zoux posted:

I call that, to coin a term, syncretism.

Tomn posted:

One bit that stuck out for me in that passage: "Admirest thou a fight for liberty? Thou wilt admire Brutus." What exactly does "liberty" mean in the context of a late Roman emperor? I'm assuming it's not exactly a Mel Gibson cry for FREEEEEEDOM and the overthrow of autocrats.

zoux posted:

There are tons, but specifically for ancient history I like Epithemeus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gBj4qAowCE

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Thank you for the link to this, it was a great little breakdown.

Anyone know of a good summary of the invention, importance, and uses of pottery? I've always heard about how it was a game changer but never hear many details about why. I dont doubt it, but I'm curious to learn more about the finer details.

skasion posted:

I missed this but yeah, it is kind of striking, isn’t it. There was a tradition going back to Tacitus (and indeed to the events themselves) which saw Brutus as an exemplary Roman aristocrat for doing the moral thing and standing up to big bad Caesar in the name of liberty (to be a rich dickhead). And that’s probably the only sense in which he means it here, but it’s funny to imagine Claudian saying that in the court of the teenage Honorius. You could easily construe it as a gently caress-you to Stilicho if you were so inclined—“take Brutus as your model, young man, and go bump off the older guy who holds tyrannical power”—though he then moves on to gushing about Stilicho saving everyone, so I doubt that was the intent.

Tulip posted:

There is a technique for making soup without pottery that is very clever and also loving sucks from a convenience standpoint that I'll leave as an exercise to the imagination

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Was this the "dig a pit, fill with water, then toss in some rocks heated by the fire to boil it" trick? I guess I always thought of that as poaching, but I'd imagine it would make a good broth too.

Tulip posted:

This question is so big that I had an out of body experience trying to think about it. I can't think of any particular summary because its just...so massive.

There are two questions that I like that highlight the importance of pottery and the difference between life in the prepottery neolithic and the rest of history. The first is: what are you storing things in and how are you transporting them without pottery? There are viable answers here: woven baskets being a good answer, animal skin bags being another. But those have very limited durability, which limits both the duration of storage and by extension the distances you can transport things. And importantly those things don't meaningfully extend the shelf life of anything you store in them, which is the vast majority of things you'd want to store anyway. You have some answers like "holes" for longer term but for I hope obvious reasons you can't carry a hole full of nuts to the next town over. Pottery opens up a lot of options here, in terms of storing things, moving things, pickling things.

The one that was a little more mind breaking to me is: how do you cook? Like what cooking techniques do you have pre-pottery? Remember that pre-pottery also means pre-metal. There is a technique for making soup without pottery that is very clever and also loving sucks from a convenience standpoint that I'll leave as an exercise to the imagination, but cooking prepottery is a real pain in the rear end. You can roast on a skewer over open flame, and you can wrap things in leaves and put them in coals or an oven, Its a really limited set of options, and these techniques are generally not super efficient and are definitely a lot harder to control.

The invention of pottery is not going to have any clean summary. Pottery was likely invented in many places independently but not simultaneously, so the question of the invention of pottery in Japan vs Iraq vs Germany vs Mexico is going to get you different answers. And of course this is thoroughly prehistoric* so we don't exactly have any written sources where we have an inventor going "yo dude check out this crazy poo poo I just figured out." What we do see is that red clay mixed with some sand and coiled can be fired in a bonfire and AFAIK that's the most common start point. Entirely likely that people independently noticed that if you get clay hot enough you can create a hard shaped object, which opens up all kinds of poo poo because without this your options for creating hard objects are basically wood stone and bone, which have limited shaping options. But any more detail than that is going to get incredibly chaotic and its also not settled, since we have ceramic works that well predate the neolithic and a whole half of the history of agriculture is generally considered "prepottery neolithic" and of course Japan just flat out started into paleothic pottery and it's all very confusing/exciting.

Anyway this was my attempt to organize my thoughts/knowledge on this question, I hope it was at least a little edifying and hopefully there's another goon who's smarter than me about the neolithic b/c I don't know nearly as much as I'd like.

*Remember that well-established clay industries were a precondition of the first place to develop writing since they were writing on clay

Tulip posted:

This question is so big that I had an out of body experience trying to think about it. I can't think of any particular summary because its just...so massive.

There are two questions that I like that highlight the importance of pottery and the difference between life in the prepottery neolithic and the rest of history. The first is: what are you storing things in and how are you transporting them without pottery? There are viable answers here: woven baskets being a good answer, animal skin bags being another. But those have very limited durability, which limits both the duration of storage and by extension the distances you can transport things. And importantly those things don't meaningfully extend the shelf life of anything you store in them, which is the vast majority of things you'd want to store anyway. You have some answers like "holes" for longer term but for I hope obvious reasons you can't carry a hole full of nuts to the next town over. Pottery opens up a lot of options here, in terms of storing things, moving things, pickling things.

The one that was a little more mind breaking to me is: how do you cook? Like what cooking techniques do you have pre-pottery? Remember that pre-pottery also means pre-metal. There is a technique for making soup without pottery that is very clever and also loving sucks from a convenience standpoint that I'll leave as an exercise to the imagination, but cooking prepottery is a real pain in the rear end. You can roast on a skewer over open flame, and you can wrap things in leaves and put them in coals or an oven, Its a really limited set of options, and these techniques are generally not super efficient and are definitely a lot harder to control.

The invention of pottery is not going to have any clean summary. Pottery was likely invented in many places independently but not simultaneously, so the question of the invention of pottery in Japan vs Iraq vs Germany vs Mexico is going to get you different answers. And of course this is thoroughly prehistoric* so we don't exactly have any written sources where we have an inventor going "yo dude check out this crazy poo poo I just figured out." What we do see is that red clay mixed with some sand and coiled can be fired in a bonfire and AFAIK that's the most common start point. Entirely likely that people independently noticed that if you get clay hot enough you can create a hard shaped object, which opens up all kinds of poo poo because without this your options for creating hard objects are basically wood stone and bone, which have limited shaping options. But any more detail than that is going to get incredibly chaotic and its also not settled, since we have ceramic works that well predate the neolithic and a whole half of the history of agriculture is generally considered "prepottery neolithic" and of course Japan just flat out started into paleothic pottery and it's all very confusing/exciting.

Anyway this was my attempt to organize my thoughts/knowledge on this question, I hope it was at least a little edifying and hopefully there's another goon who's smarter than me about the neolithic b/c I don't know nearly as much as I'd like.

*Remember that well-established clay industries were a precondition of the first place to develop writing since they were writing on clay

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Was this the "dig a pit, fill with water, then toss in some rocks heated by the fire to boil it" trick? I guess I always thought of that as poaching, but I'd imagine it would make a good broth too.

Telsa Cola posted:

There's a couple of methods (not to mention there's carvable/easily shapable stones) but there's lining a pit with something waterproof and doing that or the whole suspension boil where you have water in a waterproof container a certain height over a fire. The water prevents the material from burning and will boil. You can also do the whole rock in a container thing with wooden containers or a log. You might be able to do it with a gourd too?

However it's important to note that ceramics preserve well and these other methods rely on materials that very much do not.

golden bubble posted:

It's actually possible to boil water in perishable containers. So a soup container only needs to be waterproof, it does not need to be metal or ceramic. A waterproof animal skin could work if you don't mind doing it just once.

https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpjLcLa7rkU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9gKzea3Cno

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Wow, thank you for the writeup! I figured it would be in-depth but apparently I vastly underestimated the topic.

Tulip posted:

IIRC you're more of a milhist guy and I've been trying to think of a proper innovation in military history, but "spears" feels like an overstatement I don't think pottery changed humans as much as spears, but "bows/slings" feels like an understatement. I'm not sure there's any post-stone military technologies that are quite as massive a change as pottery, and the ones that are hitting the shortlist for me (telecomms? rail? bureaucracy?) at least happened during written history and that really changes the element of how much speculation/squishiness there is to it.

skasion posted:

I missed this but yeah, it is kind of striking, isn’t it. There was a tradition going back to Tacitus (and indeed to the events themselves) which saw Brutus as an exemplary Roman aristocrat for doing the moral thing and standing up to big bad Caesar in the name of liberty (to be a rich dickhead). And that’s probably the only sense in which he means it here, but it’s funny to imagine Claudian saying that in the court of the teenage Honorius. You could easily construe it as a gently caress-you to Stilicho if you were so inclined—“take Brutus as your model, young man, and go bump off the older guy who holds tyrannical power”—though he then moves on to gushing about Stilicho saving everyone, so I doubt that was the intent.

Tomn posted:

Again, though, what exactly is meant by the word "liberty" here? The idea that oligarchs should be free to do as they please without central state restraint? Opposition to arbitrary tyranny (as opposed to the entirely just and even-handed tyranny of our current emperor, long may he reign)? It's clear to me as a layman that "liberty" to Claudian and Honorius doesn't mean the same thing as "liberty" does to the average American on the street today, but what DID it mean as a concept to the late Romans?

Dawn of Everything posted:

The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn’t even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it’s simply power – the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited ‘by force or law’. This formulation has some peculiarities that jurists have struggled with ever since, as it implies freedom is essentially a state of primordial exception to the legal order. It also implies that property is not a set of understandings between people over who gets to use or look after things, but rather a relation between a person and an object characterized by absolute power. What does it mean to say one has the natural right to do anything one wants with a hand grenade, say, except those things one isn’t allowed to do? Who would come up with such an odd formulation?

An answer is suggested by the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson, who points out that Roman Law conceptions of property (and hence of freedom) essentially trace back to slave law.⁹ The reason it is possible to imagine property as a relationship of domination between a person and a thing is because, in Roman Law, the power of the master rendered the slave a thing (res, meaning an object), not a person with social rights or legal obligations to anyone else. Property law, in turn, was largely about the complicated situations that might arise as a result. It is important to recall, for a moment, who these Roman jurists actually were that laid down the basis for our current legal order – our theories of justice, the language of contract and torts, the distinction of public and private and so forth. While they spent their public lives making sober judgments as magistrates, they lived their private lives in households where they not only had near-total authority over their wives, children and other dependants, but also had all their needs taken care of by dozens, perhaps hundreds of slaves.

⁹Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Hrmm, I'm wondering if you're thinking of how I've briefly mentioned in this thread that I am working on a boardgame about ancient history? I'm not super into milhist but I know how military developments often fuel other developments and so on. The game I'm making is more about gamifying early developments like pottery, copperworking, irrigation, ect into a weighing the opportunity cost about which one your faction develops first because of the history-based effect I turn into a game mechanic/modifier/whatever that will help you win. I mainly find learning about how things were first invented/discovered absolutely fascinating because today's society takes so much for granted (pottery being a great example of "what was life like before humanity had vessels to hold water and other liquids, or even simply as containers for solid objects").

Tomn posted:

Again, though, what exactly is meant by the word "liberty" here? The idea that oligarchs should be free to do as they please without central state restraint? Opposition to arbitrary tyranny (as opposed to the entirely just and even-handed tyranny of our current emperor, long may he reign)? It's clear to me as a layman that "liberty" to Claudian and Honorius doesn't mean the same thing as "liberty" does to the average American on the street today, but what DID it mean as a concept to the late Romans?

Tomn posted:

Again, though, what exactly is meant by the word "liberty" here? The idea that oligarchs should be free to do as they please without central state restraint? Opposition to arbitrary tyranny (as opposed to the entirely just and even-handed tyranny of our current emperor, long may he reign)? It's clear to me as a layman that "liberty" to Claudian and Honorius doesn't mean the same thing as "liberty" does to the average American on the street today, but what DID it mean as a concept to the late Romans?

Institutes 1.III.1 posted:

Freedom, from which men are called free, is a man's natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

quote:

”If thou make any law or establish any custom for the general good, be the first to submit thyself thereto; then does a people show more regard for justice nor refuse submission when it has seen their author obedient to his own laws. The world shapes itself after its ruler's pattern, nor can edicts sway men's minds so much as their monarch's life; the unstable crowd ever changes along with the prince.

Nor is this all: show no scorn of thine inferiors nor seek to overstep the limits established for mankind. Pride joined thereto defaces the fairest character. They are not submissive Sabaeans whom I have handed over to thy rule, nor have I made thee lord of Armenia; I give thee not Assyria, accustomed to a woman's rule. Thou must govern Romans who have long governed the world, Romans who brooked not Tarquin's pride nor Caesar's tyranny. History still tells of our ancestors' ill deeds; the stain will never be wiped away. So long as the world lasts the monstrous excesses of the Julian house will stand condemned. Will any not have heard of Nero's murders or how Capri's foul cliffs were owned by an agčd lecher?​ The fame of Trajan will never die, not so much because, thanks to his victories on the Tigris, conquered Parthia became a Roman province, not because he brake the might of Dacia and led their chiefs in triumph up the slope of the Capitol, but because he was kindly to his country. Fail not to make such as he thine example, my son.”

Tulip posted:

I am probably mixing you up with somebody in the milhist thread, my bad if so.

Tulip posted:

This question is so big that I had an out of body experience trying to think about it. I can't think of any particular summary because its just...so massive.

There are two questions that I like that highlight the importance of pottery and the difference between life in the prepottery neolithic and the rest of history. The first is: what are you storing things in and how are you transporting them without pottery? There are viable answers here: woven baskets being a good answer, animal skin bags being another. But those have very limited durability, which limits both the duration of storage and by extension the distances you can transport things. And importantly those things don't meaningfully extend the shelf life of anything you store in them, which is the vast majority of things you'd want to store anyway. You have some answers like "holes" for longer term but for I hope obvious reasons you can't carry a hole full of nuts to the next town over. Pottery opens up a lot of options here, in terms of storing things, moving things, pickling things.

Tunicate posted:

How about goards?

skasion posted:

libertas had an original, fairly technical sense of freedom in the legal sense. Roman citizens had libertas because they were not slaves. One’s children are called “liberi” in Latin because they are your free, as opposed to unfree, dependents (servi). However, in the late republic libertas took on metaphoric and political overtones and became a kind of slogan or byword which denoted something a bit more difficult to grasp. The American usage of “freedom” is not a bad translation of this—if nothing else it conveys that libertas is an extremely important and loaded idea. Those who sought to monopolize control of the late Republican government and those who fought them both did so in the name of libertas—but of course none of them would have thought that liberty extended to generally emancipating slaves or women.

Writing under the empire, Tacitus describes the original Brutus, who threw out King Tarquin, as having introduced “libertatem et consulatum”—freedom and the consulship. According to Livy, Brutus was aided in the coup by his slave Vindex, who was subsequently emancipated and became his freedman (libertus). Obviously Tacitus had an axe to grind, and the message here is succinctly that public life in a city dominated by a monarch does not constitute libertas. The monarchs themselves took just the opposite opinion though. Augustus famously declared that his original muster of a private army and subsequent entry into politics had “restored liberty to the republic when it had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.” Clearly Roman monarchs were all about this libertas, whatever it was, and this continued to be the party line all the way past the breakdown of Augustus’ carefully non-monarchic image, right through the end of the principate and into late antiquity: Justinian’s Institutes offers us a handy definition.

Force and law do a lot of heavy lifting here.

But in general Claudian, as ridiculous as it may seem, is invested in contrasting Honorius with tyrants.

We’re not servile orientals, Claudian has the god-emperor’s ghost admonish his teenage heir; our people are the descendants of a stern manly bunch who won’t take it kindly if you sit around the palace all day being ritually praised and thinking yourself above the law.

skasion posted:

I missed this but yeah, it is kind of striking, isn’t it. There was a tradition going back to Tacitus (and indeed to the events themselves) which saw Brutus as an exemplary Roman aristocrat for doing the moral thing and standing up to big bad Caesar in the name of liberty (to be a rich dickhead). And that’s probably the only sense in which he means it here, but it’s funny to imagine Claudian saying that in the court of the teenage Honorius. You could easily construe it as a gently caress-you to Stilicho if you were so inclined—“take Brutus as your model, young man, and go bump off the older guy who holds tyrannical power”—though he then moves on to gushing about Stilicho saving everyone, so I doubt that was the intent.

galagazombie posted:

Given that this passage is placed among all the late kingdom and early republican heroes instead of further along with Caesar and the like, I wonder if this isn’t the earlier Brutus of founding the republic by driving out the tyrant Tarquinius fame who’s being mentioned.

quote:

Canonical texts in international relations define peace as the absence of violence (Aron 1973, 21; Bull 2012, 18; Clausewitz 1976, 75; Waltz 1959, 1; 1979, 343). However, a glance at the philology of the word “peace” reveals a more complex relationship with violence. The Latin words for peace (pax, pacis, paco) trace their roots to the verb for a pact (pacisci), “which ended a war and led to submission, friendship, or alliance.” As Rome transitioned from republic to empire, pax changed its meaning from a pact among equals to submission to Rome, and “pacare began to refer to conquest” (Weinstock 1960, 45).1

Two monuments built by Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, record this shift in the meaning of peace. The first, the Ara Pacis Augustae, a monument to the goddess of peace, commemorates Augustus’s pacification of Gaul and Spain (Kleiner 2005, 212). The second, the funerary inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, appeared on Augustus’s tomb and celebrates his many accomplishments, including bringing peace to the sea, Gaul, Spain, and the Alps. Crucially, the term used to characterize this peace is pacavi, which means pacified. Pacavi is not the absence of violence but the use of violence to reorder the world into a Roman Empire. Thus, Pax Romana meant eliminating the threat of war—both civil and foreign—through the preponderance of Roman military might.

Romans understood peace to include both the absence of violence and the forceful creation and maintenance of a political order: pacification. Modern scholars in the field, however, understand violence and peace as antonyms. While some researchers question the meaning of peace (Martín 2005; Richmond 2008), the field almost never scrutinizes its concepts of violence.2 In fact, scholars of international relations seldom even use the term (Thomas 2011, 1815–16).

skasion posted:

FishFood posted:

In the ancient Mediterranean it was pretty common for monarchs and tyrants (in the classical sense) to portray themselves as representatives of the citizenry in opposition to oligarchic institutions like the Roman Senate or various poleis' boule. This was also a line of attack against would-be-monarchs, that they would enact the will of the everyday citizenry and purge the aristocracy. Even in the middle ages, monarchs frequently portrayed themselves as representatives of "the people" in opposition to the aristocracy. It's a pretty common theme throughout European history.

Strategic Tea posted:

Now for Trump Bolsonaro Putin Caesar to take on the corrupt deep state and criminal oligarchs!

Rugikiki posted:

Pretty sure we can safely assume they’re both deceased now