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Amused to Death posted:You idiots, there's only one person who should be consul, someone who can and will last through the ages. God drat Rome is always impressive 
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Jan 3, 2014 04:08
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It's both amazing and slightly depressing that people are really only getting around to looking into this now.... well, other than the 18th Century monks who popped down there to call each other gay
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Jan 3, 2014 04:37
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In terms of how Byzantium was the New Rome, I'm just gonna leave this here:
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Jan 3, 2014 04:44
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Has anyone read Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third?
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Jan 3, 2014 07:14
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Big Beef City posted:In terms of how Byzantium was the New Rome, I'm just gonna leave this here: This series is great! I just
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Jan 3, 2014 07:44
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Mustang posted:Has anyone read Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third? I got it as a Christmas gift, but haven't read it yet beyond the introduction.
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Jan 3, 2014 08:20
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Jerusalem posted:It's both amazing and slightly depressing that people are really only getting around to looking into this now.... well, other than the 18th Century monks who popped down there to call each other gay And immortalize their gayness long since they passed.
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Jan 3, 2014 11:03
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Big Beef City posted:In terms of how Byzantium was the New Rome, I'm just gonna leave this here: Did you know? Constantine is dead.
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Jan 3, 2014 15:05
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Mustang posted:Has anyone read Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third? I read it a looooong time ago as an undergrad (in a neat comparative course on how frontiers were treated in Rome, China, and the American West). My main takeaway on the The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, between the book and the discussion after, was "there wasn't one." I remember liking it, though.
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Jan 3, 2014 16:08
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oXDemosthenesXo posted:This series is great! I just They're good for an intro and the videos are fairly entertaining, but uh, don't use them as some authoritative source. They get plenty of poo poo wrong and much more than that is overly simplified.
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Jan 3, 2014 16:18
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Koramei posted:They're good for an intro and the videos are fairly entertaining, but uh, don't use them as some authoritative source. They get plenty of poo poo wrong and much more than that is overly simplified. Oh I know. I wouldn't use them authoritatively for sure. They also move so fast that if you're not already familiar with the subject matter it would just go over your head anyway.
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Jan 4, 2014 04:14
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At what point was there, if any, a break from Western Rome into the "Dark Ages"? Reading this thread it seems like it was less poo poo fell apart than by the fifth and sixth centuries that was what Western Roman life had devolved to since Diocletian and now all the local strongmen were officially "German" instead of "German" strongmen appointed by Rome/Ravenna.
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Jan 4, 2014 05:55
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Berke Negri posted:At what point was there, if any, a break from Western Rome into the "Dark Ages"? Reading this thread it seems like it was less poo poo fell apart than by the fifth and sixth centuries that was what Western Roman life had devolved to since Diocletian and now all the local strongmen were officially "German" instead of "German" strongmen appointed by Rome/Ravenna. It's a gradual slide, so you can't really put your finger on a specific time. Especially given that if there was a definitive event you wanted to select, it almost certainly happened at different times in different places.
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Jan 4, 2014 06:52
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Mustang posted:Has anyone read Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third? I have it. Got it and read it for fun. Yes, I'm a terrible nerd.
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Jan 4, 2014 06:53
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Awesome. Even though I'm a huge Rome nerd I actually found out about the book from an International Relations reading list, which is what my degree is in. It's also the kind of stuff the author mainly writes about as well. Not too far into it but I like it so far as well.
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Jan 4, 2014 07:11
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PittTheElder posted:It's a gradual slide, so you can't really put your finger on a specific time. Especially given that if there was a definitive event you wanted to select, it almost certainly happened at different times in different places. For the British Isles, there is a nice clear-cut date; in 410 the emperor Honorious told them they were on their own. The local nobility tried to fight off the incoming Germanic tribes, but within about 100 years or so the Romanized Celts of Britain had been overrun by the Anglo-Saxons of the new Ang-land.
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Jan 4, 2014 07:25
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sullat posted:For the British Isles, there is a nice clear-cut date; in 410 the emperor Honorious told them they were on their own. The local nobility tried to fight off the incoming Germanic tribes, but within about 100 years or so the Romanized Celts of Britain had been overrun by the Anglo-Saxons of the new Ang-land. Some people have suggested that the 410 date specifically may in fact be incorrect and referring to Bruttium in Southern Italy, if you have JSTOR there's a pretty skeptical discussion on that debate here.
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Jan 4, 2014 11:55
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PittTheElder posted:It's a gradual slide, so you can't really put your finger on a specific time. Especially given that if there was a definitive event you wanted to select, it almost certainly happened at different times in different places. Yep. I would put the time period for the break (other than Britain) somewhere in the 600s. By that point the Roman Empire has stopped really trying to reconquer anything in the west, they're too busy/weak to bother with it. We're after the Plague of Justinian, which devastated the entire classical world and reshaped society much as the Black Death will later. Between the plague, the wars with Persia, and the Islamic conquests, the Empire is barely holding on at this point--though they will be back, as they improbably manage to do a few times before the Ottomans roll up with cannons. The Roman senate stops meeting somewhere in the 600s, which doesn't affect anything much but is a nice symbolic break. Also the archaeology says that the Roman trade networks, which had continued more or less uninterrupted, break down in the 600s. Western Europe stops receiving trade goods from across the world in any kind of quantity, and gold coinage virtually disappears. So it's not A Date but I'd say the 600s in general are a good place to start thinking more medieval and less antiquity. The Plague of Justinian itself would also be a reasonable point to see a discontinuity.
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Jan 5, 2014 02:12
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep. I would put the time period for the break (other than Britain) somewhere in the 600s. By that point the Roman Empire has stopped really trying to reconquer anything in the west, they're too busy/weak to bother with it. We're after the Plague of Justinian, which devastated the entire classical world and reshaped society much as the Black Death will later. Between the plague, the wars with Persia, and the Islamic conquests, the Empire is barely holding on at this point--though they will be back, as they improbably manage to do a few times before the Ottomans roll up with cannons. The Roman senate stops meeting somewhere in the 600s, which doesn't affect anything much but is a nice symbolic break. Also the archaeology says that the Roman trade networks, which had continued more or less uninterrupted, break down in the 600s. Western Europe stops receiving trade goods from across the world in any kind of quantity, and gold coinage virtually disappears.
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Jan 5, 2014 02:19
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Azathoth posted:I understand that around this time, there's much fewer written records of what is happening. I also understand that there isn't a definitive reason why this occurred, but would you be willing to speculate about why there's so few records, or fill me in on some of the more prominent theories? Nobody's entirely sure what happened. There may have been fewer people writing: the Germans adopted Latin writing when they Romanized, but they didn't have the kind of tradition of it that the actual Romans did or the obsession with record keeping. Part of why we have so much Roman material is simply that the Romans wrote a loving lot of stuff, so even when a tiny, tiny fraction survives, it's still significant. I've also seen speculation that the papyrus supply disappeared, so people didn't write much because they didn't have anything to write on. There also may not have been as much copying. We have very few original writings, most of the stuff we have are later copies from medieval monasteries and the like. The stuff from late antiquity may just have not struck people as worth copying the way that the classical texts were (as the classical era was revered as the height of civilization, while post-classical was considered a lower state of humanity), and thus been lost. Frankly, it's a minor miracle that any book survives from 1500 years ago.
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Jan 5, 2014 02:31
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The Entire Universe posted:There's always the myth about the vault full of carved dicks hidden somewhere from when a series of popes I know some monks in rural France could have used some of those stone dicks. Apparently worship of Priapus was really popular to the extent that it gave rise to a whole category of syncretic 'phallic saints'.
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Jan 5, 2014 03:46
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Grand Fromage posted:The Roman senate stops meeting somewhere in the 600s, which doesn't affect anything much but is a nice symbolic break. I always wondered how this happen. I mean what made them stop meeting. We'll never know. Did the people who composed of it at one point just go "gently caress it, what's the point, we're basically a drinking club at this point" or did it just slowly wither down to like 4 guys eventually who spent all day talking about the good old days. e: or, what was left of the Senate was all tried and executed at once!  We'll take that building now!
Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jan 5, 2014 |
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Jan 5, 2014 04:16
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I like to imagine Cato in the empty Curia yelling at the furniture about the good old days. I know he was dead but still. E: I didn't know we had a reasonably close date. The last mention of the senate in Rome is in 603, and the Curia becomes a church in 630, so it stopped somewhere in there. The senate in Constantinople exists quite a while longer. The last mention was the election of the new emperor in 1204. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jan 5, 2014 |
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Jan 5, 2014 04:21
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quote:The senate in Constantinople exists quite a while longer. The last mention was the election of the new emperor in 1204. I guess that seems like a good sign the Senate didn't survive the sack of Constantinople that year, at least in any coherent way in the long term. Grand Fromage posted:I like to imagine Cato in the empty Curia yelling at the furniture about the good old days. Well it is a popular past time of old men  
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Jan 5, 2014 04:54
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Amused to Death posted:I guess that seems like a good sign the Senate didn't survive the sack of Constantinople that year, at least in any coherent way in the long term. The Latin Emperors pretty much disbanded all the Greek institutions when they took over and I reckon when the Greeks managed to restore the empire, they didn't bother with the full Senate deal. Since most of the nobility that comprised it was dead or scattered.
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Jan 5, 2014 05:14
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Old book recovered
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Jan 5, 2014 23:41
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 Now that's a find!
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Jan 5, 2014 23:55
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The comments are pretty  though, someone even brought the "Hole left by the Christian Dark Ages" graph!But still its just amazing how we are discovering how smart the Greeks and Romans were.
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Jan 6, 2014 00:01
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Grand Fromage posted:E: I didn't know we had a reasonably close date. The last mention of the senate in Rome is in 603, and the Curia becomes a church in 630, so it stopped somewhere in there. This brings up something I've been thinking about-- It seems most historians/archeologists believe that by the 7th century Rome's population had catastrophically fallen, probably to 50,000 or even fewer people, leaving much of the city empty and in a state of gradual ruin. I also am aware that between the 5th and 7th/8th centuries it was common for the Bishop of Rome/Pope, Ostrogothic King, Eastern Emperor or whoever happened to be in control of Rome on that particular day to convert pretty much every still-usable public building into a church. By the end of the 7th century there had to have been a huge glut of churches in Rome compared to how many people actually lived there. I know Christianity had become this all-powerful social and political force by then, especially in Rome, but I imagine a huge city largely depopulated and falling apart dotted by churches that, while probably better taken care-of than other buildings in the city, were nevertheless still empty.
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Jan 6, 2014 00:06
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I think you are forgetting the importance of bringing the Good News about God's only son to the rats, owls, etc. that live in ruined buildings. For shame!
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Jan 6, 2014 01:08
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TipTow posted:but I imagine a huge city largely depopulated and falling apart dotted by churches that, while probably better taken care-of than other buildings in the city, were nevertheless still empty. This is also the account of someone visiting Constantinople a few decades before it's fall to the Ottomans. The city consisted of a few hamlets with crop fields in between them with abandoned churches and monasteries everywhere.
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Jan 6, 2014 01:23
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God drat Archimedes.  The story of how they recovered the text is amazing too, you'd think that being scraped off, written and painted over would spell the end of it ever being legible, but thanks to science inventing magic, we were able to get it back. Amused to Death posted:This is also the account of someone visiting Constantinople a few decades before it's fall to the Ottomans. The city consisted of a few hamlets with crop fields in between them with abandoned churches and monasteries everywhere. After the Romans lost control of Britain, didn't London end up being abandoned for something like 100 years before people started moving back in?
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Jan 6, 2014 01:27
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The page says that was written on October 3rd 2007, why is everyone making a big deal of it and making GBS threads it up with militant atheism just now?
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Jan 6, 2014 01:54
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Odobenidae posted:The page says that was written on October 3rd 2007, why is everyone making a big deal of it and making GBS threads it up with militant atheism just now? Shot in the dark: Reddit got a hold of it.
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Jan 6, 2014 02:02
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As exciting as it might be to mathematicians, I was hoping it'd be a new play or history. There's plenty of very old and private libraries in Europe, surely there must be something there hidden away, unlooked at for centuries?
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Jan 6, 2014 08:36
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Jerusalem posted:God drat Archimedes. I saw an article about restoring paintings using that method, by scanning the layers under the surface they can reproduce the 'intended' colors when it was new and see past the sloppy restoration attempts of the past that did more harm that good by introducing chemically incompatible paint.
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Jan 6, 2014 10:32
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 Looking at this will never stop being funny.
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Jan 6, 2014 17:04
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Octy posted:As exciting as it might be to mathematicians, I was hoping it'd be a new play or history. There's plenty of very old and private libraries in Europe, surely there must be something there hidden away, unlooked at for centuries? On that note this is depressing as poo poo. Massive, really important 16th century Italian library systematically looted with many works badly damaged or destroyed: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/16th-century-girolamini-library-in.html#.UsrywPRdV8E 
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Jan 6, 2014 19:17
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You know, if they stole the books because they were history nerds who really wanted them for themselves, I could at least kind of respect that, but they just want the money 
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Jan 6, 2014 21:32
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Honestly I feel the opposite; history nerds ought to understand the value in the books, and why it's so abhorrent to steal them. Lots of people need money.
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Jan 6, 2014 21:50
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