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Zopotantor posted:Only the finest skull vessel for me! By Krum!
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Jun 30, 2020 19:20
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Badger of Basra posted:What was the experience like of transitioning from Roman polytheism to Christianity, for people who personally made that choice? Was it usually a sharp break, or was there a transition/syncretism, like praying to Jupiter and Jesus at the same time (or something like that)? I think Christian doctrine says there shouldn't have been anything like that, but for the average citizen I'm not sure how much they would have cared about that. The most clear-cut examples of syncretism I'm aware of in this context actually involved emperors and the like rather than ordinary people (e.g., Constantine's continued association with Sol Invictus for a while after he started to move towards Christianity). But I think there were also controversies in early Christianity about whether practices involving the veneration of saints and the like were allowing too much pagan syncretism to creep in. I suspect that people weren't particularly invested in continuing to pray to Jupiter, specifically, though. I think what ordinary people (not counting those involved with "mystery religions") really had trouble giving up were things like praying to the lares and penates. But I'm speculating a bit here; it would be good to be referred to a source that directly discusses the transition to Christianity in late antiquity on the individual level. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 20:00
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A lot of people think the Catholic veneration of saints is very much lifted from pagan religion. There's debate about this of course, I've read a lot of people think that exclusive, what we would consider real Christianity where you are honestly just into Jesus and none of the pagan stuff didn't really happen over a large part of Europe until well into the middle ages. Like post 1000. This isn't something I consider myself all that knowledgeable about, though. I know the ERE had pagans until fairly late into their history, they were referred to as Hellenes as opposed to the Christian Rhomaoi.
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Jun 30, 2020 20:24
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Badger of Basra posted:What was the experience like of transitioning from Roman polytheism to Christianity, for people who personally made that choice? Was it usually a sharp break, or was there a transition/syncretism, like praying to Jupiter and Jesus at the same time (or something like that)? I think Christian doctrine says there shouldn't have been anything like that, but for the average citizen I'm not sure how much they would have cared about that. This has a huge impact on the theology of the apologists I can post that later.
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Jun 30, 2020 20:36
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Badger of Basra posted:What was the experience like of transitioning from Roman polytheism to Christianity, for people who personally made that choice? Was it usually a sharp break, or was there a transition/syncretism, like praying to Jupiter and Jesus at the same time (or something like that)? I think Christian doctrine says there shouldn't have been anything like that, but for the average citizen I'm not sure how much they would have cared about that. As I remember it, Peter Brown writes a little bit on this in the book Through the Eye of a Needle. According to him there was an element of escapism to joining Christianity, as it offered a hopeful message but also somewhere where social distinctions weren't so rigid. It could be a liberating experience and it attracted even the rich, who would pay for lavish places of worship and add prestige and legitimacy to Christianity. Throughout the Roman empire the Christian Church would also offer charity at a large scale, to the extent that it was close to a form of welfare. That may even have been a factor in making it useful to adopt for the Roman state.
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Jun 30, 2020 20:50
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Lots of sol invictus/ Apollo wrapped up in Jesus
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Jun 30, 2020 20:51
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“But such a statement – that a historical man, who lived and died, and perhaps was really in the"police files"of Jerusalem, is called "God": how can this be made understandable to the pagans? The difficulty was not the incarnation as such. "Incarnation" is one of the most ordinary events in Greek mythology and in all mythology. Gods come to earth; they take on animal or human or plant form; they do something and then return to their divinity. This is not difficult. But this idea couldn't be accepted by Christianity. The problem and the difficulty was that the Son of God, who was at the same time a historical man and not a man of mythological imagination, is supposed to be the absolute and unique Son of God. The incarnation is once for all, but it isn't a special characteristic or element in the Divinity which incarnates, but rather the very center of the Divinity. In order to make this problem clear, the Logos concept was used. The problem was to combine monotheism, which was emphasized so strongly against pagan polytheism, with the divinity of Christ – the humanity and the universality of His nature at the same time. This was the need for that time. The Apologists fulfilled that need and therefore they were successful. Now the incarnation itself, in the Apologists, is not the union of the Divine Spirit with the man Jesus, but the Logos really becomes man. This transformation Christology becomes more and more important through the Logos doctrine. Existing before the Logos, He now, through the will of God, has become man. He has been made flesh, as Justin says. This is the first clear decision for the transformation Christology over against the adoptionist Christology. If the Logos or the Spirit adopted the man Jesus, then we have a quite different Christology from the idea that the Logos is made, is transformed into, flesh.“ So basically they had to do a couple of things: Explain to polytheistic people Jesus in terms of the Jewish Greek Logos. Be monotheistic. Talk about an incarnate God without being polytheistic. In other words not being polytheistic while speaking to a polytheistic audience basically leads to Trinitarianism.
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Jun 30, 2020 23:51
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what did ancient women do for bras
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Jul 1, 2020 06:30
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Miss Broccoli posted:what did ancient women do for bras Binding was quite common for anyone expecting to perform athletic activities. Literally just a strip of cloth wrapped around and around until they stop moving.
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Jul 1, 2020 06:40
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Women were allowed to do athletic activities?
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Jul 1, 2020 07:26
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Romans loved bikini girls.
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Jul 1, 2020 07:37
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Badger of Basra posted:Women were allowed to do athletic activities? For the vast majority of history I'm pretty sure women were required to perform strenuous physical activity on a pretty much daily basis. Sitting around doing embroidery was only for the very rich, as a form of conspicuous consumption.
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Jul 1, 2020 08:05
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Yeah even in most artisan trades both members of a married couple were expected to participate. Hence when guilds came to prominence in Medieval Europe, whether and how widows were allowed to continue selling under their husband's old membership was an important topic.
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Jul 1, 2020 08:35
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Tunicate posted:Romans loved bikini girls. What's going on here? Like, modern bikinis are worn at certain times for certain reasons, and carry certain connotations; I have all those questions!
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Jul 1, 2020 11:59
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Jack B Nimble posted:What's going on here? Like, modern bikinis are worn at certain times for certain reasons, and carry certain connotations; I have all those questions! I mean given the ball and the lady in the top left with jogging weights I think this is a day of excercise on the beach.
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Jul 1, 2020 12:50
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There may be competitions involved as well, given that one of them appears to be placing victor's laurels on her head.
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Jul 1, 2020 13:15
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Tunicate posted:Romans loved bikini girls. Etrurian girls are hip I really dig those styles they wear And Campania girls with the way they talk They knock me out when I'm down there I wish they all could be Roman cives...
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Jul 1, 2020 16:59
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Tunicate posted:Romans loved bikini girls. They really were the greatest civilization 
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Jul 1, 2020 17:21
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Have you never seen or heard of sports bras.
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Jul 1, 2020 17:23
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Badger of Basra posted:Women were allowed to do athletic activities? women's role in society and associated freedoms varied widely depending on exactly what society and time period you're looking at. the past is not just an unending 1950s with working men and downtrodden housewives though i suppose i can understand how you'd come to that conclusion from the usual pop history discourse
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Jul 1, 2020 17:37
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You may have heard that women were barred even from spectating at the Olympic games, but you may not have heard that women had their own games: The Herean games was a tradition started in the 6th century BC. Young women competed wearing the Greek one-shoulder-style tunic that I forget the name of. The games were held in the weeks prior to the Olympics every four years. Married women were not allowed to compete although that doesn't mean they weren't allowed to participate.
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Jul 1, 2020 20:00
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Jazerus posted:women's role in society and associated freedoms varied widely depending on exactly what society and time period you're looking at. the past is not just an unending 1950s with working men and downtrodden housewives though i suppose i can understand how you'd come to that conclusion from the usual pop history discourse Also, depending on class (and relatedly race). A working class black woman in the US in the 50s wasnt sitting at home being a housewife.
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Jul 1, 2020 23:13
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euphronius posted:Have you never seen or heard of sports bras. Sports bras are v different to binding with fabric and I very much doubt the ancients had our stretchy fabrics. I have a draw full of them Those poor ancient women's ribs
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Jul 2, 2020 00:01
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What women could and couldn't do is a massive topic, plenty of people devote their entire academic lives to it. Suffice to say, it's complex. It's also true that the restricted lives you imagine are more of an elite thing--peasants/working class people could not afford the luxury of having half their population just loving off instead of working. There's a lot of evidence from all kinds of premodern societies that peasant women were relatively equal to men. There was still ideology, religious restriction, gender roles and all that, but as a practical matter when you're a subsistence farmer, everybody's working. What I don't know is if Roman peasant women had specific roles, like how women controlled ale brewing in medieval England. It wouldn't surprise me, I don't know that we have any documentation about it though. There's also the fact that legalities and realities were different. Like how women were legally property of their fathers/husbands and a father was allowed to kill his daughter at any time for any reason. There is literally no evidence of that ever happening. The law tells that the Romans were being ideologically misogynistic as hell, but in practice less so. It is, indeed, Complicated.
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Jul 2, 2020 01:16
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Grand Fromage posted:There's also the fact that legalities and realities were different. Like how women were legally property of their fathers/husbands and a father was allowed to kill his daughter at any time for any reason. There is literally no evidence of that ever happening. The law tells that the Romans were being ideologically misogynistic as hell, but in practice less so. It is, indeed, Complicated. The same theoretical patria potestas applied to sons too, actually. Although Hadrian made it formally illegal to kill your son; I'm not sure if that applied to daughters as well. Probably a moot point; as you say, it was very rarely if ever applied in practice, and in fact there were formal limits on paternal authority under Roman law as far back as we have reliable records; Mary Beard, for example, had argued that the full-fledged form of patria potestas never actually existed.
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Jul 2, 2020 04:03
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i wonder if infant abandonment was considered to be a rightful exercise of patria potestas people tend to envision scenarios like "ah, my daughter, you are just too wayward and rebellious, time to die" but perhaps that was never the intent of the law at all Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 04:16
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There was a tribe around lake Tanganyika that was prohibited from ritual infanticide by priests and colonizing assholes and they just surreptitiously killed their babies by putting a small needle through the brain.
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Jul 2, 2020 04:24
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Why didn't Latin stick around and mutate into a local language in Britain after the Romans left like it did in Spain, France, and Romania? Or alternatively, how much Latin influence is there in Welsh?
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Jul 3, 2020 16:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:Why didn't Latin stick around and mutate into a local language in Britain after the Romans left like it did in Spain, France, and Romania? I think it's because like a million Saxons showed up and umlauted all over everything?
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Jul 3, 2020 16:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:Why didn't Latin stick around and mutate into a local language in Britain after the Romans left like it did in Spain, France, and Romania? anglo saxon invasion + it was a backwater shithole province to begin with anyway.
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Jul 3, 2020 17:29
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Pretty sure Latin never replaced proto-Welsh/Cornish/etc. to begin with, so it couldn't "stick around"?
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Jul 3, 2020 18:15
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Iirc latín was more of a prestige/upper class thing in britain, so when the Román state and a bunch of those folks shove off and are replaced by germanic Warriors, well
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Jul 3, 2020 18:48
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All these are good explanations of why English replaced Latin in Britain, but not so good at explaining why Latin endured in Romania, which was settled later, abandoned earlier, and certainly more overrun by non-Latin barbarians.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:01
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skasion posted:All these are good explanations of why English replaced Latin in Britain, but not so good at explaining why Latin endured in Romania, which was settled later, abandoned earlier, and certainly more overrun by non-Latin barbarians. ? Romania is much closer to Constantinople - capital of the Eastern Roman empire which held together for 1000 yearsish after the fall of the Western Roman empire - than Britain is to either Rome or Constantinople?
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Jul 3, 2020 19:13
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Perhaps it's more right to say that previous languages got more thoroughly eradicated the nearer you were Rome and whoever was left kept speaking whatever they knew how to speak. Which was still a bewildering array of mutually incomprehensible languages way into the modern era.
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Jul 3, 2020 19:44
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ulmont posted:? Romania is much closer to Constantinople - capital of the Eastern Roman empire which held together for 1000 yearsish after the fall of the Western Roman empire - than Britain is to either Rome or Constantinople? Though the Eastern Roman empire mostly spoke Greek, not Latin, of course...
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Jul 3, 2020 19:52
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France and Spain also got totally overrun by Germans, Scandinavians, and Arabs, and still somehow kept a Latin language after the dust settled. Formerly-Roman Britain also wasn't completely overrun in the way that France and Spain were, because the Welsh Kingdoms held out. If the idea is that the people of Britain weren't "really" Roman after centuries under Roman rule, then why didn't Rome's influence spread there like it spread throughout the rest of the Empire? In what other places was Roman-ness only skin deep? ulmont posted:? Romania is much closer to Constantinople - capital of the Eastern Roman empire which held together for 1000 yearsish after the fall of the Western Roman empire - than Britain is to either Rome or Constantinople? Ah yes, the famously Latin-speaking city where they speak a language based off of Latin to this day. Surely the influence from that city would override any other linguistic influences.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:France and Spain also got totally overrun by Germans, Scandinavians, and Arabs, and still somehow kept a Latin language after the dust settled. Formerly-Roman Britain also wasn't completely overrun in the way that France and Spain were, because the Welsh Kingdoms held out. Look at it like this - how much latin are people speaking the levant? Rome held that area much longer than tin island. Latin did not spread everywhere even when rulers spoke it for centuries. France, Spain, and Italy had common folk speaking latin. In further off locations, latin never took root as the common language so once the romans were gone people just kept talking like they did before.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:19
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Britain losing Roman authority so early is what's different, I think. In places like France and Spain, the new bosses inserted themselves into the extant Roman system and assimilated to Roman-ness. The continental settlers that went to England were arriving in a place where Roman systems and authority were already gone. Portraying yourself as a Roman in France gave you authority and smoothed over the transition, doing so in Britain had no advantage.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:21
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how languages spread is a relatively poorly understood subfield of linguistics iirc. Or at least it was when I was an undergrad, where all my circumstantial knowledge comes from.
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Jul 3, 2020 20:22
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