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Please don't engage in fish racism in this thread.
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Jul 17, 2014 15:24
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Crassus pretty much did end up dying a Bond villain's death, what with getting molten gold poured down his throat.  Grand Fromage posted:Please don't engage in fish racism in this thread. Plutarch posted:Whereas the life of sea creatures, being set apart by mighty bounds from intercourse with men and having nothing adventitious or acquired from human usage, is peculiar to itself, indigenous and uncontaminated by foreign ways, not by distinction of Nature, but of location. For their Nature is such as to welcome and retain such instruction as reaches them. This it is that renders many eels tractable, like those that are called sacred in Arethusa; and in many places there are fish which will respond to their own names, as the story goes of Crassus' moray, upon the death of which he wept. And once when Domitius said to him, "Isn't it true that you wept when a moray died?" he answered, "Isn't it true that you buried three wives and didn't weep?'
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Jul 17, 2014 15:44
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Plutarch does the most random stuff, but an essay on whether land animals or sea animals are smarter has to be up there.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:23
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that you could train lampreys. You could start by not feeding them.
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Jul 17, 2014 17:57
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Angry Lobster posted:I'm not sure about that, African elephants are in fact bigger than Asian ones as far as I know, but what you said I think is a myth that Polybius started with his account of the battle of Raphia, for reasons unknown, maybe to perpetuate the story about everything being bigger in India? The North African elephants, though extinct, were probably a lot smaller than what we think of as "African elephants" today. The African ones you typically see are the bush elephants, which live in open scrubland and are quite big (10+ feet tall). There's a second race/species/subspecies called African forest elephants, which are significantly smaller (7-8 ft tall). If the northern elephants were that size, then Indian elephants might very well be bigger. Elephant taxonomy is quite interesting and actually relevant to ancient history. They're cool enough that people documented them when they traveled, so we know about ancient populations of elephants (N Africa, Syria, Ethiopia) that no longer exist today. And don't even get me started on mammoths. Mammoths were still hanging around in multiple areas until 10-15k years ago, and supposedly were still found on some Siberian islands 3k-4k years ago.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:15
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JaucheCharly posted:You could start by not feeding them. Pretty much this. They're lampreys they do 2 things, feed and mate. You dont have to go out of your way to get them to attack stuff.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:25
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Once I was offered some lamprey dish, in the end I ordered another thing but was tempted to try, now after watching that image I'm sure I will never try. Which is a pity because they say it's really good.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:56
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I was about to post saying that eels are really good but then I realized true eels and lampreys are less related than people and lizards. Eels are really good though! Fatty. Being devoured by lampreys would be horrifying because they can't actually bite. They just have suckers for mouths and rasps for tongues.
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Jul 17, 2014 19:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Ah, that Polybius must be it. The extinct North African Elephant was probably like the modern African forest elephant, which is smaller than Indian elephants. According to Polybius, this is why the Seleucid's larger Indian elephants were victorious at Raphia. The enormous African savannah elephant is a different species and basically untameable. E: Oops, didn't see lewd mangaby above. P-Mack fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jul 18, 2014 |
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Jul 18, 2014 14:18
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Partway reading through this thread, so I apologise if my question has already been asked and answered, but; I see lots of references to mercenary groups being used alongside or instead of "typical" Roman forces. How did that work? Are we talking distinct groups roaming around working for whoever, or a Roman general rounding up whoever's around, giving them a sword and pointing in a direction, or dealing with a local barbarian leader for him to bring forces along?
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Jul 18, 2014 16:14
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Revenant Threshold posted:Partway reading through this thread, so I apologise if my question has already been asked and answered, but; I see lots of references to mercenary groups being used alongside or instead of "typical" Roman forces. How did that work? Are we talking distinct groups roaming around working for whoever, or a Roman general rounding up whoever's around, giving them a sword and pointing in a direction, or dealing with a local barbarian leader for him to bring forces along? As always, "it depends". The Romans would classify all non-legionary troops as auxilia, regardless of origin. This term did not apply to the Italian allies, who were legionaries in all but name, they were called Socii. The allies were the initial cavalry arm of the legions. Mercenaries started getting hired in earnest around 300BC. In the early republic and empire, these forces would be commanded by their own leaders. Augustus made it so they were commanded by Romans, and then later it goes back to the mercenaries following their own guys. Here are a few common examples to show the variation of origin. Gallic cavalry - Caesar fought against Gauls a whole bunch, and their cavalry was far better then what he was bringing with him from Italy. Once he either allied or pacified the tribe, he would then go to their cavalry commander, and hire them as his own cavalry. Archers from Syracuse - During the Punic Wars, Hiero, the king of Syracuse, would supply units of archers and slingers to the Romans, and the Romans would pay them. Spanish infantry - Under Augustus they were conscripted and commanded by Roman officers in the official chain of command. They were equipped similarly to the legions, but were not actual legionaries. Eventually such troops would get to be awarded citizenship at the end of their service, under one of the other emperors. The Goths, Vandals, etc - Whole armies that would be hired by Rome and fight alongside the Roman army. This worked against Atilla but also was one of the many, many factors in the fall of the western empire. Xanthippus - Greek general who was hired by Carthage during the first Punic War. He brought a bunch of his own guys with him and beat the Romans in a fight. Obviously not a Roman mercenary, but it shows how a Roman general could find mercenary troops. You could simply hire a foreign dude who had troops under his command.
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Jul 18, 2014 16:47
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Revenant Threshold posted:Are we talking distinct groups roaming around working for whoever So mercenaries roamed the Med the way specialized tradesmen would later roam medieval Europe, moving from one conflict/paysource to the next. Xanthippus mentioned above was a famous merc commander, but there were many others, including Hannibal in his later life. Carthage is thought to have had a mostly mercenary infantry at all times relevant. The Romans got pulled into the First Punic War in part because a crew of Italian mercs started working for the Greeks in Sicily. Gauls/Celts were the standard go-to for a lot of powers up through the Roman conquest of Gaul, said conquest opened up Germania and Germans took to the business quite readily.
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Jul 18, 2014 17:33
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I want to change the thread title again now that we're almost to 10,000 posts, give me some suggestions. The current one is Pompeii graffiti meaning "He who buggers a fire burns his penis". I'd like the new title to be equally classy.
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Jul 18, 2014 18:44
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The most famous mercenary group of antiquity is pretty clearly Xenophon's Ten Thousand. Let's grab an army of Greeks with some semi-competent officers and drag them over a half a continent to help fight our war because Greeks are frighteningly warlike and good at fighting Persians. E: Hey, speaking of ten thousand. Gotta be some raunchy joke that uses ìõñßïé. Or myrioi. Sodding IE.
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Jul 18, 2014 18:48
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I doubt that you can beat that title. The one with the fire that is. Timeless wisdom of the ancients.
Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Jul 18, 2014 |
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Jul 18, 2014 18:48
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How about the classic "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo"?
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Jul 18, 2014 18:58
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Grand Fromage posted:I want to change the thread title again now that we're almost to 10,000 posts, give me some suggestions. The current one is Pompeii graffiti meaning "He who buggers a fire burns his penis". I'd like the new title to be equally classy. When I was in grad school, one student essay relayed the boast of Augustus, that "he had found Rome a brick, and left it a marble." (Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi is sometimes translated "I found Rome of brick and left it of marble") Not anywhere close to fire-sex classy though.
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Jul 18, 2014 19:07
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http://www.spreadshirt.com/pedicabo+ego+vos+et+irrumabo+t-shirts
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Jul 18, 2014 19:24
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What did the Greeks circa 600-300BCE know of the Romans? Was Rome even on their radar? I've been thinking of a "What if" which involves Alexander conquering to the West rather than the East and how this would have changed history.
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Jul 18, 2014 22:36
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I think Livy mentions Alexander was building a fleet to take on Carthage - but then goes off on one saying that Rome would've kicked his rear end. Then again, 600 BC Rome is a backwater.
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Jul 18, 2014 22:55
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redshirt posted:What did the Greeks circa 600-300BCE know of the Romans? Was Rome even on their radar? The Greeks had a lot of settlements in Italy. Syracuse in Sicily was as big as Athens. They undoubtedly encountered the Romans, but they weren't much of a threat at that point.
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Jul 18, 2014 22:58
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Sleep of Bronze posted:The most famous mercenary group of antiquity is pretty clearly Xenophon's Ten Thousand. Let's grab an army of Greeks with some semi-competent officers and drag them over a half a continent to help fight our war because Greeks are frighteningly warlike and good at fighting Persians. A fair amount of that was Cyrus the Younger being super chummy with Lysander,* the Ten Thousand was kinda a Spartan state approved reciprocation and they dropped right back into fighting for the Spartans (first in Anatolia against the Persians, because hey, a lot of practice doing that) and then even against Athens, which is how Xenophon ended up exiled for most of his life. There's actually a really interesting case in the Hellenika where Xenophon (effacing his identity, but he's talking about the Ten Thousand's post march-up-country adventures) where a satrap is murdered by her son-in-law (because, according to Xenophon, he'd been convinced it was dishonorable to serve under a woman.) Her satrap gets super pissed and cuts the son-in-law loose, basically 'gently caress you, once we kill these Greeks I'm coming for you.' So the guy tries to flip to the Greeks and they, because the old satraps' Greek mercs really liked her and tattled to the Ten Thousand, basically say 'thanks for letting us into all your cities now gently caress off.' The Ten Thousand itself also had it's regional sub-variations. Because they had no cavalry (that was supposed to have been supplied by the Persians allies, oops) the archers and some guys who didn't sign on as slingers but used slings a lot back home became super important for keeping some of the Anatolian hill tribes off their backs. Xenophon uses this to talk briefly on the virtues of paying your goddamn mercenaries drat it which, you know, near and dear to his heart. He also endorses, implicitly, female rulership because- while martial ability is super important for proper rulers- watching and then rewarding good fighting is perfectly acceptable. It's, perhaps, better than charging in and dying like some idiot and leaving your men all stranded in the middle of enemy territory. Anyway the point is that yeah, mercenary work wasn't super uncommon at all. Even your homegrown armies would, e.g. flip out and demand payment. Sailors (who got very few chances at loot) were particularly sensitive to late pay and one of the best ways for the Persians to tip the scales in the Greek wars was to hand bags of silver to the admirals of whatever side they were rooting for at that particular moment. *Since you know, helped him end the Peloponnesian War and all. That one of those what if contingencies of history. It's super 'Great Man' and all but there were times when very significant polities foreign policy could go from 'keep them fighting' to 'I like this guy, let's help them win' simply because some prince turned 16 and needed a province to oversee... And of course if Cyrus doesn't up and die and the Ten Thousand hold the field then Sparta and Persia don't end up clashing all over Anatolia, the post-Peloponnesian Spartan hegemony never over extends, no room for Thebes and then Macedon to rise, so no Alexander, another Great Man...
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Jul 18, 2014 23:19
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redshirt posted:What did the Greeks circa 600-300BCE know of the Romans? Was Rome even on their radar? He wasn't interested in the West. The Romans were irrelevant from like 600-350 BC, and during Alexander's time, they weren't any more powerful than any other Italian tribe. Alexander was a glory seeker, and the greatest achievement of his time would have been toppling the Persian empire. In the west, there was Carthage, and a few prosperous Greek cities like Massilia or Syracuse and nothing else to pique his interest. If he had gone west, he probably would have had his fleet sunk by the Carthaginians and return home like an idiot. But it's a particularly ridiculous what-if, like wondering if Hitler had invaded America instead of the USSR.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:33
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The Romans at that time would have been more of an Etruscan colony and the Greeks had plenty of dealings with the Etruscans.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:56
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This makes me wonder, how did the alexandrian succesors (seleucids, macedons and prolemies) feel about stepwise loosing to, becoming dominated by and ultimately defeated by the new upstart Rome? Considering their proud legacy and fighting old enemies they knew. Was it a big shock for them that Rome became so formidable?
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Jul 19, 2014 00:38
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:If he had gone west, he probably would have had his fleet sunk by the Carthaginians and return home like an idiot. But it's a particularly ridiculous what-if, like wondering if Hitler had invaded America instead of the USSR. I might be misremembering, but wasn't Alexander's plan something crazy like building a road across North Africa so he could march his army over to Carthage?
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Jul 19, 2014 02:08
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:He wasn't interested in the West. The Romans were irrelevant from like 600-350 BC, and during Alexander's time, they weren't any more powerful than any other Italian tribe. Not entirely true, if you believe Arrian. After turning back at India, Alexander had began to plan to conquer Arabia, then go west to the Pillars of Hercules. Had he not died we likely would never have had a Rome to speak of. Greeks would have known about Rome. The most populous part of the Greek world wasn't even Greece actually, it was Magna Graecia covering Sicily and southern Italy. They would've known all the important cities of Italy, which Rome was one of. In the 600s part of your range, nobody would've cared much, it was just another town. By the 300s Rome is starting to be a regional power in Italy, they control most of Latium and are now right on Magna Graecia's borders. In 280 the Pyrrhic War begins, by the end of that Rome controls most of Italy (except the Po valley region in the north) and is on everybody's radar.
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Jul 19, 2014 04:45
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Grand Fromage posted:I want to change the thread title again now that we're almost to 10,000 posts, give me some suggestions. The current one is Pompeii graffiti meaning "He who buggers a fire burns his penis". I'd like the new title to be equally classy. Goodbye wondrous femininity like it should have been last time 
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Jul 19, 2014 08:49
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"Ut biberent quoniam esse nollent"?  Never forget chicken drowner!
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Jul 19, 2014 14:12
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Grand Fromage posted:I want to change the thread title again now that we're almost to 10,000 posts, give me some suggestions. The current one is Pompeii graffiti meaning "He who buggers a fire burns his penis". I'd like the new title to be equally classy. "vidi, vici, veni"?
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Jul 19, 2014 14:42
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Pompeii posted:I.4.1 (bar; left of the door, near a picture of Mercury); 8475: Palmyra, the thirst-quencher This thread selling out to the Palmyran wine lobby is pretty classy.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:29
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Does anyone know where to look up these quotes to see them in the original latin? I tried using the German history site that is hosting a copy of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, but I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. The document didn't seem to be organized in the way people said it was, and the search function was useless. Clearly I'm not using it right, but I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. One the flip side, seeing their copies of the original graffiti in the appendixes was pretty cool. http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/books/CILvIV1871
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Jul 19, 2014 16:48
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I'm going to assume the answer to this question is "no", and ask anyway. Is there any surviving roman writing that records fairly mundane day-to-day life? I was re-reading Seneca's letters lately and was really taken with some of the asides he makes to comment on the everyday bullshit that was going on around him - his visits to nearby villas, the hubub of noise outside his window, and descriptions of the various culprits (hair pluckers, masseurs, etc), gossip about people who weren't emperors. It reminded me that Rome (and history in general) wasn't just the succession of crises and big events that got regularly recorded, but was mostly just fairly average people leading fairly quiet lives. I find it easy to forget that sometimes. Are there any good diarists? Travelogues? e: and they don't have to be roman or Rome-centric either.
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Jul 19, 2014 21:08
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Jazerus posted:This thread selling out to the Palmyran wine lobby is pretty classy. This thread is being sponsored by Palmyran wine. The only wine for true Romans.
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Jul 19, 2014 21:19
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Kopijeger posted:How about the classic "Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo"? My tribe votes for this.
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Jul 19, 2014 21:32
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Oberleutnant posted:I'm going to assume the answer to this question is "no", and ask anyway. Is there any surviving roman writing that records fairly mundane day-to-day life? I was re-reading Seneca's letters lately and was really taken with some of the asides he makes to comment on the everyday bullshit that was going on around him - his visits to nearby villas, the hubub of noise outside his window, and descriptions of the various culprits (hair pluckers, masseurs, etc), gossip about people who weren't emperors. It reminded me that Rome (and history in general) wasn't just the succession of crises and big events that got regularly recorded, but was mostly just fairly average people leading fairly quiet lives. I find it easy to forget that sometimes. Are there any good diarists? Travelogues? The vindolanda tablets are one source i know of.
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Jul 19, 2014 21:44
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Oberleutnant posted:I'm going to assume the answer to this question is "no", and ask anyway. Is there any surviving roman writing that records fairly mundane day-to-day life? I was re-reading Seneca's letters lately and was really taken with some of the asides he makes to comment on the everyday bullshit that was going on around him - his visits to nearby villas, the hubub of noise outside his window, and descriptions of the various culprits (hair pluckers, masseurs, etc), gossip about people who weren't emperors. It reminded me that Rome (and history in general) wasn't just the succession of crises and big events that got regularly recorded, but was mostly just fairly average people leading fairly quiet lives. I find it easy to forget that sometimes. Are there any good diarists? Travelogues? You'd probably want to look at letters rather than diaries - diaries weren't really a thing in those days, but people like Seneca and Cicero often talk about regular life (such as it were for them) in their letters. A Greek dude named Pausanias wrote Description of Greece, which is an ancient travelogue. It's a bit like a Lonely Planet guide, interested in describing cool places and buildings and features, rather than describing people, but it's accurate enough that early modern archaeologists used it to corroborate things they were excavating.
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Jul 19, 2014 22:49
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Oberleutnant posted:I'm going to assume the answer to this question is "no", and ask anyway. Is there any surviving roman writing that records fairly mundane day-to-day life? I was re-reading Seneca's letters lately and was really taken with some of the asides he makes to comment on the everyday bullshit that was going on around him - his visits to nearby villas, the hubub of noise outside his window, and descriptions of the various culprits (hair pluckers, masseurs, etc), gossip about people who weren't emperors. It reminded me that Rome (and history in general) wasn't just the succession of crises and big events that got regularly recorded, but was mostly just fairly average people leading fairly quiet lives. I find it easy to forget that sometimes. Are there any good diarists? Travelogues? It's later, but people have done amazing work reconstructing aspects of daily life in North Africa using Augustine's sermons. Besides that, the best work on the life of nonelites is probably archaeological.
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Jul 20, 2014 00:17
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Jul 20, 2014 00:46
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deadking posted:It's later, but people have done amazing work reconstructing aspects of daily life in North Africa using Augustine's sermons. See also: all the Pompeii graffiti. Still, there's a lot to be gleaned about lower class people from the writing of upper class people. The "Home Economics" texts from the big Athenian guys, for instance, gives a pretty good glimpse into the daily lives of the slaves and servants who were definitely enmeshed in those households. Legal documents are also a good source, and there's some work done building narratives out of, e.g. writings of Greek men bitching about their women doing x, y, z. Sure, it's from a male perspective and it reveals how screwed up their society was w/r/t gender but it also shows us that women were doing things that hacked off their husbands so... (Of course there's some extremely  histories done like this, like someone trying to excavate the lives of Jamaican plantation slaves using their overseer's meticulously kept rape journal.)
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Jul 20, 2014 00:56
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