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Don Gato posted:I never read the Illiad in high school, I read a novel form version of the Oddessy, and beyond that I read Oedipus Rex and Antigone, and part of the Aeneid but that's about all the exposure to the Greeks and Romans that I got. That sounds about the same, we read parts of the Illiad, the Odyssey and Oresteia. Probably went on the Shakespear from there, I think some other people in my grade had beowulf but not me. I'm sure there's a standard curriculum somewhere that proscribes three classics for the first month of 11th grade English or something and teachers get to pick their favorites.
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Jun 21, 2019 03:07
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feedmegin posted:Eh? I don't know about everyone else but my English classes at school did not in fact cover a poem written in Ancient Greek. Wait... wait, are you telling me that it is abnormal to have had a public middle school teacher that dressed up as Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Achilles when covering and reading aloud the relevant mythologies?
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Jun 21, 2019 06:46
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The book I just started (The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan) just made a claim so extraordinary to me it didn't pass the smell test and I wanted to check it here. This was in context of setting up the context for the Roman grain dole--so this claim is from before the dole started. It said that, in the city of Rome, quote:there was never desperate poverty. If you did not have money to live you either departed for the countryside or died in a back alley. Poverty was fatal. It cites Cambridge Ancient History for this. The notion that people in desperate circumstances would, by and large, just die--to the point that there didn't even exist an underclass of homeless/unemployed people because all the would-be homeless were dead--seems frankly unbelievable to me.
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Jun 21, 2019 21:07
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As far as we know that is correct. There was no concept of charity in pre-Christian Rome. If you couldn't afford to live, you died (or left or sold yourself into slavery). Large Roman cities had astronomical death rates from a combination of disease and the poor being weeded out, the only reason they kept growing was an equally huge immigration rate. We do know there were a lot of criminals in Rome, to the point that Roman writers suggest being outside at night without a solid force of personal guards is simply insane. That would've been driven by poverty like in any other society. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 21, 2019 |
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Jun 21, 2019 21:15
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Grand Fromage posted:As far as we know that is correct. There was no concept of charity in pre-Christian Rome. If you couldn't afford to live, you died (or left or sold yourself into slavery). Large Roman cities had astronomical death rates from a combination of disease and the poor being weeded out, the only reason they kept growing was an equally huge immigration rate. I've seen this claim before in an academic book arguing that the sheer hellishness of the provincial cities in the east was the primary drive for Christianization in the lower classes. While I'm definitely ready to believe that poor urban conditions helped pave the way for the social cohesion and class message spread by early Christians, I'm still very skeptical about the claim, mostly because the way they were trying to quantitatively determine population flux and death rates seemed pretty dodgy (it's been more than a few years and I can no longer recall the details im afraid). The claim that Christians invented charity is pretty silly as well, imo. For one, the grain dole, but also traditions of public festivals and banqueting and municipal donations from well-off families all contradict that idea. I guess you can draw a line between acts of public benevolence and the idea of pure caritas as some kind of intimate loving-kindness for your fellow man, but even then there are so many different competing cults in the later empire that some at least have to be contesting that ground.
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Jun 21, 2019 21:33
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Wouldn't offering bread to the whole town be one of the simplest ways to flaunt off your wealth?
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Jun 21, 2019 21:39
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Fish of hemp posted:Wouldn't offering bread to the whole town be one of the simplest ways to flaunt off your wealth? yes, and this wasn't uncommon. but rome itself was too big for such a thing, that's why the grain dole was necessary - crime, corruption (through buying votes with food), etc. could all be traced back to starvation. christianity began to accelerate precisely when the secular sources of prestige-driven charity stopped spending money during the crisis of the third century. it's not that charity was unheard of - but it was a transaction, money in exchange for civic prestige. when the aristocratic republican and early imperial culture that valued civic prestige stopped doing so, the money dried up too.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:05
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It's not so much a claim that the Christians invented charity, as the Romans just weren't practicing it. Early Christian charity concepts had a lot to do with what the Jews had already been practicing on that account for many years. Though it's arguable if the Romans even weren't practicing it the Christians definitely expanded it greatly at the minimum. But let's consider the grain dole itself. Even after the grain dole comes in though, that's something that's not really provided to everyone in the city, it's often only just barely enough bread that you can get out of it to scrape by with other food you have to buy or steal, it's usually not provided directly to women and children as its typically restricted to being collected by adult men, etc. If you end up sick or injured and need more food or can't do whatever it is you were doing to supplement the grain dole to stay alive? Yeah you're going to be pretty hosed. You may have a large number of festivals where you can potentially get extra food and rich guys throwing open-to-the-public parties around, but those still don't happen every day and you might need to trek around the city a bit from where you're living to take advantage. And when you're already getting barely enough to stay alive from the grain dole can you even rely on coming out ahead from the travel?
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Jun 21, 2019 22:18
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Edit: refresh, then comment
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Jun 21, 2019 22:28
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That Duncan quote does sound dodgy. However, I could see it plausibly being true in one sense: there might not have been a large population of free urban homeless/unemployed. I could see this because if a family is desperately poor, the pater familias could sell his children (and maybe his wife?) into slavery. He might have even been able to sell himself. I think debtors could also end up enslaved. If your family is starving to death, slavery might be preferable. Also I don't know where Duncan is going with the grain dole, but I know there's been some modern research into the subject that has undercut a lot of our preconceptions. For instance, the grain dole wasn't really for the poor. I know that sounds weird, but the main recipients were most often what we would could call the lower middle class. Think skilled tradesmen, carpenters, butchers that sort of thing, and not precariat day laborers. Most residents of Rome were not eligible for dole. Quoting wikipedia: quote:The numbers of those receiving free or subsidized grain expanded to an estimated 320,000 before being reduced to 150,000 by Julius Caesar and then set at 200,000 by Augustus Caesar, a number that remained more or less stable until near the end of the Western Roman Empire.[4][5] So if you assume there were one million inhabitants of Rome in Augustus's day that would be only 1/5 of Romans receiving subsidized grain. As the number of recipients was capped, getting on the dole took a lot of effort and was inherited within families. To be on the grain dole was seen as a mark of privilege and good standing. The poorest of the poor would have been rural migrants, freed slaves, foreigners, and other marginalized groups that would not have been eligible for subsidized grain.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:41
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I've heard from other sources that the dole started closer to being welfare for the very poor but since it was inheritable it drifted from that as a family's wealth changed. Caesar's reform supposedly re-aimed it at the poor while also reducing the size to get the conservatives on board. I know next to nothing about how it worked in the imperial period.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:51
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Fish of hemp posted:Wouldn't offering bread to the whole town be one of the simplest ways to flaunt off your wealth? I guess it depends what you mean by charity. I take it as giving to the less fortunate because you believe it's the morally right thing to do. The Romans did not do that. They did have giving to the masses as a concept, but it was solely for social control/to get people to vote for you/show off how rich you are/etc. There was no moral component to it whatsoever.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:09
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Everybody's favorite pagan emperor Julian tried in vain to bolt pagan traditions onto the framework of a religion, including Christian-style charity, but unfortunately, like himself, it didn't last long. But he recognized that charity was part of the reason Christianity was winning even at the time.
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Jun 22, 2019 00:08
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wondering if anyone knows about ancient chinese history, im wondering about emperor names. basically what they were actually called by people at the time. so like Emperor Wu of Han's real name is Liu Che, his fancy name is Tong. I assume neither of those would have been used. it seems unclear from reading whether he was called Emperor Wu at the time, since thats also his posthumous name and means "warlike" which would be a funny thing to name a 15 year old. but that seems to be what wikipedia suggests would it have been named based on the era? like would he be called jianyuan emperor in one period then yuangguang emperor the next? halp
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Jun 23, 2019 16:03
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Hentai Jihadist posted:wondering if anyone knows about ancient chinese history, im wondering about emperor names. basically what they were actually called by people at the time. I could be off, Ancient China was not my specialty, but this is my understanding of it. Ancient Chinese naming conventions are odd and they kind of stay odd until the end of the Qing Dynasty in terms of given names, courtesy names, literary names, and so on. The Emperor would generally be known as the Emperor in discourse and the reign name, Wu, would be used for the recording of the date since the recording of the years is based on the reign of the emperor. If it was a history, they would be referred to by the reign name and I believe usually in decrees and directives, they would be stamped with the seal of the Emperor. All other names are not relevant to the rest of society and would only be used by close family. It worked very similarly to the modern Japanese system, mostly because it's based on the Chinese imperial system.
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Jun 24, 2019 19:22
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Koramei posted:Yeah I read on the Ask Historians reddit a bit back that this is likely the case for acne as well, which is some serious bullshit if you ask me.
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Jun 25, 2019 13:42
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They absolutely did have to deal with some acne. There's evidence that King Tut and Cleopatra both suffered from acne during their lives. But there's also evidence that it wasn't as common or as bad as modern acne. EDIT: The Age Old Problem of Acne Acne vulgaris is one of the top three most commonly encountered dermatological problems worldwide in both primary and secondary care. Acne diagnosis and treatment date back to ancient Greek and Egyptian times. This article explores acne through the ages and discusses past theories on etiology and treatment with particular focus on the discovery of retinoids and their impact on women’s health. Acne Vulgaris: A Disease of Western Civilization In westernized societies, acne vulgaris is a nearly universal skin disease afflicting 79% to 95% of the adolescent population. In men and women older than 25 years, 40% to 54% have some degree of facial acne, and clinical facial acne persists into middle age in 12% of women and 3% of men. Herein we report the prevalence of acne in 2 nonwesternized populations: the Kitavan Islanders of Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay. Of 1200 Kitavan subjects examined (including 300 aged 15-25 years), no case of acne (grade 1 with multiple comedones or grades 2-4) was observed. Of 115 Aché subjects examined (including 15 aged 15-25 years) over 843 days, no case of active acne (grades 1-4) was observed. The authors of this paper blame high acme rates on westernized societies on the high glycemic loads common in westernized diets. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jun 25, 2019 |
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Jun 25, 2019 16:16
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I'm fascinated by those sort of cultural diseases. Like apparently diverticulitis and severe allergies are another two Western-world only diseases. Meanwhile pancreatic cancer is supposedly way higher in Japan, presumably because of soy sauce.
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Jun 25, 2019 17:29
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Americans and kidney stones are another example I think. Ah, and medieval europeans were apparently getting bladder stones constantly and had a really gnarly technique for pulling them out via the taint.
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Jun 25, 2019 17:31
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Imagined posted:I'm fascinated by those sort of cultural diseases. Like apparently diverticulitis and severe allergies are another two Western-world only diseases. Meanwhile pancreatic cancer is supposedly way higher in Japan, presumably because of soy sauce. Food allergies are actually spreading now, the rate in China is exploding like it did in the US a few decades ago. Bit of a mystery why, there was the popular idea that American kids were too clean and not getting exposed and uh, that is not a problem in China. Stomach cancer is crazy high in Korea/Japan and that's thought to mostly be the enormous amount of pickled vegetables and alcohol, though there may also be a genetic predisposition. Kind of like how lung cancer is much rarer in East Asia, Japan in particular, than you'd think given that every dude over there is chain smoking like it's a competition.
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Jun 25, 2019 18:12
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When it comes to something like very severe food allergies, that's also the kind of thing where it's easy to expose a kid to it and they pretty much drop dead at a very early age with no indication what precisely happened. But at the same time, if your kid has a severe allergy to a kind of food they rarely encounter, they might go quite a long time before anyone notices it, especially if they eat a rather repetitious and unadventurous diet. People end up being adults who just kinda remember, say, "wow the last time I ate shellfish the place was terrible I got really bad food poisoning" and don't connect the dots that they are allergic to it because they rarely bother to eat anything related.
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Jun 25, 2019 18:34
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aphid_licker posted:Americans and kidney stones are another example I think. Ah, and medieval europeans were apparently getting bladder stones constantly and had a really gnarly technique for pulling them out via the taint. That entire plotline about kidney stones in Deadwood was terrifying.
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Jun 25, 2019 18:50
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Kidney stones are absolutely fuckin awful even with the benefit of modern medicine, if I got one in antiquity i would probably just fall down and wait to die
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Jun 25, 2019 19:17
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skasion posted:Kidney stones are absolutely fuckin awful even with the benefit of modern medicine, if I got one in antiquity i would probably just fall down and wait to die Comically, one valid treatment is to ride a rollercoaster. The shaking can break it up. Jumping jacks too if you can.
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Jun 25, 2019 19:24
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fishmech posted:When it comes to something like very severe food allergies, that's also the kind of thing where it's easy to expose a kid to it and they pretty much drop dead at a very early age with no indication what precisely happened. exposing kids to foods at an early age is also how you prevent them getting allergies, so in conclusion the autoimmune system is a land of contrasts https://time.com/4622667/how-to-prevent-peanut-allergy/
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Jun 25, 2019 19:26
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aphid_licker posted:Americans and kidney stones are another example I think. Ah, and medieval europeans were apparently getting bladder stones constantly and had a really gnarly technique for pulling them out via the taint. Pepys underwent this procedure just before the start of his diary. Speculation is that the surgeon severed his vas deferens, hence his childless philandering.
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Jun 25, 2019 20:07
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Grand Fromage posted:Food allergies are actually spreading now, the rate in China is exploding like it did in the US a few decades ago. Bit of a mystery why, there was the popular idea that American kids were too clean and not getting exposed and uh, that is not a problem in China. Allergies are in essence due to our immune system not being trained or triggered properly. This can be due to our gastrointestinal tract not being colonized in an optimal fashion when we are babies, our internal microbiota differing wildly from what we evolved to get proper triggers and feedback from, and various environmental and behavioral factors that affect our cells and bodies in ways that make our immune system more trigger happy. So yes, it can very much be due to living too cleanly and eating too cleanly. Especially as intestinal parasites and your gut microbes have a major impact on your immune system and its responses. Both of these are greatly affected by our western living. Also, it's pretty bigoted to say that China is not as clean as western countries, it's a shitload of humans, the great part of which are living in an urban environment with a lifestyle similar to western countries likely outnumbers all of western Europe. Thanks to being an industry hub for the planet it's likely that they have an even greater burden of unnatural environmental factors, which in turn will also produce adverse effects for their immune responses.
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Jun 25, 2019 20:26
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There's also schools of thought that have weird things to say about intestinal parasites being part of the natural gut fauna that our bodies have evolved to deal with. There was a story I heard a while back about a guy who went off to Africa to get himself voluntarily infected with hookworm to treat his own severe allergies. https://www.ksl.com/article/20838871/man-infects-self-with-hookworms-to-treat-severe-allergies A real weird idea that could also be a bit of a public health risk to people who don't have messed up allergic reactions, but something to consider. Sure hope there isn't a resurgence of tapeworms as a dietary aid.
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Jun 25, 2019 20:48
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Hasn't there also been a fair bit of success with trying to slowly acclimatize people's immune systems to the things they are allergic to? Suggesting that lack of exposure is very definitely part of all this? Fairly sure a friend of mine in university was getting exposed to small quantities of bee venom on the regular so that he wouldn't go into shock the next him a bee decided to ruin his day.
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Jun 25, 2019 20:54
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Hasn't there also been a fair bit of success with trying to slowly acclimatize people's immune systems to the things they are allergic to? Suggesting that lack of exposure is very definitely part of all this? That's an actual thing (friend of mine had the same issue) and it is not to be confused with Homeopathy. Not that you said it was, just bringing it up because i've seen ppl make the argument.
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Jun 25, 2019 21:03
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PittTheElder posted:Hasn't there also been a fair bit of success with trying to slowly acclimatize people's immune systems to the things they are allergic to? Suggesting that lack of exposure is very definitely part of all this? Yes, it's one way, but I don't think it's applicable to all allergies as there is quite a lot of allergies where the specific allergens are unclear and where the response is not predictable enough to willingly trigger. I think cat allergy was being removed as an allergy classification in Finland due to its ease in being cured by exposure therapy.
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Jun 25, 2019 21:10
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aphid_licker posted:Americans and kidney stones are another example I think. Ah, and medieval europeans were apparently getting bladder stones constantly and had a really gnarly technique for pulling them out via the taint. although rates of gout are way UP, watch your diets goons
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Jun 25, 2019 21:41
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CommonShore posted:Pepys underwent this procedure just before the start of his diary. Speculation is that the surgeon severed his vas deferens, hence his childless philandering.
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Jun 25, 2019 21:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's also schools of thought that have weird things to say about intestinal parasites being part of the natural gut fauna that our bodies have evolved to deal with. There was a story I heard a while back about a guy who went off to Africa to get himself voluntarily infected with hookworm to treat his own severe allergies. So, in conclusion, parasites are a land of contrasts. Zudgemud posted:Allergies are in essence due to our immune system not being trained or triggered properly....
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Jun 25, 2019 21:46
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PittTheElder posted:Hasn't there also been a fair bit of success with trying to slowly acclimatize people's immune systems to the things they are allergic to? Suggesting that lack of exposure is very definitely part of all this? That or it's because of worms 
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Jun 25, 2019 21:58
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HEY GUNS posted:17th century military personell and gout Wasn't that the period when doctors believed red meat was the healthiest thing ever, and vegetables were bad for your health? I suspect some of this may be related to the rise of the Atkins/Paleo fad, and the increase in "extra protein" marketing for food.
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Jun 25, 2019 22:01
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golden bubble posted:Wasn't that the period when doctors believed red meat was the healthiest thing ever, and vegetables were bad for your health? I suspect some of this may be related to the rise of the Atkins/Paleo fad, and the increase in "extra protein" marketing for food. i asked medical people in the milhist thread and the eventual consensus was that these dudes ticked every single box you could for danger of gout. male chronic lead exposure red meat, organ meat preserved meat dehydration heavy drinking sugar metabolic syndrome (probably) chronic wear on joints--walking and riding with heavy things on your body history of injury there's also something called pseudogout, and a history of injury increases your likelihood of getting it. you can't tell the difference between that and gout without modern tech edit: according to CommonShore unfiltered alcohol is worse for gout than the normal stuff so if you're into the Paleo diet and microbrews you're hosed HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jun 25, 2019 |
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Jun 25, 2019 22:07
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aphid_licker posted:medieval europeans were apparently getting bladder stones constantly and had a really gnarly technique for pulling them out via the taint.
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Jun 25, 2019 22:14
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HEY GUNS posted:this is why when women get pelvic exams or deliver a child, lying down with your legs bent in stirrups is still called the "lithotomy position" Think if given the choice I'd go with childbirth over the brutal taint destruction
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Jun 25, 2019 22:21
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aphid_licker posted:brutal taint destruction My favourite grindcore band
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