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"Is there a Roman Senate? Y/N" is the rule I personally stick to. While its functional power waxes and wanes its kind of that quintessential Roman institution. So that'd put the fall if the West around 600s and the East somewhere around the 13th or 14th centuries where after that "Rome" is barely visible on a map
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Nov 21, 2014 00:37
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cheerfullydrab posted:I'm happy with ditching the post-1204 empire, okay, why not. That's the only bit of your argument that has any truth to it at all. The rest is total garbage. C'mon, the Palaiologos' were a well established aristocratic family well intermarried with Doukas and Komnenos, directly descended from several of those pre-1204 emperors. He reinstated all the old traditions of the pre-1204 empire and brought all the vassals, most of the them the same families holding the same titles, back into the fold. Sure, the Nicaean Empire had lost the city (just as the Emperors in Constantinople lost Rome) but the people who founded it came there from Constantinople with the intent of continuing the legacy of their Roman polity. That there were other post sack-of-the-home-city polities with similar claims is kind of irrelevant. Hell, the guy who became the first 'Nicaean' Emperor (a term no more legitimate that 'Byzantine') was crowned in Constantinople as the previous Emperor fled the Crusaders, before he too had to flee in turn. He was, in fact, the son-in-law of a different Emperor so it's not like he was just some guy dragged off the street.
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Nov 21, 2014 00:42
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Berke Negri posted:"Is there a Roman Senate? Y/N" is the rule I personally stick to. While its functional power waxes and wanes its kind of that quintessential Roman institution. So that'd put the fall if the West around 600s and the East somewhere around the 13th or 14th centuries where after that "Rome" is barely visible on a map But the senate was an irrelevant rump for millennia before that. Why does the opinion of a bunch of dude who do what the guys with the swords tell them to do have any bearing on... well, what, that thing we put on a map? Was that really the most important thing worth tracking when it comes to the legacy of Rome? Not the language, not the art, not the state structures, not the idea of empire, not the religion, just a bunch of dudes who didn't really matter. Plus, bonus points, by that definition, Romulus, not a Roman. And then things get weird when you have the Senate being cloned between the two halves of the Empire.
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Nov 21, 2014 00:45
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euphronius posted:What is Rome. I am Rome. You are Rome. The Thread is Rome. All is Rome. Except Han China, they're too cool to be Rome.
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Nov 21, 2014 00:52
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the JJ posted:But the senate was an irrelevant rump for millennia before that. Why does the opinion of a bunch of dude who do what the guys with the swords tell them to do have any bearing on... well, what, that thing we put on a map? Was that really the most important thing worth tracking when it comes to the legacy of Rome? Not the language, not the art, not the state structures, not the idea of empire, not the religion, just a bunch of dudes who didn't really matter. Romulus wasn't real, man. But the Senate he is attributed to founding was. Berke Negri fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 01:00
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the JJ posted:By whom? And what do you consider too long a break? And while the office of Emperor hadn't been filled everyone was speaking Latin, bowing to Dux's, and praying to the same God they'd prayed to in the same city when that office had been filled. By everyone. While guys like Odoacer, Theodoric, and even the Frankish rulers made claims to authority based on recognition from the Emperor in Constantinople, nobody between Julius Nepos and Charlemagne was making any sort of claim to be a Roman Emperor equal to the one in Constantinople. I'm certainly not claiming that Roman institutions didn't keep on trucking in the west. But the administrative structure changed, in that you no longer had a dude at the top who was successfully claiming authority over all of it. Instead you have a collection of Kings, Dukes, and Counts ruling more or less independently over various fragments of the former empire. The Pope was around and claiming to be at the top of the pyramid owing to his religious authority, but nobody would have acknowledged his leadership in the military realm, which was always a central role of a Roman Emperor. quote::ironycat: Like I said, 'yo, gently caress you I've got these dudes with swords' is in fact, the most Roman of successions. Had there been a line of unbroken Roman emperors in the West, and then Charlemagne had arrived and deposed them, I'd be more than willing to call him the rightful emperor. I'm not going to pretend that there's any hard and fast rules to what exactly is too long a break. But I'll say that four centuries is plenty long enough. If tomorrow a bunch of Mongols came and started conquering half of Eurasia, nobody would be pretending that it was the same thing as Genghis' empire. quote:Make it clear for me. In 1203 a bunch of Venetians and Crusaders show up to install a pretender to the Roman throne, Alexios IV Angelos, and collect a fat check the young Alex has promised them. The sitting Emperor, Alexios III flees the city more or less immediately, and years later winds up captured and killed. In his place Alexios IV is raised to the Imperial throne, with his father Isaac II a co-emperor, because nobody really trusts Alex IV to rule effectively. After a few months, disgruntlement in the city leads to yet another Alexios, Alexios V Doukas, deposing Isaac and Alex IV. Isaac II dies shortly thereafter, and Alex IV is murdered pretty promptly. This enrages the crusaders, who no longer have any one to pay them what was promised - that Alex IV never could have paid them in the first place everyone agrees to overlook. The crusaders attack the city, Alex V flees, and a new Emperor is chosen by the Latin coalition, Baldwin of Flanders. The crusaders draw up a nice document partitioning the Empire, handing large chunks to Venice and establishing the order by which the Crusaders mean to rule, in the western European style. Of note is the name of said document: Partitio terrarum imperii Romaniae.  The Empire now descends into mostly chaos, as the Latins currently have very little real control over anything, and there is no agreement over who exactly might be the legitimate Emperor. One Constantine Laskaris had actually been elected by a portion of the population of Constantinople on the day of the sack, but he rather wisely quits town rather than futilely fight the Latins now inside the city. A number of local magnates also decide they're not going to go along with this whole Baldwin In Charge business. Retrospectively, the most important of these is Theodore Laskaris, brother of Constantine, who is setting up shop in Nicaea just across the Bosporus. Theodore is himself the son-in-law of Alexios III, who was first deposed way back in the beginning of the story. The brothers Laskaris make a rapid attempt to throw the Latins back out, but the army led by Constantine is soundly defeated, and Constantine himself vanishes, presumably KIA. But the Latins are unable to ever subdue what will become known as the Empire of Nicaea, and they're free to consolidate their position for a decade or so, with only minor and intermittent conflict between them. The Latins themselves are having nothing but trouble in Europe, faced with trying to establish their rule in the face of the Bulgarians, who are defeating them at nearly every turn. After Theodore dies without a son in 1222, power passes to his son in law, John III Doukas Vatatzes. Theodore's younger brothers take issue with this, and enjoy military support from the Latin Empire, but John defeats them and the Latins at Poimanenon, and blinds these new brothers Laskaris, removing them from the imperial equation. In the wake of Poimanenon, John effectively ejects the Latins from Anatolia, and despite struggling with the Despotate of Epirus (another successor state), by 1247 John manages to seize control of Thrace, limiting the authority of the Latin Empire to the city of Constantinople itself. Rule would soon pass to John's son Theodore II, and then to Theodore's son John IV, a seven year old. In the classic style, John is rapidly deposed by his second cousin Michael Palaiologos, who enjoys the support of the aristocracy and declares himself co-emperor. Michael eventually succeeds in recapturing Constantinople in 1261, and his descendants would rule until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. John IV was blinded shortly after the recapture of the city, and removed from power for good, although he lived on until 1305. Now, the question is of course whether this counts as continuing the Roman Empire. There was of course a competing state ruling from Constantinople for more than fifty years, and both the Despotate of Epirus and the Empire of Trebizond would continue to exist as long as the Empire proper. So what we're left with is family members of the ruling Emperor, ejected from Constantinople, consolidating nearby, and then re-establishing themselves in a few decades. It's got twists and turns, and more than a few depositions, but it's a hell of a lot clearer than the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire. On the other hand, they did speak Greek, so gently caress them right? quote:I disagree. You just say 'pretty clearly' and I don't see the clarity. Well, having just typed a big block of text that I'm sure you already knew anyway, I'm less than inclined to start on another one. So why don't you tell us where the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire, keeping in mind that you're perfectly willing to accept the Palaiologos Restoration as a valid continuation of whatever mystery state you think preceded it. quote:I'm picturing a boat that expands out and gets turned into a catamaran at some point, only the 'original' hull gets mulched while the add on (made, to be fair, with a number of bits from the original) carries on, and after a while people tie the splinters of the first one back into a rough semblance of a boat only along the way some dudes on horse back hopped on a raft that these desert nomads had made from the cast offs of the second half of the catamaran and then they started stealing planks off that second bit until they had a boat of their own, so the people on the second bit were like whoa and tried to get help from the people on the second bit (a fair number of whom, to be fair, were stowaways, but that's okay because the people on the second half of the catamaran were originally people the first boat had picked up before they made it a catamaran) and then the people on the first bit tried to steal the second bit (at the time it was a nicer boat) on their way to grabbing one of the bits that the other guys had nicked because that bit had sentimental value, they'd found a chill dude on that bit of driftwood but no one really remembered how chill he was until they'd already killed him. Then the guys who were making a new boat out of the second boat stole the last plank. You left out the part where the first boat had been rotting in the ground for four hundred years before some guys decided to make a new boat out of the trees that grew where the old wood from the first boat was buried. But it did look kinda similar to the original, so they had that going for them. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 01:35
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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the JJ posted:But the senate was an irrelevant rump for millennia before that. Why does the opinion of a bunch of dude who do what the guys with the swords tell them to do have any bearing on... well, what, that thing we put on a map? Was that really the most important thing worth tracking when it comes to the legacy of Rome? Not the language, not the art, not the state structures, not the idea of empire, not the religion, just a bunch of dudes who didn't really matter. The opinions of the Senate don't matter. The idea that the Senate remains important enough to maintain as an institution, even though it has been stripped of its powers entirely, is what matters. If a nation sees that as a piece of quintessential Roman heritage that must be upheld, then I'd say they have a good claim to still be culturally Roman. America could change its language and its flag, rebalance its bureaucracy, alter its self-conception, or replace its religion, while still maintaining a sense of being American (indeed one could argue many of these things have already changed); but if America did away entirely with Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the Constitution, then it would be quite arguable that the state had morphed into something entirely different. Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 01:44
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Kaal posted:The opinions of the Senate don't matter. The idea that the Senate remains important enough to maintain as an institution, even though it has been stripped of its powers entirely, is what matters. If a nation that sees that as a piece of quintessential Roman heritage that must be upheld, then I'd say they have a good claim to still be culturally Roman. Something like that. I'm not making a legalistic argument, it's more culturally the institution though effectively powerless and routinely purged of most of its members continues to persist over the centuries. What it can actually do is less important than what it signifies. When the senates kind of dissolve to me that shows State and local elites are no longer really interested in maintaining that distinct institutional "Romanness" that was a constant while things like language, art, state structures, the idea of empire, and religion were not constants. They've opted out of the game to make their own rules. When the Senate disappears in the West that's when you start to see rulers no longer looking to Rome (the actual State not Rome) for legitimacy but start making their own legitimacy. When it disappears in the East that's more ambiguous but you're left with a rump state that is incredibly threatened and not really long for this world.
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Nov 21, 2014 01:54
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"A guy shows up with a bunch of armed dudes and seizes the throne" is Roman succession 101 and all but it's different if the guy with the army is already a head of state. That's why Leo the Syrian is different from Mehmet, at least - it's one of those obvious criteria for separating revolutions and conquests. Charlemagne is a little less cut-and-dry given that he assembled an empire out of the successor states but even he was really King of the Franks first and foremost. If being Roman Emperor isn't your most impressive/relevant title in the eyes of you and your people then I think claiming to be Rome is a little hollow.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:02
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the JJ posted::ironycat: Like I said, 'yo, gently caress you I've got these dudes with swords' is in fact, the most Roman of successions. Romans have trademarked the concept of coups, South and Central America is the fifteenth through thirtieth Rome, QED.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:33
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Why was Catallus so angry all the time?
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Nov 21, 2014 03:33
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PittTheElder posted:By everyone. While guys like Odoacer, Theodoric, and even the Frankish rulers made claims to authority based on recognition from the Emperor in Constantinople, quote:I'm certainly not claiming that Roman institutions didn't keep on trucking in the west. But the administrative structure changed, in that you no longer had a dude at the top who was successfully claiming authority over all of it. Instead you have a collection of Kings, Dukes, and Counts ruling more or less independently over various fragments of the former empire. quote:Had there been a line of unbroken Roman emperors in the West, and then Charlemagne had arrived and deposed them, I'd be more than willing to call him the rightful emperor. I'm not going to pretend that there's any hard and fast rules to what exactly is too long a break. But I'll say that four centuries is plenty long enough. Yeah, but there's no one going 'well, you know the Yuan were the true successor to the Horde' or 'Timur's horde wasn't really a horde.' I think the way we talk about the Mongol successor states is a betterish model, closer to what I'm looking for. You can talk about how the Mughal (Mongol!) empire adapted to India, how the Yuan sinized (or didn't) conflicts between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate and no one bothers to talk about which one is really the Mongolian empire. That's what I'm getting at. quote:In 1203 a bunch of Venetians and Crusaders show up to install a pretender to the Roman throne, Alexios IV Angelos, and collect a fat check the young Alex has promised them. The sitting Emperor, Alexios III flees the city more or less immediately, and years later winds up captured and killed. In his place Alexios IV is raised to the Imperial throne, with his father Isaac II a co-emperor, because nobody really trusts Alex IV to rule effectively. After a few months, disgruntlement in the city leads to yet another Alexios, Alexios V Doukas, deposing Isaac and Alex IV. Isaac II dies shortly thereafter, and Alex IV is murdered pretty promptly. This enrages the crusaders, who no longer have any one to pay them what was promised - that Alex IV never could have paid them in the first place everyone agrees to overlook. The crusaders attack the city, Alex V flees, and a new Emperor is chosen by the Latin coalition, Baldwin of Flanders. The crusaders draw up a nice document partitioning the Empire, handing large chunks to Venice and establishing the order by which the Crusaders mean to rule, in the western European style. Of note is the name of said document: Partitio terrarum imperii Romaniae. quote:On the other hand, they did speak Greek, so gently caress them right? quote:Well, having just typed a big block of text that I'm sure you already knew anyway, I'm less than inclined to start on another one. So why don't you tell us where the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire, keeping in mind that you're perfectly willing to accept the Palaiologos Restoration as a valid continuation of whatever mystery state you think preceded it. It didn't. It stopped being a singular entity a couple of times, was reunited a few times, it's various bits and pieces had a nice slow decline, took a few hammer blows (nationalism, in particular, was a pretty nasty blow to a dying horse, inter-Abrahamic religious differences (Protestant-Catholic, the Great Schism, Islam) eventually eclipsed a lot of other concerns before that) Eventually claims to the imperial title were attenuated to the point of uselessness or else fell into the hands of people unable to wield it. The Sack of Constantinople was certainly a big shift in the way that title was running but the Habsburgs would soon bootstrap their successor state into quite the golden age to face off against this Greeco-Romano-Turkic-Persian-Arab thing that was the Ottoman Empire (not that the Roman Empire hadn't ever been a bit Frankensteined before it began to split apart; hell, that was a not insignificant driver in its split, and as you say, that the Greeco overtook the Latin doesn't mean all that much.) Ultimately, there are still parts of it around. Linguistic, cultural, what have you. Even state wise (such that the idea of a Westphalian state really works for all of Roman history...) you've still got the Vatican. Yes, it's wishy washy, yeah there's no clean line. I'm sorry, that's just how it is. That's how history works. I think it's appropriate to, so long as you have competing claims, find ways to describe the rival claims without engaging with debates of 'legitimacy' because, as we've seen, legitimacy is not a Platonic concept that rests outside human action. It is displayed through history, and so if someone believes that 'X is Rome therefore...' and acts on that belief, that is legitimacy as far as a historian needs to understand it. Insisting that "X and only X is Rome" is going to warp the way you consider history. That trend was really damaging to the study of the 'Byzantine Empire,' but pushing that out to the 1400's is, just as damaging to our understanding of the 'Dark' Ages, for instance, or to the study of the Ottoman Empire. I've brought this up in a different thread but there is a guy one of the best known Persian poets, the founder of probably the most influential Sufi order around at the moment, sometimes known as Mevlevi or 'my Master' is also simply known as 'Rumi' or 'the Roman.' It's a big loving deal. quote:You left out the part where the first boat had been rotting in the ground for four hundred years before some guys decided to make a new boat out of the trees that grew where the old wood from the first boat was buried. But it did look kinda similar to the original, so they had that going for them.
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Nov 21, 2014 03:43
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I know being a roman citizen was a pretty big deal in terms of rights, et cetera. What type of proof did people have to verify it? It seems like ID cards would be too modern. Did they just have a big set of files in some central Roman bureaucracy listing every citizen?
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Nov 21, 2014 04:44
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What would stop a slave from beating the poo poo out of his master, stealing his clothes, and taking the next ship out to another city to pretend to be a citizen?
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Nov 21, 2014 05:00
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karl fungus posted:What would stop a slave from beating the poo poo out of his master, stealing his clothes, and taking the next ship out to another city to pretend to be a citizen? Depending on the kind of slave and the wealth of his master, the slave might not have any idea how to read or write while the master surely would.
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Nov 21, 2014 05:18
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karl fungus posted:What would stop a slave from beating the poo poo out of his master, stealing his clothes, and taking the next ship out to another city to pretend to be a citizen? What stops you from buying a weapon, murdering whoever in your life happens to need a good killing, and moving to your country's equivalent of Montana? I think there's probably more involved in the murder/Montana calculation than just fear of the law.
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Nov 21, 2014 05:38
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karl fungus posted:What would stop a slave from beating the poo poo out of his master, stealing his clothes, and taking the next ship out to another city to pretend to be a citizen? Preventing this situation is why all slaves were named Spartacus.
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Nov 21, 2014 06:01
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Tao Jones posted:What stops you from buying a weapon, murdering whoever in your life happens to need a good killing, and moving to your country's equivalent of Montana? Though it's worth remembering, that in any society that was pre-modern, life was a lot more cheap and the chance of actually being caught (which is why in pre-modern European societies, there tends to be a concept of "murder done in secrecy") was a lot smaller.
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Nov 21, 2014 06:49
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Did Rome even have modern-style serial killers?
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Nov 21, 2014 07:03
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karl fungus posted:Did Rome even have modern-style serial killers? It depends which historians you believe.
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Nov 21, 2014 07:25
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Nintendo Kid posted:Depending on the kind of slave and the wealth of his master, the slave might not have any idea how to read or write while the master surely would. What does literacy have to do with escaping slavery?
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Nov 21, 2014 07:43
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Pivotal Lever posted:What does literacy have to do with escaping slavery? "If you are not an illiterate slave, sign your name here."
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Nov 21, 2014 08:39
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In a Roman court, establishing the participants' identity and social status was part of the proceedings. Usually everybody knew everybody, so it wasn't needed, but if it was in dispute you absolutely were expected to provide witnesses that would swear who you were. One thing modern people have a hard time grasping: there were nothing we would recognize as police, or investigators, or prosecutors. Your friends and family acted as all of those for you. If you didn't have them, then you didn't have legal protection. Think about the consequences of that. Because I love poking hornet's nests: I think everybody is missing the point on the Rome/Byzantine thing. It's not what the rulers declared, it's what the people identified themselves as. Historians and anthropologists have learned that group identity is far more fluid than generally recognized (otherwise the United States wouldn't exist). If a group of people all identify themselves as X then they're X. "Byzantine" is a terrible term because nobody every called themself a Byzantine. We don't get to tell people from the past what they felt themselves to be any more than you could go to China and start ranting at people that they aren't really Chinese because too much has changed since the Han dynasty. Charlemagne's subjects identified themselves as lots of things, but "Roman" wasn't one of them. They may have borrowed from the Romans, copied the Romans, admired the Rimans, but they didn't think of themselves as Romans. They were not Romans. I realize this annoys people, because they'd like "Roman" to have a more precise definition, not a whole set of changing culture and customs. But try applying that logic to more modern examples. Three hundred years ago, "American" was a subclass of "English", referring to a scattering of pre-industrial settlements. Aren't those changes as large as anything Rome saw?
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Nov 21, 2014 08:48
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karl fungus posted:Did Rome even have modern-style serial killers? Probably, given that it had 100 million people at its height, and lasted ~1500 years. Not Roman, but I was reading about Assyria, and at one point, the Assyrian empire was ruled by a father and his two sons, all governing about a third of the empire. They use to write letters between them constantly, many of which were recovered and translated, giving us some useful insight into their society at the time. One of the letters from the son reports someone killing (Assyrian) children in a horrible fashion, one of the following letters from the father asks to be kept informed of the results of the investigation. I think the anecdote was in George Roux's "Ancient Iraq", which was a good read, although I don't own a copy so I can't go back and reconfirm the details of this story.
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Nov 21, 2014 16:05
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BurningStone posted:In a Roman court, establishing the participants' identity and social status was part of the proceedings. Usually everybody knew everybody, so it wasn't needed, but if it was in dispute you absolutely were expected to provide witnesses that would swear who you were. See there I think you're pushing an idea of nationalism a bit further back than it ever existed historically. Roman-ness is a thing that could interlayer with a lot of different factors (family, religion, citizenship, geography) and again you start to run into things where your Persian Sufi master living in a Seljuk Turkish monarchy is known to the world mostly as 'the Roman' because that's how he thought about that identity. Or take the Italian city-states of, what, the 12th-16th centuries (including Rome itself) tell me they're not deliberately taking that legacy forward. Go run down Hey Gal, look at the people she's writing about. There's a poo poo ton of overlapping loyalties (Bavarian/Saxon Catholic/Protestant subject of this or that lord, resident of this or that city) but for many of them if you follow those chains of how they classify themselves they are soldiers in service of the Holy Roman Emperor. Again, I'm not saying that Roman-ness ended in the East when the West fell, I'm saying it didn't end in the West when the West 'fell' and it didn't end in the East when the East 'fell' either. As far as polities go this is important only insofar as you have multiple groups claiming that same legacy, in which case it's much more important that we talk about why these groups disputed, how they made their claims, how that affected their actions than it is we actually pick a winner.
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Nov 21, 2014 17:14
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the JJ posted:Yeah, but there's no one going 'well, you know the Yuan were the true successor to the Horde' or 'Timur's horde wasn't really a horde.' I think the way we talk about the Mongol successor states is a betterish model, closer to what I'm looking for. You can talk about how the Mughal (Mongol!) empire adapted to India, how the Yuan sinized (or didn't) conflicts between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate and no one bothers to talk about which one is really the Mongolian empire. That's what I'm getting at. This actually is done and is unfortunate. There is a specific list of dynasties considered true Chinese ones and a bunch that are not, even though there is no discernible difference between the ones that count and ones that don't, one of them is culturally vastly different than any other Chinese people, one is Mongol, and one is Manchu. It's kind of a mess that Arglebargle could post more detail on because I barely know the official dynasties. That is a different situation though, there's no modern state calling itself the Roman Empire with a vested interest in cultivating its own legitimacy and a nationalist fervor in its citizens.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:42
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the JJ posted:See there I think you're pushing an idea of nationalism a bit further back than it ever existed historically. Roman-ness is a thing that could interlayer with a lot of different factors (family, religion, citizenship, geography) and again you start to run into things where your Persian Sufi master living in a Seljuk Turkish monarchy is known to the world mostly as 'the Roman' because that's how he thought about that identity. Or take the Italian city-states of, what, the 12th-16th centuries (including Rome itself) tell me they're not deliberately taking that legacy forward. Go run down Hey Gal, look at the people she's writing about. There's a poo poo ton of overlapping loyalties (Bavarian/Saxon Catholic/Protestant subject of this or that lord, resident of this or that city) but for many of them if you follow those chains of how they classify themselves they are soldiers in service of the Holy Roman Emperor. Again, I'm not saying that Roman-ness ended in the East when the West fell, I'm saying it didn't end in the West when the West 'fell' and it didn't end in the East when the East 'fell' either. As far as polities go this is important only insofar as you have multiple groups claiming that same legacy, in which case it's much more important that we talk about why these groups disputed, how they made their claims, how that affected their actions than it is we actually pick a winner. Just to be clear, I'm talking about identify, not nationalism. A "German" in 1 AD would have identified himself with a tribe, not a nation, and certainly not as a German. I think your last sentence is the important one: I don't think there's a "winner." There's no way to judge who's legacy is more pure, and it's a pointless argument, since it doesn't matter. The point I wanted to make got buried: Byzantine is a terrible term because nobody ever used that to identify themselves.
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Nov 21, 2014 18:57
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All of these statues and paintings show clean-shaven men. How did the Romans shave?
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Nov 21, 2014 19:13
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A razor?
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Nov 21, 2014 19:15
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Smoking Crow posted:All of these statues and paintings show clean-shaven men. How did the Romans shave? Plucking. Literally.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:16
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Smoking Crow posted:All of these statues and paintings show clean-shaven men. How did the Romans shave? Same way your mom shaves, basically.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:17
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Plucking. Literally. Nero's neckbeard almost makes sense now 
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Nov 21, 2014 19:18
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Seriously though razors are an old invention, they were invented thousands of years before the Romans. And they plucked.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:19
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No but seriously they used razors.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:19
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Grand Fromage posted:Same way your mom shaves, basically. My mom's dead
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Nov 21, 2014 19:21
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Also, I thought I read somewhere that in the Middle Ages the didn't have razors so they had to scrape pumice across their faces?
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Nov 21, 2014 19:22
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Smoking Crow posted:Also, I thought I read somewhere that in the Middle Ages the didn't have razors so they had to scrape pumice across their faces? That's odd I mean if you can make a good slashing sword or dagger you can make a razor.
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Nov 21, 2014 19:31
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:That's odd I mean if you can make a good slashing sword or dagger you can make a razor. Swords don't have to be razor sharp.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:01
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You don't want them to be razor sharp, for that matter. An edge that thin is way too brittle for combat use.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:09
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BurningStone posted:Just to be clear, I'm talking about identify, not nationalism. A "German" in 1 AD would have identified himself with a tribe, not a nation, and certainly not as a German. Okay, so there's a very Persian poet who called himself 'the Roman' because he lived in Rome. Grand Fromage posted:That is a different situation though, there's no modern state calling itself the Roman Empire with a vested interest in cultivating its own legitimacy and a nationalist fervor in its citizens. Which is why we ought to be able to approach Roman history without getting stuck into 'this claim is right and those claims are wrong.' And that's China though, not the Mongol hordes.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:35
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