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I think I remember after the famous band of refugees crossed over a second group appeared along the Danube threatening to cross into Roman territory by force if necessary. Valens at first agreed to move them and even sent a contingent of the Roman navy to assist, but once they were in the middle of the river they turned around and sunk the entire transport fleet exterminating the entire tribe while they were helpless in the water. Ring any bells? It came to mind because if European nationalists are using the Gothic migration as a metaphor for their current problems I'd be concerned they might get a few ideas
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Dec 27, 2016 05:54
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Squalid posted:I think I remember after the famous band of refugees crossed over a second group appeared along the Danube threatening to cross into Roman territory by force if necessary. Valens at first agreed to move them and even sent a contingent of the Roman navy to assist, but once they were in the middle of the river they turned around and sunk the entire transport fleet exterminating the entire tribe while they were helpless in the water. Ring any bells? It came to mind because if European nationalists are using the Gothic migration as a metaphor for their current problems I'd be concerned they might get a few ideas This doesn't sound quite right to me. A lot of the Tervingi did drown during the initial crossing, but not because of Roman malice so much as because they were trying to shift thousands of people as quickly as possible across a rain-swollen river in rudimentary boats and rafts. When the Greuthungi crossed the river they did so completely without permission, but also didn't face any significant opposition because troops had been pulled back from the Danube to manage the relocation of the Tervingi. It's not impossible that something like this happened at some other time since Romans (and barbarians) rarely had much compunction about massacring large numbers of people (Roman or barbarian) if they felt it was in their interests, but it doesn't ring a bell for me, definitely not in context of the Gothic War.
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Dec 27, 2016 14:45
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I've been reading up on some primary sources on the Pre Socratic, and, man, the Pythagoreans were weird dudes. Swearing by the number four, 3,000 year cycles of metempsychosis, etc.
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Dec 27, 2016 15:37
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Cnidario posted:I've been reading up on some primary sources on the Pre Socratic, and, man, the Pythagoreans were weird dudes. Swearing by the number four, 3,000 year cycles of metempsychosis, etc. Its the weird emphasis on beans that gets me.
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Dec 30, 2016 16:12
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This is somewhat outside the spectrum of this thread probably, but I got a copy of Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 - A History and it is really loving good. Has anybody read her Cleopatra: A Life? I'm thinking of grabbing it once I'm done with this one.
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Dec 31, 2016 00:10
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Jerusalem posted:This is somewhat outside the spectrum of this thread probably, but I got a copy of Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 - A History and it is really loving good. Has anybody read her Cleopatra: A Life? I'm thinking of grabbing it once I'm done with this one. I'm sure plenty of people here, myself included, would tell you that there's room on the spectrum for all of us.
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Dec 31, 2016 03:48
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FAUXTON posted:I'm sure plenty of people here, myself included, would tell you that there's room on the spectrum for all of us. This post is as pretty as a Catullus poem 
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Dec 31, 2016 05:03
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Jerusalem posted:This post is as pretty as a Catullus poem There's plenty of that on the overwatch forums ever since the big tracer reveal
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Dec 31, 2016 05:30
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Jerusalem posted:This is somewhat outside the spectrum of this thread probably, but I got a copy of Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 - A History and it is really loving good. Has anybody read her Cleopatra: A Life? I'm thinking of grabbing it once I'm done with this one. Yeah, it was interesting. Paints Cleopatra as a more effective ruler and active agent than popular history and old Shakespeare have.
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Dec 31, 2016 06:22
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FAUXTON posted:There's plenty of that on the overwatch forums ever since the big tracer reveal I don't know what that is, but like ancient history I'm gonna go ahead and assume it involves butts sullat posted:Yeah, it was interesting. Paints Cleopatra as a more effective ruler and active agent than popular history and old Shakespeare have. Did the idea of Cleopatra's great beauty originate with Augustus' propaganda? Presumably in order to both make Antony look bad and suggest she was only capable of her achievements because of her looks and not any kind of brains. If so, man that tall, broad-shouldered natural fighter sure had some effective propaganda!
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Dec 31, 2016 06:26
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only ptolemy who went out of her way to learn things about the people she ruled, that alone would have made me want to have a beer with her, let alone her political savvy
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Dec 31, 2016 06:34
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To bad Egyptian beer is the worst beer.
Firstscion fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Dec 31, 2016 |
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Dec 31, 2016 06:52
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Cleopatra was probably the most capable ruler out of her entire lineage, she just had the misfortune to be born at the wrong time.
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Dec 31, 2016 07:07
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Jerusalem posted:Did the idea of Cleopatra's great beauty originate with Augustus' propaganda? Presumably in order to both make Antony look bad and suggest she was only capable of her achievements because of her looks and not any kind of brains. If so, man that tall, broad-shouldered natural fighter sure had some effective propaganda! I think it was later histiography; how else did the great noble warrior Anthony get seduced away from his duty?
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Dec 31, 2016 16:31
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Jerusalem posted:I don't know what that is, but like ancient history I'm gonna go ahead and assume it involves butts Plutarch politely suggests that she wasn't very physically attractive, but charming, intelligent, and well-spoken. Cassius Dio is the only surviving ancient historian who explicitly claims she was a great beauty, but he was writing about a century further after the fact than Plutarch. However Plutarch himself was writing at least a century after Cleopatra's death. Her life is not very well attested and in general her importance is exaggerated. The image of Cleopatra as seductress is probably older than Actium-era propaganda, though it certainly made use of that image. It's hard to imagine that people in Rome didn't resent her relationship with Caesar or his erecting a statue in her honor in Venus Genetrix, for example. Cicero met her when she came to visit Caesar in Rome and hated her, though he doesn't speak of her in terms of having seduced Caesar -- I guess with Caesar right there and holding unmatched power it was neither likely that he would be subverted by a foreigner, nor politic to say that he had been. For all that, her relationship with Antony was pretty much the same thing as with Caesar: since Romans would decide whether she was able to maintain her status as client monarch or not, she found the most powerful Roman available and got in bed with him. It's just that in Antony's case, there was a major Roman opponent who had an interest in making him look bad, and he being absent from Rome did not possess the power to threaten that narrative. However the prevailing Roman attitudes to Cleopatra didn't portray her as a dumbass who slept her way to the top or anything. Indeed one rather gets the (dubiously accurate, since Imperator Caesar had an obvious interest in portraying Antony as not a Roman political rival but as in the thrall of a foreigner) sense that she, rather than Antony, was the brains of the operation. She's just ensnaring him with her feminine wiles to suit her decadent oriental monarch's ambitions of conquering Roman civilization, as those oriental monarchs all want to. Good thing we have Imperator Caesar Divi Filius and M. Vipsanius Agrippa to defend us, and Livia Drusilla to show us what a proper noblewoman should be 
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Dec 31, 2016 17:09
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skasion posted:and Livia Drusilla to show us what a proper noblewoman should be 
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Dec 31, 2016 19:21
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lol
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Dec 31, 2016 19:29
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Jerusalem posted:This is somewhat outside the spectrum of this thread probably, but I got a copy of Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 - A History and it is really loving good. Has anybody read her Cleopatra: A Life? I'm thinking of grabbing it once I'm done with this one. How does this try and explain the hysteria? I've got a bug up my rear about the European witch hysteria but while I've read most of the big titles on that subject, Salem is the one that seems to have the shittiest and most sensationalized books about it.
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Dec 31, 2016 22:49
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Mad Hamish posted:How does this try and explain the hysteria? I've got a bug up my rear about the European witch hysteria but while I've read most of the big titles on that subject, Salem is the one that seems to have the shittiest and most sensationalized books about it. I'm only through the first 100 pages or so right now, but so far from the people she's written about I think there is a large part of people amplifying some unrelated things because they're either (subconsciously) enjoying the attention or they're so frustrated by such a variety of issues (between the town and the village, between the minister and the villagers, the wealthy and the impoverished) that when things kicked off a bunch of people projected those frustrations onto the readily available scapegoat. There's gossip, rivalries, grudges, jealousy etc all coming out in the wash, along with an unhealthy measure of boredom from the lack of news (they got news from England months after the fact, weeks at best - when they left witch hysteria was still pretty high in Europe but had mostly petered out by the time Salem kicked off). I mean she might take a completely different tack fairly quickly, but so far she's doing a really good job of setting the background but letting the people and their stories be presented at face value, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions.
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Jan 1, 2017 00:39
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skasion posted:Plutarch politely suggests that she wasn't very physically attractive, but charming, intelligent, and well-spoken.  
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Jan 1, 2017 01:12
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Weren't the Ptolemys rather inbred by that point as well?
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Jan 1, 2017 01:42
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Chichevache posted:Weren't the Ptolemys rather inbred by that point as well? That's putting it mildly. They had something like 4 generations of sibling marriage before Cleopatra, but I suspect (with like 0 evidence) that most of these were political and that they may have secretly kept concubines or old Macedonian traditions of polygamy. Even one generation is hell on your genes, but the Ptolemies don't seem as bad as say, the Hapsburgs, despite having a worse lineage on paper.
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Jan 1, 2017 01:53
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FishFood posted:That's putting it mildly. They had something like 4 generations of sibling marriage before Cleopatra, but I suspect (with like 0 evidence) that most of these were political and that they may have secretly kept concubines or old Macedonian traditions of polygamy. Even one generation is hell on your genes, but the Ptolemies don't seem as bad as say, the Hapsburgs, despite having a worse lineage on paper.
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Jan 1, 2017 02:00
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There's always the rumors that while officially the children were from the brother-sister marriages, unofficially the children were actually from the brother and sister's various concubines and lovers. Later royal families like the Hapsburgs are the ones that we know actually did do generations of severe inbreeding.
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Jan 1, 2017 03:11
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HEY GAL posted:the hapsburgs took a long-rear end time to get to Carlos 2 though. before that they were mostly ugly, but mentally they were ok Thing is, genetically, Carlos II is basically equivalent to 1 or 2 generations of sibling incest, whereas the Ptolemies had a lot more generations than that.
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Jan 1, 2017 04:24
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FishFood posted:Thing is, genetically, Carlos II is basically equivalent to 1 or 2 generations of sibling incest, whereas the Ptolemies had a lot more generations than that. the hapsburgs had been uncle-loving for like three hundred years by then tho
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Jan 1, 2017 04:31
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FishFood posted:Thing is, genetically, Carlos II is basically equivalent to 1 or 2 generations of sibling incest, whereas the Ptolemies had a lot more generations than that. Definitely more than one generation of sibling breeding, but no idea if it was more than two. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005174
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Jan 1, 2017 04:49
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HEY GAL posted:only ptolemy who went out of her way to learn things about the people she ruled, that alone would have made me want to have a beer with her, let alone her political savvy Cleopatra is high up there on my List of Historical People I'd Get Smashed With.
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Jan 1, 2017 05:45
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Cleopatra is high up there on my List of Historical People I'd Get Smashed With. If she was anything at all in real life like her portrayal on Rome, then absolutely, but I'm guessing she was a lot more boring than that.
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Jan 1, 2017 06:01
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Cleopatra is high up there on my List of Historical People I'd Get Smashed With.
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Jan 1, 2017 06:47
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Cleopatra is high up there on my List of Historical People I'd Get Smashed With.
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Jan 1, 2017 06:47
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HEY GAL posted:can you get smashed on egyptian beer? you'd probably have to bring out the wine Me getting drunk with Cleopatra VII Philopator involves enough what-ifs and how-the-gently caress-did-yous that I just assume it's a bring your own bottle situation. So really it depends on her tolerance for Buffalo Trace and/or Beaujolais.
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Jan 1, 2017 08:25
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Me getting drunk with Cleopatra VII Philopator involves enough what-ifs and how-the-gently caress-did-yous that I just assume it's a bring your own bottle situation. gently caress that, head straight for the Booker's. Go fast or not at all.
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Jan 1, 2017 08:46
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Let's turn this into a discussion of which booze you'd bring with you into the ancient past. I'm torn between Fireball and baijiu.
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Jan 1, 2017 11:08
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Kvas. Clearly we'd need something that would have a recognisable taste to the breadbooze people. 
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Jan 1, 2017 12:16
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Atlas Hugged posted:Let's turn this into a discussion of which booze you'd bring with you into the ancient past. I'm torn between Fireball and baijiu. A decent single malt. Perhaps a Dalwhinnie. To prove to the people of ancient Rome that one day my people will create something that proves the Caledonii are not just savages.
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Jan 1, 2017 16:47
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i don't need to bring booze to the 17th century, just convince the people who drink gin straight to have a few conversations with the people who drink vermouth straight
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Jan 1, 2017 18:35
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Did Romans or other ancient people celebrate new years as we do? What i mean is huge party through every srata of society, special party customs such as fireworks and the like.
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Jan 1, 2017 21:02
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Fish of hemp posted:Did Romans or other ancient people celebrate new years as we do? What i mean is huge party through every srata of society, special party customs such as fireworks and the like. Not Romans, no. The Calends of January was a festival for Janus, and the day on which the year's consuls assumed office, at least in the late republic. The Calends of March, on which the Roman year originally began, were a somewhat more important holiday involving the relighting of the sacred fire and a festival for Mars (as the month name implies). But every Calends was a holiday and sacred to something or other, and Romans had rather a lot of holidays. Saturnalia, in late December, is probably the closest to being a full-on carnival like you're thinking, and had plenty of weird special customs like role-reversal between masters and slaves and stuff. No fireworks though. Fireworks need explosives.
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Jan 1, 2017 21:57
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Fish of hemp posted:Did Romans or other ancient people celebrate new years as we do? What i mean is huge party through every srata of society, special party customs such as fireworks and the like. The Sumerian/Babylonian new year was in April or so, and was the start of the planting season. There would be big parties, lots of drinking and ritual sex to celebrate the return of Dumuzi from the underworld.
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Jan 1, 2017 21:57
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