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You have someone taken by force from their home hundreds of miles away, spent years making them submit to you, and after they've had decades to form a strong desire for revenge, it's totally cool to just leave members of your family alone with them?
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Sep 11, 2014 06:18
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| # ? May 12, 2024 16:28 |
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Greek house slaves would probably have been raised as slaves if not born as slaves. Your parents can sell you into slavery. A poor farmer from Bumfuck, Attica might see a better life for his son selling him to a slave house that turns out educated clerks and tutors. In the Pax Romana period an educated slave could look forward to a career of clerical or education work and then probably manumission after a decade or three of loyal service. You'd have to be a dick to just sell your kids' live-in tutor who's been with the family 20 years. This reminds me of that scene in Rome when Cicero is getting ready to get killed because Marcus Antonius is coming up the road with his soldiers, and his slave who's served his family since Cicero was a boy is pleading with him to flee. Cicero lets him know that he's freed all the slaves in his will, but the slave is like 60. What is freedom to a guy who is obviously a loyal family retainer? A wage wouldn't change the relationship much. 100 years later he would have been freed earlier probably but the point still stands; slavery isn't an intolerable situation for some slaves. I mentioned it a long time ago, but Claudius in particular caught flack from the upper classes for employing so many freedmen in the highest levels of his administration. These people were educated slaves who had risen to running the empire at the Emperor's side. Compared to being the son of a turd farmer, being sold into slavery as a boy suddenly doesn't look so bad. (If that doesn't answer the question, barbarian slaves captured in war wouldn't even be capable of teaching kids Homer anyway.) Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 06:31
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karl fungus posted:You have someone taken by force from their home hundreds of miles away, spent years making them submit to you, and after they've had decades to form a strong desire for revenge, it's totally cool to just leave members of your family alone with them? If you're educated, then you've just been taken to the most cosmopolitan place in the known world and put into the home of a member of the upper class, where your duties are sitting around discussing philosophy and rhetoric as opposed to back-breaking labor in the mines or scrubbing floors. You've got free food and lodging, the freedom of probably the most secure city there is (depending on when a personal feud in the Senate escalates) and opportunities to make money and eventually buy your freedom and become a citizen of the mightiest empire in the known world.
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Sep 11, 2014 06:32
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My understanding is that the ancient ideal is that fathers teach their children the kinds of skills they'd need, which for most people was probably rudimentary literacy, basic math, and some kind of moral education. Anything beyond that, if your father wasn't a specialist, you had to find someone to teach it to you. This was probably much easier in a gigantic imperial city like Rome or an ancient cosmopolitan nerd-center like Alexandria than it would be in a farming village or even a mid-tier city-state.
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Sep 11, 2014 06:48
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karl fungus posted:You have someone taken by force from their home hundreds of miles away, spent years making them submit to you, and after they've had decades to form a strong desire for revenge, it's totally cool to just leave members of your family alone with them? Not all slaves were Spartacus
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Sep 11, 2014 12:07
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sassassin posted:Not all slaves were Spartacus Sorry, but you're wrong there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q
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Sep 11, 2014 12:21
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Octy posted:Sorry, but you're wrong there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q Excellent 
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Sep 11, 2014 12:42
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Is anyone following the excavation at Amphipolis? Any good reads available on it?
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Sep 11, 2014 12:47
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I haven't been much but blanket warning on new excavations, take all the interpretation with many grains of salt. Pictures are cool though. Wait for people to figure stuff out before believing anything. As for the slave thing, being an educated slave was a pretty good life. A lot of people would've preferred it. Think about it, take two choices: spend your life scratching at dirt to raise cabbages, never have money, and maybe die of starvation if there's no rain. But you have freedom. Or live in a rich person's household, with all your needs taken care of, and teach the kids. You're not allowed to leave here, though. Freedom is great and all, but being an educated slave? You were definitely in the top 10% of society. I don't think there were very many educated slaves who were super pissed off about being enslaved. Farm slaves, mine slaves, sure. Slaves are not all equal, though.
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Sep 11, 2014 13:43
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Also, it's not like farmers had a ton of freedom practically speaking. The land is a tyrant of its own.
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Sep 11, 2014 13:53
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I've always been curious about what Athens was up to during the heyday of the Roman Empire. It's such an important polis in our understanding of Ancient Greece, yet the focus is always on it's own personal heyday during the 5th century BC. Did it revert to an irrelevant slice of Greece or was there still something important about it to the Romans? (I do realise the importance of Athens to us is based on the sources we have, but still)
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Sep 11, 2014 14:08
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Arglebargle III posted:Greek house slaves would probably have been raised as slaves if not born as slaves. Your parents can sell you into slavery. A poor farmer from Bumfuck, Attica might see a better life for his son selling him to a slave house that turns out educated clerks and tutors. In the Pax Romana period an educated slave could look forward to a career of clerical or education work and then probably manumission after a decade or three of loyal service. You'd have to be a dick to just sell your kids' live-in tutor who's been with the family 20 years. quote:Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:11
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Didnt China has some good schools?
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Sep 11, 2014 14:14
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Halloween Jack posted:Can you guess who said this? For something so full of generally-useful-sounding advice about agriculture, it's kind of surprising that more "different" manuscripts of Cato's De Agri Cultura (which is what I'm assuming it's from) didn't make their way into the textual tradition. I'd think that would be something with a lot of manuscripts copied out in a lot of places. I'm not a textual critic, though, so I maybe there's something I'm missing.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:26
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Halloween Jack posted:Can you guess who said this? Michael Jordan?  euphronius posted:Didnt China has some good schools? Meh. Chinese premodern education focused mostly on book-learnin' as far as I remember.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:54
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Tao Jones posted:My understanding is that the ancient ideal is that fathers teach their children the kinds of skills they'd need, which for most people was probably rudimentary literacy, basic math, and some kind of moral education. Anything beyond that, if your father wasn't a specialist, you had to find someone to teach it to you. This was probably much easier in a gigantic imperial city like Rome or an ancient cosmopolitan nerd-center like Alexandria than it would be in a farming village or even a mid-tier city-state. My understanding is that was what often happened in the early Republic and even in the later stages, it was often seen as something of a failing or a slide into decadence that aristocrats hired tutors to educate their children. On Athens: I've gotten the impression from what I've seen of Roman history that it maintained an important cultural position, having spawned much of the philosophical schools that dominated the Roman world. It was also politically quite important within Greece but Greece itself simply faded into irrelevance in the context of the wider Empire. The remaining division of the city states meant that it was never any kind of united political force despite some Emperors seeking to get it more involved (Trajan iirc). Greek culture obviously continued to be incredibly influential but by the time you're getting into the heyday of the Roman Empire the major Greek city is Alexandria in Egypt. Athens maintained philosophical schools and contributed some stuff but it was far more historical pedigree than anything else.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:31
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euphronius posted:Didnt China has some good schools? At different times (we're talking about a millenia plus of different exam type systems adapting to different needs/dynasties/whatever) you had state run schools, but pretty inconsistently. "Blahblahblah was a good governor because he found space in the budget for education" might be a thing a regional bureaucrat might get a pat on the back for but it wasn't really part of the job. A lot of those public-ish schools would have been gate by entrance exams so... welp if you didn't get schooling earlier. A lot of the bureaucratic exams system was a way for the elite to perpetuate itself in a way that pretended to be meritocratic.* That said someone who passed the first few exams but couldn't hack it past that would pretty much go back to being a rich 'farmer' (landlord) or become a teacher so there were dudes around offering education for relatively cheap. *Insert comments about e.g. wealth and SAT correlation in the US. Basically it did weed out rich idiot for the most part (and for a given definition of 'idiot') but it wasn't really a leg up for smart paupers, nor was it meant to be.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:51
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karl fungus posted:You have someone taken by force from their home hundreds of miles away, spent years making them submit to you, and after they've had decades to form a strong desire for revenge, it's totally cool to just leave members of your family alone with them? Worked fine in the American South, don't forget, and that was a rather more brutal system than Roman house slavery. Doubly so if the person in question wasn't taken from anywhere but raised from birth knowing they're a slave because their parents are slaves.
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Sep 11, 2014 18:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Can you guess who said this? I'm guessing Cato the Elder?
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Sep 11, 2014 22:25
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Jerusalem posted:I'm guessing Cato the Elder? quote:If you wish to clean out the upper digestive tract, take four pounds of very smooth cabbage leaves, make them into three equal bunches and tie them together. Set a pot of water on the fire, and when it begins to boil sink one bunch for a short time, which will stop the boiling; when it begins again sink the bunch briefly while you count five, and remove. 3 Do the same with the second and third bunches, then throw the three together and macerate. After macerating, squeeze through a cloth about a hemina of the juice into an earthen cup; add a lump of salt the size of a pea, and enough crushed cummin to give it an odour, and let the cup stand in the air through a calm night. Before taking a dose of this, one should take a hot bath, drink honey-water, and go to bed fasting. 4 Early the next morning he should drink the juice and walk about for four hours, attending to any business he has. When the desire comes on him and he is seized with nausea, he p143should lie down and purge himself; he will evacuate such a quantity of bile and mucus that he will wonder himself where it all came from.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:06
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CABBAGES
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Sep 11, 2014 23:13
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That's so much loving effort that whatever illness you have will have subsided by then.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:13
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Sleep of Bronze posted:CABBAGES Diocletian: Awwwww ysssss
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Sep 11, 2014 23:41
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Jerusalem posted:Diocletian: Awwwww ysssss I understood this reference.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:48
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Ras Het posted:That's so much loving effort that whatever illness you have will have subsided by then. It's no effort at all if you have slaves do it.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:51
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homullus posted:It's no effort at all if you have slaves do it. ...a fair point.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:51
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It's not like an educated slave tutor would probably be sold into a really bad life after a family's done with him. You'd get a way better price sending him to another family that needs a tutor than you would if you sent him off to the mines to die in a week. I've also heard that the Romans would take in abandoned babies to raise them as slaves. How true is that?
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Sep 12, 2014 00:09
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Ras Het posted:That's so much loving effort that whatever illness you have will have subsided by then. And thus, how bullshit traditional medicine works. "Take these herbs, they can take up to two months to be effective!" 
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Sep 12, 2014 00:10
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Grand Fromage posted:And thus, how bullshit traditional medicine works. "Take these herbs, they can take up to two months to be effective!" Also, take a treatment that produces copious vomit/feces/sweat/pus/whatever, and then show that the fact that the medicine got rid of all of that nasty stuff means it worked. See also: hot yoga.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:13
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Do you wake up tired?  TOXINS
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Sep 12, 2014 00:16
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Al Harrington posted:Do you wake up tired? This one is true if you drink a lot.
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Sep 12, 2014 03:17
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Lewd Mangabey posted:Also, take a treatment that produces copious vomit/feces/sweat/pus/whatever, and then show that the fact that the medicine got rid of all of that nasty stuff means it worked. When food poisoning was a common problem, purgatives were useful in getting it out and helping you recover. Nowadays it's bullshit, though.
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Sep 12, 2014 03:23
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Deteriorata posted:When food poisoning was a common problem, purgatives were useful in getting it out and helping you recover. How can it be nonsense when it's clearly removing yellow bile and restoring the balance of your humours? I bet you don't even treat everything with cabbage!
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Sep 12, 2014 03:26
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This is why people in Korea and Germany never get sick. Massive amounts of cabbage
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Sep 12, 2014 07:42
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Halloween Jack posted:You win! The prize is a recipe. It sounds like a good hangover cure. I usually go to bed fasting after a big night out, so all I'd need is for the mixture to be prepared in advance, and some willingness to drink it the next day. Nothing can go wrong.
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Sep 12, 2014 08:07
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Mustang posted:Augustus and Agrippa might be the most successful bro partnership in history, dudes were awesome. They were the Boss and Johnny Gat of ancient history. EDIT: Holy poo poo the last page. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 08:26
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I don't get it either. Cabbages are awesome.
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Sep 12, 2014 14:32
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Fo3 posted:I don't get it either. Cabbages are awesome. Romans most certainly agree.
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Sep 12, 2014 15:52
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I don't get how cabbage-water with salt and cumin is supposed to make you vomit. EDIT: vvv What an appropriate quip for the antiquity megathread! LordSaturn fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 17:57
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Obviously, you don't know my wife's cooking.
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Sep 12, 2014 18:24
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