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Every now and then someone asks about books that are good for information on early Japan, so I thought this is worth bringing up: Sources of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600 is just like...there...on Academia.edu. The entire thing. I haven't read this one, but the volumes for Korean history are some of the most helpful English language books out there and I imagine this is similar--it's a collection of relevant primary source snippets covering basically every possible subject. If you're someone with institutional access to research databases then this won't be that special, but this is a pretty amazing book to just be completely available to the public like this.
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Feb 22, 2020 16:14
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Koramei posted:Every now and then someone asks about books that are good for information on early Japan, so I thought this is worth bringing up: this book looks cool, thanks for sharing. i probably won't read the whole thing but i'll definitely flip through a few chapters absentmindedly one afternoon.
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Feb 22, 2020 23:35
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WoodrowSkillson posted:What's Morgan got to say about it?
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Feb 23, 2020 00:44
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How do Greek and Roman ideas on male homosexual activity compare/contrast? And I know there were many Greek city-states that were very different and I'm guessing Rome had a lot of different ideas depending on time and location too but is there any general rule? I was told many years ago Greeks had a more pleasant view of male sexuality, especially Athenians given their misogyny. It was the Romans who had the disdainful view for you being the penetrated partner. But I have no idea how true any of this is. (Well, apart from Athenians being massively sexist. I know that was totally true)
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Feb 23, 2020 00:57
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NikkolasKing posted:How do Greek and Roman ideas on male homosexual activity compare/contrast? And I know there were many Greek city-states that were very different and I'm guessing Rome had a lot of different ideas depending on time and location too but is there any general rule? Greeks weren't big on being penetrated either; proper Greek pederasty involved the erastκs placing his dick between the thighs of the erτmenos and thrusting. According to Homosexuality in the Ancient World, by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, "The Greeks knew other types of homosexuality" than the normative form of pederasty, "but considered them rare or silly; the adult pathic (passive partner) was an object of ridicule." On the other hand, "Pedophilia in the sense of attraction to boys younger than twelve has left no trace in the literature" regarding ancient Greece, which provides a contrast with some really horrific anecedotes from Rome (e.g., Suetonius on Tiberius). The Romans had a law called the Lex Scantinia that prohibited certain forms of homosexual behavior, although exactly what those were unclear; possibly it only banned nonconsensual assaults on freeborn males. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 01:18
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Silver2195 posted:Greeks weren't big on being penetrated either; proper Greek pederasty involved the erastκs placing his dick between the thighs of the erτmenos and thrusting. What happened to Tiberius? And thanks for the info and the source.
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Feb 23, 2020 01:37
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Traditional Roman culture perceived itself as being more opposed to male homosexuality than the Greeks which is not to say that this was necessarily accurate about every Roman or every Greek. It was very much a Roman topos to contrast traditional Roman morality with oriental sexual deviance; hence e.g. the long-running rumor that Caesar had taken it up the rear end from the king of Bithynia during his military tribunate is supposed to convince you (the hyper-wealthy politically engaged Roman citizen) that Caesar is not a real man. This kind of slur worked to some extent because Roman mores did broadly consider being passive during homosexual sex as unsuitable for free men. However, this does not mean that Roman men did not have sex with teenage boys they did, quite a lot, sometimes to the dismay of contemporary moralists, other times not so much. Roman art and literature treats of sexual desire for boys regularly under the republic and high empire. After the 3rd century crisis and particularly in the 4th century (by which point all major political leaders are Christians and are obliged to look like they oppose sexual immorality), governments got harsher and harsher on homosexual conduct by men. Roman men also had sex with adult men sometimes: this was considered weirder but was still done. Some of the same Roman figures who praise pederasty are those who express contempt for men who were penetrated by other men. It was not unheard of for men to marry men or boys (Emperor Nero allegedly did this) and probably a lot more common to keep them as concubines (a number of emperors did this: Hadrians concubine Antinous was a particularly notable figure, deified upon death and made into a sculptural sex symbol but note that Antinous was Greek and Hadrian made a point of appearing to be thoroughly Hellenic).
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Feb 23, 2020 01:40
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Silver2195 posted:Greeks weren't big on being penetrated either; proper Greek pederasty involved the erastκs placing his dick between the thighs of the erτmenos and thrusting. suetonius's story about tiberius is possibly his least believable story of all. and when you're talking about suetonius that really says something
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Feb 23, 2020 01:47
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NikkolasKing posted:What happened to Tiberius? According to Suetonius, he kept a bunch of extremely young fuckboys in his palace at Capri quote:Then in Capri's woods and groves he arranged a number of nooks of venery where boys and girls got up as Pans and nymphs solicited outside bowers and grottoes: people openly called this "the old goat's garden," punning on the island's name. Allegedly (also by Suetonius), the future short-lived emperor Vitellius was one of the kids, his father having whored him out to curry favor. This should illustrate the kind of political invective that youre reading here: better not take it too very seriously.
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Feb 23, 2020 01:51
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Jazerus posted:suetonius's story about tiberius is possibly his least believable story of all. and when you're talking about suetonius that really says something It did give us Cyrano's best avatar though.
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Feb 23, 2020 01:54
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How often are extremely taboo sexual practices attested on better-recorded rulers? I sort of got the impression that kings tend to be at least as good at hiding their freaky poo poo as the average person, because there really aren't very many reliable accounts of it. I was thinking the other day about how the fact that there was sexual gossip about all the Roman emperors means that we basically have to dismiss all of them: if any of them are actually true, then we'll just never know because it's indistinguishable from gossipmongering. I wonder how many extremely unlikely events got written down, but are dismissed by modern historians because it's more likely that the writer was making it up (or reporting something someone else made up) than that the unlikely thing actually happened.
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Feb 23, 2020 02:39
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Dio talks about Trajans fondness for boys like it was general knowledge and broadly accepted because he didnt do it to excess or hurt anybody by it. (Wonder what the boys thought about that.) He brings it up as a trifling vice at the end of a glowing assessment of Trajans character. The tone of Roman writers on homosexual behavior isnt always polemical or smearing. Well obviously never know for sure if any antique historian is being truthful about any aspect of anyones character, but I dont think we need to assume theyre making everything up either. Notice how careful Suetonius is to equivocate about the really dirty rumors, he acquired a reputation for such and so, the story is told that, he does this kind of thing constantly through the Vita Caesarum whenever hes just talking poo poo. By contrast he reports the infamous story about Tiberius loving up the fisherman with his own fish completely without qualifying it. Who knows what he really knew about any of it? But we can at least try to think about where he was coming from.
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Feb 23, 2020 03:21
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Would anyone have recommendations on books of Roman history/culture for the non-academic? To be more specific, I'm a writer looking at doing a fantasy series in not-Rome and while 100% accuracy isn't the goal, I'd like to nail the flavor down enough that someone reading it would say "oh, hey, this guy actually read a book." Which, I know, low bar and all, but I'd like to do what I can. Thanks.
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Feb 23, 2020 03:26
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Pieuvre posted:Would anyone have recommendations on books of Roman history/culture for the non-academic? To be more specific, I'm a writer looking at doing a fantasy series in not-Rome and while 100% accuracy isn't the goal, I'd like to nail the flavor down enough that someone reading it would say "oh, hey, this guy actually read a book." There's Mary Beard's SPQR, although that tends to focus on the limits of our knowledge to an extent that arguably limits its value as an inspiration for fantasy novels. Actually, you might as well go straight to the ancient texts, e.g., here: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/home.html. Some of them are full of bullshit, but that just makes them better as inspiration.
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Feb 23, 2020 03:58
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skasion posted:. It was not unheard of for men to marry men or boys (Emperor Nero allegedly did this) Well...so there are two stories about Nero. The first is by Tacitus and says that in the midst of a series of banquets, Nero dressed up as a bride and exchanged marriage vows with one of his freedmen named Pythagoras. They then had sex on the couch in front of everyone. The second is by Suetonius and says that after his wife died, Nero found a teenage slave who resembled her named Sporus. He then castrated him, dressed him in his wife's clothing, married him, demanded everyone call Sporus empress , and treated him like his dead wife. Please note, Suetonius includes this in a list of weird Nero sex stuff, between "incest with mom" and "rapes a vestal virgin to death" If those stories are true, and with the second, it's a big if, that's less "Roman men married other men sometimes", and more drunken party shenanigans in the first case and weird psychosexual horror in the second.
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Feb 23, 2020 04:17
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If dressing up as a woman, marrying a man, and having sex on the couch in front of everyone is just everyday drunken party shenanigans to you then you go to much more interesting parties than me 
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Feb 23, 2020 04:29
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Wafflecopper posted:If “dressing up as a woman, marrying a man, and having sex on the couch in front of everyone” is just everyday drunken party shenanigans to you then you go to much more interesting parties than me Well, you know, when in Rome
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Feb 23, 2020 04:35
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I've heard that a lot of the stuff that was written about Nero might've been exaggerated to make him sound extra-bad, like that other guy who plucked out baby teeth to be better at dick sucking. The reported sexual antics of the most hated emperors seems like a bad point of reference when drawing a picture of what was accepted.
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Feb 23, 2020 04:55
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The revisionist Nero view is fairly popular these days. He was definitely not a good emperor. The ones who gained power as teenagers almost always were not good, shockingly enough. But he wasn't terrible either. His reputation was tarnished by actions that pissed off the elite class and persecuting Christians. Even a few historians of the era mentioned that elites loved to slander Nero for no real reason, and he was popular enough among the people that multiple pretenders to the throne claiming to be Nero showed up, which was not a common thing.
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Feb 23, 2020 05:03
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I mean a lot of the wackiest things various emperors allegedly did was written by their political enemies. It's like if 2000 years from now the only surviving sources about Obama were Infowars and Fox News so cyberspace would be full of zany holo-listicles about how crazy 21st century president Obummer was a Islamic Communist who ate dogs for dinner every night and his vizier Hillary Clinton had a pizza themed sex dungeon and a penchant for assassinating her enemies.
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Feb 23, 2020 05:04
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Thinking about what historians would think about Trump was put me on the thought of how extremely unlikely events might have trouble being accepted even when they happen. From the perspective of a historian a thousand years from now, which is more likely: that he really is like this, or that it was all exaggeration by his political opponents? And I wonder how many historical events get dismissed along the same line of reasoning, even though they got recorded.
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Feb 23, 2020 06:14
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cheetah7071 posted:Thinking about what historians would think about Trump was put me on the thought of how extremely unlikely events might have trouble being accepted even when they happen. From the perspective of a historian a thousand years from now, which is more likely: that he really is like this, or that it was all exaggeration by his political opponents? And I wonder how many historical events get dismissed along the same line of reasoning, even though they got recorded.
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Feb 23, 2020 07:31
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Epicurius posted:Well...so there are two stories about Nero. The first is by Tacitus and says that in the midst of a series of banquets, Nero dressed up as a bride and exchanged marriage vows with one of his freedmen named Pythagoras. They then had sex on the couch in front of everyone. The Theodosian code also suggests that Christian emperors could refer to men marrying other men and expect people to understand what they meant (and that it was capitally bad). I dont suggest that Romans were actually getting gay-married all over the place, but that it was not unheard of. Ive read a couple of papers which suggest that what is meant by this code is not actual marriage (which seems fairly obvious since roman law does not ever seem to have recognized homosexual unions) but it does seem to me that these guys had heard that men were marrying other men in some way and that that was a behavior they wished to squelch, together with the whole business of effeminate men letting men have sex with them. The Latin phrase under dispute is from the start of Codex Theodosianus 9.7.3 quum vir nubit in feminam viris porrecturam... Lot of argumentation about this one in recent years.
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Feb 23, 2020 13:07
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porrecturam? I hardly knew him!
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Feb 23, 2020 14:05
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Nessus posted:I thought, well, there's going to be a huge abundance of stored data, indeed a violent surfeit of it, but there is the question of how much of this is going to be archived in a reliable and accessible way. The gripping hand to this is that I think people may underestimate how easy it will be to store things like codecs and old operating systems. Yep. There's a very good chance most of the information available now will be inaccessible since it's digital. That's why archives like the Library of Congress spend time printing out millions of pages from the internet to store.
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Feb 23, 2020 16:16
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If Rome ran on olive oil, what did their chinese contemporaries run on?
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Feb 23, 2020 16:31
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Power Khan posted:If Rome ran on olive oil, what did their chinese contemporaries run on? As a lubricant? Carrageenan I think.
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Feb 23, 2020 16:42
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cheetah7071 posted:Thinking about what historians would think about Trump was put me on the thought of how extremely unlikely events might have trouble being accepted even when they happen. From the perspective of a historian a thousand years from now, which is more likely: that he really is like this, or that it was all exaggeration by his political opponents? And I wonder how many historical events get dismissed along the same line of reasoning, even though they got recorded. Trump being attacked by a bald eagle named Uncle Sam was clearly a metaphor, and you'd have to be a complete idiot to take it literally!
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Feb 23, 2020 16:55
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Another nublet question (thanks for the previous responces, that interactive map is a work of art:) what the hell did the Roman senate actually do I ask because the Emperor seems to have all the political power, and when he don't it the other factions are the army and/or the Praetorian guard. That, and the fact that the tetrarchy actually seems to work really well* makes me wonder what the senate actually did. If a major slice of Rome's problems were caused by the fact that the emperor was just one man, then I don't get why all the bitchy aristocrats are so butthurt every time somebody points out "but you are not doing anything about it." Of course, as far as the ladder of political appointments goes, I basically have no idea. It starts with "supervise building and maintaining roads" and ends with "Consul" and aside from the "Consul" position being highly describable, I still don't know what its function was exactly Two further questions: 1. I get why the start and the end of the Roman empire are well documented, is there any reason why the sources get so bad in the middle? 2. One thing that sticks out to me is that while in some ways the Romans were quite modern, when it came to economics, even the smartest period thinkers seem to struggle to articulate the issues, let alone find permanent solutions to them. Did the Romans ever have a chance to move their economy onto more stable foundations, or was this like their medicine at the time: missing so many basic concepts it was hopeless? *on that note, it does seem odd that the Romans never figured out making laws for orderly successions
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Feb 23, 2020 19:09
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The Senate did a lot more before there were Emperors.
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Feb 23, 2020 19:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:Another nublet question (thanks for the previous responces, that interactive map is a work of art:) they were the primary ruling body during the republic, and retained some power into the empire which slowly dwindled over time. technically, the emperor is simply a dude who has had basically every significant office that the senate can legally bestow, bestowed upon him. i don't really understand your statement about the aristocrats. first of all, the tetrarchy was a dumb rear end idea that broke down as soon as there was no clear most-senior emperor. second, by the time you're talking about institutions like the tetrarchy, the senate has long since become a decorative vestige that mostly serves as a country club instead of anything meaningful. third, i don't know who the aristocrats are that you're talking about. quote:Of course, as far as the ladder of political appointments goes, I basically have no idea. It starts with "supervise building and maintaining roads" and ends with "Consul" and aside from the "Consul" position being highly describable, I still don't know what its function was exactly i mean, that's because you're treating hundreds of years of history describing two very different governments as a singular thing. the consul is the leader of the republic, but there are two of them so nobody has a unitary executive authority. the roman upper classes would progress through a series of titles with increasing responsibility and then, ideally, become one of the two consuls for the year. perhaps more than once. that was the peak of a political career. during the early empire, the emperor permanently occupied one of the two consul slots, with the other being a prestigious award he could dole out (unofficially; they are still being elected, just through a system so corrupt that the emperor has effective control over every vote) to people as a reward, or to butter them up. quote:Two further questions: the end is pretty poorly documented compared to our understanding of the republic and early empire. in short, it's a combination of chance and the relative popularity of various texts - many of the sources we have were probably very, very common at the time. there was simply more time and more incentive for copies of cicero to be made than for some random guy writing in 380 AD. additionally, the empire was much more prosperous in the early years with more trade and luxury items, including books, spreading around. ultimately, almost everything written from the ancient world is lost. no, the romans did not understand macroeconomics at all. nobody did for over a thousand years after them, either. it's not really something you can reason about without either a very large number of historical examples of "king so-and-so did this, and then this happened", or statistics. both played a part in the establishment of economics as a discipline, and to this day it's one of the shakiest fields of academic study. roman medicine, on the other hand, actually kicked a lot of rear end. trust me, you'd rather be treated by a roman doctor than anyone else if you have to pick a pre-1900 doctor. as far as succession goes, they did eventually get it more or less sorted out, but only after history starts calling them the byzantines. the problem with roman succession is that no law really would have sorted it out - i mean, if you're standing on the verge of leading an army to seize the office of emperor, making that more illegal isn't really a deterrent. structuring the whole system so that handing an army to a general during a crisis isn't basically an invitation to give rebellion a go is more complicated than just making laws.
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Feb 23, 2020 19:41
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The powers and purpose of the senate varied wildly across the centuries. Under the early republic, records are sketchy, but it was probably an ad hoc nebulous body that the consuls assembled to advise them. Later on in the republic, it became a set body that was the same from consul to consul. Theoretically, the senate had no innate powers, but over time laws would get passed assigning certain duties that might have gone to magistrates, to the senate instead--for instance, it was the senate that appointed all provincial governors. It also became very customary to only present legislation to the assemblies for ratification if it passed the senate first (though technically, consulting the senate was a formality that could be and occasionally was ignored in favor of putting the legislation directly in front of the people). Augustus' big innovation for avoiding civil wars was to leave the senate theoretically as powerful as ever. They knew the score, and wouldn't exercise their power against the emperor, but within the bounds of the emperor's approval they were free to perform their old duties. In fact, the legal basis for the emperor's power was that the senate delegated a bunch of their power to him (hence the title for early emperors being princeps senatus, roughly speaking the first man of the senate). The tradition of having the senate vote on whether or not to give each new successor the powers of the emperor never stopped, though it was pretty clearly a fiction from the beginning, and I'm not aware of any instances of the senate exercising its theoretical power to decide between multiple candidates, or to refuse to ratify someone with de facto power. Under the empire, the real purpose of the senate, as far as I can tell, was as a way for the emperor to address all the richest, most powerful men of the empire all at once.
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Feb 23, 2020 19:45
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Nebakenezzer posted:Another nublet question (thanks for the previous responces, that interactive map is a work of art:) One of the main things the Senate still did under the early Empire was provide a pool of educated and ostensibly *competent* leaders who still would be used as generals, governors, office holders etc. to actually run the Empire. Through to the crisis of the third century almost all the Emperors came from this pool of senatorial families, although their makeup was different then it was during the Late Republic. In regards to succession, when Tiberius is offering to give control of the Empire back to the Senate, how are they supposed to know this offer is legitimate and not a trap. You can kind of see how they would be wary of sticking their neck out to attain more power at the expense of the autocrat who controls the army. Also as time went on wealth became less concentrated in Rome, and the Senatorial class was more distributed, so they just weren't in Rome. They were out in the provinces, they couldn't compete with the wealth and prestige of the Emperor in Rome, but they could build amphitheaters in London etc. and dominate local politics. Like in the Crisis of the third century, the wealthy class in Gaul essentially propped up the Gallic Empire under Postumus to deal with the Rhine Border and set up their own senate and consulate to help administer this breakaway realm. In regards to succession being an issue, it generally wasn't for long periods of time, like ostensibly between Augustus & Septimius Severus you had 2, 1 year long civil wars the Year of Four & Five Emperors. That gets you like 2 years of actual armies clashing for the throne in ~220~ years of history. Compare this to the last century of the Republic where you had like a dozen lasting decades between Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Gaius Marius, Augustus, Lepidus, Spain, Marc Antony, Liberators etc. Sure there was chaos at times, but it usually resulted in the Emperor and his family and some of his closest supporters getting killed. If you stayed out of the way it was probably easier to avoid losing your life and your families wealth. Then again once you get to the Eastern Roman Empire, everything is stable for almost ~200~ years between the Theodosians and Maurice. Then there are periods of complete anarchy related to the plague sporadically killing hundreds of thousands every 20-30 years and the fact the Empire just got ripped apart by the Arabs and the ensuing religious controversies. Then everything becomes fairly stable again by the Amorians/Macedonians for another couple centuries till Romanos Diogenes gets captured by the Turks at Manzikert and you get more anarchy, then a big stable period under the Komnenoi then a clusterfuck of civil war till the end of the Empire in 1453. Its those sources happened to survive, it probably just comes down to luck. I mean they had some good idea's, but there was fundamental flaws. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 19:46
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The issue was not senators and aristocrats sitting on their butts doing nothing, it's that if they went and did big important things without the Emperor's okay, then that would be treason and they'd get executed for it. It's the emperor's choice whether or not to share or delegate power, and between wanting to exert their own personal will and preventing the risk involved in letting their armies be commanded by somebody else, they usually preferred keeping everything centered upon the one emperor. Diocletian's idea to spread imperial authority throughout a small group was a cross between brilliance and lunacy. Maybe if he somehow created a stronger internal hierarchy between emperors with more than 4 people it might've kept the empire more intact without becoming a thunderdome of regional emperors. If you look at the more orderly successions in the medieval era, I think a lot of that came from all the independent power held by all the landed lords and the church that all agreed on a process of succession, or even engaged in complex negotiations over who would be the proper heir before resorting to war (which they sometimes resorted to anyways). Most Medieval European kings were much less "strongmen' than most Roman Emperors or even the absolutist monarchs that came later. As for "permanently solving problems" it's worth keeping in perspective that you're looking at a bunch of centuries lumped together, and there's not really many foundations that can stay stable for over a hundred years. They had the disadvantage of not having modern science and statistics to help them plan things out, but even those don't always save the day in the present.
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Feb 23, 2020 20:11
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There's probably an alternate reality out there where Diocletian's gambit was a Roman Federation, where each province has its own emperors who elect he overall emperor, and the holy roman empire truly can say it's roman
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Feb 23, 2020 20:28
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cheetah7071 posted:though it was pretty clearly a fiction from the beginning, and I'm not aware of any instances of the senate exercising its theoretical power to decide between multiple candidates, or to refuse to ratify someone with de facto power. maximinus thrax Historia Augusta posted:However that may be, after Alexander was killed, Maximinus was the first man from the body of the soldiers and not yet a senator to be acclaimed Augustus by the army without a decree of the senate, and his son was made his colleague. And about the latter we shall tell later on the few things that we know. Now Maximinus was always clever enough not to rule the soldiers by force alone; on the contrary, he made them devoted to him by rewards and riches. He never took away any man's rations; he never let any man in his army work as a smith or artisan, which most of them are, but kept the legions busy only with frequent hunting. Along with these virtues, however, went such cruelty that some called him Cyclops, some Busiris, and others Sciron, not a few Phalaris, and many Typhon or Gyges. The senate was so afraid of him that prayers were made in the temples both publicly and privately, and even by women together with their children, that he should never see the city of Rome. For they kept hearing that he hung men on the cross, shut them in the bodies of animals newly slain, cast them to wild beasts, dashed out their brains with clubs, and all this for no desire for personal authority but because he seemed to wish military discipline to be supreme, and wished to amend civil affairs on that pattern. All of which does not become a prince who wishes to be loved. As a matter of fact, he was convinced that the throne could not be held except by cruelty. He likewise feared that the nobility, because of his low barbarian birth, would scorn him. apologies for the excessively long quote but it's one of my favorite passages from a primary roman source. every paragraph has something either dramatic or culturally interesting. this is a good example of how the senate still had power during the pre-crisis empire. even discounting a lot of this as propaganda, they were fully capable of seizing parts of the imperial apparatus and purging supporters of the emperor, if they were so inclined as an entire body. the trick was that maximinus was basically the only guy to ever get every single member of the senatorial class pissed off at him all at once; they were incapable of flexing their power unless they were united against the emperor, but it did still exist, because these are the people who are overseeing the state. it is only after maximinus thrax and the whole mess of the crisis that the senate's powers are permanently trimmed to prevent another situation like this one. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 20:46
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Jazerus posted:maximinus thrax Do remember that the Historia Augusta is very unreliable, though. It also says of Max Thrax that he was over 8 feet tall.
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Feb 23, 2020 20:55
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Silver2195 posted:Do remember that the Historia Augusta is very unreliable, though. It also says of Max Thrax that he was over 8 feet tall. yes, of course. i posted it in full for its outlandishness as much as anything. but, the core of the story is what was under discussion: did the senate ever play favorites among folks jockeying to be emperor? and the answer is, yes, so much so that they basically tried to seize the office for more pro-senate candidates several times. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 23, 2020 |
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Feb 23, 2020 21:05
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I read a book once that in its sources section described Historia Augustae as the most boring ancient source they had ever read when you guys are making it sound like it kinda owns even if it's an unreliable history
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Feb 23, 2020 21:24
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The Historia Augusta isnt always boring, but some of it is. The stuff right before that (life of Severus Alexander) is this incredibly tedious and probably half bullshit exploration of the concept of the philosopher-king. Then you have a bit later on about a made-up emperor who ate ostriches.
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Feb 23, 2020 22:15
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