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More Pompeian poop analysis! http://www.voanews.com/content/ancient-romans-may-have-eaten-giraffe/1824403.html quote:The middle and lower classes of the Roman city of Pompeii had a surprisingly rich and varied diet, including such exotic fare as giraffe, according to newly published research. E; Peter Heather's "Fall of the Roman Empire", how is it? I already have it so now I need to know how quickly I should get to it. Amused to Death fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jan 7, 2014 |
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Jan 6, 2014 23:48
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quote:He adds that as a result of the discoveries, “The traditional vision of some mass of hapless lemmings – scrounging for whatever they can pinch from the side of a street, or huddled around a bowl of gruel – needs to be replaced by a higher fare and standard of living, at least for the urbanites in Pompeii.” Is that the picture anywhere still? Especially of the middle-class? Because I thought we had moved already to depicting something similar to cities like Jakarta, Manila or Mumbai today, just replacing wheat and legumes for rice.
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Jan 7, 2014 06:50
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It makes me wonder about some of the common wisdom I'd read about more ancient societies; I read that most of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer subsisted on bread and onions.
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Jan 7, 2014 07:39
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Halloween Jack posted:It makes me wonder about some of the common wisdom I'd read about more ancient societies; I read that most of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer subsisted on bread and onions. There must have been such flatulence.
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Jan 7, 2014 15:38
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The world's oldest joke is Sumerian, and it's about how your wife never fails to fart in your lap.
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Jan 7, 2014 15:40
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Halloween Jack posted:The world's oldest joke is a fart joke. Cliff notes for your post.
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Jan 7, 2014 18:46
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Amused to Death posted:E; Peter Heather's "Fall of the Roman Empire", how is it? I already have it so now I need to know how quickly I should get to it. It's alright. Personally I think Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell is better and more convincing.
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Jan 7, 2014 21:46
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Halloween Jack posted:It makes me wonder about some of the common wisdom I'd read about more ancient societies; I read that most of the inhabitants of ancient Sumer subsisted on bread and onions. Is that from Larry Gonick's history tome? It's good, but limited. The ration lists from temple paystubs aren't luxurious, but they're not that Spartan.
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Jan 8, 2014 03:20
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Eons ago in this thread we discussed the graffiti found at Pompeii. What other sites of notable Roman graffiti have we found? More of a Latin question, but what're the best Roman insults?
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Jan 8, 2014 07:03
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bobthedinosaur posted:Eons ago in this thread we discussed the graffiti found at Pompeii. What other sites of notable Roman graffiti have we found? Herculaneum  quote:More of a Latin question, but what're the best Roman insults? There was that book of jokes posted a month or so ago that had some pretty good burns against other cities.
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Jan 8, 2014 07:26
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bobthedinosaur posted:Eons ago in this thread we discussed the graffiti found at Pompeii. What other sites of notable Roman graffiti have we found? "O Senatorum! Audi ergo Catonem  " - Gaius Julius Caesar(I don't know latin)
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Jan 8, 2014 07:32
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bobthedinosaur posted:Eons ago in this thread we discussed the graffiti found at Pompeii. What other sites of notable Roman graffiti have we found? I can't think of any off the top of my head. We only have all the things we have in Pompeii and Herculaneum because the towns were buried very fast and very deep. For most Roman ruins, we don't even have walls let alone the wall paintings and graffiti. 79 AD was the most wonderful horrible tragedy -- tens of thousands of people (most likely killed instantly, at least) died, but because of the way they died, we can humanize them and the rest of ancient Rome so much better than we ever could before.
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Jan 8, 2014 15:29
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Amused to Death posted:More Pompeian poop analysis! Things like this always make me wonder. Maybe Grumio's prized menagerie giraffe falls sick, he makes a deal with the local foodie restaurant and voila, Tuesday's special.
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Jan 8, 2014 17:08
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AvesPKS posted:Things like this always make me wonder. Maybe Grumio's prized menagerie giraffe falls sick, he makes a deal with the local foodie restaurant and voila, Tuesday's special. I dunno, that's a tall order to fill.
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Jan 8, 2014 19:03
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Hey guys tell me about the vague ideas the Romans and Chinese had about each other. We talked about this once but it was a long time ago. I think there were things like the Chinese thinking Rome was some kind of democracy or republic ruled by enlightened philosophers while Rome pictured China as some country in the clouds where silk just hung from trees like leaves. Or maybe it's none of that, hence why I'm asking.
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Jan 8, 2014 20:24
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Mitsuo posted:I dunno, that's a tall order to fill. Not only that but he'd really be sticking his neck out offering an exotic meat like that.
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Jan 8, 2014 21:18
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sullat posted:Is that from Larry Gonick's history tome? It's good, but limited. The ration lists from temple paystubs aren't luxurious, but they're not that Spartan. Oh man remember any details? For some reason I find the diets of ancient people really interesting.
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Jan 8, 2014 21:36
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Amused to Death posted:Hey guys tell me about the vague ideas the Romans and Chinese had about each other. We talked about this once but it was a long time ago. I think there were things like the Chinese thinking Rome was some kind of democracy or republic ruled by enlightened philosophers while Rome pictured China as some country in the clouds where silk just hung from trees like leaves. Or maybe it's none of that, hence why I'm asking. Florus posted:Nay, the Seres came likewise, and the Indians who dwelt beneath the vertical sun, bringing presents of precious stones and pearls and elephants, but thinking all of less moment than the vastness of the journey which they had undertaken, and which they said had occupied four years. In truth it needed but to look at their complexion to see that they were people of another world than ours. Pliny the Elder posted:The Seres are famous for the woolen substance obtained from their forests; after a soaking in water they comb off the white down of the leaves… So manifold is the labour employed, and so distant is the region of the globe drawn upon, to enable the Roman maiden to flaunt transparent clothing in public. Gan Ying posted:"Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry. The people of this country are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin [or 'Great China']. This country produces plenty of gold [and] silver, [and of] rare and precious [things] they have luminous jade, 'bright moon pearls,' Haiji rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony, red cinnabar, green gemstones, goldthread embroideries, rugs woven with gold thread, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth. They also have a fine cloth which some people say is made from the down of 'water sheep,' but which is made, in fact, from the cocoons of wild silkworms. They blend all sorts of fragrances, and by boiling the juice, make a compound perfume. [They have] all the precious and rare things that come from the various foreign kingdoms. They make gold and silver coins. Ten silver coins are worth one gold coin. They trade with Anxi [Parthia] and Tianzhu [Northwest India] by sea. The profit margin is ten to one. . . . The king of this country always wanted to send envoys to Han, but Anxi [Parthia], wishing to control the trade in multi-coloured Chinese silks, blocked the route to prevent [the Romans] getting through [to China]." Some bits stolen from Wikipedia. Seres is what Romans called the Chinese, it means silk people I think. Also where Sino comes from I believe, if you ever wondered why the gently caress Sino was the word for describing Chinese stuff.I haven't seen descriptions of what Romans thought China was like, I'd be interested if there are any. Most of the Roman material is trade based stuff about silk since that was their primary concern. I like that Gan Ying's secondhand description of Rome adds in Chinese concepts like the Mandate of Heaven.
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Jan 9, 2014 01:29
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How does anyone read things like that and not love history. People are amazing with what they can imagine.
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Jan 9, 2014 01:47
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Pliny the Elder was almost right, he just didn't know about the worms. You do need a forest, and there is a water bath involved, and picking the end of the silk thread and then spooling it is extremely labor-intensive.
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Jan 9, 2014 01:50
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They did know a little about it both from reports and the wild silk in Europe, which I never knew was a thing until a book I just read. Also the Romans would import Chinese silk, reweave it into thicker stuff, and export it back to China. The Parthians pulled off a hilarious scam and convinced the Chinese that this was Roman silk and was higher quality, and for hundreds of years the Chinese bought back their own silk at a markup, the Parthians skimming profits both ways.
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Jan 9, 2014 01:56
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Grand Fromage posted:Some bits stolen from Wikipedia. Sort of. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the Seres were the particular group that the Greeks got their silk from, hence Greek Serikos to Latin sericum, both meaning silk. From the quotations above Seres was obviously used to refer to the Chinese, as well. However, the word China itself and the prefix sino- come from Latin Sina, a latinized version of Qin.
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Jan 9, 2014 03:49
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I've posted about it before but the Chinese really liked Mediterranean coral. They were also thoroughly impressed with asbestos cloth, which they thought was made of unicorn hair. I haven't seen any references to it but we know they imported glassware. Because of geography almost everything came over the same trade routes, so the Chinese were not going to be too clear about which things came from Sogdia or Parthia or India and which came from Europe and Africa.
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Jan 9, 2014 06:15
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Grand Fromage posted:They did know a little about it both from reports and the wild silk in Europe, which I never knew was a thing until a book I just read. Also the Romans would import Chinese silk, reweave it into thicker stuff, and export it back to China. The Parthians pulled off a hilarious scam and convinced the Chinese that this was Roman silk and was higher quality, and for hundreds of years the Chinese bought back their own silk at a markup, the Parthians skimming profits both ways. The loving Parthians
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Jan 9, 2014 06:33
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Speaking of which, do we know much about Persia through the Roman years? Obviously it lacks the all consuming focus placed on Rome by western historians for a thousand years, and I suspect much of the work isn't in English, but is there much scholarly work happening there?
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Jan 9, 2014 06:37
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Grand Fromage posted:They did know a little about it both from reports and the wild silk in Europe, which I never knew was a thing until a book I just read. Also the Romans would import Chinese silk, reweave it into thicker stuff, and export it back to China. The Parthians pulled off a hilarious scam and convinced the Chinese that this was Roman silk and was higher quality, and for hundreds of years the Chinese bought back their own silk at a markup, the Parthians skimming profits both ways. Where's the basis for this story and where can I reas more like them? I like quirky tidbits about ancient trade. This one sounds a bit too neat and apocryphal to be true. mila kunis fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Jan 9, 2014 |
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Jan 9, 2014 07:11
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Squalid posted:Oh man remember any details? For some reason I find the diets of ancient people really interesting. I'm sorry, I can't remember the book, which was about the Sumerian way of life. I was looking into the legal stuff mostly, for a school paper, but they did have access to plenty of fruits and veggies. The corvee rations included oil, dates, and meat, in addition to the staples of bread and beer. There were also recipes they've found from that era, although presumably anyone with access to a literate chef wasn't going to be on the corvee. (The corvee is what modern people seem to call the labor draft in Sumer and Egypt. Dunno what they called it. It varied over the millenia, but essentially any male adult could be drafted during the off-season to do manual labor for the upkeep of the city-state's infrastructure. The wealthy could pay a fee in silver to be excused from it. The temples that organized it would provide laborers and their families with rations and supplies while they were working. Which is why people often talk about Sumerians being paid in beer.)
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Jan 9, 2014 08:31
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What is a "water sheep"?
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Jan 9, 2014 08:54
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bartkusa posted:What is a "water sheep"? A mollusc
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Jan 9, 2014 09:32
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tekz posted:Where's the basis for this story and where can I reas more like them? I like quirky tidbits about ancient trade. This one sounds a bit too neat and apocryphal to be true. This specific one was in Justinian's Flea, which is a neat book about the Plague of Justinian and other stuff.
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Jan 9, 2014 13:40
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bobthedinosaur posted:More of a Latin question, but what're the best Roman insults? You assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fix fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned of, though, and took you off your game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set the watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles.
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Jan 9, 2014 21:21
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Alhazred posted:You assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fix fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned of, though, and took you off your game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set the watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles. Using Cicero is cheating! “My refutation would be framed in considerably more forcible terms if I did not feel inhibited by the fact that the woman’s husband - sorry, I mean brother, I always make that slip - is my personal enemy.”
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Jan 9, 2014 23:16
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It kind of does look like a sheep.
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Jan 10, 2014 05:44
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Jerusalem posted:Using Cicero is cheating! And don't forget the always popular Catullus 16 (Catullus of course wrote his Lesbia poems about the same woman Cicero - Clodia - condemned here): quote:I will sodomize you and face-gently caress you,
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Jan 10, 2014 14:18
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Decius posted:And don't forget the always popular Catullus 16 (Catullus of course wrote his Lesbia poems about the same woman Cicero - Clodia - condemned here): And what was Clodia's response?
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Jan 10, 2014 14:31
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The Entire Universe posted:And what was Clodia's response? That's to Aurelius and Furius, not Clodia.
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Jan 10, 2014 17:22
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WoodrowSkillson posted:That's to Aurelius and Furius, not Clodia. No, I meant the stuff from Cicero and Catullus to Clodia. Wasn't she the one who sent a couple toughs to basically rape a guy who was calling her a cheap whore, later sending him a letter asking him "who's the whore now?"
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Jan 10, 2014 17:41
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Well Fulvia, Clodia's brother's widow (married at the time to Mark Antony) apparently took great glee in stabbing the severed head of Cicero through the tongue with a hairpin as revenge for all the insults he directed at herself, at Clodia, at Clodius, and at Mark Antony. Cicero just couldn't help himself when it came to throwing around insults. Even when he praised Augustus (still Octavian at the time) he couldn't help but throw in a pun about killing him - the young man should be praised, honored and made immortal.
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Jan 10, 2014 23:48
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The Entire Universe, and Jerusalem - friendly call out: Source 'em or you ain't got 'em.
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Jan 11, 2014 07:58
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The Entire Universe posted:No, I meant the stuff from Cicero and Catullus to Clodia. Wasn't she the one who sent a couple toughs to basically rape a guy who was calling her a cheap whore, later sending him a letter asking him "who's the whore now?" After Marcus Caelius' trial where Cicero's remarks come from, Clodia apparently was too mortified to show much in public as far as we know. Cicero's character assassination was pretty thorough and seems to have been too much to bear for her. A few years after the trial Clodius is killed by Titus Milo on the Via Appia which might also have contributed to her disappearance from public life (as far as we can reconstruct from the sources). The last we hear of Clodia is a letter by Cicero to a friend that he thinks about buying a Hortia (riverside garden), and that he especially likes the one Clodia has, but he doesn't think she will sell it. Shortly after that Cicero is dead too, killed by the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate. I don't think there are any later sources on the life of Clodia. The rape story is much earlier IIRC, at the height of Clodius power, when his mob ruled half of Rome (Titus Milo's mob ruled the other half on behalf of the Optimates and especially Pompey). Decius fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 09:20
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