|
Kurtofan posted:One day Janus shall have his revenge. Any interesting neopagan Greco-Roman movements? Like, today? In medieval Iberia? 'cause at one point there is a kinda of nasty intellectual war of word within the Islamic world which ends more of less with al Ghazali taking shots at the neoplatonic, more Hellenic philosophers for basically those reasons: putting old dead Greek dudes ahead of the Qu'ran. That book's title was the Incoherence of the Philosophers to which Ibn Rushd responded with the Incoherence of the Incoherence, proving once again that academic discourse is at it's best when it's as catty as can be. the JJ fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Mar 16, 2015 |
#
?
Mar 16, 2015 22:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 16:46 |
|
|
Anytime, anywhere.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2015 23:00
|
|
|
Kurtofan posted:Anytime, anywhere. Well I mean the grand daddy of all that is Julian the Apostate, who tried to turn back the clock on Christendom and might have been able to pull it off if he hadn't gotten himself killed in Persia.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2015 23:04
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:I was gonna say, he reminds me of 16 year old me. I don't mind Grumblefish's positions in and of themselves, since I'd totally be a philosopher-king in any society ruled by the good and the truthful. But it's impossible to have a discussion around someone who makes their own political opinions the focus of every post.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 01:35
|
|
on the other hand was an rear end in a top hat of the highest calibre.
|
Grand Fromage posted:He is the villain in a Confucian cultural context (he's not being filial!), but westerners usually like him. But...when his father was murdered in Xuzhou Cao Cao marched armies on Xuzhou with big banners labeled "Revenge," murdering every man, woman, and child in his way, on his way to depose the governor Tao Qian, holding him and the entire province culpable for his father's death. (Yes, it's a pretext for conquering Xuzhou, I get that) If mass slaughtering of thousands of innocents isn't an expression of filial grief at the murder of one's father, I don't know what is. EDIT: and that story of Cao Cao's oldest son sacrificing his life so that his father could escape from an ambush is kind of horrifying and cowardly by Western standards (you'd let your kid die for you?), but is the essence of filial piety on the part of Cao Ang. Patter Song fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Mar 17, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 05:22
|
|
|
This is a fun article about the reconstruction of the pronunciation of a poem by Sappho, including a reading of how it might have sounded. It sounds quite... different. It als linked to this page: http://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/ , which has more readings from Greek and Latin texts. I especially recommend the one from Terence, as it sounds quite hilarious.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 11:23
|
|
|
Charlie Mopps posted:This is a fun article about the reconstruction of the pronunciation of a poem by Sappho, including a reading of how it might have sounded. It sounds quite... different. When I was learning Homeric Greek for the first time, we always took turns reading aloud to practice scansion of the hexameter (in order to talk about fifth-foot spondees and correption and digammas and crap). We had one guy in the class who insisted on reading/singing aloud with accents-as-pitch and I could never decide whether that was weird or awesome. Probably both, since he did have a good voice.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 14:19
|
|
|
I guess this is as much a modern political question as a historical question, but throughout history you have these great men from great families with a huge amount of capital. Sure, an occasional nobody pops up and changes the world, but by and large it seems to be those with access to capital. Do such dynasties still exist in the modern world, and we just don't pay attention to their importance because we're fooled by the appearance of a ballot box every few years?
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 15:23
|
|
|
wealthy dynasties? they're everywhere. The Rothschilds are still going strong to pick a random example.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 15:27
|
|
|
Exioce posted:I guess this is as much a modern political question as a historical question, but throughout history you have these great men from great families with a huge amount of capital. Sure, an occasional nobody pops up and changes the world, but by and large it seems to be those with access to capital. Do such dynasties still exist in the modern world, and we just don't pay attention to their importance because we're fooled by the appearance of a ballot box every few years? This was in the NYT today. quote:. According to the Bank of Israel, roughly 20 families control companies that account for half the total value of Israel’s stock market. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/o...nav=MostEmailed
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 15:34
|
|
|
Also look at Korea's "Chaebols" - family owned multinational conglomerates.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 15:39
|
|
|
Bush, Clinton, Kennedy. I bet there are tonnes more if you start looking in the senate and congress and not just families that have held the presidency.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 15:51
|
|
|
Even in the lists which discount royalty (such as Forbes'), you can see that plenty of the richest billionaires in the world inherited much of their wealth. The Walton (Wal-mart) and Mars (the candy company) families in particular. It's not always easy to separate the personal assets of heads of state from the national resources they can bring to bear, but even if you included royalty and other heads of state on those lists of richest people, only the King of Thailand is one of the richest 20. In the modern era, political dynasties are rich, but not typically billionaire rich. If Romney had won the presidency, his $250 million fortune would have made him one of the richest heads of state.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 16:19
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Well I mean the grand daddy of all that is Julian the Apostate, who tried to turn back the clock on Christendom and might have been able to pull it off if he hadn't gotten himself killed in Persia. The impression I've gotten is that Julian the Apostate's "apostasy" is very limited, short-reached, and does very little to actually "turn back the clock," as you put it on Christianity. Christianity is simply too institutionally entrenched by that time to be undone, especially when Roman "paganism" can't really offer an alternative for an exclusive official religion. In fact, I'm pretty sure Julian's reputation as an existential threat to the church is the product of later Christian authors looking back at his reign.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 16:33
|
|
|
deadking posted:The impression I've gotten is that Julian the Apostate's "apostasy" is very limited, short-reached, and does very little to actually "turn back the clock," as you put it on Christianity. Christianity is simply too institutionally entrenched by that time to be undone, especially when Roman "paganism" can't really offer an alternative for an exclusive official religion. In fact, I'm pretty sure Julian's reputation as an existential threat to the church is the product of later Christian authors looking back at his reign. If he had survived though... And if he had heirs who were more like Julian's cousins than he was. Yeah, he didn't persecute Christians, but he did stop them from receiving official state funding which was almost as bad.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 21:08
|
|
|
sullat posted:If he had survived though... And if he had heirs who were more like Julian's cousins than he was. Yeah, he didn't persecute Christians, but he did stop them from receiving official state funding which was almost as bad. Um, is it? How? Ooh, let me see, either I stop getting Roman welfare money, orrrr I get burned to death as a living torch at the Emperor's parties. Tough one. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 21:28
|
|
|
People tend to hang on to the "Apostate" bit, but Julian didn't try to turn back the clock on religion, but on the Roman Empire in general. Basically his first acts as Emperor were to cut down post-Diocletian/post-Constantine court and bureaucracy. The second thing it's easy to gloss over is that Julian was a well-learned Christian before his apostasy, and he might have understood perfectly how to stifle Christianity: Ammianus Marcellianus posted:3. And in order to give more effect to his intentions, he ordered the priests of the different Christian sects, with the adherents of each sect, to be admitted into the palace, and in a constitutional spirit expressed his wish that their dissensions being appeased, each without any hindrance might fearlessly follow the religion he preferred. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Mar 17, 2015 |
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2015 22:04
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Um, is it? How? Ooh, let me see, either I stop getting Roman welfare money, orrrr I get burned to death as a living torch at the Emperor's parties. Tough one. If Christians are good at one thing it's killing other Christians. Suddenly the church can't use state resources to enforce what is or isn't orthodox. Would Christianity have vanished? Almost assuredly not. But it might have fragmented into dozens of smaller heresies rather than being the monolithic single church.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2015 03:39
|
|
|
From what I've read Julian's programme was, as has been said, to turn the clock back on the Empire. At the very least to try and go back to the way things worked under Augustus (I don't think he was quite far gone enough to try to revert to a Republic but he was certainly paleo-conservative enough to probably think fondly of the possibility). With regards to religion his ambition was to two-fold: 1) Like was said, to wrest state powers from the Church and encourage heresies and general localisation and splitting of Christianity. If Patriarchs and bishops couldn't have clamped down on any heresies we might have seen theological split and fights that make what actually happened look fairly minor, which would have crippled the political power of the Church. 2) To consolidate Paganism into some sort of religion equivalent to Christianity, giving it a similar possible political power base to the Church. Basically he wanted to encourage a status swap, breaking Christianity into small local cults while uniting all the Pagan cults into a more unified group able to help each other out and encourage unified action and identification. He had such a short run that it's hard to say how realistic any of this was but the vision he showed definitely appeals to anyone with a less totalitarian bent or who just resents Christianity for whatever reason. Or just admires people with intellectual chops in a position of power that has the balls to enact their views. Especially if you enjoy thinking about how the world could be better run it's hard not to root for someone actually trying to do that. And, and the whole historiographical blowjob he got from the Enlightenment writers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2015 04:07
|
|
|
Gorgeous coins: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150311124137.htm
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2015 07:18
|
|
|
The quality of these are absolutely stunning 
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2015 07:58
|
|
|
Jamwad Hilder posted:Enjoy: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486446&userid=183787 Looking at his other post history I think his problem was that he actually seems to have been a holdover from the days of British Empire. Somebody from the good ol' boys club who looks down on everybody who's not his 'rank.' These look too good to be true and I'm very afraid somebody's going to come out and say they're fakes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 02:08
|
|
|
It's kind of surprising that Julian's disastrous handling of the Persian campaign, which not only led to his death but nearly led to the destruction of his entire army, doesn't dock more points from his Emperor score.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 03:16
|
|
|
I think most people are willing to forgive a terrible tactical blunder combined with some seriously bad luck. Now if he'd survived the campaign and had failed at handling the fallout from it I think there'd be much more criticism of him but the fact is people make mistakes and have to deal with the problems. Julian had energy, drive and vision and constructively approached many of the problems facing the Empire in a fairly difficult time, that gives him a lot of Emperor Points compared to many of the ones that don't make it into the Good Emperor column. Considering how much time most spent either dealing with piecemeal problems, acting as a simple administrator, ignoring problems or actively loving things up, it doesn't even take a huge amount of success to get yourself into the positive column.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 04:28
|
|
|
Why was salt so valuable in the ancient world? Couldn't people just grab ocean water and boil off the water to get salt?
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 17:47
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:Why was salt so valuable in the ancient world? Couldn't people just grab ocean water and boil off the water to get salt? It was the only method for preserving food long-term, which I imagine made demand muuuuuuch higher than today. Also (I'm no expert) I believe you need to set aside a fairly large amount of space to recover a fairly small amount of salt.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 17:55
|
|
|
Sea salt contains far less iodine than mined salt or the salt that's in animal flesh. A lack of iodine can cause some pretty severe health risks, including stunted growth and retardation. When humans made the transition to an agricultural diet where meat was a rarity, mined salt became important as a source of iodine.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 17:58
|
|
|
It's labor intensive (salt mining is a pain and there aren't a lot of places you can do it, and harvesting sea salt takes a lot of work), however also the value of salt in the ancient world has been vastly overstated in pop culture. It was certainly much more valuable than it is today but stories of people being paid in salt because it was better than money and that kind of thing are not true.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 17:58
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:Sea salt contains far less iodine than mined salt or the salt that's in animal flesh. I think you have that backwards.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 18:01
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:Why was salt so valuable in the ancient world? Couldn't people just grab ocean water and boil off the water to get salt? It's more economical just to let the sun evaporate all the water instead of actively burning it. The problem is in transporting salt from coastal areas to inland areas. It's a basic nutrient, but only available in limited quantities, making it inherently more valuable than others. There are also uses for it besides direct consumption. Sea water can also have different salinities, depending on where you are. The Adriatic has a higher salinity than the rest of the Med, which was great for the Romans. The Baltic has a fairly low salinity, making inland salt mines more important to the region. afaik Salt mines are pretty horrendous places to work. The air inside these places are thick with salty dust, and any minor injuries you get won't heal because of the aggressive salinity.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 18:09
|
|
|
Any mine is safely high on the lovely places to work list in the Roman world. They aren't exactly pleasant today either.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 18:12
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:It's labor intensive (salt mining is a pain and there aren't a lot of places you can do it, and harvesting sea salt takes a lot of work), however also the value of salt in the ancient world has been vastly overstated in pop culture. It was certainly much more valuable than it is today but stories of people being paid in salt because it was better than money and that kind of thing are not true. Yeah, in Rome salt ran about 13 denarii per liter, or something like that. Still high compared to today, since you can get it for twenty bux a ton.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 18:22
|
|
|
Thanks everyone! 
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 19:37
|
|
|
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/s...pe=article&_r=1
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 22:01
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:Yeah, in Rome salt ran about 13 denarii per liter, or something like that. $20 a ton* *some shipping fees apply 
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 22:26
|
|
|
Earlier this afternoon I finished Julian by Gore Vidal. I enjoyed it a lot, so check it out if you're into historical fiction of the Roman sort!
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 23:02
|
|
|
brozozo posted:Earlier this afternoon I finished Julian by Gore Vidal. I enjoyed it a lot, so check it out if you're into historical fiction of the Roman sort! Well poo poo, I really enjoyed Lincoln and 1876 but for some reason I've never read this, thanks for making me aware of it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 23:17
|
|
|
Jerusalem posted:Well poo poo, I really enjoyed Lincoln and 1876 but for some reason I've never read this, thanks for making me aware of it. If you liked those, try Creation as well. Bit of timebending goes on (it's set just after the Greco-Persian War but Zoroaster's a character) but it's fantastic.
|
|
#
?
Mar 20, 2015 23:26
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:Why was salt so valuable in the ancient world? Couldn't people just grab ocean water and boil off the water to get salt? People have mostly answered this but additionally, it was a popular item for duties and taxes since it was relatively easy to divide by region. Absolutely literally everyone needed salt, relatively few regions could produce it economically. It wasn't quite as expensive as pop culture usually says but a relatively small change in taxes or duties on salt (and these changes were often not that small) could make a huge difference to the average person who, a lot of the time, lived on the knife edge of survival in any case.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 00:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 16:46 |
|
|
Testikles posted:Looking at his other post history I think his problem was that he actually seems to have been a holdover from the days of British Empire. Somebody from the good ol' boys club who looks down on everybody who's not his 'rank.' Ancient coins can be much better preserved than you'd think, particularly gold ones since they didn't usually see much circulation. It was a common practice to bury your hoard of coins before you went off to battle/just in general so nobody took them from you, and a lot of people died before they could dig them back up or even sometimes forgot where they buried them. Those coins are in extremely nice condition and the gold ones are going to be worth an absurd amount of money, but the condition doesn't worry me at all when it comes to their authenticity. There are coins that nice in many collections all around the world.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2015 07:08
|
|