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homullus posted:If you're wondering about the usage of Latin "Papa" for the Pope, don't just Google "Latin Papa." And while are you are not Googling that, make a special point of not Googling it at work. Google customizes results based on previous search history, if you have cookies enabled...
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Jan 27, 2017 01:50
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Google customizes results based on previous search history, if you have cookies enabled... I had a leaky pump that needed repairing, but "busted O-ring" was apparently not the right term to search.
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Jan 27, 2017 02:00
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I googled "roman emperor baby dick nibbles" and do NOT look that up at work
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Jan 27, 2017 02:24
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Ainsley McTree posted:I googled "roman emperor baby dick nibbles" and do NOT look that up at work It just brings up a photo of Suetonius leaning over the fence while his neighbor hangs out the laundry, going,"Girrrrl you would not believe what I just heard about the Emperor...."
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Jan 27, 2017 04:53
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I googled "lives of famous whores full movie" and boy was I disappointed
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Jan 27, 2017 06:22
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FreudianSlippers posted:Disciple: Hey, God, I have a question. I think you'll find they're actually the same person, you heretic.
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Jan 27, 2017 07:20
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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They're different persons, but they have the same hypostasis. Stulte.
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Jan 27, 2017 10:13
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I googled "lives of famous whores full movie" and boy was I disappointed NON de Vitae Meretrices Illustris 30 Parodia Excuse the pig latin, I couldn't find the actual title in latin by googling. Also I like that the romans had different terms for registered and non-registered prostitutes. Syncopated fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jan 27, 2017 |
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Jan 27, 2017 18:10
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A cool report out of an archeological journal (reported by Ars) reports new evidence showing that the Sun Temple in New Mexico used by Pueblo peoples a thousand years ago has signs of being designed with advanced geometric principles, the earliest known evidence of such in the Americas. Specifically, the temple was designed using a measurement increment of about 30cm, and using this, the structures were placed within a one percent margin of error. Golden rectangles, squares, 45◦ triangles, Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangles, and equilateral triangles are all present in the design of the temple. Cool stuff froman often neglected part of ancient history.
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Jan 27, 2017 19:15
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More evidence of contact with the Greeks.
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Jan 27, 2017 19:16
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euphronius posted:More evidence of contact with the Greeks. You mean Atlanteans. 
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Jan 27, 2017 19:21
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I googled "lives of famous whores full movie" and boy was I disappointed I dunno, i thought your mom did a good job in it
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Jan 27, 2017 19:38
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PittTheElder posted:I think you'll find they're actually the same person, you heretic. Bullshit. He clearly had a divine and a human nature which are separate. Learn the facts.
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Jan 28, 2017 09:27
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Grevling posted:Bullshit. He clearly had a divine and a human nature which are separate. Learn the facts. Even Monophysites accept Nicaea
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Jan 28, 2017 09:37
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Any recommendations for audiobooks on 17th - 18th century political history?
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Jan 29, 2017 02:42
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Man, did it take forever to catch up with the thread... Just how 'barbaric' were the barbarians - their lands and states? The most common word, tribes, invokes an image of a bunch of stick huts in the middle of a forest, filled with large dudes, so hairy that you cant tell where their beards end and their uncured furs begin, but even with my miniscule knowledge I know that's not (entirelly) it. Do we have any knowledge on how Gaoul/ Gothic/ Frankish society was organized?
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Feb 4, 2017 08:15
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RedSnapper posted:Man, did it take forever to catch up with the thread... It's extremely difficult to say, since when we speak of barbarians we are not speaking of people who all lived in one time, or one place, or spoke one language, or indeed necessarily shared religions, cultures, ancestry, or anything else besides not being Roman. I'll give it a shot though. A very cool book to read on this subject if you can find a copy is Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West by Guy Halsall, but I'll try to give short answers. Gallic: probably we know the most about these, but only from what Caesar recorded, and he was not exactly an unbiased source -- that said, he's what we've got. He says Gallic society was divided into confederations of what had at one point been clan groups -- he refers to the confederations as "tribes", but it's important to remember that the Romans themselves were divided into tribes as a form of political and administrative organization (albeit not literally physically divided by territory) before you go thinking of any unwashed men in fur coats. Each of these groups claimed some amount of land centered around an oppidum. This would be a walled, defensible site (usually on a hilltop) where trade was conducted, political decisions were made, and the tribe could retreat in time of war. Most seem to have been permanently inhabited as well, making them more like permanent fortified towns than just fortifications. He says that there was a professional class called druids responsible for organizing religious and legal ritual who were exempted from military service. This was the province of a nobility who were politically organized into senates, dominated other free men in what might be termed patron-client relationships, and held what might be called civil magistracies, chief among them the role of vergobret. This was an annual position that entailed defending the tribal land, which the vergobret was not permitted to leave; within the land they had quite a lot of power during their term of office, but not to an arbitrary extent, being forbidden from elevating their close family members to magistracies for example. If this sounds somewhat similar to Republican Rome itself, it's worth remembering that Caesar's source for this is the political dealings he had with his allies the Aedui, who had been allies of Rome for a while and were surely politically influenced by Rome. For all that though, this office of vergobret seems to have been common-ish in some parts of Gaul, even in the early days of the Roman province. Among the Belgae in the north, kingships seem to have been more common before Caesar's campaigns. But again, it's worth remembering that Caesar was operating under the point of view that the closer you were to Rome, the more civilized you no doubt were, and if you were away in the north or on the dark side of the Rhine, you were probably a smelly unshaven axe-murderer slaving away under a tyrant. Gothic: very little until they crossed into Roman territory. When the Tervingi and the Greuthungi showed up on the Danube in 376, each was a large migrant group led by a pair of leaders -- chiefs or kings, it's hard to say. A couple of years before, the Tervingi had been led by a king named Athanaric, who fell foul of the Romans -- some later sources allege over the question of whether Goths could be Christians or not -- and was deposed. A generation before that, apparently all the Gothic peoples had been united under the rule of one king, Ermanaric, though there's more than likely legend at work there. After the Gothic wars and the settlement of the Goths in the empire, Goths were settled on Roman lands which they farmed and raised troops from in exchange for freedom from Roman law. They seem to have maintained political organization under their kings as well. They clearly didn't have a developed or even rudimentary urban culture when the Romans let them in in 376, but that's because they were refugees fleeing their lands -- it seems like before they moved towards the empire they were more probably pastoralists than a settled agricultural society with a lot of food surplus, but it's hard to say for sure. Anyway, while Romans continued to piss and moan about them being barbarians, it didn't stop some Gothic leaders from reaching important positions in the Roman military and government. Halsall suggests that many of the settled Goths initially considered themselves to be proper Romans and that they only chose to forsake Roman identity and set themselves apart from it as western Roman government authority disintegrated in the mid-5th century. Again, the impression from the sources is that these weren't like dim-witted cavemen. Even if Roman elites complained about their barbarousness, it's entirely possible that the wider Roman society -- particularly the military -- was culturally meeting the Goths halfway. Frankish: we have little about Franks from Roman sources, because they frankly weren't very prominent until after Roman authority collapsed in Gaul. They were a number of Germanic groups settled by the Romans in the Low Countries as federates, in the aftermath of the fall of the empire they consolidated under a united kingship, conquered a lot of Gaul and the rest is history. What they were like before the Romans settled them, we have no clue from the sources and I'm not familiar enough with archaeological evidence from this region to say if there's any evidence there. tl;dr the image of scruffy rear end beardies in the woods scratching themselves and wiping it on their furs is probably inaccurate, but a lot of Romans thought that way so it's understandable that we have this image. Some barbarians were more like Romans than one might expect, and in the end some Romans were more like barbarians than they might have expected. Read Halsall's book, it's really interesting.
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Feb 4, 2017 15:20
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skasion posted:tl;dr the image of scruffy rear end beardies in the woods scratching themselves and wiping it on their furs is probably inaccurate, but a lot of Romans thought that way so it's understandable that we have this image. I think the Romans might have had less caricatural views (at least those who left written testimonies behind...) and that it got inflated over time after the Middle Ages. I especially blame the Renaissance Roman fanboys. Also, the idea of "scruffy rear end beardies in the woods" (love that phrasing) implies they were isolated from the outside world. It's linked to the idea that Gauls was poor and primitive but... The thing is, there was plenty of trading going around in that part of the world too. By the times the Romans started taking over parts of Gauls, the locals would have been trading with Greeks for something like 5 centuries (going by when Massilia was founded, although obviously it'd depend on the tribe). Carthaginians too, before the Romans wrecked them (edit: the Carthaginians went all the way to Britain for tin). And that means some cultural exchange, too. Plus Celts had a tendency to migrate and/or go off to fight abroad as mercenaries (like for Carthage). Kassad fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Feb 4, 2017 |
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Feb 4, 2017 16:13
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Is there much known about the Germanic tribes that didn't leave Germany? That's always been something that I've wondered about, and it seems like they were a big influence on the way things happened after Charlemagne came and went.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:07
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Kassad posted:I think the Romans might have had less caricatural views (at least those who left written testimonies behind...) and that it got inflated over time after the Middle Ages. I especially blame the Renaissance Roman fanboys. Some Romans were definitely more nuanced than others in their opinions on barbarians, but as a whole antique writers seem to have pretty much thought of them as savages - noble savages, when it suited them, but savages nonetheless. Of course the tale grew in the telling, but it's not hard to see where the images of barbarians as fur-clad subhumans squatting around the campfire plotting human sacrifice came from when you read poo poo like Ammianus Marcellinus' description of the Huns. While it's true that Gaul was neither poor nor especially primitive (and Caesar would not have wasted his time subduing it unless he figured it was going to make him good money), it's very clear from archaeological record that there were people out there beyond the Roman frontier who were both. What's now Germany, particularly east of the Elbe, had very little permanent political structure or development of any kind as far as we can tell -- while closer to the Roman frontier there were richer, more settled groups, the more distant cultures didn't have oppida, and may not even have had towns or villages at all. Caesar claims the Germans had no or very little agriculture, went mostly unclothed, were pastoral nomads who had no organized religion or fixed leaders but were animists led by chieftains. Mind you this is right before the infamous passage where he claims elk sleep standing up and people hunt them by cutting down the trees they're leaning against to sleep, so he might be bullshitting (even Julius Caesar can't convince me that anyone who habitually lived through a German winter went mostly naked), but his basic point -- that whereas Gaul proper was rich, populous, and settled, Germania was none of the above -- is as far as we know correct. Come to think of it, by the time the Romans started taking over parts of Gaul, the locals had been trading with them for quite a while too. The Romans did an extremely rich trade of wine for slaves with the Gauls -- I think Caesar makes a comment to the effect that the fiercer, more barbarous Belgae were so because they were further from the wine markets (and thus freed from this civilized habit). And hiring barbarians to fight for you was a long-term motif in antiquity -- the Romans did it constantly themselves, both on the justification that savages were bolder and better individual fighters than civilized men even if, as a unit, civilized men were superior, and more cynically on the assumption that whereas Romans might always have their own loyalties and opinions, a bunch of hired Germans would be loyal to you exclusively as long as you paid them.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:11
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skasion posted:
It's actually as early as the fourth sentence, a nice little bit of rhetorical trickery: quote:Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. Gallos ab Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana dividit. Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important, proximique sunt Germanis, qui trans Rhenum incolunt, quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt. quote:All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our language Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws. The river Garonne separates the Gauls from the Aquitani; the Marne and the Seine separate them from the Belgae. Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because they are furthest from the civilization and refinement of the Province, and merchants least frequently resort to them, and import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; and they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war. The Belgae are the fiercest because they are furthest from these strength-sapping luxuries...luxuries which, for the most part, come from Rome. But Rome isn't affected by these luxuries, right? If civilization corrupted absolutely, Rome would never win a battle. So the Romans, by being able to beat the Gauls, are practically superhuman in their moral fiber. There is of course the longstanding unease about luxury in Rome itself, with sumptuary laws coming and going over the centuries, but Caesar takes the rhetorical stance that true Romans can rise above it.
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Feb 5, 2017 00:56
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Any of you champions have any reading material about pre roman celts/picts?
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Feb 6, 2017 09:03
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What if Julius Caesar hadn't been assassinated? Is it better that Octavian / Augustus became Emperor when he did?
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Feb 6, 2017 12:06
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bean_shadow posted:What if Julius Caesar hadn't been assassinated? Is it better that Octavian / Augustus became Emperor when he did? His assassination and civil war that followed basically liquidated the Roman aristocracy which imho was good for everyone .
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Feb 6, 2017 14:06
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bean_shadow posted:What if Julius Caesar hadn't been assassinated? Is it better that Octavian / Augustus became Emperor when he did? Nobody knows whether Caesar would have gone full on emperor/imperator or left the trappings of the republic prominently intact. Much of the framework for Augustus' imperial rule was there but there was still plenty of room to go between the consulship/dictatorship of JC and the principate, let alone the empire as it became with Augustus. On the other hand the guy was a ruthless power hound.
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Feb 6, 2017 14:06
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I've always felt that Caesar was going to end up pulling a Sulla and retiring after fixing the republic (but much more radically than Sulla did, of course), but it's impossible to know. On one hand, there's no real evidence that the fear that Caesar wanted to be a king/emperor was anything more than a paranoid fantasy cooked up by the optimates - who were going to end up being the ones eating the price of JC's intended reforms, you see. Why would you do a bunch of constitutional reforms if you didn't really intend for the system to be functional at some point? On the other, the symbols used by his administration get more gaudy, regal, and self-absorbed over time, and JC was always a guy to believe that he was the only one who really knew what he was doing, so maybe he never steps down after all. Whatever the case, people sometimes like to call Caesar the real first emperor but that's silly. The establishment of the principate is a much more radical alteration of Roman society than Caesar seems to have intended, while also being much subtler. The empire would probably have been quite different if Caesar had gone full emperor compared to how it turned out as a creation of Augustus. Better or worse? Who knows.
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Feb 6, 2017 14:51
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Jazerus posted:I've always felt that Caesar was going to end up pulling a Sulla and retiring after fixing the republic (but much more radically than Sulla did, of course), but it's impossible to know. On one hand, there's no real evidence that the fear that Caesar wanted to be a king/emperor was anything more than a paranoid fantasy cooked up by the optimates - who were going to end up being the ones eating the price of JC's intended reforms, you see. Why would you do a bunch of constitutional reforms if you didn't really intend for the system to be functional at some point? On the other, the symbols used by his administration get more gaudy, regal, and self-absorbed over time, and JC was always a guy to believe that he was the only one who really knew what he was doing, so maybe he never steps down after all. Caesar called Sulla a political illiterate for resigning the dictatorship. I don't think he had any plans to willingly diminish his power.
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Feb 6, 2017 15:17
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skasion posted:Caesar called Sulla a political illiterate for resigning the dictatorship. I don't think he had any plans to willingly diminish his power. I mean you can exist as dictator within the confines of the republican system, but I would say the assumption would be that you'd resign or at least divest yourself of the powers once the poo poo was no longer spraying into the fan. A systemic problem related to this was the lack of an impeachment process. You were ironclad inviolable (barring, y'know,  ) until you left office but you could be held liable afterward for actions you took during. So retaining power until death became a solid way of evading any kind of culpability for any crimes you commit, but also a way of avoiding the frivolous cases brought by your opponents.
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Feb 6, 2017 16:24
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The vast majority of our sources from the period are basically Caesarean propaganda, right? Both Caesar himself and Augustus had a huge vested interest in portraying Caesar as the best guy ever.
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Feb 6, 2017 17:47
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cheetah7071 posted:The vast majority of our sources from the period are basically Caesarean propaganda, right? Both Caesar himself and Augustus had a huge vested interest in portraying Caesar as the best guy ever. Not really. It's a mistake to think of Roman republican sources as being state or government propaganda, even the most adulatory recorders are a long way from the spin-doctor bullshit of late imperial panegyrists. Augustus didn't suppress anti-Caesarean writers (Livy apparently favored Pompey though we don't have enough of his history to be sure) or even writers overtly opposed to his own rule (Asinius Pollio for example), though subsequent emperors were a apparently less open-minded about it. Cicero is a major source for the period and certainly did not write Caesarean propaganda! FAUXTON posted:I mean you can exist as dictator within the confines of the republican system, but I would say the assumption would be that you'd resign or at least divest yourself of the powers once the poo poo was no longer spraying into the fan. Caesar was dictator in perpetuity and since, as you point out, he would have been legally vulnerable only once he left office, I can't imagine why he would ever have stepped down from the dictatorship.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:00
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skasion posted:Caesar was dictator in perpetuity and since, as you point out, he would have been legally vulnerable only once he left office, I can't imagine why he would ever have stepped down from the dictatorship. Right, there's this noble assumption of ethics underpinning the whole of the republican system which completely collapses when you have people who have little or no concern for ethical behavior. Sure you can share power fairly and act within the law and step down from your position of absolute power after a crisis but why do that when you can just as easily twist an incredibly powerful state apparatus to suit your personal desires, stay in an ever-strengthening position of power, and (assuming the knives stay home) die peacefully in office? Sure it's against the law to order extrajudicial killing of your opponents but lol you can't be touched until you leave office so why even hesitate. Everyone was waiting for their opportunity to take a poke at him and what probably set it all in motion was a belief that they'd never get it unless they murdered him. So, of course, they did.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:07
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cheetah7071 posted:The vast majority of our sources from the period are basically Caesarean propaganda, right? Both Caesar himself and Augustus had a huge vested interest in portraying Caesar as the best guy ever. That's the feeling I get from reading about people like Atia or Octavia. Not much is known except they were the model Roman women. Perfect in every way. Yeah, Livia and Julia (Augustus's daughter) are colorful but I'd like to know more about the others.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:28
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bean_shadow posted:That's the feeling I get from reading about people like Atia or Octavia. Not much is known except they were the model Roman women. Perfect in every way. Yeah, Livia and Julia (Augustus's daughter) are colorful but I'd like to know more about the others. Virtue in Roman women consisted in large part in keeping your head down and not inviting comment from historians and other passers of judgment. Just about every woman from the ancient world we do know more than a few things about, it's because they famously slept around or did dumb poo poo, or both at the same time. Livia is the only real exception because she was so important for so long. Even then she got an undeservedly nefarious reputation out of it despite pretty much living as blamelessly as any politician could ask of his wife.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:05
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FAUXTON posted:Right, there's this noble assumption of ethics underpinning the whole of the republican system which completely collapses when you have people who have little or no concern for ethical behavior. This is a fairly generous description of a totally aristocratic system
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Feb 7, 2017 00:50
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Speaking of the HBO Rome series. Is the depiction of urban life for the masses accurate? It looks utterly dire and devoid of any kind of rule of law. Also would it be safe to assume that Aetia's role in the series is to represent Rome itself?- they're both pragmatic, lucky, ruthless and have a knack for winning the devotion of powerful men... (Long-time lurker. Thanks posters one and all, for this most excellent thread!)
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Feb 7, 2017 03:01
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Ras Het posted:This is a fairly generous description of a totally aristocratic system  you might say optimal system, as it were.
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Feb 7, 2017 04:05
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FAUXTON posted:
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Feb 7, 2017 05:48
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FAUXTON posted:Right, there's this noble assumption of ethics underpinning the whole of the republican system which completely collapses when you have people who have little or no concern for ethical behavior. Sure you can share power fairly and act within the law and step down from your position of absolute power after a crisis but why do that when you can just as easily twist an incredibly powerful state apparatus to suit your personal desires, stay in an ever-strengthening position of power, and (assuming the knives stay home) die peacefully in office? Sure it's against the law to order extrajudicial killing of your opponents but lol you can't be touched until you leave office so why even hesitate. Everyone was waiting for their opportunity to take a poke at him and what probably set it all in motion was a belief that they'd never get it unless they murdered him. So, of course, they did. jeez this feels weird to read in america, 2017
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Feb 7, 2017 08:11
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That paradigm really became perverted when the legions became loyal to the general (consul) and not the state . Which has maybe not happened in the USA . Maybe.
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Feb 7, 2017 14:20
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euphronius posted:That paradigm really became perverted when the legions became loyal to the general (consul) and not the state . Which has maybe not happened in the USA . Maybe. I read in a lot of places that Mattis holds incredible loyalty from the USMC. Granted that probably means the three branches that aren't cannon fodder will take any reason to ignore him but that's that.
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Feb 7, 2017 14:26
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