but without numbers (because of a citizen army with strict requirements) or any ability to go on extended campaign (because of a society so pressurized that it risks exploding when the army leaves) they never had a shot at empire. Insert your favorite quote about how logistics are the most important thing. Who knew that making all your citizens also fight on the frontlines does not do wonders for your demographics. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 09:17
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Yeah, if it weren't for 300 (and the admittedly badass story that it's based on), I'm not sure that anyone would have a romantic conception of Sparta. Everything I've heard about them makes them sound like a really pretty terrible people/society. What finally erased them from history for good?
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Nov 4, 2013 09:18
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Greece descends back into squabbling shortly after. Suddenly, bumblefuck Macedonia starts to give no poo poo starts expanding under Philip II. He dies, Alexander comes up and does his thing. He razes Thebes (A little much), and subjugates Attica, and then proceeds onto Persia. Sparta is ignored. There's that little smug little anecdote about the Spartans being all "If." at the idea of a Macedonian invasion, but that's pretty much bs. It would have been more work than it was worth, and the Spartans weren't running any invasions soon. So, essentially; Sparta, slightly too competent to bother capturing but lovely enough that it wouldn't be worth it anyway?
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Nov 4, 2013 09:25
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From what I've read, the... gently caress I can't spell their goddamn peninsula, suffered serious depopulation by the Late Roman Republic. What happened there?
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Nov 4, 2013 09:26
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Ainsley McTree posted:Yeah, if it weren't for 300 (and the admittedly badass story that it's based on), I'm not sure that anyone would have a romantic conception of Sparta. Everything I've heard about them makes them sound like a really pretty terrible people/society. Compared to the Athenians they were downright progressive for women.
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Nov 4, 2013 10:29
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Frostwerks posted:Compared to the Athenians they were downright progressive for women. Mostly because they were constantly running low on non-women citizens though.
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Nov 4, 2013 10:51
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If the aristocracy of Lacedaemon had reformed and made the helots into stake holders and used them in their army they could have conquered Greece and the Balkans I suppose. IMHO they were definitely held back by their horrible society. Horrible even at the time, not even in hindsight.
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Nov 4, 2013 14:14
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Ainsley McTree posted:What finally erased them from history for good? Like with so many others, the Romans. But the Roman conquest was basically the comma at the end of a long, slow decline. After their golden age the state was just decaying in isolation. It's a model example of the death spiral that happens to stagnant societies: every war made the Spartiate/Helot ratio worse, and they had no mechanism for promoting people to Spartiates. As a society that held philosophy, progress and critical thinking in deep contempt, they were completely incapable of generating any kind of reform movement, and so couldn't adapt to changing circumstances. The only thing they were good at was "not getting conquered" and by the time the Romans rolled around, Sparta was a backwards, isolated, irrelevant living history exhibit. As for the Spartan Way of Life, it's probably safe to assume that their culture just gradually dissolved once they lost their independence and were forced into economic and cultural exchange with the then-modern Roman and Hellenic world. Batshit isolationism must have been the only thing keeping it together.
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Nov 4, 2013 14:43
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Imagine the difference if the US military was tied up with garrisoning the country and constantly putting down revolts and keeping things in order. That's basically what Sparta's position was. Spartans were exceptional fighters who spent most of that energy making sure their awful slave state didn't collapse in a revolt. You can't go out adventuring unless you're secure at home, and the Spartans designed their society so that it was literally impossible for them to ever truly be secure at home. Even if they had, they were such assholes nobody would've put up with it for long. They wouldn't have been able to march into a place and Spartanize it and then not worry about it anymore like Rome frequently could. They just would've been adding more territory that was constantly simmering with revolt.
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Nov 4, 2013 15:19
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I feel like there's so many crazy things written down by the Athenians about Sparta that they can't all be true.
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Nov 4, 2013 17:34
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Frostwerks posted:Compared to the Athenians they were downright progressive for women. This is disingenuous. It's a bit like claiming that Spartans had a better gym benefits plan. Probably true, but the rights extended only to Spartan citizens. VanSandman posted:From what I've read, the... gently caress I can't spell their goddamn peninsula, suffered serious depopulation by the Late Roman Republic. What happened there? You mean while under Roman rule? I dunno about that. The population of Spartans proper had been declining since the Peloponnesian war. The famed agoge that brought up Spartan soldiers also killed thousands of Spartans who really didn't need to die. My favourite incident concerning battle is this one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lechaeum A spartan force is running around without skirmishers, so an allied force just rushes out and starts loving with them with javelins and slings and whatever. The Spartans don't have any idea what to do, and spend the whole time running back and forth, getting wasted. Some Spartan cavalry shows up, but they don't chase the allied skirmishers away, instead they trot alongside the hoplite formation and get trashed some more.
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Nov 4, 2013 18:16
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From what I remember Sparta did have helots fighting alongside citizens in several of the battles of the 2nd Peloponnesian War, but that usually didn't work out very well for the helots because then they were the first guys on the top of the To Be Purged list. Also, there were half-citizens, but a lot of them ended up as mercenaries. I think my copy of The Campaigns of Alexander had an author's note talking about how more Greeks probably fought against Alexander than fought for him. Sparta actually did try to rebel while Alexander was away, but one of his generals that was staying in Macedonia (for exactly this reason) put it down.
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Nov 4, 2013 18:32
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Sounds like they got the "individually strong soldier" part of warfare down and then didn't bother with tactics, logistics, manpower or technology.
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Nov 4, 2013 18:33
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veekie posted:Sounds like they got the "individually strong soldier" part of warfare down and then didn't bother with tactics, logistics, manpower or technology. But those are the hard parts! It's like how I've always reasoned: your average fighting Gaul, assuming he is well enough off to afford good arms and armor, would beat your average fighting Roman from the legions, most of the time. Now, 100 average fighting Gauls at once vs 100 average fighting Romans? No contest, Romans win every time.
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Nov 4, 2013 18:41
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veekie posted:Sounds like they got the "individually strong soldier" part of warfare down and then didn't bother with tactics, logistics, manpower or technology. Nah, in straight up hoplite warfare their drill and formation was notoriously good. They could run in formation etc. etc. Creative thinking could throw them for a loop, but that's not something alone to them. Logistically, they were fine, it's just that, save for a brief period, projecting considerable hegemony wasn't really a goal, and it worked out for them better, arguably, than it did for the Athenians. But yeah, manpower shortages caught up with them and some bad leaders got them in a situation they didn't want. A lot of problems, but lionizing the individual over the group wasn't one of them. SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like there's so many crazy things written down by the Athenians about Sparta that they can't all be true. Yeah, but some sources, like Xenophon, are super Spartan-o-phile, others are very anti. You can sort of pick and chose and sort things out. Ithle01 posted:From what I remember Sparta did have helots fighting alongside citizens in several of the battles of the 2nd Peloponnesian War, but that usually didn't work out very well for the helots because then they were the first guys on the top of the To Be Purged list. Also, there were half-citizens, but a lot of them ended up as mercenaries. I think my copy of The Campaigns of Alexander had an author's note talking about how more Greeks probably fought against Alexander than fought for him. Sparta actually did try to rebel while Alexander was away, but one of his generals that was staying in Macedonia (for exactly this reason) put it down. Well, the Spartans had a class between full SPARTANS and the helots that did a lot of fighting. They were in an okay position socially. You're quite right though, when they did start recruiting helots, they literally killed the first couple thousand volunteers on the basis of 'if they're this eager to be armed they must be up to something.' Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is disingenuous. It's a bit like claiming that Spartans had a better gym benefits plan. Probably true, but the rights extended only to Spartan citizens. Sure, but they're nice benefits. And Athens gym sucked. Seriously, on a sheer economic basis Sparta was more equitable than modern day, and, strict division of labor aside*, it'd probably be better, relative to men, to be a woman in the Spartan elite than a woman today. (And yes, insert caveats about 'if you're one of the elite' here.) It's like the one thing they did right, and Athens was waaaaaay worse about it. *And we still have issues throwing women into combat zones...
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Nov 4, 2013 18:49
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