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Nessus posted:You would think they would notice, but I suppose you don't start taking weird immortality pellets if you aren't starting to fade or getting pretty old anyway. Well obviously the last emperor died because his apothecary got the dosage wrong!
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Aug 22, 2020 11:17
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Well obviously the last emperor died because his apothecary got the dosage wrong! He has been executed I trust?
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Aug 22, 2020 11:21
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Jazerus posted:perhaps related, the class of people who were former slaves, or whose parents had been slaves, or grandparents, etc. grew tremendously throughout the early empire and, by being the empire's preferred class for staffing the mid-levels of the bureaucracy, had a lot more influence than you might expect. Wasn't it a recurring joke in Roman comedies that former slaves treated their slaves worst of everybody?
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Aug 22, 2020 11:28
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How’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” held up?
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Aug 22, 2020 15:18
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Epicurius posted:Wasn't it a recurring joke in Roman comedies that former slaves treated their slaves worst of everybody? I don't remember that (I am not a big ancient literature guy tbh), but it is a trope that the slave is the only character in the comedy who isn't just a complete loving moron. Usually gets one over on everybody by the end. A lot of the laws restricting how you could mistreat slaves came into being around the Servile Wars for some reason. The increasing restrictions on manumission come after the empire isn't expanding anymore so they aren't getting huge numbers of new slaves all the time.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:22
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Jazerus posted:i feel like it's pretty clear from the escalating "things you can't do to your slave" laws passed over the course of centuries that there was an undercurrent of what we would today call abolitionist thought - the slaveholding class doesn't simply restrict themselves without a push from somewhere. i mean, some of it is quite practical stuff - "folks, we only have so many slaves so maybe don't murder them?" - but by the time slavery was on the decline throughout the empire, you really couldn't treat your slaves much worse than you could an average poor citizen. yeah iirc we have a couple of examples of people complaining that Claudius was relying on freemen to do important jobs and giving them too much power. always struck me as a shrewd move tbh - they're a group of people who have demonstrated competence and if the emperor is involved in freeing them - either directly or via legislation - you have to imagine extremely loyal.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:34
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Nessus posted:I imagine the ancient Romans and other people might not have had a mental image of slavery in the same sense that we do, which would make criticism of it even if recorded and internally consistent, potentially hard to discern as some kind of abolitionism. You also probably had the issue that most of the people writing down organized thought that would be passed down would be rich By the time of Caracalla they also don't see "citizen" in the same way as we do. He's occasionally mentioned as some brave liberator because he made every free man in the empire a citizen, but the only reason he did that was so that he could tax them.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:39
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't remember that (I am not a big ancient literature guy tbh), but it is a trope that the slave is the only character in the comedy who isn't just a complete loving moron. Usually gets one over on everybody by the end. Right. It's a subversion. The slave, who you''d expect to be the least powerful person, really is the one in charge of the situation. It was also a warning....hey, you Romans, your slaves see and hear everything and may be smarter than you think.
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Aug 22, 2020 16:44
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Trimalchio has a sign on his door saying that slaves get 100 lashes if they leave the property without permission. But he’s also kind of chummy with his slaves and promises to manumit them all when he dies. I guess the latter is meant less to show that he’s actually a nice guy and more to suggest that he’s such a colossal egotist he doesn’t care what his wife will do for help once he’s dead, but the whole passage is interesting as a comic take on slavery-related social issues.
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Aug 22, 2020 16:47
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I think Romans definitely had their own cultural stereotypes and jokes about old and new money, which former slaves made good would by definition probably be. Came up earlier that educated slaves whose main job was being scribes and teachers were a pretty common thing, complete with slaves being bought and educated specifically for that purpose, wouldn't be surprising that they'd often do well when freed and would already be suited for jobs in government and bureaucracy as well as going into business. (And if on good terms with their former master, they'd probably have a good job reference)
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Aug 22, 2020 19:28
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My favourite type of slaves is the sort that were either literally or functionally the ruling class in their society. See: Janissaries and Mamluks. Like imagine being technically someone's property but having a better quality of life than most people in that state and even having a direct hand in the day to day administration of that state.
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Aug 22, 2020 20:05
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Animal posted:How’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” held up?
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Aug 22, 2020 22:38
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I've never actually read it since it gets widely panned in academia. I have seen summaries of the arguments, and yeah. It's not the wrongest book but it doesn't hold up to a lot of scrutiny. It has some broad core points, like European military technology/tactics were often superior to many of the other civilizations they encountered, but that's just sort of... obvious? If you know any history. I imagine it might be mindblowing if that's the first history book you read but if you're nerdy enough to be posting in this thread I don't think there's much in there to get.
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Aug 22, 2020 22:43
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The core point of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that Europeans were just lucky of being in the right place at the right time and had no inherent superiority over the people they conquered as a result of being in the right place.
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Aug 22, 2020 22:48
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That's what I get for not reading it and relying on summaries, I guess. 
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Aug 22, 2020 22:50
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I think there were like three takeaway theses: 1. European military technology was very good and was honed by the political division in Europe 2. That same political division motivated Europeans to go pull dumb poo poo which eventually lead to colonization 3. The east-west orientation of Eurasia made it relatively easy for crops and animals to spread while the Americas and Africa were more north-southy, which would cause environmental conditions to shift much faster. 1. is obvious and is reasonable, although also untested because, for instance, there were not many battles between conquistadors and Chinese infantry. 2. seems like a great simplification of a complex question, although it could lead you to think about things like "so why did Spain and Portugal end up going west and kicking rear end, and what kept the Chinese empire from doing the same?" 3. seems like it would be hard to actually demonstrate or test in any reasonable way, and could just as easily be explained as "it is relatively easy to travel around Eurasia, and significantly harder to penetrate deep into Africa or reach the Americas." Geographical determinism. But how much is historical accident? FreudianSlippers posted:The core point of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that Europeans were just lucky of being in the right place at the right time and had no inherent superiority over the people they conquered as a result of being in the right place.
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Aug 22, 2020 22:52
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It wasn’t just Europe but yeah
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Aug 22, 2020 22:56
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Aug 22, 2020 23:47
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Animal posted:How’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” held up? Someone once described it as a anthropologist who decided they were a historian for the purposes of writing a novel.
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Aug 22, 2020 23:49
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Irregardles of the accuracy or whatever of GG and S it had a positive influence by making stupid thick headed western people take a larger perspective and question racist conclusions about the state of the world
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Aug 22, 2020 23:53
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"...Greece's rule over the western Mediterranean." This should tell you everything you need to know about the credibility of the author. Edit: oops, missed a page, that's in relation to Aristotle's racism quote from the last page. Regarding G,G&S I thought it skirted too close too scientific racism when it claimed African animals were too ornery to be domesticated. To my teenaged self it felt like there was a between the lines 'there is an environmental reason for this and humans are animals too' which put me off considerably. Weka fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 22, 2020 23:55
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Nessus posted:But how much is historical accident? He very much emphasizes the historical accident part.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:00
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The core chain of reasoning for point 3) is something like: 1. Without agriculture, you don't get the population density or sedentary populations necessary for economic specialization, which results in more rapid technological advancement 2. Crops that grows well in the tropic don't grow well outside of the tropics, and vice versa--the topics of cancer and capricorn can be viewed as barriers to the spread of farm crops as solid as oceans (this isn't true for domesticated animals, however) 3. By random chance, the middle east had several ideal species for domestication, both plants and animals. Pretty much the entire world eventually domesticated some of their local species, but Eurasia got a head start due to luck of the draw and the boundaries of oceans and tropics. Past "Eurasia got a head start on agriculture" I'm not sure how well any logic past that point holds up. While domesticated crops have trouble traveling north/south, other inventions have no such trouble.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:01
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Weka posted:
I don't understand how you got that at all. The author iirc makes the opposite point illustrating how africans weren't uniquely dumb for not inventing zebra cavalry or turning wildebeest and buffalo into domesticated meat and dairy animals, because europeans tried the same (with prior knowledge it was possible and picking superficially similar animals) and failed miserably. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 00:12
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:He very much emphasizes the historical accident part. But is weirdly very pat, teleological, 'it could never have been otherwise' about it. Just "these three or four environmental factors determined all of human history." Which, you know, he's an ornithologist specializing in bird evolution on island. That's his hammer and he nailed everything he could.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:27
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Zebra can't really be domesticated on the same level as horses. Try to ride a zebra and it will murder you. Maybe we might someday reach the point of zebra domestication but it will take a while since the zebra is so fundamentally different from the relatively easy to tame horse.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:48
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This is a good thing. The slave like submission of the horse makes it at best a tragic and pitiful animal. If it had the decency of murdering it's riders instead of submitting to them it would be worthy of respect.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:51
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The distant ancestors of humans evolved in Africa, so the wildlife there had plenty of time to develop responses to sneaky human tricks. Something like that is the theory, right?
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Aug 23, 2020 00:55
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I'd be surprised if that were true. Being useful to humans would presumably be artificially selected for, since the humans would be less likely to kill and eat you.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:12
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Bongo Bill posted:The distant ancestors of humans evolved in Africa, so the wildlife there had plenty of time to develop responses to sneaky human tricks. Something like that is the theory, right? It's not provable, but I would guess that it probably has more to do with all the lions, crocodiles, cheetahs, wild dogs, and hyenas that zebras have had to contend with. A few million years of that business would make me wary of predators too.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:13
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PittTheElder posted:I'd be surprised if that were true. Being useful to humans would presumably be artificially selected for, since the humans would be less likely to kill and eat you. Africa's the only place where megafauna survived prehistoric humans though (unless you count my friends the american bison, which you prolly shouldn't). Kaal posted:It's not provable, but I would guess that it probably has more to do with all the lions, crocodiles, cheetahs, wild dogs, and hyenas that zebras have had to contend with. A few million years of that business would make me wary of predators too. The rest of the world had apex predators before humans. I don't know if the Diamond idea is true but I dunno that y'all are right either.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:16
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It's been a while since I read GGS but I remember thinking that all the evidence he pulls together was super interesting in its own right, even if the thesis isn't totally convincing. I also remember a chapter on the "why Europe not China?" question tacked on at the end that was basically just a big  .I went to a talk by Jared Diamond once where he just told well-rehearsed stories about being in New Guinea decades ago.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:36
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Most of the animals we've domesticated seem to have had some kind of social structure habits we were able to hijack by putting a man-animal at the top of the chain, or else we just selected for docility over uncounted generations (I think this is the case for cows?)
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Aug 23, 2020 01:45
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Africa's the only place where megafauna survived prehistoric humans though (unless you count my friends the american bison, which you prolly shouldn't). Um, aurochs and mammoths in Eurasia? The former were around until iirc 400 years ago and as was posted a bit up thread mammoths died out 4000 or so years ago. Your point about apex predators is good though, Europe for instance had lions, hyenas and cave bears until fairly recently.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:54
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I usually hear it as old world megafauna surviving because they got to practice with pre-sapiens humans, whereas the first experience America and Australia had with walking apes was after we were extremely effective hunters already
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Aug 23, 2020 01:57
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Nessus posted:Most of the animals we've domesticated seem to have had some kind of social structure habits we were able to hijack by putting a man-animal at the top of the chain, or else we just selected for docility over uncounted generations (I think this is the case for cows?) yeah domesticating animals appears to have been hard as poo poo and a real luck of the draw sort of thing, and it’s not like anyone has done it in the past thousand years or more so it clearly isn’t easy to do with an arbitrary animal some areas got the horse, some areas got the guinea pig
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Aug 23, 2020 02:03
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Weka posted:Um, aurochs and mammoths in Eurasia? The former were around until iirc 400 years ago and as was posted a bit up thread mammoths died out 4000 or so years ago. I'd put the aurochs with the bison and the mammoths as surviving specifically where prehistoric hunters weren't.
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Aug 23, 2020 02:23
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Nessus posted:Most of the animals we've domesticated seem to have had some kind of social structure habits we were able to hijack by putting a man-animal at the top of the chain, or else we just selected for docility over uncounted generations (I think this is the case for cows?) Yeah Diamond's thesis about species domestication is his strongest yet, and this only covers the "Germs" part of his title: domesticating animals exposes you to zoonitic diseases that periodically hop species and causes horrific pandemic waves that wipe out populations that haven't been previously exposed. But that's something you can bounce back from: the problem is if it's succeeded by a wave of heavily armed migrants and colonizers moving into the suddenly freed up fertile farmland. This is explored a bit better in Mann's 1491. Diamond's other thesis, about the north-south vs east-west axes of the Americas and Eurasia, on the other hand, I find extremely poor evidence. There is plenty of longitudinal variation in America, plenty of lattitudinal variation in Eurasia and Africa, and plenty of exchange of ideas and tools and domesticated foods across both continents. His thesis really only holds to explain how Europe colonized the Americas, but alone can't explain how it also colonized Africa and the Middle East and South/East Asia.
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Aug 23, 2020 03:36
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Those colonizations are a bit different Like Indonesia doesn’t have a huge Dutch population and there isn’t tons of English people in Iraq
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Aug 23, 2020 03:38
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Wouldn't the answer to why Europe not Asia be luck? Didn't Columbus have to beg to get funding? Wasn't it thought of as a pointless fruitless expedition until oops he found America and oh His motivation was to find a way to India, wasn't it? It's not like anyone in Asia had as much trouble getting there as Europeans did? And then from there you just go hog wild What motivation would an Asian civilisation have to try circumnavigate the globe Miss Broccoli fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Aug 23, 2020 |
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Aug 23, 2020 03:52
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