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Fly Molo posted:I’d watch that show in a heartbeat. Weird political drama, long philosophical discussions between broken people, long panning shots of medieval industry, and everybody yelling at Romanos IV to go lead the army while he breaks down and tries to run away? Hell yes. Speaking of shows, I wish something like Rome could get GoT’s budget. I don’t even care if it jumps the shark at the end and Pullo and Vorenus are still having doing shenanigans at age 180. Actually it would kinda rule if Augustus got a new old man actor and eventually died and those two remain the same. Pullo can be the one to kill Nero.
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Oct 8, 2020 13:39
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Speaking of shows, I wish something like Rome could get GoT’s budget. I don’t even care if it jumps the shark at the end and Pullo and Vorenus are still having doing shenanigans at age 180. Rome had a 100m budget when it was created, which was by far the largest budget at the time. Season 2 was 120m if i recall
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Oct 8, 2020 14:51
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Speaking of shows, I wish something like Rome could get GoT’s budget. I don’t even care if it jumps the shark at the end and Pullo and Vorenus are still having doing shenanigans at age 180. even better: nobody ever acknowledges that Pullo and Vorenus are old as gently caress, they just continue to get involved in gang wars and violent shenanigans throughout the ages. Plus the cinematography and dialogue from Spartacus. 
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Oct 8, 2020 17:08
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As much as I wished the series continued forever I'm simultaneously glad ROME ended where it did. Even besides the fact it had a great ending, the next few seasons were going to be about Pullo rosencrantz and guildensterning his way through the Passion of the Christ and I just can't see a way that doesn't come out terrible.
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Oct 8, 2020 17:27
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Weren't they planning on having Pullo convert to Christianity in the third season? Which would make him, what, ninety years old?
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Oct 8, 2020 17:27
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Dalael posted:Rome had a 100m budget when it was created, which was by far the largest budget at the time. Season 2 was 120m if i recall Yeah I don't think HBO wanted to run 5 seasons of that at the time, and while I think season 2 could've been two seasons itself, it still works better I think than trying to show the Principate. I think Octavian is played a bit too sociopathically, too. I thought Brian Blessed was an absolute dope in I, Claudius but Octavian was absolutely someone who could socialize and I think Rome tended to fail to show that. Also they did Lepidus dirty in the show but there's only so many characters you can have.
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Oct 8, 2020 18:02
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I feel like I just want more fantasy series to borrow from periods of history other than medieval. Historical fiction can be a rich resource to work with, but to some audiences and writers, it's harder to work with and maintain dramatic tension when the important events of the future are well-known, and you can have the characters not involved in important events so that you have more creative freedom, but if they're not involved then you run the risk of wasting the setting. Fantasy settings can sidestep all of that by just being directly analogous to historical periods. Although then you have the weird question of the supernatural, because historically the supernatural at least existed as a real thing in people's minds that affected their behavior, and a lot of fantasy seems obligated to do stuff with magic.
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Oct 8, 2020 18:04
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SlothfulCobra posted:Although then you have the weird question of the supernatural, because historically the supernatural at least existed as a real thing in people's minds that affected their behavior, and a lot of fantasy seems obligated to do stuff with magic. Caesar’s explanation to Marc Antony for why he doesn’t punish Vorenus and Pullo after they let Pompey go is an brilliant example of exactly this
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Oct 9, 2020 00:13
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Please stop talking about Rome before you guys make me watch again 
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Oct 9, 2020 00:32
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Was mary beard involved in Rome? I really liked how much of the series was dedicated to showing the lives of average romans and their day to day lives. What was the deal with Vorenus's apartment btw. Was he a renter in that housing complex or was he an owner? Always liked that set and was rooting for him when his family bought their farmland. ughhhh fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 9, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 01:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Christian Cameron is a historical fiction author whose work is...hit and miss on quality, honestly, although his recent books are more consistently well written than his older stuff. But he absolutely nails the whole "real/supernatural" thing in a way that makes it easy to see why his characters believe it's magic/divine intervention without it truly being so. He described the scene of the Greeks sacrificing sheep for omens before the battle of Plataea, and the viewpoint character witnesses the priest cut the sheep's throat, and sees the blood flow out in a pattern that seems to duplicate the shape of the river they're adjacent to. Then the priest examines the liver and the lobes are described as looking like the hills the Greek army is camped in, and from this omen the characters are heartened that they're in the right place to fight and win.
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Oct 9, 2020 01:14
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ughhhh posted:What was the deal with Vorenus's apartment btw. Was he a renter in that housing complex or was he an owner? Someone tell us if ancient Rome had condos.
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Oct 9, 2020 16:35
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Paging the terror of the forum, III Olivarum
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Oct 9, 2020 16:57
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quote="Jrenster" post="508691875"] But it became centralized in the third century under state-owned military bases called fabricae. I'm not too certain as to why specifically this became the case, I imagine it's related to the "crisis", but I won't speculate. Later on, they became even more centralized and bigger. [/quote] So the theory I’ve read for this that the general collapse of the currency system made it difficult to actually pay private contractors. State factories made sense since the government could more easily arrange for payment in kind, among other advantages. Kylaer posted:He described the scene of the Greeks sacrificing sheep for omens before the battle of Plataea, and the viewpoint character witnesses the priest cut the sheep's throat, and sees the blood flow out in a pattern that seems to duplicate the shape of the river they're adjacent to. Then the priest examines the liver and the lobes are described as looking like the hills the Greek army is camped in, and from this omen the characters are heartened that they're in the right place to fight and win. My favorite example of this kind of thinking in a classical source was in Xenophon, when he is trying to justify his decisions to hold his army tight while threatened by a Persian army. He keeps doing sacrifices that get unfavorable results, and even though he’s writing years later you can tell he’s still mad about it, and describes how frustrated everybody is and how he calls the men out to watch the sacrifice to prove it really was bad and he definitely wasn’t faking it despite their suspicions
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Oct 9, 2020 17:52
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I also wouldn't be surprised if the state factories was just another centralized control measure since it apparently came under Diocletian. Armies getting out of control was an issue, if the state had full control over military equipment instead of legions able to manufacture their own that would give the emperor more ability to limit legionary troublemaking.
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Oct 9, 2020 18:01
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Halloween Jack posted:Someone tell us if ancient Rome had condos. now I'm curious about what housing looked like in rome for people who were too well off for insula but not "has a mansion" rich
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Oct 9, 2020 18:08
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:now I'm curious about what housing looked like in rome for people who were too well off for insula but not "has a mansion" rich Caveat with as far as I know, but in Rome I don't think there was anything other than insulae and the domus. Houses could range significantly in size and extravagance, as could insulae. Not everything is the House of the Faun. If you imagine an average Gaius who starts with nothing and makes his way up to the wealthy plebeian class, you'd start out in a shitbox on the top floor of an insula, gradually work your way down to the first floor of a good insula, then trade up to a small domus. If you got super rich you could get a large domus in the city or a villa in the countryside, or if you're properly rich you maintain a city domus and a countryside villa that you escape to during malaria season.
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Oct 9, 2020 18:18
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Everyone in Rome except the absolute wealthiest would live in apartments, including members of the equestrian class not rich enough to own their own house. Apartments got smaller the higher you went, so a second story apartment above the ground floor shops and restaurants (Rome had a lot of those too) would still be a decent place to live. Having an individual domus in Rome also came with the expectation of you being rich enough to have a full staff of slaves/servants and plenty of elaborate decorate and artwork to show off.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:09
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When Rome the city was still important, were the well-off but not rich people inclined to do what modern people will do and move to cheaper cities? Like would you ever consider leaving your expensive second story insula for an affordable place out in Massillia or Narbonensis?
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Oct 9, 2020 20:46
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When Rome the city was still important, were the well-off but not rich people inclined to do what modern people will do and move to cheaper cities? The thing about an empire is that, unless you're in the provincial class, your political power (and therefore wealth) depends on access to the imperial power center, which is ususally the Emperor. If he wants to sit in Rome, you sit in Rome. If he fucks off to Ravenna, you gently caress off to Ravenna. Especially in situations where telecommunications are still rather primitive?  E: IIRC, same thing happened during the Avignon Papacy, really? Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Oct 9, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 20:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:When Rome the city was still important, were the well-off but not rich people inclined to do what modern people will do and move to cheaper cities? Not really. Anybody who wanted access to the levers of power was in Rome. You couldn't be anywhere else, you had to physically be in the city where the action was. You might maintain other residences, like the cluster of fancy villas around the Bay of Naples, but Rome's where it's at and if you leave it you're cutting yourself off from power. I'm sure there were some people who didn't care about political power and just wanted to be rich on their latifundia in Sicily or whatever. And you have similar groupings of power in other major cities like Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, etc. But if you wanted opportunities to advance you had to stay in the big cities at the very least, if not Rome itself.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:53
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Cicero's friend whose name I forget basically just decided he didn't want to be a senator and moved to Athens, iirc. Though that's one or two social classes higher than you're talking about
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Oct 9, 2020 20:55
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Yeah, there's always exceptions. The biggest obvious one being Diocletian going off to his cabbage patch, or Sulla's similar retirement.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:57
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, there's always exceptions. The biggest obvious one being Diocletian going off to his cabbage patch, or Sulla's similar retirement. 
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Oct 9, 2020 20:59
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cheetah7071 posted:Cicero's friend whose name I forget basically just decided he didn't want to be a senator and moved to Athens, iirc. Though that's one or two social classes higher than you're talking about The appropriately named Titus Pomponius Atticus. He had enough money and was Epicurean enough that he just didn't care about politics, though. He did end up moving back to Rome, and inherited a pretty enormous palace on the Quirinal from his uncle.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:06
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Pliny the Younger had several villas, I think he worked for many years outside Rome (started his book but life got in the way). And it's funny to read him explain to his friend how nice it is to have a place in the country that still has easy access to Rome, it sounds so modern and middle class.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:09
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The thing to remember, too, was that Rome was pretty unhealthy in the summer, between malaria and contagious diseases, so people who could afford to, left.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:18
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I feel like if you're "well-off but not rich" then you wouldn't be in a situation where you feasibly can get access to the levers of power. Except for when the Assemblies still mattered. And I think I've heard that as part of that, there would be mass migrations to Rome whenever something big was happening in the assemblies.Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, there's always exceptions. The biggest obvious one being Diocletian going off to his cabbage patch, or Sulla's similar retirement. It's weird for someone who was wading in the thick of power to just quit, but I don't think it's weird for somebody not in much power in the first place to just not go in deep on the rat race. Especially as the empire got bigger and the amount of people with political power got smaller. If you move out to the provinces you could also have a shot at being a big fish in a small pond, but I don't know how much of a motivation that is. Weren't there also colonization projects to get citizens out to the provinces? Like in addition to the practice of rewarding retired legionaries with conquered land.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:33
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It would deeply conflict with Roman culture, at least of the republican era, to not try to gain more power. Taking action to increase the status of yourself and your family was a core value. Like any culture there certainly were people who didn't buy into it, but the majority would not intentionally remove themselves from the possibility of an increase in status--unless they thought they had some plan to do so that would work better outside of Rome, anyway. This does change throughout the principate when the power is not so deeply concentrated in one place anymore. Once you're getting emperors who never even visit the city it's hard to argue there's any one center of power until later, when Constantinople becomes the indispensable imperial core again the way Rome once was.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:53
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The coloniae were for veterans first — under the republic they had been essentially garrison towns, but many colonies at the end of the republic were old soldiers’ towns founded as a direct result of Augustus wanting to get rid of the gazillions of soldiers left behind by defunct warlords and bring the army down to a size he could afford to pay. I don’t think there was ever a concerted drive to get random Roman citizenry to move out to them. I feel like it would have been a pretty tough sell.
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Oct 9, 2020 21:57
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Grand Fromage posted:you'd start out in a shitbox on the top floor of an insula, gradually work your way down to the first floor of a good insula
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Oct 10, 2020 00:05
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Carrying things (especially water) up multiple floors sucks. That's just the first thing to come to mind, there may be other reasons as well.
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Oct 10, 2020 00:09
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I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it flips right around when the elevators invented
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Oct 10, 2020 00:10
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Cefte posted:This fascinates me - why on earth was the first (ground?) floor considered better than the top? My go-to comparison for mixed-class multi-story buildings would be the Edinburgh old city, where the rich took the top floors, nominally to get away from street level noise and smells. No elevators. Also insulae kinda caught on fire a lot. Also culturally, being seen going about business was very important to Romans. Can't do that on the top floor the way you can on the bottom.
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Oct 10, 2020 00:15
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Epicurius posted:The thing to remember, too, was that Rome was pretty unhealthy in the summer, between malaria and contagious diseases, so people who could afford to, left. This is getting a bit into speculative territory, but among the working class there was almost certainly a large migration out of the city in the winter time and probably in the harvest season. This is because the the ports largely shut down in winter, the Mediterranean being rather hostile in that season, and the oxen used to move goods around had to be moved out to rural barns. As far as I know the idea that urban laborers fanned out into the countryside during planting and harvest season is not really in any classical sources, however in the medieval and renaissance it was normal for city residents either to temporarily leave seeking the high wages available or to assist their family on the ancestral farm plot.
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Oct 10, 2020 01:47
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Thread, it’s time to expunge the former webmaster’s name from the public monuments and petition the new one for a liberal donative
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Oct 10, 2020 02:55
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skasion posted:Thread, it’s time to expunge the former webmaster’s name from the public monuments and petition the new one for a liberal donative His name is one of the load bearing slurs
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Oct 10, 2020 03:04
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i'll get to work chiseling new heads in the likeness of Ieffrius Caesar Augustus YosPosicus to replace all the old busts we're throwing out
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Oct 10, 2020 03:05
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Gaius Marius posted:I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it flips right around when the elevators invented Also I imagine better access to running water.
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Oct 10, 2020 04:36
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My friends in Taipei tell me that ground floor apartments are way more expensive there so I guess it depends on where you are.
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Oct 10, 2020 05:06
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