|
The Nuremberg example was comparing the statement “Rome was against (or has a taboo about ) child sacrifice” to the statement “the west is against (or has a taboo about ) genocide ” I think they are similar statements euphronius fucked around with this message at 16:07 on May 9, 2024 |
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
Mad Hamish posted:Didn't the Romans - presumably Jules C - write down that the Gauls or the Celts or the Druids or whoever it was they wanted to feel better than sacrifice criminals to their gods? I feel weird about that, like, wouldn't you want to give the Gods something you see as valuable? Sometimes? I really feel like there are two or three distinct types of human sacrifice: There's retainer sacrifice, where deceased rulers or important figures are buried with servants and/or consorts, presumably so they can continue their service in the afterlife. This seems to show up pretty early in history but is usually replaced by burying effigies instead or just waiting for people to die. There's the sacrifice of criminals/outsiders/prisoners, which I think is pretty common and can be hard to distinguish from ritual execution/auto da fe/etc. A couple of times in history this scaled up massively, such as under the Shang or Aztecs, and ends up as this horrible hungry monster that demands more and more blood. Finally there's the sacrifice of valuable members of one's own community, such as with the River God mentioned above or the Carthaginian tophets. I think this is the kind both modern people and outsiders have the hardest time with, because it is the most obviously religiously motivated and seems to equate members of one's own community with sacrificial animals or objects. FishFood fucked around with this message at 16:24 on May 9, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:17
|
|
|
euphronius posted:The Nuremberg example was comparing the statement “Rome was against (or has a taboo about ) child sacrifice” to the statement “the west is against (or has a taboo about ) genocide ” To make it excruciatingly clear, as the person who first mentioned Nuremberg, my point was the following: Nuremberg executions : Roman human sacrifice :: Roman executions : Carthaginian human sacrifice. I was saying that a person may consider the executions carried out after Nuremberg to be right, proper, and morally justified while simultaneously considering the widespread practice of capital punishment for minor offenses as practiced by the Romans to be wrong, improper, and morally unjustified. This is equivalent to how the Romans saw their own (rare, last resort) human sacrifices as moral while considering the (allegedly) widespread practice of human sacrifice in Carthage to be immoral.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:23
|
|
|
Right. I understand your argument. Tho I am leery of any statement which generalizes what Romans thought or believed based on what we know
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:27
|
|
|
Though I would never call them "the same thing", for me where the logics of state, criminal execution and ritual sacrifice can begin to blur and overlap is in their purposes. They're both forms of formalized murder that reach to produce a desired effect. Sacrifice a person because we got bad harvests once and we want good harvests, the gods control harvests, and they like sacrifices, so it makes sense, even if there's only conjectural evidence. Execute a criminal for retribution/vengeance (incidentally, also a pagan god...), and as a deterrent, people want less crime, and criminals will be deterred by the penalty, so it makes sense, even if there's only conjectural evidence. The formal logic in either case is that the appropriate death can somehow satisfy an abstraction which needs satisfaction.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:34
|
|
|
Elissimpark posted:Dubbin, which is a wax/oil combo for waterproofing leather, has been around since mediaeval times. Tallow, I think, would also work. According to Wikipedia, polishing leather is a more modern phenomenon. Yeah, Wikipedia looked kind of suspicious to me because I thought tallow/wax/oil/etc would all have been around before then and there's a clear utility to maintaining leather things, so surely someone would have worked something out earlier. But maybe it's just less obvious than it looks.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:38
|
|
|
Romans threw effigies in the river as well btw. Specifically, vestal virgins did it, on the festival of Argei in May. It’s in Ovid’s Fasti. He and the river-god debate about whether it was a replacement for human sacrifice, or to commemorate a weird form of archaic burial.Mad Hamish posted:Didn't the Romans - presumably Jules C - write down that the Gauls or the Celts or the Druids or whoever it was they wanted to feel better than sacrifice criminals to their gods? I feel weird about that, like, wouldn't you want to give the Gods something you see as valuable? Caesar says this in the famous wicker man passage yeah. Gallic Wars 6.16, tr. Edwards posted:The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so, employing the Druids as ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless for a man's life a man's life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private, life they observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind. Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails they resort to the execution even of the innocent. The gods prefer the guilty. Or anyway so says Caesar. Slightly later he also says the Gauls burn their beloved possessions and (animal) chattels with them when they die (Gallic Wars 6.19), and that until “a little while ago” (“paulo supra hanc memoriam”), their slaves and dependents would also be burned in these funerary rites.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 16:41
|
|
|
skasion posted:The gods prefer the guilty. Or anyway so says Caesar. How convenient.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 17:50
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Sure, it all blurs together. We can even see this right now in the modern day. But to me it just comes back to: the simpler way of looking at it, is to assume that they mean what they say. As the other guy just said, the Romans considered these separate categories of action. Were the Romans wrong, or lying to themselves, or what? I think you can persuasively argue the Romans did not have a concept of anything being separate from religion. The Roman religion was all-pervasive, even if the named gods weren't interested in something the spirits of the objects/land/whatever would be involved. Sacrifice, however, is a quite specific act in Roman religion and can be thought of as a business transaction. You are making payment to a god for something they already did or you are hoping they will do. It's not a "here's a dead cow, someone help me" thing either, the ritual forms are extremely specific (to the point that if you mispronounce a word you have to start over from the beginning) and a particular god has to be named. You are not doing this in an execution, or at a butcher shop, so it's not a sacrifice. There's really not much room for debate about it, the Roman view on this is clear. You can talk about it as an intellectual exercise but you have to understand that's you, a modern person, considering things through a modern lens. It has nothing to do with how the Romans viewed it.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 18:28
|
|
|
Kylaer posted:To make it excruciatingly clear, as the person who first mentioned Nuremberg, my point was the following: Did the Romans consider the human sacrifice in that situation moral? Might they not have considered it as something "not good" and morally questionable at best but simply necessary in the situation of extreme crisis? I don't know and I don't know if we even have the evidence to determine that but it is a possibility. Some of the later Roman commentators seem to have regarded the episode as having been morally bad but I don't know if those same commentators also regarded it as having been ineffective and unnecessary.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 18:47
|
|
|
A_Bluenoser posted:Did the Romans consider the human sacrifice in that situation moral? Might they not have considered it as something "not good" and morally questionable at best but simply necessary in the situation of extreme crisis? I don't know and I don't know if we even have the evidence to determine that but it is a possibility. Some of the later Roman commentators seem to have regarded the episode as having been morally bad but I don't know if those same commentators also regarded it as having been ineffective and unnecessary. In Livy's words: "A Gaulish man and a Gaulish woman and a Greek man and a Greek woman were buried alive under the Forum Boarium. They were lowered into a stone vault, which had on a previous occasion also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings. When the gods were believed to be duly propitiated, Marcus Claudius Marcellus sent from Ostia 1500 men who had been enrolled for service with the fleet to garrison Rome." It's an instance of "moral" and "effective" being different concepts. The Roman religion had a lot of room for this--foreign gods were real, they just weren't our gods and ours are better. Similar to how early parts of the Bible are explicit that there are many gods, you're just only allowed to worship Yahweh. Human sacrifice works, you're just not supposed to do it.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 18:55
|
|
|
Yeah I think people are getting really hung up on blurring the various kinds of state-sponsored killing. Propitiatory human sacrifice, judicial executions, military action, and clandestine black ops can certainly overlap in terms of their political functions, and, like, killing people is bad, mmkay? But society (both modern and ancient) has vastly different ethical and theological views of them, and it is facile to say that they're all one and the same.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 19:55
|
|
|
For Carthage in particular, I had heard the theory that since the remains were almost exclusively babies, that this possibly wasn't killing living babies in sacrifice, but dedicating the victims of natural infant mortality to the gods. Does that possibility remain open with current research?
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 19:58
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:For Carthage in particular, I had heard the theory that since the remains were almost exclusively babies, that this possibly wasn't killing living babies in sacrifice, but dedicating the victims of natural infant mortality to the gods. Does that possibility remain open with current research? It doesn't seem particularly likely
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 20:02
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:It doesn't seem particularly likely Based on?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 02:46
|
|
|
while i agree that believing roman propaganda without any reservations is foolish, it is not outlandish to think that carthage probably did have a culture of human sacrifice. it was a phoenician colony and the phoenicians were canaanite. the old testament slams the canaanites an awful lot for, wouldn't you know it, human sacrifice. yes this is also an enemy perspective and quite divorced in time from carthage itself, but i find the correlation between the two a lot more convincing than either account is by itself
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 03:18
|
|
|
While it's still a little controversial, I think the current view is that the archaeological evidence also supports the idea that the Carthaginians practiced human sacrifice. The various tophets in Punic settlements throughout the Western Med were first interpreted as proof of child sacrifice, then as simply child cemeteries, but now the thought is that at least some of the burials are of sacrificial victims. Some graves seem to contain both animal remains and those of children, and there are some pretty unambiguous inscriptions along the lines of "Hannibal son of Hannibal promised Baal Hammon his next child if he gave him [x] and Baal Hammon did so here's my child".
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 03:54
|
|
|
Is it really any worse than leaving children on mountainsides instead?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:01
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Is it really any worse than leaving children on mountainsides instead? It’s totally different. Romans do it this way and Carthaginians do it that way. See? Different.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:04
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Is it really any worse than leaving children on mountainsides instead? I don't really think so, but the Greeks and Romans sure did. I really wish we had some surviving Punic sources rather than just the writings of people who hated them.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:09
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:In Livy's words: Yeah, that is kind of what I figured: less "the only moral human sacrifice is my human sacrifice" and more " human sacrifice is always disgusting and degenerate but is also really effective so if you need to save the city then you do what you need to do and bury some folks alive" kind of thing.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:14
|
|
|
The leaving children out to die thing has also been overstated as part of the Spartan mirage stuff. Like we have written records of adult Spartiates with physical deformities. People loved their kids and were not excited to just toss them away for having a club foot or whatever. It's similar how to, legally, a Roman father was allowed to kill his children but there is not a single record of that ever happening. There's good evidence for Phoenician child sacrifice but like you say, we lack the records to really understand what was going on or the scale of it.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:17
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:In Livy's words: I note they were buried alive in what sounds like an oubliette, so it's almost like they technically didn't sacrifice them per se. "If we leave a couple people in this hole and the gods come and accept them as a sacrifice, waddya gonna do?"
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 04:35
|
|
|
All the Roman human sacrifices I can think of are buried alive, yeah. I'm not sure if there are any recorded ones of actually killing the person the way you would an animal.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:01
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:All the Roman human sacrifices I can think of are buried alive, yeah. I'm not sure if there are any recorded ones of actually killing the person the way you would an animal. But was it ‘buried alive’ like ‘fill the pit back in with dirt and they suffocate’, or ‘close the entrance again, they’ll die eventually’.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:07
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:But was it ‘buried alive’ like ‘fill the pit back in with dirt and they suffocate’, or ‘close the entrance again, they’ll die eventually’. It's a little room. There was also one where Vestal Virgins were executed if they were caught having sex. Their blood couldn't be spilled so they were put in there and left to die.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:22
|
|
|
The vestal not-virgins get entombed with a candle and some water so they have time to reflect on their mistakes.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:23
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:All the Roman human sacrifices I can think of are buried alive, yeah. I'm not sure if there are any recorded ones of actually killing the person the way you would an animal. Well when they ritually murder Vercingetorix at the end of Caesar's triumph, a cynic might call that a human sacrifice and that's done by strangulation.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:27
|
|
|
A baby left out to die of exposure could also get found and taken care of despite being abandoned. There are a couple myths regarding that possibility, either to console people about the cruelty or to warn against the practice.sullat posted:Well when they ritually murder Vercingetorix at the end of Caesar's triumph, a cynic might call that a human sacrifice and that's done by strangulation. That's an occasion where it's pretty clearly more of a party for Caesar than a sacrifice to the gods. Also the ritual murder part seems like it wasn't that important since Caesar nixed that part of the ceremony for some of his other triumphs when the crowd was vibing against it. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 05:39 on May 10, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 05:34
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:It's similar how to, legally, a Roman father was allowed to kill his children but there is not a single record of that ever happening. Constantine did nothing wrong, got it  I know you're an earlier Rome guy so probably outside the period and quite possibly repealed by Big C's day, also the suggestions of assorted treason allegations which mix it up, but I couldn't help myself
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 06:59
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
Is it really a party if you're not strangling an enemy general in front of everyone?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 07:00
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:Constantine did nothing wrong, got it Fair but not really what I was talking about. I meant that Roman fathers held legal power of life and death over their children so in theory a regular Roman dad could just decide his kid sucks and kill him without that being considered murder, but there's no recorded instance of anyone actually doing that. Dynastic disputes among the elite are a different thing, you always end up with some family murders anywhere that kind of system exists.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 07:07
|
|
|
Infanticide of deformed children was enshrined into very early Roman law (codified in 449 BC, presumably much older than that), in section IV.1 of the Twelve Tables. It's not just allowing the father to kill a deformed infant; it's requiring him to do so (though with weaselly language; it specifies a 'notably' deformed child in the translation I'm looking at). Though the fact that a law was made commanding fathers to do that suggests that many did not, hence the law. The secondary source I remembered that from claims without discussion that infanticide of girls was also common; the citation it gives is from 1971 (and the book I'm reading is from 1995) though so it might be superceded by newer work.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 07:21
|
|
|
The current thinking is it wasn't that common. There hasn't been much evidence of it turned up--we know it happened, there are letters and such that don't make any sense if infanticide didn't happen, but physical evidence is lacking and it seems like if it was as routine as some of the older sources suggest, we'd find more dead babies around. Plus more recent scholarship has leaned a lot more into thinking that ancient people's emotional life was not that different from ours and most people just aren't going to murder their children, no matter what law or tradition says. That certainly falls into squishy and unprovable territory but I think it's right.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 08:06
|
|
|
I would have assumed exposure wouldn’t leave much archaeological evidence because the bones would be scattered and broken by scavenging animals?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 08:10
|
|
|
One of the best evidences of exposure is also evidence that it didn’t kill every kid. Namely, the existence of people named Kopron (poop) and related terms, all so called because, apparently, they were found on dumps/dung hills (kopriai). So some would have been adopted, some definitely enslaved (this is like a stock plot device in Roman comedy, the foundling slave who ends up restored to his parents), and some (probably most) died. In the 4th century AD there was some legislation apparently opposed to the practice, including a law of Constantine which allowed people to sell their children into slavery (cutting out exposure as the middleman, and incidentally also making GBS threads all over a fundamental principle of old school Mediterranean city-state law), and later a Valentinian law which seems to say that exposure was to be considered illegal infanticide and punished accordingly (death).
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 11:13
|
|
|
euphronius posted:I’m not clicking on a British tabloid link Quite apart from anything else, not every British newspaper is a 'tabloid' (in the sense you're using it). The Guardian is the main mainstream centre-left newspaper. It used to be a broadsheet (paper size), then moved to Berliner, and is now a tabloid in physical dimensions, but it's not the Daily Mail. You might as well just say 'I don't trust the lying mainstream media' and have done with it. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:26 on May 10, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 12:23
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Quite apart from anything else, not every British newspaper is a 'tabloid' (in the sense you're using it). The Guardian is the main mainstream centre-left newspaper. It used to be a broadsheet (paper size), then moved to Berliner, and is now a tabloid in physical dimensions, but it's not the Daily Mail. You might as well just say 'I don't trust the lying mainstream media' and have done with it. Ok but I don’t think people here want me to rant about British media so we will just move on
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 12:30
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:I would have assumed exposure wouldn’t leave much archaeological evidence because the bones would be scattered and broken by scavenging animals? Yeah bearded vultures and other big birds would have gobbled that up in a heartbeat.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 13:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
skasion posted:One of the best evidences of exposure is also evidence that it didn’t kill every kid. Namely, the existence of people named Kopron (poop) and related terms, all so called because, apparently, they were found on dumps/dung hills (kopriai). The ancients were savage man
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 14:13
|
|
