Jerusalem posted:And the guys who slept with them were meant to be whipped to death I believe, which lead to the amazing story of Crassus being accused of trying to seduce a Vestal Virgin, admitting that he did it but proclaiming with complete sincerity that he was only doing it to get his hands on her property, and since it was Crassus everybody went,"Oh yeah that makes sense, not guilty!" I have always imagined that in the background, large sacks of gold are being unloaded from an ox cart and pressed into the jurors' hands as they vote on the verdict.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 02:44 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 04:13 |
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Probably should have just sprung for an angry mob occupying the courtroom. If it worked against Cicero, it can work against ANYONE!
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 02:46 |
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Jerusalem posted:Also because nobody was supposed to be buried in Rome, burying them alive was also sacrilege, so they'd give them food to take with them and pretend like they'd just moved them into a new room.... underground with no doors or windows or light. I seem to recall they got a candle, too? So they could choose between additional air and light. The Romans were kind of dicks.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 03:31 |
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Tao Jones posted:They didn't really have them. Crimes that we would imprison people for were handled with corporal punishment or if you were someone important, exile, loss of property, or house arrest. Wasn't taking PoWs for ransom also a pretty big thing back then?
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 04:47 |
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Disinterested posted:I feel like at that point it's really all pretty minimal compared to the mere fact of drowning, but you never know. The more offenses you penalize with execution, the more different methods of execution you need to invent to try and up the ante of severity.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 05:21 |
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Pornographic Memory posted:The more offenses you penalize with execution, the more different methods of execution you need to invent to try and up the ante of severity. Also, without the Internet I imagine you basically resort to creative methods of corporal punishment and execution as a way to get your daily fix of entertainment via cruelty.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 06:35 |
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Tunicate posted:Wasn't taking PoWs for ransom also a pretty big thing back then? That's people of importance and I imagine it would resemble house arrest more (i could be confusing it with mediaeval times) The rest would be sold into slavery. Big Willy Style fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 12, 2015 |
# ? Jan 12, 2015 06:46 |
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What about the mines and the galleys?
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 09:44 |
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JaucheCharly posted:What about the mines and the galleys? Galleys - at least military ones - weren't rowed by slaves, or at least not widely so. Mines were pretty much a death sentence. Working conditions were not very far removed from Nazi "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" (extermination through work) camps. The Romans enslaved conquered populations (it was a major pay incentive for legionaries to be able to collect some slaves and sell them) like all peoples did then, but those slaves weren't put into work detail by rank or as punishment by the state or as a replacement for imprisonment. They were sold to slavers, who then sold them on to the general population, where they were treated like any other slave. You could luck out and end up running million dollar estates as freedman, or do our former job just with someone providing you with meals and living space, or you could get a poo poo deal and die after three months of working yourself to death in the mines or on a Latifundia. Or end up getting raped daily by your new master if you happen to be a pretty slave girl or boy.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 10:21 |
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"Well slave-boy, the good news is that you've been handpicked by the Emperor himself. The bad news is that the Emperor is Tiberius."
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 10:53 |
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Jazerus posted:I have always imagined that in the background, large sacks of gold are being unloaded from an ox cart and pressed into the jurors' hands as they vote on the verdict. He didn't claim he'd had sex with her, just that the reason he was spending a suspicious amount of time in her presence was to try to get her property.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 14:37 |
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JaucheCharly posted:What about the mines and the galleys? As Decius says, the galley thing is mostly myth. War galleys were rowed by their crew, both sailors and marines. I wouldn't say there were no civilian ships using slave labor but it was not normal the way fiction depicts it.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 14:57 |
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Grand Fromage posted:As Decius says, the galley thing is mostly myth. War galleys were rowed by their crew, both sailors and marines. I wouldn't say there were no civilian ships using slave labor but it was not normal the way fiction depicts it. I wonder how much of this comes from people projecting renaissance era galleys back onto the classical period.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 15:36 |
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Alchenar posted:He didn't claim he'd had sex with her, just that the reason he was spending a suspicious amount of time in her presence was to try to get her property. He could also have argued that he only put it in her butt. Still a virgin, you see?
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 18:00 |
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Big Willy Style posted:That's people of importance and I imagine it would resemble house arrest more (i could be confusing it with mediaeval times) The rest would be sold into slavery. Generally they lived in Villa's outside of the walls till they where killed.
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# ? Jan 12, 2015 19:49 |
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How did the mines find the vast amount of slave labor when the conquests ceased? Surely there couldn't have been that many debtors and people selling themselves to sustain the losses described for Roman era mining.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 04:54 |
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Did debt slaves even go to the mines? That seems very unlikely to me.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 05:59 |
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YouTuber posted:How did the mines find the vast amount of slave labor when the conquests ceased? Surely there couldn't have been that many debtors and people selling themselves to sustain the losses described for Roman era mining. Just because you're not conquering doesn't mean someone else isn't conquering. You can buy slaves on the open market; the Germanic tribes, the Kushites (Nubians) and the steppe tribes out past Crimea were all probably big sellers on the market. The supply probably dropped, true, which IIRC was one of the reasons there was a labor shortage in the third century. Well, that and the constant civil wars and plagues. Hence Diocletian's imposition of serfdom on the peasants, so that someone was out there to farm the land.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 06:03 |
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How about pre-trial jails? Was it the type of thing where they'd give you a rough and ready spot judgement if you weren't a citizen, and only bother to lock you up to await a full trial if you were a citizen with actual rights? Also, I vaguely recall that immunity to debt slavery was one of the perks of citizenship. What other types of judgment did they get immunity for?
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 06:16 |
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YouTuber posted:How did the mines find the vast amount of slave labor when the conquests ceased? Surely there couldn't have been that many debtors and people selling themselves to sustain the losses described for Roman era mining. Even when expansion stopped, there was still shitloads of fighting going on. Roman armies in the west were constantly raiding across the Danube in order to maintain a desirable status quo, and I imagine that would have yielded plenty of slaves if they so desired. Of course that source dries up if you're too busy using the army to settle internal problems.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 06:17 |
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Tunicate posted:How about pre-trial jails? Was it the type of thing where they'd give you a rough and ready spot judgement if you weren't a citizen, and only bother to lock you up to await a full trial if you were a citizen with actual rights? I believe - probably wrongly! - that anybody actually arrested on a serious enough charge where they couldn't risk letting them stay in their own houses, the general thing was to have somebody trustworthy put them up in their home as their guest until the trial could take place. I have a vague recollection of something like this happening or being mooted with the Catilina conspirators, but I guess they could equally have been all grouped together and put in one of the temples or something until it was time for their trial/judgment to be passed on them.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 06:53 |
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Depends on the rank and the crime. But yes, Patricians and rich Plebs sometimes were put in a kind of house arrest (at the house of the Consul for example before the Principate or even their own) awaiting trial if the crime was something really serious like treason. Which I always found odd, since every Roman always had the "I go to exile" way out (Massilia/Marseille was very popular until the Civil War of Julius Caesar). For less serious stuff they were free to go around until the trial was done. Probably the most famous case of house arrest was the apostle Paulus, who spent the time before his execution in Rome in his rented flat loosely chained and under guard. Decius fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Jan 13, 2015 |
# ? Jan 13, 2015 08:44 |
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Man, they should really reintroduce exile as a form of punishment. Even if it meant never being able to see my family or friends or be a participant in political life again, I'd happily retire to a coastal villa and spend my remaining days relaxing on the beach and drinking myself into a stupor.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 11:08 |
I would totally be okay with exile and seizure of assets as a punishment for grievous white-collar crimes. Except it would be more like "Exile to the lovely part of Cancun" than "Exile to a seaside villa in Marseille" hailthefish fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 11:29 |
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hailthefish posted:I would totally be okay with exile and seizure of assets as a punishment for grievous white-collar crimes. Eh, Marseille has been full of nouveau riche for the last 2000 years.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 11:51 |
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Agreed. Once you start letting new men in somewhere, everything goes to poo poo.
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 12:13 |
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Tao Jones posted:Agreed. Once you start letting new men in somewhere, everything goes to poo poo. Agree with Tao "Sulla" Jones or he'll put you on the proscription lists!
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# ? Jan 13, 2015 21:27 |
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I've been reading a little bit on Roman North Africa, and I keep finding bits that try to emphasize the how Romanized the Berbers were then. Just how Romanized were they? Were towns like Caesarea and Volubilis strictly the work of Berbers who embraced the Roman way, or did Italians coming over play a big role in all that? If the Berbers were so heavily Roman back then, why aren't they now? Arabization aside, the Berber language doesn't seem to have much Roman(ce) influence in it. Is it comparable to Roman Britain and how the sub-Roman Britons gradually just dropped Latin altogether, but while the Empire was going hot were quite keen on that whole Roman thing?
Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jan 13, 2015 |
# ? Jan 13, 2015 23:41 |
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Has any kind of academic consensus been reached regarding the origin of the sea peoples?
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:15 |
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Krill Nye posted:Has any kind of academic consensus been reached regarding the origin of the sea peoples? Not really. It's difficult to pin down much for certain. That said there has been some speculation based off the names given in egyptian records during rameses lll's reign and (iirc this is a bit more contentious) philistine pottery that at least some of them might have been aegean in origin. Whatever the case it's clear that a lot of desperate people were trying to migrate somewhere with food in a hurry.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 01:59 |
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Krill Nye posted:Has any kind of academic consensus been reached regarding the origin of the sea peoples? The version I read was that the whole episode probably originated with a tribe in the southern steppes of Russia figuring out how to smelt iron. Their iron weapons were vastly superior to the bronze ones of their neighbors, and they began conquering and expanding west and south. They don't appear to have had enough manpower or organization to sustain their conquests, but it was enough to start a wave of refugees ahead of them which overran the established civilizations in Greece and Anatolia. Further waves of displaced peoples fanned out over the eastern Mediterranean on down to Egypt. I don't know how much evidence there is to support that narrative and a lot of it is probably speculation, but it does make sense. I have a hard time believing that the beginning of the Iron Age, the collapse of the classic Greek civilization, and the Sea Peoples invasions are unrelated. The invaders of Egypt were eventually bought off by giving them some land along the coast east of Egypt and south of Israel, producing the Philistines. Their culture and artifacts show a strong Greek connection, so they may very well have been Greek refugees looking for a new place to live out of necessity.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 04:05 |
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Krill Nye posted:Has any kind of academic consensus been reached regarding the origin of the sea peoples? The sea, probably.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 04:17 |
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Real answer: nobody knows for sure. Somewhere north of Egypt seems a sure bet but otherwise it's all speculative.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 04:18 |
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Bought off, as well as deprived of their cattle and settled in parts of the Nile delta according to Egyptian sources. The version my professors have been fond of is that migration followed the decline and collapse of aegean and Anatolian civilizations due to periods of drought and other unfavorable environmental changes rendering the old palace system unsustainable.
forkis fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jan 15, 2015 |
# ? Jan 15, 2015 04:24 |
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Everyone knows it was the sons of Herakles coming home to reclaim their birthright.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 04:44 |
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Grand Fromage posted:The sea, probably. Obviously Bolivia.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 05:16 |
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Atlantis
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 05:31 |
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Atlantis No, that's the Mayans.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 05:39 |
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Smoking Crow posted:No, that's the Mayans. guess what they are the same
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 05:57 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 04:13 |
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Deteriorata posted:I don't know how much evidence there is to support that narrative and a lot of it is probably speculation, but it does make sense. I have a hard time believing that the beginning of the Iron Age, the collapse of the classic Greek civilization, and the Sea Peoples invasions are unrelated. Interestingly, isn't this pretty much what happened with the Germanic tribes rushing across the Roman border and causing all kinds of problems for the Western Empire, but they themselves were fleeing from the Huns?
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 06:28 |