|
If you were spending a bunch of your own money to build a temple or whatever with GAIUS FURIUS IS AWESOME FOR BUILDING THIS you wanted it to last. I doubt anyone expected bridges to still be in use 2000 years later, but you certainly didn't want it to be in need of replacement in 50. A lot different than building a modern apartment or whatever. Roman concrete would also set underwater, which I think took modern people a while to rediscover. Keep in mind that while Roman concrete was as strong or stronger than standard modern concrete, they never figured out reinforced concrete. So modern reinforced concrete structures are stronger.
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 02:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 15:52 |
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:If you were spending a bunch of your own money to build a temple or whatever with GAIUS FURIUS IS AWESOME FOR BUILDING THIS you wanted it to last. I doubt anyone expected bridges to still be in use 2000 years later, but you certainly didn't want it to be in need of replacement in 50. A lot different than building a modern apartment or whatever. I sort of recall this being covered before, but I'd like to clarify something in case I ever decide to open my big mouth in conversation. They never discovered reinforced concrete, but was that really about them being worse than us at using concrete? What I mean is didn't the Romans care too much about their iron to use it in their concrete when the concrete was good enough without it?
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 04:46
|
|
|
They just never came up with the technology. My understanding (I am not a civil engineer) is it's unnecessary unless you're building something of a certain height/size or trying to reinforce against earthquake damage, and the Romans didn't build anything big enough or have any scientific knowledge of earthquakes. So, reinforced concrete was never a thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 04:57
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:or have any scientific knowledge of earthquakes. I take this to mean they assumed that earthquakes were the work of the Gods or just something that happened that they couldn't explain/understand, yeah?
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 05:49
|
|
|
As everyone knows, earthquakes are the consequence of homosexuality.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 05:57
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:They just never came up with the technology. My understanding (I am not a civil engineer) is it's unnecessary unless you're building something of a certain height/size or trying to reinforce against earthquake damage, and the Romans didn't build anything big enough or have any scientific knowledge of earthquakes. So, reinforced concrete was never a thing. Yeah the Romans were fairly conservative in how they actually built things. When crossing a valley for an aqueduct, for example, they'd prefer to do it with a whole bunch of small arches instead of one or several large arches, which would have necessitated stuff like reinforcing metal.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 06:04
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:They just never came up with the technology. My understanding (I am not a civil engineer) is it's unnecessary unless you're building something of a certain height/size or trying to reinforce against earthquake damage, and the Romans didn't build anything big enough or have any scientific knowledge of earthquakes. So, reinforced concrete was never a thing. Are earthquakes frequent in the Mediterranean? I get the impression, possibly erroneous, that they're pretty rare. They might just have had no need to compensate for tectonic activity.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 06:27
|
|
|
Italy is fairly active, decent number of quakes and the only active volcanoes in Europe. I think its the most seismically active part of the continent. But that was the work of the gods, they didn't understand it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 06:55
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Italy is fairly active, decent number of quakes and the only active volcanoes in Europe. I think its the most seismically active part of the continent. But that was the work of the gods, they didn't understand it. And just recently they sent several geologist to jail because they suggested that several minor pre-shocks didn't necessarily mean a large earthquake was coming. A large earthquake did hit a few dozen people died and the geologist found themselves in prison on manslaughter charges because they didn't accurately predict something as finicky as a future earthquakes size and time period.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 07:36
|
|
|
If I recall, there was a discussion a while back in the thread about steam engines and things, and it was pointed out that the Empire didn’t actually produce all that much iron. I have a feeling that even if someone had thought of reinforcing a concrete structure with iron rebar, the idea would have been discarded as being too expensive. That’s just a guess, of course. New subject: tell me about Roman navies! Was there a “branch” of the coastal legions that handled military boats, or was it a separate thing entirely? The Romans aren’t really famous as a naval power prior to I guess the medieval period with their fire-ships and stuff, but I’ve been going through the History of Rome podcast and I’ve noticed that there are a lot of times where they seem to pull fleet of a few hundred ships right out of nowhere. Sometimes they built them for a specific campaign, but they must have been getting people with shipbuilding and naval command experience from somewhere. There’s a great story from the third century where a general fucks off to Britain with the entire fleet and rules the island for a while; Constantius eventually comes to take the island back, but while I can understand just plain building more boats, he must have gotten the sailors from someplace, surely? Non-Roman question: how exactly did Greek/Phoenician/whatever colony cities work? There are a lot of cities all over the Mediterranean that are colonies of some other city, but what was the relationship between the mother city and the colony? Where did the population for these colonies come from – how does Athens or whoever found a bunch of colonies and then not end up depopulated at home?
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 14:44
|
|
|
The Romans tended to disdain the navy and raise/disband them as needed. They built their first to fight Carthage, and it was literally just copying Carthage's ships with the addition of the corvus so they could go stab all the Carthaginian sailors rather than try to out-sail them. Later there are many instances of fleets being built out of whole cloth because there was a need. After the pirates were finally eliminated from the Mediterranean they largely got rid of the navy, though there were always some ships for patrols and making sure pirates didn't come back. But if they needed a larger force, typically it would be built on order. There were also specific river fleets that were used a lot, especially on the Danube. They did maintain a major naval base at Misenum. Wikipedia has a list of the fleet ships that were recorded at one point or another: 1 hexeres: Ops 1 quinquereme: Victoria 9 quadriremes: Fides, Vesta, Venus, Minerva, Dacicus, Fortuna, Annona, Libertas, Olivus 50 triremes: Concordia, Spes, Mercurius, Iuno, Neptunus, Asclepius, Hercules, Lucifer, Diana, Apollo, Venus, Perseus, Salus, Athenonix, Satyra, Rhenus, Libertas, Tigris, Oceanus, Cupidus, Victoria, Taurus, Augustus, Minerva, Particus, Eufrates, Vesta, Aesculapius, Pietas, Fides, Danubius, Ceres, Tibur, Pollux, Mars, Salvia, Triunphus, Aquila, Liberus Pater, Nilus, Caprus, Sol, Isis, Providentia, Fortuna, Iuppiter, Virtus, Castor 11 liburnians: Aquila, Agathopus, Fides, Aesculapius, Iustitia, Virtus, Taurus Ruber, Nereis, Clementia, Armata, Minerva These weren't all in service at the same time. The fleet of Ravenna had these: 2 quinqueremes: Augustus, Victoria. 6 quadriremes: Fortuna, Mercurius, Neptunus, Padus, Vesta, Victoria. 28 triremes: Aesculapius, Apollo, Aquila, Archinix, Ariadna, Augustus, Castor, Concordia, Costantia, Danae, Danubius, Diana, Felicitas, Hercules, Mars, Mercurius, Minerva, Neptunus, Nereis, Pax, Pietas, Pinnata, Providentia, Silvanus, Triumphus, Venus, Virtus, Victoria. 5 liburnians: Ammon, Diana, Pinnata, Satyra, Varvarina. 5 other vessels: Clementia, Danubius, Hercules, Mercurius, Victoria. Those were the two major imperial fleet centers, Ravenna and Misenum. Various provinces had their own detachments for their use. It was totally its own branch of the service, though. Different rules, many/most of the sailors were recruited from maritime people rather than Romans, the service period was 26 years instead of 25, etc.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 14:55
|
|
|
Greek colonies were one response to overpopulation at home. Greece is pretty compact and there wasn't much in the way of places you could expand to, and nobody really wants a bunch of unemployed men wandering around the city with nothing to do. New colonies would tend to have affection toward the mother-city (metropolis), but they were politically independent from the start in most cases. In most cases, though, there were favorable trade arrangements with the mother-city, so if your new colony happened to settle near some kind of rare resource, the metropolis would end up getting a supply of it through these kinds of deals. So it was often a mutually beneficial arrangement -- people who were on the margins of society got to try to make a new life for themselves in some (That said, some were founded as the result of strife -- by refugees or the remains of a losing faction in a civil war.) I don't know about the Phoenician side of things, but I can't imagine it was too different.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 14:59
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:Are earthquakes frequent in the Mediterranean? I get the impression, possibly erroneous, that they're pretty rare. They might just have had no need to compensate for tectonic activity. The Mediterranean is a collision zone between the African and European plates. Italy is actually a piece of the African plate that broke off and got rammed into southern Europe, plowing up the Alps ahead of it. The entire area from Sicily to Turkey is very seismically active, with large earthquakes occurring fairly regularly. The island of Thera, off the coast of Greece, blew itself up completely in a volcanic eruption similar to Krakatoa around 1500 BC. In fact, the Jordan River valley and Dead Sea are actually a part of a chain of rift valleys extending down through the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa, as the African plate is now pulling away from the Asian plate. I don't think the western end, towards Spain, is as active though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 16:00
|
|
|
Phoenician colonies were significantly different from Greek colonies in a number of different ways. First of all, population growth wasn't the primary motivation for expanding. The Phoenician cities had quite happily stayed confined to their cozy little area for hundreds of years, and the only real expansion was at each others expense. At this point, the Phoenicians are primarily concerned with trading throughout the Mediterranean and the only real overseas presence are small little enclaves in port cities (notably in the west, there's evidence of combined Greek/Phoenician trading companies). Unfortunately right next door was the Assyrian Empire, who basically saw the Phoenicians making mad bank of their sea trading and realized they could extort the living poo poo out of them. So the Assyrians set up what is essentially a protection racket, with the Phoenicians (chiefly Tyre, which becomes the defacto leader) providing all the materials Assyria needs that in can't produce itself (Cedarwood, dyes, silver, iron, copper, etc) and acting as Assyria's navy, and in return the Assyrians don't crush them like a bug. So that actually works out pretty well for both parties - Assyria gets what it wants and the Phoenicians have superpower backing - until the Assyrians start demanding more and more resources. The Phoenicians, realizing they have no way to reach the new quotas just by trading, start bulking up those little commercial enclaves with walls and guards and start directly extracting the resources themselves. Eventually this leads to full scale annexation of certain places (Tyre grabs chunks of Cyprus and other islands). But with constantly increasing demands by the Assyrians (especially for silver), the Phoenicians are forced to continue expanding. Unable to expand in the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians head west. The western Med was already a trade zone at this point, but in the old style of small little trading enclaves in native cities. The enclaves in places like Sardinia and Sicily are quickly replaced with large, entirely Phoenician settlements that start extracting whatever they can and sending it back home. At some point, the Phoenicians get to Spain ("Tarshish", probably Tartessus), and the massive amount of silver turns the Phoenician expansion into overdrive. They start building cities like crazy trying to grab as much as they can from this essentially untapped money-hose while also cutting off their rivals (notably, the Greek/Phoenician feud probably started here - there's evidence of cooperation between the two until around this period when the Greeks are basically told to get the hell out). At some point, Carthage is founded by Tyre and it's location halfway between Spain and Italy makes it one of the most important settlements, and what is essentially a transhipment hub between the west and Phoenicia. Carthage's rise also coincided with Tyre downfall, as they join a rebellion against Assyria and get curbstomped, leaving them a shadow of their former self. At this point, Carthage sort of just takes the reins of this massive network of trading colonies and becomes one of the big players in the Mediterranean. tldr, Greek colonies are a housing development / Phoenician colonies are chain restaurant. Slantedfloors fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Jun 10, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 16:25
|
|
|
How did death work in antiquity? Did they also have the tradition of a death bed where you'd be surrounded by loved ones? How much did it vary between social classes and civilizations?
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 17:27
|
|
|
Death is probably the most well understood social event because of the way tombs and graves tend to survive over the centuries. For example, for a long time, "how they died" was about all we knew about the Etruscans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Leopards That scene pictured may be the funeral banquet.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2013 17:29
|
|
|
For anyone interested in the process, there's a newish three part BBC documentary called Archaeology: A Secret History which is about the history of archaeology and its evolution into its modern form. I've only watched a bit so far but it seems good, and it has a lot of beautiful shots of ancient stuff so worth that if nothing else.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2013 16:32
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:How did death work in antiquity? Did they also have the tradition of a death bed where you'd be surrounded by loved ones? How much did it vary between social classes and civilizations? Proper burials were super important to the Greeks as well. As for, you know, the act itself, people tended to die for reasons, well, mostly out of their control, some suicides aside. Death beds and such were, well, places you'd be if you were sick. Plato writes that Socrates went out surrounded by friends, so that doesn't seem terribly unusual.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2013 17:30
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Proper burials were super important to the Greeks as well. As for, you know, the act itself, people tended to die for reasons, well, mostly out of their control, some suicides aside. Death beds and such were, well, places you'd be if you were sick. Plato writes that Socrates went out surrounded by friends, so that doesn't seem terribly unusual. Socrates's death was more easily scheduled for friends and family to attend.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2013 22:20
|
|
|
Hello everyone, I just started reading "Lords of the Sea" by John R. Hale. It's all about how the Golden Age of Athens was entirely powered by their maritime virtues- and how that seeped into their cultural in a big way. In the introduction, it even mentions that girls would be named "Naval something" like the female name Naumache meaning "naval victory" (@_@) All their sexual slang was focused on ships ramming each other too. Anyway, this book looks great. Lots of interesting factoids and worth picking up. A highlight so far is that the Parthenon was not an especially astounding thing for the Athenians compared to their pride and joy: the naval arsenal!
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 04:10
|
|
|
Barto posted:Hello everyone, It definitely seeped into their culture. If you look at Sophocles' Oedipus the King, for example, there's a lot of allusions to seafaring and nautical metaphors. (I usually like to rag on the old-school British translators, but in general they were good at preserving that kind of language.)
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 04:49
|
|
|
Quite possibly because Britain had the same sort of experience with regards to naval dominance securing their empire. Little point I want to pick up on for Barto - someone being called Naumache specifically might reflect a state's thalassophilia, but remember that most names had meanings, as they do and have done in lots of cultures. It's much less out of the ordinary compared to the same thing in a modern Anglophone context. Though I suppose even now parents often think of the derivations for their childrens' names, it's just less likely to be noticed by everyone else.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 08:47
|
|
|
Sleep of Bronze posted:Quite possibly because Britain had the same sort of experience with regards to naval dominance securing their empire. I guess the spoken effect of calling someone Naumache and using it in a contextual sentence is just processed differently in Greek?
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 09:00
|
|
|
sullat posted:Socrates's death was more easily scheduled for friends and family to attend. Well, yeah, but insofar as we have a death bed tradition of our own, it really only comes into play when you know somebody is going to die.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 10:07
|
|
|
Barto posted:I guess the spoken effect of calling someone Naumache and using it in a contextual sentence is just processed differently in Greek? Well, consider Hector's wife, Andromache - literally "man's victory". But even in English, do you process it as weird if you hear the name "Victoria" spoken? (Or various other names that are also nouns, like Faith or Meadow?)
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 10:25
|
|
|
Thanks for answering my questions before, guys.  Somehow I'd never heard of a liburna, although I guess it's similar enough to a bireme that the distinction doesn't come up often in modern sources?Naming someone "naval victory" doesn't seem that weird to me, but I suppose an additional question would be: is "naumache" the actual term you would use if you were discussing a real battle? I don't know ancient Greek, but it occurs to me that if you mention your fleet winning a battle, you might just say "mache" or whatever the plain word for victory is. I mean, I don't think anyone would get confused and think your fleet rowed into a field and drove off some hoplites, but then I don't know how Greek works so I could be totally wrong.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 12:36
|
|
|
Let me type out the passage here for the amusement of all (xxiv on the paperback) "Athenians exposed their naval obsession even in the names they gave their children. You could meet men named Naubios or "Naval Life" and Naukrates, "Naval Power"; women named Naumache or "Navel Battle" and Nausinike, "Naval Victory." Pericles, architect of the Golden Age, identified himself so closely with the fleet that he named his second son Paralos after the consecrated state Trireme Paralos. Another patriotic Athenian named his son Eurymedon after the Eurymedon River in Asian Minor, where an Athenian naval force won a great victory over the fleet and army of the Persian King in about 466 B.C. It was as if a family in more recent times had named a child Trafalgar or Midway. Perhaps inevitably, young Eurymedon grew up to be a naval commander."
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 13:01
|
|
|
ναυμαχία is a noun that means naval combat. You might also express it as "μαχαι ναων". (machai nauon) As a parallel in English, I once saw a board game called 'Cityfight'. The name was memorable to me because it's a neologism; a weird but not unintelligible to say "fight in a city" or "urban warfare", etc. It seems plausible that ναυμαχία might have originally been something like that. It's certainly easier to say than μαχαι ναων. ναυμαχεω is the verb for to fight in a ship. Unlike "cityfight", which could plausibly be an English verb as well as a noun, a Greek would never confuse between the two types of words because of the endings. (English speakers would never confuse "victorious" and "Victoria" unless they misheard the speaker.) Unfortunately, most of what we have for ancient Greek is literary writing, which isn't written to mirror informal/common speech. It does seem perfectly plausible that if the context were clear, someone might omit the naval part and just say battle. Barto posted:It was as if a family in more recent times had named a child Trafalgar or Midway. I dunno, I kind of get that. Plenty of folks in the American South are named after Confederate generals, putting the General's last name as their middle name. I went to high school with a "Jeb Stuart (lastname)" which I thought was weird since JEB Stuart was James Ewell Brown Stuart -- it wasn't like his name was literally 'Jeb'. (Granted, "Trireme Jones" or whatever would be a bit weird.) fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Jun 12, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 13:04
|
|
|
Ehhhh... It seems a little pat. You can say that Athenians were naming their kids after naval things, but can we say American life has become absolutely centered around vampires just because there's been an uptick in Bellas and Edwards since Twilight came out? I mean, it's interesting information, but ultimately kinda bleh as far as actually telling us how much that, you know, extended past naming fads.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 13:07
|
|
|
Actually, you can frequently see people being named after something that was really loving important to their parents or society. Hell, back during the Communist rebuilding of Yugoslavia after WW2, you had people naming their kids stuff like "Тракторка" (Literally meaning she-Tractor) A similar example would be Christian names sweeping over Europe in the early Middle Ages and onwards.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 13:24
|
|
|
my dad posted:Actually, you can frequently see people being named after something that was really loving important to their parents or society. Hell, back during the Communist rebuilding of Yugoslavia after WW2, you had people naming their kids stuff like "Тракторка" (Literally meaning she-Tractor) Sure, but I'm named after the last pagan Roman emperor but my parents chose the name because it sounded nice, not because they wanted to walk the clock back on all the Peters of the world. I'd like to see, e.g. a breakdown of city-to-city naming practices, changes over time, big numbers, that sort of thing, before I started calling it significant. Did Corinthians name their kids naval things? What about the Thebans? We could also start talking about, say, Athenian farmers calling their kids something nautical, for instance, that'd be pretty fun. Or you could talk about when these names became common (if indeed they became common, not just, you know, happened once), who they became common with, the sorts of names that well out of style... blahblahblahblahblah.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 14:29
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Ehhhh... It seems a little pat. You can say that Athenians were naming their kids after naval things, but can we say American life has become absolutely centered around vampires just because there's been an uptick in Bellas and Edwards since Twilight came out? I mean, it's interesting information, but ultimately kinda bleh as far as actually telling us how much that, you know, extended past naming fads. You could make an argument for this trend demonstrating the centrality of television/cinema to American culture, rather than focusing on vampires. We're decidedly not naming our children after famous generals or farm implements, but a popular TV/movie character can spawn a generation of Aryas or Bellas.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 15:25
|
|
|
The girl's name "Madison" can be directly attributed to the movie Splash.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 15:27
|
|
|
Probably a better way of looking at it. Cultural trends and influences are complicated things.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 15:28
|
|
|
It's also a function of language. Ancient Greek didn't have the same linguistic baggage that modern English does. We have a set of words that are only good as names, which has been formed through a mindless orgy of linguistic swinging. Other languages are more loose with new names than we are. A whole generation of Chinese children under Mao grew up named after various Communist slogans. Mostly "Red", but there are a few "Socialists", "Peoples", and "Workers" around. It sounds completely ridiculous when translated, but it's only a bit odd for Chinese speakers.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 17:48
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:(Granted, "Trireme Jones" or whatever would be a bit weird.) That would be the most badass name ever 
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 18:13
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:According to Wikipedia, it translates as "Better than Antioch Khusrau Built this" Just to reinforce how awesome and bizarre late antiquity is, Khosrau I almost ended up being Justinian's adopted brother. My Turtledove-o-meter is pinging off the charts. my dad posted:Actually, you can frequently see people being named after something that was really loving important to their parents or society. Hell, back during the Communist rebuilding of Yugoslavia after WW2, you had people naming their kids stuff like "Тракторка" (Literally meaning she-Tractor) paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jun 12, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 20:16
|
|
|
Seoinin posted:Just to reinforce how awesome and bizarre late antiquity is, Khosrau I almost ended up being Justinian's adopted brother. Care to explain? I can't find the connection anywhere on wiki.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 21:40
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
PittTheElder posted:Care to explain? I can't find the connection anywhere on wiki. Here's the 10 cent version: Khosrau's dad, Kavadh, was a member of a radical Zoroastrian sect called Mazdakism. It was kind of proto-communism that said all property should be held in common. Now this obviously didn't fly too well and there was some internal strife over it that ended with him being exiled. He retook power, thanks to help from the eastern Huns, and everything was cool for a while. Except for the issue of his succession. Khorau was the son of his favorite wife, but was also a traditional Zoroastrian - which meant if he came to power, the clerics would take over again and undo all of Kavadh's commie kenyan-usurper socialism. Around the same time Justin I was considering adopting the king of Armenia as his son, to basically cement Armenia's position as a Roman client. Again. For like the fifth time. Kavadh figured if Justin was going to go around claiming to be the guaranteer of an Eastern kingdom, Kavadh might as well make him go all-in and be guaranteer of the Sassanids. So he wrote Justin a polite letter suggesting that he adopt Khosrau into the royal family. This would accomplish a couple things: 1) it would get Khosrau out of the county and keep him away from scheming priests until he was ready to take the throne. 2)It would hopefully keep the Romans and Sassanids at peace and free Kavadh up to deal with the Huns sucking around Afghanistan and the Caspian. It sounds like a neat idea, and Justin wasn't necessarily opposed to it. Problem being the issue of Roman subsidies for the Sassanid frontier defense. For a while, the Romans had essentially been bribing the Sassanids to hold off the Huns around the Caspian. Kavadh was currently having to shell out hella ducats to keep the Huns on their side of the border, and was starting to think that maybe the Romans should pay more for his services. Justin disagreed, pointing out they didn't have to pay anything and were quite capable of holding off the Huns these days, thank you very much. Words were exchanged, the adoption was canceled, and Kavadh invaded Roman territory. Khosrau become Shah anyway and promptly booted the Mazdakites. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jun 12, 2013 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2013 22:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 15:52 |
|
|
Ancient religion question. This came up in another thread. The idea that a god becomes more powerful the more people worship him is modern, D&D kind of idea, not an actual ancient one, right? In Roman/Greek/Egyptian etc. mythos, did believers actually think their belief sustained or gave power to their god? What about sacrifice? Was that seen as actually giving something to the gods, that a god actually gained something when sacrifices were made in his name?
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2013 14:06
|
|
