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Epicurius posted:Every year, Sparta would declare war against the helots. It wasn't an actual war that was fought, but it meant that legally, a Spartan citizen could kill a helot without it being considered murder. This is what Plutarch said, but he was a guy wandering Roman Greece and recording stories from local bars. You can't find this accusation within the actual rumour mill of the Peloponnesian War. It could just be lost to history, but the Athenians loved to talk poo poo about other Greeks, and they wouldn't have ignored it. Nessus posted:Depends what you mean by second fiddle, I could absolutely see people allying with these strange men with their wonderful weapons, riding beasts, and durable armor. Especially if you can intermarry with some of them and start trading gold ornaments and maybe crop plants for more of the weapons and beasts and armor... after a certain point you have a Spanish-native composite culture of some kind. At this point the timeline becomes unstable. Those sorts of times are when history becomes "cool".
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Jul 24, 2020 06:26
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Arglebargle III posted:"actually the classical period lasted 160 years" Classical Greece lasted 160 years, give or take, in the traditional dating of Greek historical periods, Ancient Greece is a longer period of time, but generally, Classical Greece is used to refer to the period of time between either the start of the Persian War or the death of Hippias the Athenian tyrant, and the death of Alexander.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:30
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is what Plutarch said, but he was a guy wandering Roman Greece and recording stories from local bars. You can't find this accusation within the actual rumour mill of the Peloponnesian War. It could just be lost to history, but the Athenians loved to talk poo poo about other Greeks, and they wouldn't have ignored it. I feel like I remember the part about declaring war on helots in either Herodotus or Thucydides.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:43
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Those sorts of times are when history becomes "cool". Someone is going to say that about our lifetimes some day. It's only cool if you don't have to live through it.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:47
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Epicurius posted:The only one of those that was a Classical Greek city was Byzantion, and it wasn''t all that important during the period, just a former Megaran colony that was controlled by Persia that made its money off the Black Sea trade. It doesn't get important until Constantine refounds it. Alexandria was established by Alexander, and Antioch by the Seleucids. Would that make the Proto-Greek culture which traded with the Minoans fall into Homeric Greece, or was that still before? "1100 BC" triggered my memory of a book about this oldest Hellenic culture period I've read while in university. The book talked about the archaeological evidence of the Proto-Greeks essentially copying everything advanced from the Minoans and using it to boost their own civilization -after a certain point, the early Hellenics start building the same type of fortress found on Crete for example and later they grow from trading partners to fierce competitors. When the Minoan civilization went under, the Hellenics just slowly replaced them as major trading power in the Mediterranean area. Edit: The book spend a lot of time talking about early Greek written language, and how it was "logogrammatic" and not really complete from a linguistic standpoint. This means translation even today is causing endless arguments because you can apparently read those ultra-ancient texts differently, depending on what kind of context you assume that you don't have.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:50
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Mycenean Greece. 1600-1100 BC?Jazerus posted:i wonder what aspect of theban society parmenides has a problem with When you post like that those six letters are eventually going to become a problem for you.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:56
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Weka posted:When you post like that those six letters are eventually going to become a problem for you. i don't have a clue whether this is directed at me or him, and frankly i have no regrets about my posting as an official Theban Sympathizer edit: nevermind i got the joke. my sentiment remains
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Jul 24, 2020 07:00
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Arglebargle III posted:I feel like I remember the part about declaring war on helots in either Herodotus or Thucydides. Apparently it was Plutarch citing Aristotle, and that was the only source wikipedia at least cited for the claim. Wikipedia is Wikipedia of course but I would find it weird if it was also in Herodotus and the Wikipedia page doesn't cite it for the claim. I found the passage though: quote:Now in all this there is no trace of injustice or arrogance, which some attribute to the laws of Lycurgus, declaring them efficacious in producing valour, but defective in producing righteousness. The so‑called "krupteia," or secret service, of the Spartans, if this be really one of the institutions of Lycurgus, as Aristotle says it was, may have given Plato also this opinion of the man and his civil polity. This secret service was of the following nature. The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the day time they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every Helot whom they caught. Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where Helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them. So, too, Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian war, tells us that the Helots who had been judged by the Spartans to be superior in bravery, set wreaths upon their heads in token of their emancipation, and visited the temples of the gods in procession, but a little afterwards all disappeared, more than two thousand of them, in such a way that no man was able to say, either then or afterwards, how they came by their deaths. And Aristotle in particular says also that the ephors, as soon as they came into office, made formal declaration of war upon the Helots, in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them. The Thucydides passage he's citing of course we have in full but apparently this Aristotle book has been lost--presumably it was part of his broader project to record the constitutions of all the major poleis. My take on the actual historicity of all this is a bit complicated. One bit that gives me a bit of pause is that Plutarch says that Aristotle said that these were Lycurgus' laws, Lycurgus being the mythical founder and lawgiver of Sparta. If that's the case, this might have been one of those situations where rumor had it that back in the day the Spartans would declare war on the helots, but it wasn't actually observed in Aristotle's time. Or maybe it was observed in Aristotle's time and was just attributed to Lycurgus. Very difficult to tell from this fragment. Thucydides of course is a reliable source who was writing about events within his own lifetime and put a lot of effort into confirming reports before writing them down, so I'm inclined to believe his story that the Spartans, at least once, rounded up the two thousand bravest helots under the pretense of honoring them and killed them all. Whether or not the Krypteia existed in the form Plutarch thought it did, it seems likely that they routinely brutalized the helots to keep them docile.
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Jul 24, 2020 07:13
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Someone is going to say that about our lifetimes some day. It's only cool if you don't have to live through it. Yes, "cool" Arglebargle III posted:I feel like I remember the part about declaring war on helots in either Herodotus or Thucydides. I think one of them heard some news about the Spartans raising helots for the army but then killing all the volunteers, but this could easily have been garbled. What is known is that the Spartans and Messenian Helots (Different from the Laconian Helots) were constantly embroiled in rebellion and harsh suppression. Fundamentally a different situation from the idea that Spartan society just institutionalized random murders
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Jul 24, 2020 07:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Entirely possible. IIRC the Spanish managed to knock over the Incas without much help from disease, which gives them access to the silver mines. I also suspect they would have been able to bring down the Aztecs, the smallpox outbreak helped but the main reason they won was they were able to put together an alliance of all the people the Aztecs had pissed off. But certainly if the Europeans couldn't make any inroads at all in the Americas, things would've been quite different. Huayna Capac literally died of smallpox that was transmitted to the Incan Empire over middlemen traders from the Caribbean coast. When the Spanish showed up, the Empire was already in civil war over the succession crisis
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Jul 24, 2020 07:16
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you do not maintain a slave force that vastly outnumbers the free citizens for centuries without either some truly outre terror, or not actually treating them like slaves at all. considering it's sparta we're talking about and the overall poor treatment (if not the random murder) of the helots is well-attested...
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Jul 24, 2020 07:17
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My main takeaway from Plutarch about Sparta was their pederasity, but I also got the impression Plutarch was something of a dumbass so I'm not sure if that was necessarily exactly as depicted. Still, it seems like it should be a bit of a big deal when choosing a culture to idolize.......
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Jul 24, 2020 07:34
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Jazerus posted:you do not maintain a slave force that vastly outnumbers the free citizens for centuries without either some truly outre terror, or not actually treating them like slaves at all. considering it's sparta we're talking about and the overall poor treatment (if not the random murder) of the helots is well-attested... You're just saying that because the Spartans were violent to the helots, they must have been cruel in the specific way outlined by Plutarch, a guy who was 400 years removed from Sparta. Plutarch's actual description of the Krypteia comes from a passage where he claims to be quoting Aristotle. We don't actually have any record from Aristotle on the krypteia. Furthermore, Plutarch goes on in the same paragraph to mention that Plato thought similarly of the Krypteia. quote:Now in all this there is no trace of injustice or arrogance, which some attribute to the laws of Lycurgus, declaring them efficacious in producing valour, but defective in producing righteousness. The so‑called "krupteia," or secret service, of the Spartans, if this be really one of the institutions of Lycurgus, as Aristotle says it was, may have given Plato also27 this opinion of the man and his civil polity. 2 This secret service was of the following nature. The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the day time they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, p291 where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every Helot whom they caught. 3 Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where Helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them. But in Plato did leave a description of the Krypteia in one of his dialogues, and it doesn't involve any murder, it's just some harsh training course for Spartans. quote:Megillus Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 07:36
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Scarodactyl posted:My main takeaway from Plutarch about Sparta was their pederasity, but I also got the impression Plutarch was something of a dumbass so I'm not sure if that was necessarily exactly as depicted. Still, it seems like it should be a bit of a big deal when choosing a culture to idolize....... There's some Plutarch story where he talks about a cliffin Sparta that they throw weak babies over. Well this hill was real, and archaeologists excavated a bunch of human bones at the bottom of it. However, they were all adult bones, so clearly something was lost in transmission there. My guess is that whatever was actually happening, the story spread over time and people just bullshitted about it for years until Plutarch came along and he recorded some local bozo's interview and repeated it as fact.
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Jul 24, 2020 07:48
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Dalael posted:Is there a good podcast revolving around the greeks pre Alexander? To be fair, the term "Hellenistic" refers specifically to the period after Alexander conquered and Greekified Asia Minor, and the effects thereof.
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Jul 24, 2020 07:55
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I doubt the Spartans were regularly killing thousands of their slaves if only because that might mean they'd have to soil their precious little hands with manual labor, but it sounds like the broad outlines are plausible, especially if it's a mythologization of "a spartan citizen could just straight up kill a helot out after dark or whatever." Even if it wasn't a frequent event, it only has to happen once in a particular settlement every few years.
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Jul 24, 2020 08:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:You're just saying that because the Spartans were violent to the helots, they must have been cruel in the specific way outlined by Plutarch, a guy who was 400 years removed from Sparta. not at all. just that, even if literal random murder was not institutionalized, the scale of violence the spartans were certainly engaging in might easily have been mistaken for random murder from the outside despite following some form of logic that made it technically non-random
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Jul 24, 2020 08:12
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Jazerus posted:i don't have a clue whether this is directed at me or him, and frankly i have no regrets about my posting as an official Theban Sympathizer Oh yeah I definitely agree with it.
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Jul 24, 2020 09:16
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Weka posted:Mycenean Greece. 1600-1100 BC? Yeah, that sound's like the right time frame.
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Jul 24, 2020 09:26
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Can we all just acknowledge that "Plutarch's Memes" was a beautiful phrase for shitposting, one to which we all should aspire?
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Jul 24, 2020 09:55
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Nessus posted:Depends what you mean by second fiddle, I could absolutely see people allying with these strange men with their wonderful weapons, riding beasts, and durable armor. Especially if you can intermarry with some of them and start trading gold ornaments and maybe crop plants for more of the weapons and beasts and armor... after a certain point you have a Spanish-native composite culture of some kind. At this point the timeline becomes unstable. I don't think it's a given that there would be so much intermarrying. Things could lead to a similar situation as in Japan, with foreign traders restricted to one trading post and the locals eventually figuring out how to make the guns themselves.
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Jul 24, 2020 10:09
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I often can't help but wonder to myself how close Japan was to getting colonized in the same way as South or Southeast Asia: the sengoku had to last for juuuust a little longer, some daimyo had to be sliiightly more willing to cut deals with technologically advanced westerners, the successor shogun could be a liiiittle less capable of enforcing state sovereignty, and the Japan that enters the 20th century would be significantly more dysfunctional and 3rd-world. Like westerners would sneer and look down on Japan rather than think of them as de facto white.
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Jul 24, 2020 11:34
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Phobophilia posted:I often can't help but wonder to myself how close Japan was to getting colonized in the same way as South or Southeast Asia: the sengoku had to last for juuuust a little longer, some daimyo had to be sliiightly more willing to cut deals with technologically advanced westerners, the successor shogun could be a liiiittle less capable of enforcing state sovereignty, and the Japan that enters the 20th century would be significantly more dysfunctional and 3rd-world. Like westerners would sneer and look down on Japan rather than think of them as de facto white. Short answer, not very.
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Jul 24, 2020 11:57
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Sparta could have (probably was ) spreading stories about how they were so tough as propaganda as well
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Jul 24, 2020 11:59
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Stringent posted:Short answer, not very. This deserves a long answer, surely.
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Jul 24, 2020 12:17
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VanSandman posted:This deserves a long answer, surely. It's got so many irrelevant hypotheticals not really. Most of the questions are answered by the Meiji restoration. The bakafu was basically a failed state when Perry showed up which more or less covers if sengoku had lasted longer. The Satsuma and other daimyos in Kyushu had been cutting deals with westerners. I think just being an island nation Japan, has a clannish identity that lended itself to nationalism. Couple that with the genocidal colonialism the British carried out in China, the absolute need to consolidate, not hampered by outside forces thanks to being an island are pretty inevitable.
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Jul 24, 2020 13:19
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That's a gross oversimplification, how westerners were going to be dealt with was basically what destroyed the bakafu and what could have happened if foreigners had come in strength earlier is just so complicated as to resist hypothesizing. But given that they managed it at the end of the Tokugawa, I'm at least halfway sure they could have managed it earlier. I mean the only successful conquest of Japan that I'm aware of is the Americans in WW2. That said when Perry showed up it instantly became a nationwide debate of the absolute first importance, so everybody knew it was a problem and they were intent on fixing it. That's not the response of a nation likely to be conquered.
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Jul 24, 2020 13:29
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Yeah, Perry's whole thing was going out of the way to force Japan to stop trying to pretend the rest of the world didn't exist, and well, it worked. Honestly I'm more interested in how China got so dysfunctional and unable to effectively respond to what turned into open military conquest from Europe.
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Jul 24, 2020 14:47
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Scarodactyl posted:My main takeaway from Plutarch about Sparta was their pederasity, but I also got the impression Plutarch was something of a dumbass so I'm not sure if that was necessarily exactly as depicted. Still, it seems like it should be a bit of a big deal when choosing a culture to idolize....... Spartan pederasty was supposedly such a successful social institution that Spartan women started banging adolescent girls too. Pederasty was socially accepted or outright encouraged in almost all Greek city-states, so there's no reason Sparta would be an exception. Though no doubt Plutarch is idealizing or otherwise garbling the details in some way as usual.
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Jul 24, 2020 14:54
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Silver2195 posted:Spartan pederasty was supposedly such a successful social institution that Spartan women started banging adolescent girls too. IIRC there's sources for basically all the greek city states mocking the others for pederasty.
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Jul 24, 2020 15:27
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Stringent posted:I mean the only successful conquest of Japan that I'm aware of is the Americans in WW2. It's been basically discredited now, but there was a popular theory* that emerged in the postwar period that Japan was conquered sometime in the 300-400s by "horse riders" from the continent. There's a big spread of horse fittings from that time, and other things I can't recall without reading about it again, that were seen as a bit of a cultural shift. Conversely a theory that has actually been getting widespread popularity is that the original Yamato line was overthrown around 400 (the particular date is also controversial; the book the early reigns come from is thought to misdate them by about 100 years), by the ascent of a very likely foreign dynasty under Emperor Ojin. This was all a couple of centuries before there was really "Japan" as such, though, and everything from before about the 8th century is incredibly nebulous. There's fairly concrete evidence of extremely pronounced cultural influence, population, and perhaps rule from continental peoples in parts of Japan, but at what point do they stop being continental and start just being Japanese? *mostly popular outside of Japan, although it was originally a Japanese historian that proposed it Koramei fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 15:28
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Koramei posted:Conversely a theory that has actually been getting widespread popularity is that the original Yamato line was overthrown around 400 Does the current Japanese government care much about the line of continuous Emperors back to some mythical past? I'm curious if the government gets pissed off about theories like this, like say China would to suggesting there isn't 5000 years of Chinese history. e: man, 1500 years of documented hereditary succession is still pretty bonkers. Obviously for some of that time the Emperors weren't really calling the shots, but I'm surprised they've been going for that long. Was there a common way to marry powerful new families into the line? PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 16:22
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Does the current Japanese government care much about the line of continuous Emperors back to some mythical past? I'm curious if the government gets pissed off about theories like this, like say China would to suggesting there isn't 5000 years of Chinese history. The current Emperor has outright said that the Japanese imperial family is probably Korean if you trace them far back enough, IIRC. Obviously some far-right types are upset about any suggestion that there isn't a continuous line of Emperors going back to Amaterasu herself, and the Imperial Household Agency probably doesn't like to talk about the break in the line of succession, but there isn't the kind of pressure on scholarship that there is in China.
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Jul 24, 2020 16:44
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Grevling posted:Ancient Greece Declassified Thanks! I started it yesterday. it is so different from the History of Rome or the History of Byzantium. the format is different but its pretty interesting so far. Episode 1 was great. I knew about the Rosetta Stone, but I did not know it was almost used as fortifications and how close it came to be lost forever. Love it so far.
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Jul 24, 2020 16:54
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galagazombie posted:Was there ever really any way for the natives of the Americas to not get wiped out? 90+% of them got wiped out by disease without even being aware that White people existed. Even in a perfect world where the Europeans hadn't been genocidal colonizers and instead been pacifist hippies I really don't see how the Native Civilizations could have lasted. Hell even the worst plagues in all of Eurasian history never came close to that level. 1491 has this chapter about the first settlers in North America marveling at all this empty land and wondering why the nearby tribes hadn't settled it, when what they didn't realize was that they had, just that they had all died over the decade or so before they arrived, because the Feral Pigs and Trade Routes had already given them all smallpox and similar. While disease definitely killed an impossibly huge amount of native Americans, there were still enough to maintain some states of their own, and it was Europeans and their descendants who over the course of a few centuries drove most of the remainder from their lands and turned them into a marginalized population within a much larger state. I think that in theory they could've played the diplomatic game with Europeans to maintain their power and more allies in good faith, but it also would've been hard for them to know what was happening in Europe to play them off against eachother. And the relations between natives and Europeans started off pretty weird by anyone's standards, because of course the hugely diminished native population was going to be generous about the land where everyone who lived there died, but it still feels like such a weird move even to this day that people use that as a basis for some weird thing where the natives somehow never developed an idea of being attached to the land. Of course, that's just in Anglophonic America. the story they go with in Latin America is that instead of finally being driven from their lands (which was definitely NOT inevitable and the result of some very specific decisions), the natives were dense enough to survive in sizable numbers and were just turned into a the lowest class under spanish dominion, mixing with the other people under spanish dominion until spanish rule was pushed off and the populations that began self rule had a hefty native genetic influence even if they had been mostly converted and relatively little of the precolumbian states or culture remaining intact. Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC there's sources for basically all the greek city states mocking the others for pederasty. It's weirdly comforting whenever I see that, because it means that someone somewhere saw something wrong with the whole process even if it was pretty rampant.
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Jul 24, 2020 17:41
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Dalael posted:I knew about the Rosetta Stone, but I did not know it was almost used as fortifications and how close it came to be lost forever. Many great finds have this sort of story, they almost got lost or destroyed or not found or something. It makes you wonder how much we
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Jul 24, 2020 18:02
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Ola posted:Many great finds have this sort of story, they almost got lost or destroyed or not found or something. It makes you wonder how much we I took a classical and medieval political theory class in college, and the professor started the class with a great demonstration. First day, she walked in, and none of us were paying a lot of attention. She then had each of us write a paragraph describing how she walked in and what she did. Then, after she collected the papers, she just started throwing them out, one by one, saying "fire in the monastery, city sacked, mice ate the manuscript, and so on, until she had two pieces of paper left, neither of which agreed with each other and neither of which were accurate as to what she had actually done. (She also had a bunch of dates on index cards, and had us put them around the room to scale, just so we could get an idea of the timespan involved that we were talking about.)
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Jul 24, 2020 18:11
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Epicurius posted:But the whole "Is the Byzantine Empire the same as the Roman Empire or is it distinct thing is something that goes around and around and nobody ever changes their mind. The few times I've had that discussion with people, I put it this way. Imagine America today, with its President and Vice President. The one day, its decided that a new Capital is going to be on the West coast, wit the President moving there and the vice president remaining in washington, with quasi presidential powers. Then one day, over 100 years later, us dirty Canadians invade the US and manage to conquer the entirety of the Eastern US and keep it. Does that mean anyone remaining on the west coast are no longer Americans? No. Then Eastern "Byzantines' are in fact Romans. Period. Are they the same as the "classical" romans? No? But really, anytime you go back 100 years in time, are the people really the same? Anyways, that's my modern comparison. I know its not perfect and flawed but the point should come accross.
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Jul 24, 2020 18:59
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Dalael posted:The few times I've had that discussion with people, I put it this way. Do Wisconsinites get Canadian citizenship under this proposal? Is there a newsletter or something I could subscribe to?
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Jul 24, 2020 19:04
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Epicurius posted:Classical Greece is basically just the Persian Wars, the Peloponesian War, and the conquest of Alexander. People are always leaving out Philip.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:10
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