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WoodrowSkillson posted:This is my point, if you were a black man whose parents were from Ethiopia but was born in Egypt you were just as Roman as a white man born to Pict parents in Britain. The only way for racism to come into it is to use the most liberal definition of the word race to mean any group with shared history or heritage, which when you talk about racism in the western world in 2014, is normally not how it is used. People think of racism as discrimination by white people against other colored people first, and then against other religious groups next, and normally only nonwhite members of those religions. So when you say "The Romans were racist" is creates an incorrect assumption of how the Romans acted. Dude, Indian princes sent their sons to Eton. Class trumped race. The British Empire was indeed racist but it wasn't, by and large, 'brown people aren't even human beings' or slavery would never have been abolished. Things aren't that black and white (as it were).
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Oct 21, 2014 20:41
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It really should be in the OP is the thread wasn't so long but the answer to the racism question is easy. Racism as we understand it did not exist in ancient Empires beyond a few noticeable acceptions, the Greeks being the biggest one, even A Alexander the Great wasn't considered Greek by anyone from Greece at the time. Ancient Empires practiced what could only be described Cultural Supmeracy wherein as long as you followed laws and rules of the Empire they didn't care.
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Oct 22, 2014 02:18
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Guildencrantz posted:Can someone give me the original Latin of that titular quote? I know I saw it here, but can't find it anywhere. The rest of the famous Pompeii graffiti would be great as well. cunne superbe va [le] is implied. The inscription in full is something like: [H]ic Rufum ka[r]um <..>SE<.>AE, dolete, puellae, pedi[co] cunne superbe va[le] Here dear Rufus - weep, girls! - I did bugger. Proud oval office, goodbye!
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Oct 22, 2014 02:26
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I definitely believe that ordinary Romans of the period most usually discussed in this thread engaged in some talk about foreigners having different color hair, eyes, skin, or what have you. Romanitas was real but people are people.
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Oct 22, 2014 05:29
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Well this is more psychology but is that really true? I don't think we naturally focus on skin colour nearly as much as people think, like, look at kids; this is insanely anecdotal but I can't even remember a little kid identifying someone by their skin colour, and they give no fucks if what they're saying might be hurtful or offensive. I get that people will pick up on the most identifiable features a lot of the time, but at least in many cases I don't think skin is that; tan caucasians get pretty dark, there are pale north africans and near easterners etc. I'd be interested in reading a study on that for sure.
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Oct 22, 2014 05:38
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Koramei posted:Well this is more psychology but is that really true? I don't think we naturally focus on skin colour nearly as much as people think, like, look at kids; this is insanely anecdotal but I can't even remember a little kid identifying someone by their skin colour, and they give no fucks if what they're saying might be hurtful or offensive. I get that people will pick up on the most identifiable features a lot of the time, but at least in many cases I don't think skin is that; tan caucasians get pretty dark, there are pale north africans and near easterners etc. If you haven't seen kids entirely aware of skin color, then you haven't seen many suburban families. The "Mommy, look at the chocolate man!" moment is near universal in those communities that are super-homogenous and don't have easy access to ones that aren't. So with that established, the question then becomes the (19th/20th-century-defined) ethnic demographic makeup of each Roman city to determine what skin colors Romans from which parts of the empire would find odd, and that will simply never be possible.
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Oct 22, 2014 05:59
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sbaldrick posted:It really should be in the OP is the thread wasn't so long but the answer to the racism question is easy. We love to apply our views and lenses to history. For Americans it's usually race, for Europeans class. Look at Victorian British time texts on history, and they say a lot about the Victorians in the way they apply their world view to history. Same of course for us (look at all the people trying to draw parallels between the end of the Roman Republic and America/Britain, the various Roman economic crisis and ours currently, the influx of "barbarians" in Rome as their downfall and the same thing supposedly happening to us...). But they all aren't really applicable to a culture/group that's very much different from ours, even if it (seemingly) is so near us like the Romans. The cultural continuation between Rome and us makes it often far more difficult to see them as very different people with a very different mindset from us. Romans definitely saw themselves as superior to every other git on Earth (like most humans do), but it's as far as we know not because of skin colour or class you're born in (except Patricians of course) or passport (although being a Citizen made you a better person of course in Roman eyes). It was maybe more a "favoured by the Gods because you're Roman, fiercely proud of Roman achievements compared to all those idiots elsewhere, fiercely contenting that your own ancestors were better than everyone elses"-thing. Seeing the whole thing more through a religious-"nationalist"-chauvinist lens might be more correct than either classism or racism. Neither your skin colour nor the money you were born with, nor the title some other barbarians near your two-story hovel in Bumfuck, Helvetia give you could make you automatically Roman or would make a Roman think more of you. The Romans were proud of being a amalgam of different people, outlaws, pirates and bandits and refugees from Troy and migrants from Etruscan towns, fighting against the culturally and military superior Etruscan and Italians. That's not the origin story a people, who thinks themselves racially superior, gives themselves. Decius fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 07:00
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Sleep of Bronze posted:cunne superbe va So in the end, it's the Roman equivalent of 'im gay'. Truly the gibbis of the ancient world
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Oct 22, 2014 07:12
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Not Roman and possibly not even from antiquity, but there's a famous hadith where Mohammad supports racial equality, as part of his final sermon. Even if you think its an invention by later writers, it still suggests at least the presence of pre modern racism. Otherwise, why speak out against it?quote:O people! Indeed, your Lord is one and your father is one. Indeed, there is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor of a non-Arab over an Arab, nor of a white over a black, nor a black over a white
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Oct 22, 2014 07:14
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I'm sure the idea existed, but that's not evidence that Romans thought it was important. Especially because the tribal Arab society Mohammed emerged from was pretty darn different from the society in the contemporary Empire.
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Oct 22, 2014 07:28
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Let's talk about farting in ancient cultures instead.
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Oct 22, 2014 09:04
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Arglebargle III posted:Let's talk about farting in ancient cultures instead. Sumerians already said everything that could be said in that regard.
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Oct 22, 2014 09:06
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my dad posted:Sumerians already said everything that could be said in that regard. There's little documentation on Sumerian sharting, however. Are there Roman sources on the matter?
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Oct 22, 2014 09:13
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Anyone have any good general reads on Classical Greece? Might as well get something out of the three hours I have in this class.
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Oct 22, 2014 09:19
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Arglebargle III posted:Let's talk about farting in ancient cultures instead. "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."    
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Oct 22, 2014 13:56
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I'm the censor bar.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: this is also why translation inherently sucks and any scholar who hopes to study a foreign culture in any serious way has to learn its language. Some concepts just don't translate well between languages and you get to spend a paragraph trying to describe the meaning of a term rather than just finding a 1:1 equivalent in your own language. This is a truism, in that concepts attached to words vary across groups within a given language too, and any kind of interpretation across contexts is an act of translation. As in, the words "slave" and "master" in Krista Siegfrids' Eurovision song "Marry Me" don't hold the same meaning that they do in an American history textbook.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:16
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So I'm not the first person to fart on my cat.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:19
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That is treason, Jiro-san.
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Oct 22, 2014 15:41
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LingcodKilla posted:So I'm not the first person to fart on my cat. But did you make your cat fly?
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Oct 22, 2014 15:50
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Veering from fart chat for late antiquity question I don't recall being asked before. In the places Germanic tribes settled (Suebi in Gallicia, Visigoths in Iberia, Franks in Gaul, Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy) they adopted the Latin derived languages of the locals. In England though the locals adopted the Germanic languages of the invaders (with influences from Welsh). Why wasn't this the other way around with the Anglo-Saxons adopting the local Celtic/Latin language? Was England at the time particularly depopulated? Or were there other reasons?
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Oct 22, 2014 19:19
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:Veering from fart chat for late antiquity question I don't recall being asked before. I'm not convinced post Roman Britain spoke much Latin outside maybe some of the elites. It was a peripheral border province after all.
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Oct 22, 2014 20:17
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:Veering from fart chat for late antiquity question I don't recall being asked before. Probably a combination of Britain being less Romanized than Gaul or Iberia, and random luck. Nor did the Franks completely adopt Latin; in keeping with their hybrid administration Latin was mostly retained, but tons of military words and a number of legal terms were imported from Frankish.
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Oct 22, 2014 20:28
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The loanwords point is a good one: languages frequently show their roots in which predecessor specific words come from. English is a good example, where technical terms come from Latin, philosophical concepts from Ancient Greek, basic nouns (words like 'thing' or 'earth') from Germanic (presumably Saxon), and words associated with the nobility (e.g. moat, castle, royal) come from French via Norman. Then again English is crazy mad for loanwords. e: I guess my point is that what matters is where any invading group ends up: if like the Normans they just build a bunch of castles and represent a small ruling elite their language won't spread into the wider population except in specific cases. This would imply that truly 'Romanised' Britons were either a minority or fled post-410. Obliterati fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 20:35
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feedmegin posted:I'm not convinced post Roman Britain spoke much Latin outside maybe some of the elites. It was a peripheral border province after all. There were probably lots of Britons who didn't speak Latin, but the main reason for its effective disappearance was that the most Romanized parts of Britain were the first to fall to the Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and most of the remaining governmental structures went with them. Latin didn't totally vanish, however. Of the two known Britonnic authors of the fifth and sixth centuries, Gildas's Latin was excellent and the result of an education in the classical style, and St. Patrick apologized to his readers because his Latin was somewhat rustic and unpolished. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 23:52
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Yeah I'd imagine the continuation or loss of Latin would have more to do with the extent to which the existing Roman administrative system survived. In the case of the Franks it seems they made some strong attempts to co-opt what worked and part of that meant retaining some of the language and terminology. In Britain Roman administration had already broked down somewhat and it seems either due to that or just luck, the Anglo-Saxon immigration wave really brought along its own governance structures that used the Germanic language. Of course that's very much a semi-educated layman's perspective on what happened so it could be laughably wrong.
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Oct 23, 2014 02:49
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MrNemo posted:Yeah I'd imagine the continuation or loss of Latin would have more to do with the extent to which the existing Roman administrative system survived. In the case of the Franks it seems they made some strong attempts to co-opt what worked and part of that meant retaining some of the language and terminology. In Britain Roman administration had already broked down somewhat and it seems either due to that or just luck, the Anglo-Saxon immigration wave really brought along its own governance structures that used the Germanic language. Also by the 400's Gaul had been Romanized for almost half a millennium and finding a Celtic speaker would have been pretty hard. Outside of London the Britons, especially the Brigante, pretty much just paid their taxes when they couldn't evade them and continued life as normal.
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Oct 23, 2014 10:51
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exmachina posted:Also by the 400's Gaul had been Romanized for almost half a millennium and finding a Celtic speaker would have been pretty hard. Outside of London the Britons, especially the Brigante, pretty much just paid their taxes when they couldn't evade them and continued life as normal. Is there evidence for this or is it supposition? Because I see a possibility of plenty of Celtic speakers in places outside of the large towns or cities. I mean mutually unintelligible regional dialects and remnant languages in the countryside remained a thing in a lot of countries up until the early 20th century with the advent of mass communication.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:05
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:Is there evidence for this or is it supposition? Because I see a possibility of plenty of Celtic speakers in places outside of the large towns or cities. I mean mutually unintelligible regional dialects and remnant languages in the countryside remained a thing in a lot of countries up until the early 20th century with the advent of mass communication. I'm going to take a wild guess and make a further supposition that Romanisation occurred most heavily in large towns and cities. The countryside was always different in a lot of ways.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:36
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Wasn't there a discussion about exactly this just like a month ago
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Oct 23, 2014 21:38
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Can anyone tell me how Roman beliefs in the afterlife evolved over time until the rise of the mystery religions? Did Roman religion change in response to their popularity?
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Oct 23, 2014 21:40
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Koramei posted:Wasn't there a discussion about exactly this just like a month ago We also had a discussion about racism in the ancient world about three months ago. There's only so much to discuss.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:46
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Halloween Jack posted:Can anyone tell me how Roman beliefs in the afterlife evolved over time until the rise of the mystery religions? Did Roman religion change in response to their popularity? Roman religion chat has come up a few times but it's basically that pre-Christianity, the Romans had a "cover all the bases" mentality when it came to religion. You had the freedom to believe in whatever you wanted to so long as you made the requisite sacrifices when the state demanded/needed it. Plus the Romans were always down for a party so if the new religion 'X' came in with a sweet new festival, why not join in? So you had a mix of every ancient religion/belief system in Republican/early-Imperial Rome. The problem with Christianity was with not participating in the Roman state requests and, being an extremely superstitious lot, the Romans weren't about to let some freaky cult get them on the bad side of any particular set of gods, real or imagined. As Christianity became more widespread, the Romans grew more tolerant of it (with some notable exceptions) and the Church helped itself by adopting popular Roman festivals as Christian holidays (Christmas cooping Saturnalia being the foremost example).
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Oct 23, 2014 21:47
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It's worth keeping in mind that priesthoods etc were usually attached to local magistracies, and often totally inseparable from them. So refusal to sacrifice was more than impious and antisocial - it was thumbing your nose at the city's rulers. There was also the problem that, as it grew, Christianity became very popular among middlingly wealthy urban elites. These were the exact people you'd expect to become local oligarchs, who instead refused the office on religious grounds and preferred to climb up the secretive Church hierarchy. From an emperor's point of view, it starts to look a lot like political subversion.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:01
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MrNemo posted:Yeah I'd imagine the continuation or loss of Latin would have more to do with the extent to which the existing Roman administrative system survived. In the case of the Franks it seems they made some strong attempts to co-opt what worked and part of that meant retaining some of the language and terminology. In Britain Roman administration had already broked down somewhat and it seems either due to that or just luck, the Anglo-Saxon immigration wave really brought along its own governance structures that used the Germanic language. My very limited understanding from the reading I've been doing on roman-era "Germany" (however we want to call that space on the map between the Rhine, Vistula, and Danube) is that you really can't begin to compare what happened in England to what happened on the main part of the continent. It isn't so much about the continuing existence of administrative systems on the continent as it is the fact that the tribes that moved in in the 4th-6th centuries had been engaged in centuries of cultural exchange with the Romans for hundreds of years before. National borders work totally different in the ancient era from how we think of them today, and there was never this hard line where it's Romans speaking Latin ruling over Gauls on this side of the water and Germans speaking Proto-German on the other. There's all sorts of trading and just general day to day contact, and with that goes all the normal cultural exchanges that are typical in border regions. One of the really interesting things I found in one book in particular ("Before France and Germany" by Geary for those who remember me sperging about it before) was that we already (apparently - I'm kinda taking his word for this as I don't really do ancient history) have this well developed model for talking about how this cultural contact latinized the Germanic tribes, but he insists that the western empire was simultaneously slowly Germanized from ~mid 2nd century through the 6th by more or less the same process. He describes the formation of what we'd think of as early medieval France (ca. Charlemagne) as much less a rebuilding following a collapse and more the result of a bunch of centuries of latinized Germans settling among somewhat germanized Latins. That's just what I'm getting so far, though, although I have to admit it's a really intriguing model and one that I find really compelling as it much better matches what we see in border regions today, even with our more modern concepts of national boundaries.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:32
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Thwomp posted:
I don't think its the only problem. The fact that christians thought there was only 1 god, and all others were not real was a sure source of tension, in a world in which you had so many different religions tolerating, if not accepting each other.
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Oct 24, 2014 03:19
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Dalael posted:I don't think its the only problem. The fact that christians thought there was only 1 god, and all others were not real was a sure source of tension, in a world in which you had so many different religions tolerating, if not accepting each other. I don't think this is true. Culturally, we have inherited this idea of Christians believing this crazy innovative "one god" stuff that blew Roman minds and upset them, but Jews and Zoroastrians were part of the Roman world as well.
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Oct 24, 2014 16:31
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The Christians did make a bigger show of snubbing the Roman traditions though. And he Roman authorities seemed to consider them more of a threat for whatever reason, I'm not sure exactly why. My guess would be because they were following someone deemed a criminal stirring up insurrection against the Roman state, which neither the Jews or Zororastrians were doing. Also they hadn't been beaten down repeatedly like the Jews.
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Oct 24, 2014 16:35
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Wasn't it simply because Christianity had caught on in the more wealthy greek-speaking parts of the empire far more readily than Judaism and Zoroastrianism ever had?
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Oct 24, 2014 16:39
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I think the evangelism was a big part too, yeah. Jews pretty much minded their own business barring the occasional uprising in Judea. I don't think the empire ever had any big Zoroastrian populations to deal with, just some weirdos out in the far east which was already full of weirdos anyway.
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Oct 24, 2014 16:43
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