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Don Gato posted:
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Oct 30, 2014 01:28
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TropicalCoke posted:What's the general line of thought about the Aeneid? I've heard the whole praise of Rome tons before but is there any value in the idea that he was secretly writing about his problems with Augustus and the state? I honestly find it very hard to believe he was doing anything other than praising Augustus and Rome. I could write a coherent set of thoughts on the topic, but that seems too much effort. So here are the key words and phrases in a semblance of order. Imagine a post created from them. Blah Aeneas blah Augustus blah pietas blah ancestral lineage. Blah blah blah imperfections of Aeneas blah furor blah Turnus blah inconclusive ending. Blah blah blah, reflections are not perfect imitations blah to equate blah to elevate blah suddenly to contrast? Blah. My personal conclusion runs very much to: blah. Granting the position, Vergil would have to be expressing it subtly enough that our identification could not help but be dubious, so the whole debate lacks good verifiability. As far as actual scholarly consensus goes, I think the narrative of Vergil as a subversive has definitely retreated from its high water mark some decades ago, but it isn't totally receded yet. This as well: Ras Het posted:Well for one it's a loving boring book. There's lots of things about the Aeneid which are interesting. It's just that, in itself, it fails to capture the greatness of what went before. Fanfic. 
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Oct 30, 2014 02:40
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Are you guys talking about the Elgin Marbles? The archive I work at has all the papers of Admiral Lord Lyons who was commanding the Royal Navy in the Med at the time, and we have loads of whiny letters from Elgin asking for ships to come and carry off all his looted poo poo. Responses basically amount to "uh we kind of have a war on atm", but they helped him out plenty often. One ship full of marbles sank just off Greece lmao.
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Oct 30, 2014 12:08
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I don't know if this is the best place to ask but it seemed as good as any. Can anyone recommend a translation of The Republic for me? Same deal as When I was reading Meditations a while back, girlfriend reading it in English, English is her second language, gotta find a translation that's easy to read even if it's sacrificing accuracy and stuff. She's reading it in her native language too, but she wants to read it in English to compare too (Korean translations of the Republic loving suckkkk) So, that means we don't need like a kids translation or something, but something in clear and common English. With Meditations it was easy, Gregory Hays translation was clearly what we needed. With Plato it's kinda more confusing.
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Oct 31, 2014 14:49
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Well English is my second language, and I read the Oxford World's Classics edition when I was like 15, and didn't feel too hosed over. So that should work.
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Oct 31, 2014 15:12
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Is there a new edition with modern English instead of the faux-Victorian poo poo? That would likely be a lot easier, more pleasant to read too.
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Oct 31, 2014 16:56
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The current OWC of the Symposium is a 2011 one by Waterfield, and Amazon preview shows he's not gone mad and opted for Victorian language. Never read his actual translation of the Symposium,* but his translation of Pre-Socratic testimonia and fragments was pretty acceptable.** I guess there's the caveat that those were fairly short passages, so he didn't have to make stuff hang together like with he'd have to with the Symposium, but it ought to be fine. *Translations are for the weak. ** Translations are for the weak unless you'd have to spend a shitload of money buying all the fifty separate obscure books that the originals are contained in.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:32
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The Allen Bloom translation isn't too flowery. He's a Straussian; they always favor the most accurate and plain translation possible to minimize the translator's influence on the text. It can make the reading a bit dull, but it would be understandable for an ESL reader.
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Nov 1, 2014 00:17
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I might go with the Bloom one, I think that's the one I originally read years ago in college. I'll have to look up the Waterfield one. I'm also looking at the Tom Griffith translation in the "Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought" edition, and it seems nice. I've been comparing excerpts from a bunch of modern translations and it looks like a lot of them are at about the same English level. There really aren't any big differences to be honest (for a casual reader) that I'm seeing, just a little bit of difference in structure and word choice.
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Nov 1, 2014 02:29
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BrainDance posted:I don't know if this is the best place to ask but it seemed as good as any. Can anyone recommend a translation of The Republic for me? Same deal as When I was reading Meditations a while back, girlfriend reading it in English, English is her second language, gotta find a translation that's easy to read even if it's sacrificing accuracy and stuff. The Reeve translation is the one I use in Intro to Philosophy; basically any Plato translation that's not 100 years old with be accurate enough for anyone who's not a dedicated scholar. The Reeve is especially easy to read because he makes a change that I wish more Plato translators did: He adds in speaker indicators. Makes it much easier to tell who's talking at a glance, instead of reading dialogues that are line after line of unattributed quotations. (In context it's easy to tell who's speaking if you read carefully, but adding "SOCRATES: " and "GLAUCON: " before anything Socrates or Glaucon says is a real time-saver.) If you want to read any other Plato, the rule of thumb is to see if Hackett has published what you want. Their raison d'etre is putting out affordable translations of texts for student use, and they're good at it.
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Nov 1, 2014 04:55
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BrainDance posted:I don't know if this is the best place to ask but it seemed as good as any. Can anyone recommend a translation of The Republic for me? Same deal as When I was reading Meditations a while back, girlfriend reading it in English, English is her second language, gotta find a translation that's easy to read even if it's sacrificing accuracy and stuff. Choosing a passage at random (420b, around the start of book IV): Benjamin Jowett posted:"If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall find the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of State." Allan Bloom posted:"Making our way by the same road," I said, "I suppose we'll find what has to be said. We'll say that it wouldn't be surprising if these men, as they are, are also happiest. However, in founding the city we are not looking to the exceptional happiness of any one group among us but, as far as possible, that of the city as a whole. We supposed we would find justice most in such a city, and injustice, in its turn, in the worst-governed one, and taking a careful look at them, we would judge what we've been seeking for so long. Now then, we suppose we're fashioning the happy city -- a whole city, not setting apart a happy few and putting them in it. We'll consider its opposite presently." e: Hackett's translator is Grube, but I don't own that translation, so I don't have his rendering. He translated it in the 1970s, though. Bloom is 1960s, Jowett is old enough that it's public domain. Personally I like Allan Bloom's translation and think it's more straightforward English in most cases. But there's arguments to be made all around. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 05:26
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I asked a little while ago, but never received an answer.. I'd like to know more about the Domus Aurea. More precisely, why it was buried. All I've managed to read about it states that it was an embarassement to Nero's successor, so they filled it with earth and used it as foundations to build stuff on top of it. Considering the cost to construct such a palace, the hardship suffered by the people of Rome (its my understanding some aqueducts were redirected to the build site).. I find it hard to believe that 'embarassement' is a good enough reason alone. Would it not have been a better idea to e-use it for other needs, rather than to just bury it? Do we have more information regarding this?
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Nov 1, 2014 05:58
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Anyone know any good book about Philip II and how he made Macedon dominant in Greece?
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Nov 1, 2014 08:12
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Alexander the Great Failure -by John D Grainger. It doesn't exclusively focus on Phillip. But it gives good information on the politics and economics of Makedonia, as well as all the predecessors of Phillip. And explains why Phillip was able to do what he did.
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Nov 1, 2014 09:40
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Suenteus Po posted:The Reeve translation is the one I use in Intro to Philosophy; basically any Plato translation that's not 100 years old with be accurate enough for anyone who's not a dedicated scholar. The Reeve is especially easy to read because he makes a change that I wish more Plato translators did: He adds in speaker indicators. Makes it much easier to tell who's talking at a glance, instead of reading dialogues that are line after line of unattributed quotations. (In context it's easy to tell who's speaking if you read carefully, but adding "SOCRATES: " and "GLAUCON: " before anything Socrates or Glaucon says is a real time-saver.) There are translations that don't do that? 
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Nov 1, 2014 10:49
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Egypt's often called the breadbasket of the Roman empire, but just how fertile was it back in ancient times? Was it all green, or was it like modern times where its basically desert outside of the banks of the Nile? Was there grass around the pyramids when they were built?
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Nov 1, 2014 13:09
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All desert like today, but that fertile area around the Nile is really, really fertile. The delta also is pretty big.
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Nov 1, 2014 13:15
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Jaramin posted:This is like saying German=English because they have the same ancestor language. Breton is closer linguistically to Welsh and Cornish than it is to the Gallic languages, indicating that its origin lies in the British Isles. That is also ignoring the legendary accounts of their arrival from the 4th century. By the same ancestor language, do you mean Latin and the dialects of the Germanic tribes in England? Or do you mean the Indogermanic roots? The distinction is important, because the history of English and German is slightly different as soon as Germanic dialects and Latin hit each other and start to mingle. Mostly I guess because the weren't that many different Germanic dialects to borrow from on the British islands, so more words were borrowed from Latin. The German language developed slightly differently, since the Theurge (a form of proto-German) was a wild mix of a lot of different Germanic dialects mixed in with some Latin loanwords. This happened mostly because of Charlemagne: He used Latin as official language, but most of the Germanic tribes he unified infused his armies with soldiers who couldn't speak Latin and often couldn't speak with other tribesmen, too. So they had to make do and a chaotic, artificial language developed out of the mix: Theurge, which later turned into Althochdeutsch (old high German). You could say English and German developed parallel, but to find a common root you would have to go back to the Indogermanic language itself, since most of the constituent parts of both languages came from there.
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Nov 1, 2014 13:50
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The delta was also larger; most of the branches are dead today because of the Aswan high dam.
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Nov 1, 2014 13:51
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Libluini posted:The German language developed slightly differently, since the Theurge (a form of proto-German) was a wild mix of a lot of different Germanic dialects mixed in with some Latin loanwords. This happened mostly because of Charlemagne: He used Latin as official language, but most of the Germanic tribes he unified infused his armies with soldiers who couldn't speak Latin and often couldn't speak with other tribesmen, too. So they had to make do and a chaotic, artificial language developed out of the mix: Theurge, which later turned into Althochdeutsch (old high German). This seems massively wrong. I've never heard of the term "Theurge", and Old High German isn't post-Carolingian, since what's distinct about it is the High German consonant shift, which started in the 500s. What have you been reading?
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Nov 1, 2014 14:01
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Ras Het posted:This seems massively wrong. I've never heard of the term "Theurge", and Old High German isn't post-Carolingian, since what's distinct about it is the High German consonant shift, which started in the 500s. What have you been reading? It's from my old university course work. I can look it up, but that can take a while. So don't expect an effort post before Sunday.
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Nov 1, 2014 14:51
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Dalael posted:I asked a little while ago, but never received an answer.. There is no answer other than "the Romans didn't think as we do" about some things. We don't usually raze a city to the ground and salt the fields when we go to war, either -- it would be a better idea to re-use a city and those fields. One's monuments were a part of one's legacy, which is what made the damnatio memoriae such a big deal, so burying the building that was so very Nero makes perfect sense.
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Nov 1, 2014 16:56
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It's not uncommon in the Ancient world for rulers to try and 'erase' predecessors like this, especially if their own ascent is on shaky foundations. My favourite example is Hatshepsut, the female Pharaoh: her son and successor is so embarassed about the whole thing that he destroys a bunch of her obelisks and literally chisels her name out of genealogical/pharonic records in tombs and the like. Removing a previous ruler from memory also allows you to point at their accomplishments and claim them for yourself.
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Nov 1, 2014 17:05
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Palaces aren't exactly easy to convert to a better use, either, most of the time. It depends on their original purpose; in the case of the Domus Aurea, it probably was just easier to strip it of valuables and bury it so that higher density construction could take place on top of it. The Domus Aurea was also built on ruins itself, and burying it was a symbolic "gently caress that" to the idea of an Emperor taking advantage of a tragedy to build a pleasuredome in a former residential neighborhood. The Romans were generally practical about this kind of thing (spiting Carthage aside) so you are correct that it is a little unusual, but in context it makes a lot of sense. Edit: Also, the neighborhood that it was built on top of was an ancient patrician-inhabited area on the Palatine. This was before the patricians were powerless and undoubtedly a lot of them were clamoring for the land to be returned to them so they could rebuild their city estates. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 17:40
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Doesn't burying it also help to keep away looters that you don't like from taking parts you want left in place too? Seems like it'd be a consideration.
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Nov 1, 2014 17:47
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homullus posted:There is no answer other than "the Romans didn't think as we do" about some things. Honestly this element of dissimilarity is unappreciated in popular understanding of antiquity. We have a tendency to look at historic people as being pretty much the same as modern people, just in a different situation. As if Romans were just a bunch of Americans in chainmail and togas. And while there is some truth to this, it conceals the greater truth that in many ways there are fundamental differences between a Roman and a modern American that go far beyond iPhones and democratic capitalism. There's differences in how they understand the world and society, and there's differences in how they were motivated and norms of behavior. And those differences are often difficult to bridge.
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Nov 1, 2014 18:23
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:There are translations that don't do that? Not where the Greek doesn't have it. Plato doesn't include them for any nested dialogues (which is most of them in the "Republic"; the frame narrative is just a tiny bit at the beginning of book one), and neither does e.g. the Grube translation. There will be third-person narration at times, "Socrates said" and the like, but no "SOCRATES: " before every line Socrates says.
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Nov 1, 2014 18:32
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Kaal posted:Honestly this element of dissimilarity is unappreciated in popular understanding of antiquity. We have a tendency to look at historic people as being pretty much the same as modern people, just in a different situation. As if Romans were just a bunch of Americans in chainmail and togas. And while there is some truth to this, it conceals the greater truth that in many ways there are fundamental differences between a Roman and a modern American that go far beyond iPhones and democratic capitalism. There's differences in how they understand the world and society, and there's differences in how they were motivated and norms of behavior. And those differences are often difficult to bridge. One thing that tends to get glossed over (particularly when this thread talks about slavery in the ancient world) is the extent to which Roman society tolerated many forms of sexual violence. To some extent this is true of most slave societies, but the Romans are unique, as far as I know, in castrating their prepubescent male slaves just to preserve their youthful beauty. 
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Nov 1, 2014 18:54
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I thought the "salting the fields" thing was a myth? The Romans razed Carthage and enslaved the populace, but Tunisia was pretty fertile in those days, so they colonized it. Pretty standard stuff.
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Nov 1, 2014 21:13
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Silver2195 posted:One thing that tends to get glossed over (particularly when this thread talks about slavery in the ancient world) is the extent to which Roman society tolerated many forms of sexual violence. To some extent this is true of most slave societies, but the Romans are unique, as far as I know, in castrating their prepubescent male slaves just to preserve their youthful beauty. Eunuchs as a whole are pretty popular in this timeframe: Persians even obtained them for the specific purpose of administration, the theory being that they'd have no sons to try and pass their status on to.
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Nov 1, 2014 21:38
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Obliterati posted:Eunuchs as a whole are pretty popular in this timeframe: Persians even obtained them for the specific purpose of administration, the theory being that they'd have no sons to try and pass their status on to. I referred specifically to the reason involved; I wasn't saying the Romans were the only people to practice castration.
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Nov 1, 2014 22:05
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What about castrating boys to preserve their singing voices?
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Nov 1, 2014 22:30
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sebzilla posted:What about castrating boys to preserve their singing voices? Still gross, but not really comparable to literally castrating boys to enjoy raping them more.
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Nov 1, 2014 22:36
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Silver2195 posted:Still gross, but not really comparable to literally castrating boys to enjoy raping them more. Uh yeah catholic priests would never do that.
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Nov 1, 2014 22:42
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Arglebargle III posted:lol This is from a few days ago, but you're thinking of it in the wrong context. It's not secretary in the sense of a typing assistant, it's Secretary as in Secretary of State/Defense/Agriculture/whatever. Censor is still a pretty rad title though.
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Nov 2, 2014 19:13
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Ras Het posted:This seems massively wrong. I've never heard of the term "Theurge", and Old High German isn't post-Carolingian, since what's distinct about it is the High German consonant shift, which started in the 500s. What have you been reading? I didn't forget about this! Turns out I may have thrown those papers away, well poo poo. But I found a Wikipedia-entry which mentions this. quote:Das Wort „deutsch“ erscheint zum ersten Mal in einem Dokument aus dem Jahre 786 in der mittellateinischen Form theodiscus. In einer Kirchenversammlung seien die Beschlüsse tam latine quam theodisce verlesen worden, also „sowohl lateinisch als auch in der Volkssprache“. Die althochdeutsche Form des Worts ist erst deutlich später belegt. In der Abschrift eines antiken Sprachlehrbuches in lateinischer Sprache, vermutlich im zweiten Viertel des 9. Jahrhunderts angefertigt, fand sich der Eintrag eines Mönches, der offenbar das lateinische Wort galeola (Geschirr in Helmform) nicht verstanden hatte. Er muss sich bei einem Mitbruder nach der Bedeutung dieses Wortes erkundigt und die deutsche Bedeutung hinzugefügt haben. Für seine Notiz verwendete er die althochdeutsche Frühform diutisce gellit (‚auf Deutsch Schale‘). At this point Theurge has already moved to Theodisce ("language of the people") and then to the already Old High German "Diutisce". One consonant shift later and we're well on our way to Deutsch (German). For some reason the English counterpart to this entry completely misses the origins of German. Which is kind of weird, but typically Wikipedia, I guess. If you're still interested, I'll try to find more. There are still some folders left from earlier semesters I haven't looked in yet.
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Nov 3, 2014 00:35
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What are you trying to say? I don't read German, so I'm blatantly missing something here.
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Nov 3, 2014 00:43
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Lord Tywin posted:Anyone know any good book about Philip II and how he made Macedon dominant in Greece? I found 'Philip II of Macedonia: Greater than Alexander' to be really enjoyable
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Nov 3, 2014 00:51
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Ras Het posted:What are you trying to say? I don't read German, so I'm blatantly missing something here. You asked me and I answered. Also google translate is a thing. If you still want to know more about what I've been reading about the history of the German language, I can try to dig out my own sources somewhere in my old folders and try to find some books, hopefully even with English translations available.
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Nov 3, 2014 01:10
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Libluini posted:
I have no idea where you're getting "Theurge", which is a totally different word. I think this is what you are talking about?
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Nov 3, 2014 01:24
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