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There was a drawing of what the Roman emperors probably actually looked like that made the rounds a few years back, and a lot them looked like guest actors on The Sopranos. Vitellius may have moved slow, but it was only because Vitellius didn't have to move for anybody.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:33
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Oh sure. I picture Romans as dudes from Staten Island all the time. It's not like there have been no changes in 2000 years, but it's also not an enormous span of time and it's not like everyone in Italy was wiped out and replaced.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:43
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commodus with an obnoxious peroxide job
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Feb 28, 2024 06:45
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FMguru posted:There was a drawing of what the Roman emperors probably actually looked like that made the rounds a few years back, and a lot them looked like guest actors on The Sopranos. Man, I remember when Aurelian was starting quarterback for the Niners.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:48
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I want to know more about this Hostilian fellah, he sounds friendly.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:51
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bob dobbs is dead posted:They had actual organized crime lords (clodius, milo, etc) and close links between the state and those crime lords. It's kind of a mindfuck that basically no depiction of the Romans gives them the Italian accent they deserve Kinda crazy given the Spyro Reignited Trilogy version of Sunny Villa had me going, this is literally the first time I've heard fantasy Romans (who are also talking cartoon bears iirc) who have Italian accents. Asterix also has those vibes sometimes, I suppose.
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Feb 28, 2024 07:05
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Normally the excuse given for making Romans have British accents is because the range of accents can be used to represent the social stata of the time. But Britain does have a lot of specific crime person accents that they don't use either (although those crime accents can also sound very silly if you're an American and have no prior learned respect for them). But yeah, Romans are just dudes.
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Feb 28, 2024 07:43
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Friend of the thread Bret Deveraux talked about this and even followed the general thread of "why do we give Romans british accents" -> "ok but seriously what was Roman identity" https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/ bob dobbs is dead posted:They had actual organized crime lords (clodius, milo, etc) and close links between the state and those crime lords. It's kind of a mindfuck that basically no depiction of the Romans gives them the Italian accent they deserve I feel like whenever I listen to an interview with an ancient historian they say at some point "mafia studies is way more useful to understanding ancient rome/egypt/sumeria than any other lens of governance"
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Feb 28, 2024 08:36
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SlothfulCobra posted:Normally the excuse given for making Romans have British accents is because the range of accents can be used to represent the social stata of the time. But Britain does have a lot of specific crime person accents that they don't use either (although those crime accents can also sound very silly if you're an American and have no prior learned respect for them). We should give Greeks proper English accents and make the Romans sound like various kinds of Americans. The elite Romans who went to school in Greece can have those mid-atlantic accents where you can't really tell what side of the Atlantic they're from
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Feb 28, 2024 08:47
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So, the Yakuza series. Long-running series of games about, well, yakuza. Called Like A Dragon in Japan and they are now moving to using that naming in english. They recently remastered Like A Dragon: Ishin and released it in english for the first time. It's a spinoff game that takes place in the 1860s rather than the 2000s and the characters are samurai rather than yakuza. In doing this it makes the not-very-subtle point that samurai and yakuza are basically exactly the same thing.
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Feb 28, 2024 08:58
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The Lone Badger posted:So, the Yakuza series. Long-running series of games about, well, yakuza. Called Like A Dragon in Japan and they are now moving to using that naming in english. I mean, it depends on the samurai. 1860s would be at the very end of the Edo Period and samurai fortunes were all over the place in those 200 years. The Samurai were nominally at the apex of society but many were poor, powerless, and especially by the end other classes of people had more money and influence. I've never played any of the games but choosing such a precise period at the end of the old, long-lived regime seems like the story might be one of tragic decline and transition. "The old ways and traditions are dying, and our hero must find his way in a new world or die with the old" is usually how such stories go. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 09:28
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A shitload of medieval knight stories also make total sense if you picture them as mafioso. Ridiculous ideas of honour included.SlothfulCobra posted:Normally the excuse given for making Romans have British accents is because the range of accents can be used to represent the social stata of the time. But Britain does have a lot of specific crime person accents that they don't use either (although those crime accents can also sound very silly if you're an American and have no prior learned respect for them). Thing is you can absolutely do this with American accents. I hear one game does as much, with Romans instead of the usual British accents, being clear Americans to indicate that they are the dominant militaristic superpower of the time and everything that goes with it.
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Feb 28, 2024 12:22
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A shitload of medieval knight stories also make total sense if you picture them as mafioso. Ridiculous ideas of honour included. Wasn't the whole point of over the top honour rules that even with them knights were total bastards who abused their power when ever possible?
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Feb 28, 2024 12:31
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NikkolasKing posted:I mean, it depends on the samurai. 1860s would be at the very end of the Edo Period and samurai fortunes were all over the place in those 200 years. The Samurai were nominally at the apex of society but many were poor, powerless, and especially by the end other classes of people had more money and influence. I'd like to see Blackadder set in this milieu
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Feb 28, 2024 12:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A shitload of medieval knight stories also make total sense if you picture them as mafioso. Ridiculous ideas of honour included. The best samurai drama is The Wire.
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Feb 28, 2024 15:22
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I would love more American accents to be used in period pieces or even fantasy settings, but the American TV and Film industry kinda just doesn't want to acknowledge or play around with American dialectical diversity. At least they do it much less than Britain. The last TV show I watched with a bunch of southern accents was an anime where they had to dub in southern accents to translate how the main character from Tokyo moved out to a small town in Kyushu.The Lone Badger posted:] it makes the not-very-subtle point that samurai and yakuza are basically exactly the same thing. Doesn't that sometimes go the other way though? Where there's a lot of pro-Yakuza sentiment floating around, thinking of them as following some romantic ideas of honor and duty like romanticized Samurai were supposed to have. Which is a little unfortunate, but I guess you at least get more variety than the one organized crime story I see over and over again where after the protagonist goes through the highs of getting into the business and making friends and profiting, they are inevitably tainted and destroyed by it because crime actually doesn't pay.
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Feb 28, 2024 15:22
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One of the most Yakuza film series is famously called Battles Without Honour or Humanity.
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Feb 28, 2024 15:32
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There's a lot less "the money is good and the life is glamorous and you get to party all the time but actually crime bad ok" in Yakuza movies and a lot more "this life destroys everyone in it without exception and this is a fate you must just grimly accept because there is nothing else for you, also that honour thing is a mug's game now watch me betray everything you thought we stood for" which is definitely a different thing, yeah.
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Feb 28, 2024 16:26
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I just finished the first volume of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies and it is vicious in its takedown of Plato, providing ample direct quotation and historical context to cast him as one of the earliest examples of a radical regressive totalitarian. Popper paints Plato as a propagandist, cynically exploiting humanist rhetoric to advance a model for a dystopian society which is thoroughly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, as well as a betrayer of Socrates, whose corpse he exhumes to serve as a mouthpiece for a starkly anti-Socratic view of the world. As an aside, Popper also pushes back on Thucydides' portrayal of the destruction of Melos as turning the Greek world against Athens, pointing to similar unjustified slaughters inflicted by the Spartans, all in an effort to argue that viewing the Athenian "empire" through a modern lens is anachronistic. Athenian imperialism, he argues, was welcomed by the democratic-minded and rejected by the aristocratic-minded and should not be understood as bearing the negative traits of imperialism as has existed since. I'm curious if anyone here knows whether scholarship in the 80-some years since has provided insight on Popper's framing of either issue one way or another.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:14
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I like the ones who look exactly as you would picture them. Hello Nero.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:19
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Nero looks like someone getting a breakout villain role in an A24 film
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Feb 28, 2024 17:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:Normally the excuse given for making Romans have British accents is because the range of accents can be used to represent the social stata of the time. But Britain does have a lot of specific crime person accents that they don't use either (although those crime accents can also sound very silly if you're an American and have no prior learned respect for them). You can probably get away with working class London (think Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Edit: re accents, one of the things I did like about Barbarians (the recent German TV series) is they have the Romans speaking actual Latin - and they sound Italian as gently caress. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 17:23
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Popper has a lot of strong opinions.
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Feb 28, 2024 17:35
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soviet elsa posted:I like the ones who look exactly as you would picture them. Hello Nero. The neckbeard emperor 
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Feb 28, 2024 18:31
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Fish of hemp posted:Wasn't the whole point of over the top honour rules that even with them knights were total bastards who abused their power when ever possible? I'm not sure which rules you're talking about but the medievalists I've talked to and read tend to treat the chivalric code as something people generally believed in and obeyed and the people who broke those rules too flagrantly found themselves losing many of the benefits of their power and standing, notably losing the protection and loyalty of both their lieges and vassals. And that's not coming from a place of romanticism. The view is not that medieval knights were super kind and generous and altruistic, but that the chivalric code that actually existed provided mutually beneficial boundaries on behavior. Think more like how drivers who obey driving norms - using turn signals, staying in their lane, wearing seatbelts - outlive drivers who don't. Probably the most important norm for old school knights is "take prisoners, treat them well, and ransom them back in good faith." If you are a knight you want this norm to be taken seriously, because you are a life-long warrior aristocrat and you'll probably get taken prisoner at some point. So you treat prisoners you capture well, and if another aristocrat treats their prisoners harshly you come down on them loving hard. The other part of the code that seems to have been considered pretty effective were limitations on the destructiveness of warfare. These were more often violated but ultimately military historians seem to consider the cultural constraints on medieval warfare to be pretty successful and that part of the modern European military revolution was the relaxing of those constraints. Again this is a pretty self-serving norm: kind of the whole economic engine behind warfare is to capture land and add it to your own holdings, and if you ruin the land and kill the serfs on it, you are reducing what you can potentially win from a war. It's in everyone's interests, but specifically the interests of the people driving the causes and execution of war, to try and keep a lighter touch, just as a matter of job security. And yes I do know that there are some very brutal medieval wars like the Harrying of the North and such, but our point of comparison for medieval armies is to compare them to Caesar in Gaul or the Army of Flanders. The much smaller size of medieval armies also limited the destructiveness of warfare but I think its also fair to say that smaller sizes also made the mechanism of cultural constraints - focused on individual honor and reputation - much more effective.
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Feb 28, 2024 18:34
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Cugel the Clever posted:I just finished the first volume of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies and it is vicious in its takedown of Plato, providing ample direct quotation and historical context to cast him as one of the earliest examples of a radical regressive totalitarian. Popper paints Plato as a propagandist, cynically exploiting humanist rhetoric to advance a model for a dystopian society which is thoroughly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, as well as a betrayer of Socrates, whose corpse he exhumes to serve as a mouthpiece for a starkly anti-Socratic view of the world. That's a strange contrast of opinions. 'Plato was a totalitarian" is as anachronistic as saying the Athenian Empire is equivalent to a modern one. Being fair, I've never read the book, but just being in phil circles a lot these past six or seven years, Popper's assessment of Plato (and Hegel) is very, very unpopular. Like, Plato is still studied and respected to this day, including his politics. I don't think Popper's assessment is viewed with much respect by Plato scholars. I don't know if they even bother to consider and respond to it anymore. Still, this book is listed under the References and Suggested Reding Page or Karl Popper's own philosophy page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.139411/page/n15/mode/2up For my part, from what I have read, Popper was a committed Liberal. Plato was distinctly critical of private property. In fact, the Platonic tradition he founded has been pretty hostile to the whole idea. A book I have actually read and quite enjoyed and would recommend is called The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. Most relevant to this thread I remember the book discussing how it was only Greek, Platonic thinkers like Plutarch who showed any sympathy for the Agrarian Laws. Romans loved their private property. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 18:38
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a lotta peeps view of what the medievals were like is kinda shrouded by what the early moderns were like. like peeps calling game of thrones medieval when it's basically one of the most important early modern english wars, but with dragons stuck in
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Feb 28, 2024 18:39
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bob dobbs is dead posted:a lotta peeps view of what the medievals were like is kinda shrouded by what the early moderns were like. like peeps calling game of thrones medieval when it's basically one of the most important early modern english wars, but with dragons stuck in it also suffers from a version of the Rome problem: if you're talking about ~800 CE that's a whole different ballgame than ~1200 CE, plus a lot more regional variation.
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Feb 28, 2024 18:42
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War of the Roses is early modern?
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Feb 28, 2024 18:42
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if you demark the end of the middle ages as the fall of constantinople, yes. if you demark it as columbus doing his thing (or martin luther doing his thing), no. it's basically at the end, unquestionably
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 18:45
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bob dobbs is dead posted:a lotta peeps view of what the medievals were like is kinda shrouded by what the early moderns were like. like peeps calling game of thrones medieval when it's basically one of the most important early modern english wars, but with dragons stuck in I only have an interest in intellectual history, so philosophy and religion is my bag, but you can see this so clearly in the massively influential and important early modern philosophers. They all disparaged the Medieval Scholastic way of doing things and helped usher in this very self-congratulatory mindset of "we're so much smarter than the past." I just find it interesting how history was held up with reverence for much of, uh, human history. Confucianism in China was literally just "these past times were the best, lets' try to be like them." Homer in Greece was an authority on basically everything. The "Renaissance" is supposed to have been triggered by the rediscovery of long-lost ancient learning. For a long, long time, education in the West meant reading Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and literature. Then we get to the Modern Period and It's all about how "before us were the Dark Ages and everyone in the past was stupid and barbaric." We still have this mindset, hence the entire expression of "go medieval on someone's rear end," basically saying to be medieval is savage in some special way we are not.
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Feb 28, 2024 18:56
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You can roughly point to the rise of centralized states in Europe as starting around this time, albeit the British was significantly further along on this.
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Feb 28, 2024 18:57
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bob dobbs is dead posted:a lotta peeps view of what the medievals were like is kinda shrouded by what the early moderns were like. like peeps calling game of thrones medieval when it's basically one of the most important early modern english wars, but with dragons stuck in Over in cspam the dividing line for modern vs pre modern is 1789, which I realize is so that people who want to bite each other over spanish civil war minutia are quarantined, but always leaves me with "what the hell do we do with the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Do we just memory hole them or are we saying the 7 Years War was medieval?" zoux posted:War of the Roses is early modern? Some people use it specifically as the start of the modern era! Though more common is using Bosworth as the very last pre-modern event.
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Feb 28, 2024 19:00
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if you demark the end of the middle ages as the fall of constantinople, yes. if you demark it as columbus doing his thing (or martin luther doing his thing), no. it's basically at the end, unquestionably
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Feb 28, 2024 19:00
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NikkolasKing posted:Then we get to the Modern Period and It's all about how "before us were the Dark Ages and everyone in the past was stupid and barbaric." We still have this mindset, hence the entire expression of "go medieval on someone's rear end," basically saying to be medieval is savage in some special way we are not. I think that's more about Quentin Tarantino
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Feb 28, 2024 19:04
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Tulip posted:Over in cspam the dividing line for modern vs pre modern is 1789, which I realize is so that people who want to bite each other over spanish civil war minutia are quarantined, but always leaves me with "what the hell do we do with the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Do we just memory hole them or are we saying the 7 Years War was medieval?" I’m sure nothing important happened in Europe between 1500 and 1800 either
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Feb 28, 2024 19:12
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Tulip posted:Over in cspam the dividing line for modern vs pre modern is 1789, which I realize is so that people who want to bite each other over spanish civil war minutia are quarantined, but always leaves me with "what the hell do we do with the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Do we just memory hole them or are we saying the 7 Years War was medieval?" Depends on your field and the kinds of questions you're asking. There are cases to be made for (just off the top of my head) 1453, 1455, 1476, 1485, or 1517, depending on perspective. That's not an exhaustive list - just a bunch that I can remember people having made cases for at one time or another for different purposes.
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Feb 28, 2024 19:15
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NikkolasKing posted:That's a strange contrast of opinions. 'Plato was a totalitarian" is as anachronistic as saying the Athenian Empire is equivalent to a modern one. NikkolasKing posted:Being fair, I've never read the book, but just being in phil circles a lot these past six or seven years, Popper's assessment of Plato (and Hegel) is very, very unpopular. Like, Plato is still studied and respected to this day, including his politics. I don't think Popper's assessment is viewed with much respect by Plato scholars. I don't know if they even bother to consider and respond to it anymore. NikkolasKing posted:For my part, from what I have read, Popper was a committed Liberal. Plato was distinctly critical of private property. In fact, the Platonic tradition he founded has been pretty hostile to the whole idea.
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Feb 28, 2024 19:16
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Kylaer posted:The best samurai drama is The Wire. Ghost Dog my man
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Feb 28, 2024 19:48
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I thought it was pretty transparent that the philosopher advocating a philosopher king controlling all of society was an obviously self-serving wish fulfillment, but I guess some philosophers might have found the idea appealing?
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Feb 28, 2024 19:49
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