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quote:but what a woman says to her passionate lover, she ought to write on the wind and swift-flowing water. Catullus: best at writing really good poetry about being a douche.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:16
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That Ovid stuff was great, thanks for the post.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:47
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Ovid claims in Ars amatoria that Hector invented rubbing your girl's clit while loving her.
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Aug 13, 2015 19:50
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Ras Het posted:Ovid claims in Ars amatoria that Hector invented rubbing your girl's clit while loving her. Hector who? The guy with the chorizos at the colosseum?
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Aug 13, 2015 19:53
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StashAugustine posted:Catullus: best at writing really good poetry about being a douche. Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, qui me ex versiculis meis putastis, quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest; qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. Vos, quod milia multa basiorum legistis, male me marem putatis? Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
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Aug 13, 2015 20:19
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I think Kaal's post there put the issue to bed very nicely.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:21
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Ras Het posted:Ovid claims in Ars amatoria that Hector invented rubbing your girl's clit while loving her. He also calls king Minos a massive cuck because his wife would rather sleep with a bull than with him. And then he tells the reader that he's probably going to find a woman who wants to sleep with him, because some women would rather bang an animal than their husband.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:51
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I had no idea there was a theory that Ovid's carmen et error are just . . . made up by Ovid. That he was never exiled, and just wrote a bunch of stuff as if he were. 
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Aug 13, 2015 21:34
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Deltasquid posted:I hope I am forgiven for quoting such an old post, and my answer being a lot longer than anticipated, but as you can see, I really like Ovid's ars amatoria, since most Roman works are about politics or mythology or science and it's interesting to just... Read about the casual day to day life of the Roman citizens, I suppose? Hey man, I dig it. It keeps me from having to repeat the question six months from now  There's probably some class bias to these courting tips, here. Is it right to assume a literate Roman is a wealthier one?
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Aug 14, 2015 03:27
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Keldoclock posted:Hey man, I dig it. It keeps me from having to repeat the question six months from now The more literate Roman is likely the wealthier one, but the more literate of two inhabitants of Rome may not be the wealthier one.
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Aug 14, 2015 04:28
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Keldoclock posted:Hey man, I dig it. It keeps me from having to repeat the question six months from now Oh, definitely. Ovid tells the reader to get on the good side of the servant/maid of whatever girl you're courting, so she can keep you updated on her mistress' mood, interests, etc. and basically wingman you. quote:The maid can rouse her, when she combs her hair in the morning, Oh, and of course; quote:You ask perhaps if one should take the maid herself? Nevertheless, most Roman families, even the poorer ones, usually had a slave or two milling about. And even for the poorest classes, nothing except their workload or patron would really have stopped them from going to the circus or theatre, or hanging around the porticos when they had nothing to do. And I guess any feasts organized by your patron would also be where you meet the daughters of his other clients. But we don't really know for sure; Roman writers are notoriously bad at documenting things they think are unimportant, such as casual, day-to-day life and the lower classes. 
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Aug 14, 2015 09:02
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Keldoclock posted:Is it right to assume a literate Roman is a wealthier one? Depends on definition of wealthier and Roman. In the countryside yes. In cities no, literacy was apparently common. Among the very poorest it probably wasn't so much. We don't have good figures but the circumstantial evidence is strong for widespread urban literacy.
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Aug 14, 2015 09:13
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Grand Fromage posted:the circumstantial evidence is strong for widespread urban literacy. In other words, graffiti?
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Aug 14, 2015 09:53
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Tomn posted:In other words, graffiti? That and how often written announcements/advertisements/letters/etc appear. If literacy is rare then writing a paragraph on a wall about your olive oil is a huge waste of time. People scratching "Gaius has a tiny dick" in the bathroom wall is totally valid and effective evidence though.
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Aug 14, 2015 13:01
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Look, cunnilingus is great and no one's saying otherwise. But the city wall is not an appropriate venue, Theophilus.
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Aug 14, 2015 13:58
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Is there much evidence for what daily life in the Achaemenid Empire was like?
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Aug 14, 2015 15:00
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Halloween Jack posted:Look, cunnilingus is great and no one's saying otherwise. But the city wall is not an appropriate venue, Theophilus. What do you expect from a degenerate Greek? 
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Aug 14, 2015 15:09
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I want you to look at this terrible terrible documentary and feel revolted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmJ1DPI856U
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Aug 14, 2015 17:22
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Whorelord posted:Is there much evidence for what daily life in the Achaemenid Empire was like? Not too terribly much. Somethings like the Persepolis Fortification Tablets can give us an idea through inference, though of course they are government kept records. Things like unskilled women laborers being paid at 2/3rds the rate of men but many female scribes and overseers making the same wages as their male peers. Then there's also things like Herodotus and Xenophon who did some travelling in the areas and wrote things down. Xenophon is hard to use because his description of 'Persia' is more of a polemic/didactic musing on the nature of authority and not actual history history. Sort of a national hero myth.... written for another culture. Herodotus is fucky because we don't know what to believe about what he said. He wrote down a lot but wasn't the best at vetting his sources. I think one of the things you do get out of him though is an idea of the diversity in the Med/Levant at the time. Life in the Achaemenid Empire would have been very different if you were in Israel (which we know quite a bit about, come to think of it) or in Anatolia, or Syria, or where ever.
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Aug 14, 2015 19:23
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Blut posted:Those are great. Small talk, physical touching etc. It's really interesting to see how little some elements of being human don't change over thousands of years. Cock and balls on toilets and beer goggles, not much has changed in ~2000 years.
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Aug 15, 2015 03:56
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the JJ posted:Not too terribly much. Somethings like the Persepolis Fortification Tablets can give us an idea through inference, though of course they are government kept records. Things like unskilled women laborers being paid at 2/3rds the rate of men but many female scribes and overseers making the same wages as their male peers. Then there's also things like Herodotus and Xenophon who did some travelling in the areas and wrote things down. Xenophon is hard to use because his description of 'Persia' is more of a polemic/didactic musing on the nature of authority and not actual history history. Sort of a national hero myth.... written for another culture. Herodotus is fucky because we don't know what to believe about what he said. He wrote down a lot but wasn't the best at vetting his sources. I think one of the things you do get out of him though is an idea of the diversity in the Med/Levant at the time. Life in the Achaemenid Empire would have been very different if you were in Israel (which we know quite a bit about, come to think of it) or in Anatolia, or Syria, or where ever. thanks for this. anyone know of any good books on the achaemenids that deal with the empire outside of the invasions of greece?
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Aug 15, 2015 17:11
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The problem is nearly all the surviving writing about Persia is from Greeks. We do know they were accepting of multiple cultures/ethnicities, maybe even moreso than the Romans, and it seems like women were treated quite well by ancient standards. There are records of many women in positions of power and authority in the imperial bureaucracy.
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Aug 16, 2015 06:39
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Are there any good books about the Sassanids? Specifically focused on them? I've been looking and haven't found anything. The stuff I know about them is fascinating and I'd really like a full history of them.
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Aug 17, 2015 05:13
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I dunno how much digging around you've done already, but the Sassanids are also sometimes referred to as the Sasanian Empire, might be worth looking for sources that use that name. Here's one I just found on Amazon, not sure how good it is but might be a decent starting point? http://www.amazon.com/Sasanian-Persia-Rise-Fall-Empire/dp/1780763786
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Aug 17, 2015 05:20
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Blut posted:Those are great. Small talk, physical touching etc. It's really interesting to see how little some elements of being human don't change over thousands of years. To me, this is really the source of my Roman interest. We just have so much information about them compared to a lot of other societies, and we can at least get a glimpse into a regular persons life. There is just so much humanizing information available.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:30
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WoodrowSkillson posted:To me, this is really the source of my Roman interest. We just have so much information about them compared to a lot of other societies, and we can at least get a glimpse into a regular persons life. There is just so much humanizing information available. To some degree, you can get a sense of this simply by visiting--and ideally living within--other cultures today. I had the opportunity to live in South Korea for a year, and in southwest Asia for a bit over a year. The basics are all the same. Mom and Dad want junior to marry the little girl next door and make grandbabies. People have affairs. Sometimes relationships are "complicated" (even in very traditional societies). Want to make friends? Share a meal with someone. Outsiders who try to be polite are treated better than outsiders who do not. People are stressed about money, whether they have much or little. Everybody hates politicians. I don't think people's basic humanness has changed all that much in the past several thousand years, however much the trappings have changed.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:35
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Ynglaur posted:To some degree, you can get a sense of this simply by visiting--and ideally living within--other cultures today. I had the opportunity to live in South Korea for a year, and in southwest Asia for a bit over a year. The basics are all the same. Mom and Dad want junior to marry the little girl next door and make grandbabies. People have affairs. Sometimes relationships are "complicated" (even in very traditional societies). Want to make friends? Share a meal with someone. Outsiders who try to be polite are treated better than outsiders who do not. People are stressed about money, whether they have much or little. Everybody hates politicians. I don't think people's basic humanness has changed all that much in the past several thousand years, however much the trappings have changed. Probably the biggest way people's basic humanness has changed is their appreciation for the basic humanness of others, and in that respect we are very unlike the ancients.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:51
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homullus posted:Probably the biggest way people's basic humanness has changed is their appreciation for the basic humanness of others, and in that respect we are very unlike the ancients. If you mean other individuals, empathy is not a modern invention.
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Aug 17, 2015 17:59
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HEY GAL posted:If you mean other cultures, Terence said "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", Herodotus wanted to write about the entire world as he knew it, aeschylus writes a play that seems to be sympathetic to the persian point of view during the war that they were fighting with them at the time. Empathy isn't a modern invention. We don't own slaves, though, and we definitely don't torture slaves as a matter of course to make sure their testimony is true. We rarely slaughter every living being in a city we capture. We very rarely crucify prisoners, and definitely don't line roads with them.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:11
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Violent crime rates have plummeted. Or was that research debunked.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:13
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No, violent crime in the US has dropped absurdly since it peaked in 1993 and I have read that there is a drop worldwide but wouldn't swear to it. Empathy has always existed but there definitely does seem to have been shifts in it. There's a good long time before basic things like "killing is bad" start to show up in religious or philosophical thought. Having lived in multiple cultures myself I can tell you that while I believe all people (without mental issues like sociopathy) have empathy, the way it occurs and is expressed is very much culturally linked.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:34
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In our liberal societies with wide-ranging comunication and aspirations of equality, empathy is expected, but you still get people cheering for death and war, and justifying inequality.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:39
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Whorelord posted:thanks for this. anyone know of any good books on the achaemenids that deal with the empire outside of the invasions of greece? Tom Holland's is a good one. Persian Fire, I think it's called?
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Aug 17, 2015 18:51
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Grand Fromage posted:No, violent crime in the US has dropped absurdly since it peaked in 1993 and I have read that there is a drop worldwide but wouldn't swear to it. Yes, and afaik nobody really knows why.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:01
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I like the unleaded gasoline hypothesis. I wasn't sure if a worldwide crime decrease was well supported though. I know the US one is.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:07
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Grand Fromage posted:I like the unleaded gasoline hypothesis. I wasn't sure if a worldwide crime decrease was well supported though. I know the US one is. There's also the "Roe v Wade resulted in the non-births of a lot of people without many options better than crime" hypothesis.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:22
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homullus posted:There's also the "Roe v Wade resulted in the non-births of a lot of people without many options better than crime" hypothesis. i thought legalizing abortion didn't change abortion rates much, just how safe they are
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Aug 17, 2015 19:24
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homullus posted:There's also the "Roe v Wade resulted in the non-births of a lot of people without many options better than crime" hypothesis. That's just the US though. There was a long article floating around proposing that leaded gasoline had caused a worldwide crime surge that dropped once it was banned plus time had passed for lead levels to decrease in the population. I don't remember the author but it was a university researcher, not a random nutjob.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:26
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HEY GAL posted:i thought legalizing abortion didn't change abortion rates much, just how safe they are This is one of a number of problems with the hypothesis.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:27
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I like the hypothesis that when more and more people grow up with something resembling humanitarian values and considering women, foreigners and gays people, they are also less likely to murder each other for petty reasons.
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Aug 17, 2015 19:39
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