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Foxtrot_13 posted:In medieval times England was a very big exporter of wool to the continent, with what is now Belgium being a massive importer of English wool. These involved very sophisticated (for England at the time) networks of wool merchants taking small to large amounts of wool and selling it to the Low Countries to be turned into cloth by the weavers. It may be apocryphal but it was almost as quick for a wool merchant in Norfolk or Suffolk to get their goods to Ghent or Amsterdam than to London and allowed them to cut out a layer of middlemen. It was very much a cash crop and you can see the wealth in wool towns like Long Melford and Lavenham in Suffolk. Technically still true that it's quicker to get from Norwich to Amsterdam than London. Takes 2 hours to get to London by train or car but you can fly to Amsterdam in like 20 minutes. Foxtrot_13 posted:The connection between East Anglia and the Low Countries carried on even after the wool trade slowed as large numbers of weavers from what is now Belgium and the Netherlands settled in Norfolk and Suffolk due to the wars and the counter reformation, with Norwich's Strangers Hall being named after Dutch, Flemish and Walloon immigrants in the 16th century. In a sort of roundabout way, the influence of the strangers can still be seen in the nickname of Norwich City as the canaries. The strangers would keep the birds as their song kept them entertained while they weaved (similar idea to having the radio on today I guess). This led to Norwich becoming a centre for the breeding of canaries which would continue until the 20th century, when one of the football club's chairmen, who also reared canaries, changed the club's colours to yellow and green.
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Mar 20, 2023 08:30
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Latin experts: how could I adapt Cato's famous addendum about Carthage but substituting "landlords" for Carthage? Would this work? Ceterum censeo domini terre esse delendam.
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Mar 21, 2023 18:16
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"People called landlords they own the house"?
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Mar 21, 2023 18:43
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zoux posted:"People called landlords they own the house"?
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Mar 21, 2023 18:59
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Landlords should be in the accusative and delenda should agree with it. Dominos terrae ... delendos Don't know how you'd translate landlord but I found dominaidius in some dictionaries, so you could also say Dominaidios esse delendos
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Mar 21, 2023 19:12
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Dominos domus?
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Mar 21, 2023 19:14
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Landlord is “dominus” but with qualifiers. in the Roman understanding, if you live on a farm owned by someone else, he more or less owns you as well. It doesn’t mean just landlord but lord, milord, or for that matter the Lord (God). So it feels kind of weird to say “domini must be destroyed”, it’s a term of submission. It’s both kind of vague and seems inappropriately elevated in tone. It’s like if you opposed the Supreme Court by saying “their honors must be destroyed”. Which idk, would be funny at least. Dominaedius “master of the house” is more precisely to the point but doesn’t seem to have been commonly used, the only source quote I can find for it is the bishop Paulinus of Nola speaking of his sainted forebear Felix, whose martyr’s shrine he renovated. a somewhat unconventional landlord relationship.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:07
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didn't renters in urban apartments exist? Was there a word for the kind of business Crassus did?
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Mar 21, 2023 21:12
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Yes. The buildings were called insula
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Mar 21, 2023 21:14
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cheetah7071 posted:didn't renters in urban apartments exist? Was there a word for the kind of business Crassus did? Racketeering
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Mar 21, 2023 21:14
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cheetah7071 posted:didn't renters in urban apartments exist? Was there a word for the kind of business Crassus did? Yeah most people living in Rome would have been in apartment buildings. But apartment buildings owned by dudes none of the tenants ever saw because they were far too rich and full of themselves to dirty their hands. Remember, as a senator, Crassus in legal theory did no business at all: he could not in honesty use a bank, conduct trade, etc. Of course this only led to such activities being performed in dishonesty instead, through intermediaries (typically freedmen) whose activities were less likely to be recorded. It’s these guys who probably would have caught heat from tenants first—would you seriously want to, or even know a way to, complain to a guy like Crassus that you felt a draft in your accommodation in one of his many slum blocks? There was such an occupation as “property manager” (villicus). The name implies a rural estate, but Juvenal uses it to speak of apartment building management too: Satire 3.193-6 posted:nos urbem colimus tenui tibicine fultam A.S. Kline translation posted:We inhabit a Rome held up for the most part by slender Not a bad rendition I guess, although it’s very typically modern to make a whole institution of “management” out of one ignoble and deceitful guy.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:53
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skasion posted:Landlord is “dominus” but with qualifiers. in the Roman understanding, if you live on a farm owned by someone else, he more or less owns you as well. Lol, what's changed? quote:
Does it? I feel like I've seen variants of "storm heaven and destroy God". But, for that matter, "landlord" is literally also the same word as lord, milord, and "The Lord", for all that we've diluted the meaning in modern English. quote:Dominaedius “master of the house” is more precisely to the point but doesn’t seem to have been commonly used, the only source quote I can find for it is the bishop Paulinus of Nola speaking of his sainted forebear Felix, whose martyr’s shrine he renovated. a somewhat unconventional landlord relationship. So "Dominaedius delenda est", or "Ceterum censeo dominaedius esse delendam"? (Also sorry for snark / jokey tone. I really do appreciate the reply. Same for Grevling.)
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Mar 21, 2023 22:03
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Lol, what's changed? Modern rentiers in most jurisdictions can’t legally enslave people, so they are usually slightly more subtle about their domination. There’s also building codes and poo poo like that nowadays, if anyone in authority cares enough to enforce them. Not that it’s so great nowadays but it must have been truly poo poo to rent in antiquity—that Juvenal bit I posted above, and in fact a lot of his writing overall, paints such a nasty picture of life in the big city you have to laugh. Lead out in cuffs posted:Does it? I feel like I've seen variants of "storm heaven and destroy God". Yeah pretty much. the underlying metaphor of master and servant hasn’t changed. People just came to have different associations with it as the traditional institutions of servitude in large part got swept away over the last few centuries. Landlords are the only kinds of lords most people ever deal with nowadays, I guess. Lead out in cuffs posted:So "Dominaedius delenda est", or "Ceterum censeo dominaedius esse delendam"? Nbd, it’s an interesting question and this isn’t Serious Posts Only even if I come off that way lol. Both of those are talking about a singular landlord to be destroyed. Try “dominaedii delendi sunt” for “landlords (plurally) must be destroyed”. If you plan to append it to your every address to the senate, maybe “ceterum censeo delendos esse dominaedium”? Not sure though, “dominaedius” is kinda weird word, never seen it before today, let alone gone through the declensions. If I ever have to deal with a Roman landlord, I think im gonna be better off just cutting to the chase and destroying him
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Mar 21, 2023 22:48
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I feel like if you wanna say a specific thing about renting and not just end up with a generic anti-authoritarian cry, you should probably jury-rig something to be more specific.
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Mar 22, 2023 00:45
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For a good read about (fictionalized) Roman apartment hijinx, read the Falco novel "Venus in Copper".
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Mar 22, 2023 00:49
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The Roman's did have urban apartment buildings though?
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Mar 22, 2023 03:31
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Contextually I imagine this is meant as a denouncement of the owners of necessary property (such as housing) who gain wealth by renting it to others, often at usurious rates, rather than, specifically, slumlords.
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Mar 22, 2023 16:33
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sullat posted:For a good read about (fictionalized) Roman apartment hijinx, read the Falco novel "Venus in Copper". Falco books are pretty drat good. Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series was one of the first books that got me into reading historical fiction though.
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Mar 30, 2023 07:11
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Came up in another thread how 'Byzantine' became a byword for baroque, overcomplicated and incomprehensible systems and arrangements, obviously associated with Byzantium or whatever the heck you'd like to call it in its last days. I do wonder, how much of that is true? We're well aware how ridiculous and weird a fading empire can get, but some of the stuff like the docks of Constantinople being made of wrecks has a sniff of propaganda to it.
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Mar 30, 2023 12:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Came up in another thread how 'Byzantine' became a byword for baroque, overcomplicated and incomprehensible systems and arrangements, obviously associated with Byzantium or whatever the heck you'd like to call it in its last days. I do wonder, how much of that is true? We're well aware how ridiculous and weird a fading empire can get, but some of the stuff like the docks of Constantinople being made of wrecks has a sniff of propaganda to it. My understanding is that the reference is mostly to the court politics which was basically intrigues nested in intrigues.
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Mar 30, 2023 13:25
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I don't think it's really based in anything. The court politics got complex, but that happens in lots of places. The Roman Empire was the largest state (I'm using state loosely, you can argue it was the only state at all) in medieval Christendom and had like a proper state bureaucracy, so if anything I guess it's based in that? But it's not like that's unique to the Romans.
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Mar 30, 2023 13:26
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Came up in another thread how 'Byzantine' became a byword for baroque, overcomplicated and incomprehensible systems and arrangements, obviously associated with Byzantium or whatever the heck you'd like to call it in its last days. I do wonder, how much of that is true? We're well aware how ridiculous and weird a fading empire can get, but some of the stuff like the docks of Constantinople being made of wrecks has a sniff of propaganda to it. This particular association is traced to Gibbons, and as a deracinated adjective seems to mostly be traced to Koestler (1937). Gibbons gonna Gibbons, he drew a stark difference in judgment between sophisticated Italian Romans backstabbing and jockeying for power vs degenerate Greek Romans backstabbing and jokeying for power. I could try and make a complicated argument here but honestly I think you can just ask yourself, how much do you trust Edward Gibbons' judgment?
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Mar 30, 2023 13:45
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think it's really based in anything. The court politics got complex, but that happens in lots of places. The Roman Empire was the largest state (I'm using state loosely, you can argue it was the only state at all) in medieval Christendom and had like a proper state bureaucracy, so if anything I guess it's based in that? But it's not like that's unique to the Romans. Random googling suggests that it's a 19th century thing, and stems from Gibbon bagging on them : quote:In his influential multi-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon caricatured the history of the Byzantine Empire as little more than a series of shady backroom deals, backstabbing, and power grabs. (In fact, the same could easily be said of Ancient Rome—which Gibbon glorified—or the Islamic societies nearby.)” Source is some weird lifestyle thing so take it with a sack of salt, but is actually cites names and dates in a way that makes me suspect they're cribbing from someone else. If anyone has access to OED Online you can probably get a better first attested use of it as a synonym for excessively complex. edit: Oh I'm dumb. That dumb lifestyle thing points to a Slate article, which is where they're getting all their info from unsuprisingly. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 13:49
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I mean, if you’re engaging with the English-language historiography about Rome at all, you probably do trust Gibbon’s judgment on a lot of things whether you want to believe it or not. Gibbon didn’t invent the idea that there was something hosed up and weird about the grandiosity of Byzantine court culture. It’s a very obvious result of the western European cultures spending centuries and centuries defining themselves in imitation of and opposition to the Empire at Constantinople, and in the long run, getting to be quite smug about outlasting it. For example of the former, here’s an account of bishop Liutprand of Cremona’s embassy from Otto I and II, Saxon emperors of the Romans, to Nikephoros Phokas, Greek emperor of the Romans, in 963. quote:On the day before the Nones of June we came to Constantinople, and there, as a mark of disrespect to yourselves [ie the Ottos], being shamefully received, we were harshly and shamefully treated. We were shut up in a palace large enough, indeed, but uncovered, neither keeping out the cold nor warding off the heat. Armed soldiers were made to stand guard who were to prevent all of my companions from going out and all others from coming in. This dwelling, into which we alone who were shut up could pass, was so far removed from the palace that our breath was taken away when we walked there—we did not ride. To add to our calamity the Greek wine, on account of being mixed with pitch, resin and plaster was to us undrinkable. The house itself was without water, nor could we even for money buy water to still our thirst. To this great torment was added another torment—our warden, namely, who cared for our daily support. If one were to look for his like, not earth, but perhaps hell, would furnish it; for he, like an inundating torrent, poured forth on us whatever calamity, whatever plunder, whatever expense, whatever torment, whatever misery he could invent. Nor among a hundred and twenty days did a single one pass without bringing us groaning and grief… And this is before they even started being rude to him in person. Read on and you’ll get an idea of why people who actually had to read the available primary sources to get a picture of the past, like Gibbon for example, came away impressed with the complexity, if not the moral character, of the medieval eastern empire.
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Mar 30, 2023 14:00
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We've also got the "Byzantine Generals Problem", which was originally the "Chinese Generals Problem", until some computer scientists thought it better to use a name no one has ever self-identified as.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:43
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If I had a button that would erase gibbons from history I would press it
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Mar 30, 2023 16:48
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Omnomnomnivore posted:We've also got the "Byzantine Generals Problem", which was originally the "Chinese Generals Problem", until some computer scientists thought it better to use a name no one has ever self-identified as. Though there's now a push in CS circles to rename this (along with other more problematic terms, most notably master-slave relationships which are all over the place) to something that doesn't reference any ethnic group. Two Generals Problem works just as well anyway.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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skasion posted:
quote:On the seventh day before the Ides (June 7), moreover, on the sacred day of Pentecost itself, in the palace which is called the crown hall, I was led before Nicephorus—a monstrosity of a man, a pygmy, fat-headed and like a mole as to the smallness of his eyes; disgusting with his short, broad, thick, and half hoary beard; disgraced by a neck an inch long; very bristly through the length and thickness of his hair; in colour an Ethiopian; one whom it would not be pleasant to meet in the middle of the night; with extensive belly, lean of loin, very long of hip considering his short stature, small of shank, proportionate as to his heels and feet; clad in a garment costly but too old, and foul-smelling and faded through age; shod with Sicyonian shoes; bold of tongue, a fox by nature, in perjury and lying a Ulysses. Always my lords and august emperors ye seemed to me shapely, how much more shapely after this! Always magnificent, how much more magnificent after this! Always powerful, how much more powerful after this! Always gentle, how much more gentle henceforth! Always full of virtues, how much fuller henceforth. At his left, not in a line but far below, sat two petty emperors, once his masters, now his subjects. His discourse began as follows: Get his rear end your eminence In that letter, by his own accounting, he is insanely confrontational with the emperor and his court, and they with him, is that how it was done or is he just embellishing it to make himself look more courageous? Fiction has led me to believe that medieval diplomacy was a delicate dance of manners, protocols, and allusion, but these guys are calling each other dishrags
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Mar 30, 2023 17:19
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euphronius posted:If I had a button that would erase gibbons from history I would press it What have gibbons ever done to you? They're just innocent monkeys, euphronius.
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Mar 30, 2023 17:21
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euphronius posted:If I had a button that would erase gibbons from history I would press it The thing is that Gibbons is not really doing history in the sense we think of it today. He is largely marking a critique of 18th century society using his interpretation of the history of Rome as a mirror for this. In this sense he really has a lot more in common with the people today who try to draw parallels between current governments and Rome than he does with academic historians. This has actually been a pretty common way of doing history for most of, well, history; moralizing the past and using it as a mirror for now has often been seen as the primary thing history is useful for. Gibbons is working in that tradition.
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Mar 30, 2023 17:26
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Gibbons certainly is a net positive on the field purely from the amount of people he inspired even if his work doesn't meet today's standards.
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Mar 30, 2023 17:28
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zoux posted:Get his rear end your eminence Really hard to say for sure unfortunately. If there was ever an account of this embassy from the opposing side, it does not survive. Though it doesn’t follow that it would have been any less full of spin anyway. If you get to the end it turns out Liutprand brokered a worse marriage-alliance deal than he was sent to get, so it was definitely in his interests to justify this to his boss by stressing how bad, dumb, smelly, uncooperative etc the other guy was, and how hard he fought to get his own end in. It’s a prepared, and highly rhetorical, report, and not a record of strict facts. But if nothing else, the sheer amount of vitriol he fits in there suggests there was real bad feeling. One should probably doubt that his comebacks were all that snappy in real life. But I don’t think it’s at all unbelievable that he came across high-handed, given his position in his own society. For that matter it’s easy to see from his own account that his Byzantine interlocutors might well be skeptical about German emperors (or “emperors” in their opinion) sending embassies to them like equals, rather than inferior supplicants. From their standpoint, to tolerate his behavior as opposed to trying to bust his balls would have been to encourage the Germans to push them around, which they were already trying to do anyway—the underlying issue here is basically them taking advantage of Byzantine force projection problems to try and get legal recognition of a seizure of Byzantine territory in Italy. People could be more mannerly than this, and probably usually were, even in the 10th century.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:11
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I now imagine this guy as medieval George Constanza writing that the jerk store is out of Byzantines on the boat home.
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Mar 30, 2023 18:49
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A_Bluenoser posted:The thing is that Gibbons is not really doing history in the sense we think of it today. He is largely marking a critique of 18th century society using his interpretation of the history of Rome as a mirror for this. In this sense he really has a lot more in common with the people today who try to draw parallels between current governments and Rome than he does with academic historians. This has actually been a pretty common way of doing history for most of, well, history; moralizing the past and using it as a mirror for now has often been seen as the primary thing history is useful for. Gibbons is working in that tradition. David Womersley (iirc the most recent scholarly editor of Gibbon) basically argues that Gibbon should now be read as a grand literary narrative rather than as a historical text.
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Mar 30, 2023 19:33
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I took that as a Gibbon
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Mar 30, 2023 19:54
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PittTheElder posted:Though there's now a push in CS circles to rename this (along with other more problematic terms, most notably master-slave relationships which are all over the place) to something that doesn't reference any ethnic group. Two Generals Problem works just as well anyway. im pretty happy to report none of the CS circles I'm in has a Paradox map gamer trying to argue Byzantine is a valid ethnicity
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Mar 31, 2023 04:17
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Lady Radia posted:im pretty happy to report none of the CS circles I'm in has a Paradox map gamer trying to argue Byzantine is a valid ethnicity yah, they were romans, but i still think byzantine counts as an exonym even with a huge time gap. tho there were folk that still considered themselves romans into the 20th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnos#Modern_period
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Mar 31, 2023 04:23
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Yeah, the idea that the Byzantines were untrustworthy and always scheming was something the Western Europeans believed long before Gibbon. Especially during the crusades there was mutual mistrust between the Westerners and the Greeks practically right from the start. To the Greeks the Westerners were little better than crude, violent barbarians who had to be kept under close watch the entire time they were in Byzantine lands - and to the Westerners the Greeks were constantly being difficult, stingy and ungrateful to the people who had come to aid them in their hour of need. This mistrust was a major reason that the Westerners attacked and sacked Constantinople during the fourth crusade - from their point of view they had been hired to help install a Byzantine pretender to the throne, but after he was made co-emperor he basically went "sorry, we can't pay you - go away".
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Mar 31, 2023 08:57
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skasion posted:
Nowadays we only have retsina, but the other ones must have been wild.
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Mar 31, 2023 09:55
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I've heard of builder's tea, but not building wine
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Mar 31, 2023 12:31
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