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Oh no will somebody think of the lawyers and priests.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:49
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Yeah I’m at least mildly sympathetic to the Donatist high horse here, even if some of them were notoriously loving nuts and would beat the poo poo out of you just hoping to get killed. The non-Donatist “traditors” were by and large well-off Christians in positions of authority who sold out their less well-off brethren when they felt the tetrarchic pinch. That’s an appalling breach of trust. To the people who lived through it, it must have seemed like a Judenrat-esque enormity. I’m not surprised that people didn’t want to go back to church with those same quislings as soon as Constantine said it was ok.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:58
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Also ofc standard history written by the moneyed elites disclaimer
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Mar 15, 2019 23:23
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I like how at some point the church had to try and say "okay, no self-castration." Still didn't stop some people though.
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Mar 15, 2019 23:35
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I will never doubt the piety of someone who does that, I know that much.
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Mar 15, 2019 23:39
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SlothfulCobra posted:I like how at some point the church had to try and say "okay, no self-castration." Eh, just a ploy to protect the profits of licensed castrators
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Mar 15, 2019 23:41
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Eh, just a ploy to protect the profits of licensed castrators I mean it’s not exactly a growth industry.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:38
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LingcodKilla posted:Oh no will somebody think of the lawyers and priests. As a general rule, for every death of a relevant, memorable elite in antiquity there’s a minimum dozen poor schmucks who got got along with them.
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Mar 16, 2019 03:23
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Zheng He, Narses the general from Justinian times, whichever early Christian writer is known for doing the self castration thing? and the really famous castrati are the most bad rear end castrated men I can think of. can anybody name some other rad eunuchs? they raise sex/gender identity issues that rarely pop up in modern society and they were around in numbers and positions of influence for a long long time, all over Eurasia at least. they were a big deal and I'd be interested in learning more about the things they did and the cultural things that put them in the position to do them edit: just realized, if it doesn't exist yet, there should totally be a version of the chad vs virgin meme where the eunuch is the chad. just putting that out there oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 04:13
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Sima Qian, aka The Grand Historian, might be the most famous eunuch of all.
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Mar 16, 2019 04:18
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Mu'nis al-Muzaffar was pretty influential as a general of the Abassids and eventually the de-facto ruler as the power behind the Caliph.
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Mar 16, 2019 08:20
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Judar Pasha conquered the Songhai Empire for Morocco.
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Mar 16, 2019 15:16
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I know this is from over 14 years ago, but holy poo poo this is a terrible article. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/sep/08/architecture quote:The title of this exhibition is a bit misleading. Forgotten Empire, the British Museum calls its spectacular resurrection of ancient Persia. Yet the Persians are as notorious in their way as Darth Vader, the Sheriff of Nottingham, General Custer, or any other embodiment of evil empire you care to mention. They are history's original villains. Whorelord fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 17:10
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Whorelord posted:I know this is from over 14 years ago, but holy poo poo this is a terrible article. If I read this literally, the author seems to say the British Empire and the USA were Evil Empires, too Also holy gently caress did he confuse 300 for a documentary??? 
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Mar 16, 2019 18:10
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thanks for telling me about those guys. honestly i was googling to make some kind of contribution to the eunuch discussion but once you get into any details at all it's really loving depressing i did find something i feel is interesting and didn't make me hate humanity too much - a discussion of eunuch generals in Eastern Roman history. according to mikeaztek's wordpress.com blog, there were three: quote:The eunuch Eutropius had led a successful campaign against the Huns at the close of the fourth century. It seems, however, that the late fourth-century Roman world was not quite ready for a eunuch to take on such a prominent military role. Claudian (ca. 370 – 404 AD) a native Greek-speaker from Alexandria based in Italy crafted a famously hostile portrait of Eutropius ... Of course, as a propagandist for the Western generalissimo Stilicho, Claudian was naturally a bit over the top in his denigration of a rival from a then hostile Eastern half of the Empire. It is important to point out, however, that several Eastern sources (e.g. Eunapius frag. 65. 1-7, Zosimus, 5.38-18, Marcellinus Comes, 396) criticize Eutropius with similar hostile rhetoric ... interesting that Romans had a bias against letting eunuchs be generals; it worked pretty drat well for a lot of people throughout history, as has been noted by other posters above. if the article i linked is right that the bias lessened in the Eastern Roman Empire over the centuries, i'm guessing that's correlated to a general reassertion of the Eastern Empire's pre-Roman "Oriental" political traditions? did Rome have a tradition of eunuchs? edit: i found what appears to be a good article that directly addresses the Claudian-Eutropius thing as a manifestation of the 'masculine west, effeminate east' argument that persists to this day: https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004291935/B9789004291935_010.xml this article argues that Western Romans had been dehumanizing eunuchs and using them as an exemplar of oriental decadence since at least Augustus, but that the first eunuch in an Imperial court shows up in the West, and that "one can also make the case that it was the consumption of eunuchs as luxury slaves in Rome by the Imperial court from its very beginnings (and probably by the elite prior to the advent of Augustus) that created the eventual institutionalization of court eunuchs, rather than Persia simply being suddenly copied." so this argues that Rome did have a tradition of eunuchs; if true, it would fit with all those other decadent Eastern things like silk and various gods that Romans loved to hate themselves for loving. the details in that article are interesting too. it has a fragment of a lost history where the historian talks about how hard it was for people in the East to even find out what was happening in the West because the sources of info were basically varieties of court gossip, which is poignant to me. also, it's kinda poignant but kinda schadenfreudy reading the parts of the anti-Eutropius screed about how great things were going in the Western empire compared to the bad-at-war East, given later events and then in the successor state to Byzantium there was a really bizarre race thing where the ottoman empire's favored eunuchs switched over the centuries from the White Eunuchs to the Black Eunuchs. maybe it was related to broader economic developments in the slave trade? oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 18:30
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oystertoadfish posted:thanks for telling me about those guys. honestly i was googling to make some kind of contribution to the eunuch discussion but once you get into any details at all it's really loving depressing It may of been a cost related thing. Black slaves were cheaper and the survival rate for young boys wasn’t great in the first place.
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Mar 16, 2019 19:23
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also, in the footnotes of that article i linked it mentions a eunuch diety, Attis, which i didn't know about. he started out in Phrygia and spread throughout the Mediterranean. they've found shrines and statues to him in the Roman world, including Herculaneum, and his priests were apparently eunuchs, which i think is a pretty clear indicator that eunuchs had been part of Roman life for a long time by the late empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attis quote:In his self-mutilation, death and resurrection he represents the fruits of the earth which die in winter only to rise again in the spring.
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Mar 16, 2019 19:37
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There are several eunuch jokes in the laugh addict.
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Mar 16, 2019 19:40
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Didn't eunuchs and slaves basically run the Ottoman empire while the official rulers spent their time on being useless decadent nobles?
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Mar 16, 2019 21:08
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FreudianSlippers posted:Didn't eunuchs and slaves basically run the Ottoman empire while the official rulers spent their time on being useless decadent nobles? Have children OR have political power (unless you are the emperor, who gets both) does seem to be a remarkably common system.
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Mar 16, 2019 21:46
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Then you have Egypt where the slaves literally took over the country forming a upper class of enslaved warriors.
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Mar 16, 2019 22:01
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Are slaves really a good word for it when the average citizen have less rights than you, though...
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Mar 16, 2019 22:15
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I think it's mostly emblematic of the key differences between the slavery of the old world and the latter race based slavery of the new world.
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Mar 16, 2019 22:35
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FreudianSlippers posted:I think it's mostly emblematic of the key differences between the slavery of the old world and the latter race based slavery of the new world. The Mamluks were an outlier, though; the vast majority of slaves in Europe, Africa, and Asia, in all eras, were definitely not in positions of power. In general I think people are too quick to assume that forms of slavery other than "the latter race based slavery of the new world" were somehow "not really all that bad" (though I'm not accusing you of saying that). While there aren't many cultures in history that practiced a form of slavery comparable in average awfulness to that of the plantations of the American South, let alone the Caribbean (Sparta is the biggest exception that comes to mind), let's not forget that masters could legally rape their slaves in basically every slaveholding society, and that while some slaves in the Roman Empire were tutors, others were literally being worked to death in the mines. If anything, raping one's slaves was probably more normalized in the ancient world than the modern world. "Take hold of your slave girl whenever you want too; it's your right," reads a graffiti from Pompeii. This goes for the Ottoman Empire and other historical Islamic societies too; see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Sexual_slavery Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 23:23
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Were there protections against rape for non-enslaved women (and men I suppose) in many of those societies though? First off I dunno if people really are that quick to assume it's "not really all that bad," and secondly I think there really does need to be room for multiple understandings of what slavery was. I can speak about Korea for instance; at some points in its history, like 40% of the recorded population was enslaved*, but in practice the lives of most of that figure (the "out-resident slaves", or nobi) were functionally not any different from our standard image of medieval peasants. They could own property and land, seek to hold up their rights in court, and there were nominally "free" classes that had it worse off than most of them. It's true that they weren't protected from sexual violence, but uh, that goes for literally all the other Joseon-period Korean women too. And as far as I know while Joseon was particularly misogynistic that's not at all unusual. *in recent years whether to call them slaves at all has been getting challenged a lot in scholarship. It's kind of an arbitrary delineation in all sorts of societies and in my opinion continues to need more nuance applied to how we understand it, not less.
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Mar 17, 2019 02:41
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Koramei posted:
I read an interesting thing a while ago about Jannisaries. I forget pretty much all the important details, but the gist was that the term "slave" probably isn't appropriate. It pointed out how many of the restrictions that they lived under would be familiar to someone serving in a modern military, and it would sound odd to describe people who enlisted in the US Army as "slaves." Yet, they are not entirely free, with restrictions on basic liberties that are pretty extraordinary for a society as obsessed with individual liberty as the US. It's an interesting argument and I don't know enough about the subject matter to come down for or against it, but it is a useful reminder that even with slavery there is an entire continuum of circumstance. It isn't just a hard binary between free/slave.
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Mar 17, 2019 03:22
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Whorelord posted:I know this is from over 14 years ago, but holy poo poo this is a terrible article. Oh hey, it's THAT guy. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/may/27/emoji-language-dragging-us-back-to-the-dark-ages-yellow-smiley-face
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Mar 17, 2019 03:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:I read an interesting thing a while ago about Jannisaries. I forget pretty much all the important details, but the gist was that the term "slave" probably isn't appropriate. It pointed out how many of the restrictions that they lived under would be familiar to someone serving in a modern military, and it would sound odd to describe people who enlisted in the US Army as "slaves." Yet, they are not entirely free, with restrictions on basic liberties that are pretty extraordinary for a society as obsessed with individual liberty as the US. It's clearly not a hard binary, but as I understand it, and I'm admittedly not an expert on Ottoman society, the jannisaries were considered slaves at the time. The Ottoman sultans justified their raising of Janissary troops on Ottoman laws saying that the Sultan had an automatic right to a certain percentage of slaves captured in war, and that the Jannisaries were Eastern European Christians taken from their parents at a young age and pressed into service. They had an exalted status because of their role, and they got a salary and things like that, but they weren't considered free. A Jannisary couldn't leave service except through retirement or injury, and even then they tended to be put in non-strenuous work. They still weren't "free".
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Mar 17, 2019 03:58
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eszett engma posted:Oh hey, it's THAT guy.
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Mar 17, 2019 03:59
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Generally it sucks not being able to quit your job. I think most people have some kind of inherent resentment over having no real control over their own fate. Theoretically there have been ways where people, having been raised from birth, can be groomed for a life of servitude, but that can have a bit of a mixed success rate. At this position we are at in history, it sure seems like most of the attempts to lock a population and its descendants into a specific service role forevermore have failed, although maybe that's just entropy. Maybe the state of the world in the present is a weird aberration in the grand scheme of things and everything will sink back into more "traditional" power structures. How static was the position of medieval serfs? Would they get hunted down if they tried to pick up sticks and go somewhere else? Could outsiders join a community?
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Mar 17, 2019 04:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:How static was the position of medieval serfs? Would they get hunted down if they tried to pick up sticks and go somewhere else? Could outsiders join a community? It depends on where and when you're talking about, but in a lot of cases, both of these things were true.
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Mar 17, 2019 04:18
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When making cross cultural comparisons regarding slavery I think we run into translation problems. The word slavery is extremely emotionally loaded and we have strong preconceptions as to what it means. This creates the problems Koramei and Cyrano4747 alluded to, where it's hard to decide whether a given Korean or Turkish word should really be translated to "slave". Ultimately I think the argument is as much about deciding how we should feel about these institutions and relationships as it is about accurately describing them. I've been reading the book Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber recently, and he talks a lot about slavery and various forms of relationships and obligations across time and cultures. In it he gives a pretty good definition of slavery, which I'm going to paraphrase since I only have the book in audio format: Slavery is the state of being cut off from all natural social bonds and connections, to be ruled purely by force. The part of being cut off from existing social bonds is essential I think, and it really distinguishes the Janissaries and Mamluks from other contemporary military groups. Medieval Middle East politics was an extremely messy affair, and rulers were frequently threatened by usurpation. Building up a strong military was a dangerous game because those armies could be turned against their own Emir as easily as an enemy. Powerful subordinates can install their kin as officers, while the army as a whole becomes the general's client and more loyal to him than the King. In the political theory of Medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun this process is expected to produce a cyclical rise and fall of dynasties, as new families emerge and usurp the old dynasty only to be replaced in turn. To build support for their cause usurpers would rely on ties of family, marriage, tribe and clientship, and other forms of relationships. These ties make them hard to remove when you are suspicious as it would be an insult to their kin, and gives rivals more power to draw on for their schemes. Slaves though are necessarily severed from such bonds. By restricting the Janissaries to christian converts from the periphery, The Ottoman Sultans insured their families would be inconsequential players in any political conflict. By making soldiers slaves, even if only in name, all of their social bonds are severed except for those between the soldier and Monarch. It socially and politically isolates them, especially from the families of rich Lords that are most likely to contest with Kings for power. Unfortunately for Middle Eastern Emirs and Sultans, cutting the ties of tribe and kinship resulted in groups like the Mamluks forming their own corporate identities, which proved just dangerous in palace intrigue as ties of kinship. Still I think the system worked pretty well a lot of the time.
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Mar 17, 2019 04:20
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Koramei posted:Were there protections against rape for non-enslaved women (and men I suppose) in many of those societies though? I think rape (of noble women at least) was punishable, yes feller fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 05:29
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Koramei posted:Were there protections against rape for non-enslaved women (and men I suppose) in many of those societies though? Keeping them confined to the house/harem tends to work fairly well.
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Mar 17, 2019 18:38
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Silver2195 posted:If anything, raping one's slaves was probably more normalized in the ancient world than the modern world. "Take hold of your slave girl whenever you want too; it's your right," reads a graffiti from Pompeii. This goes for the Ottoman Empire and other historical Islamic societies too; see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Sexual_slavery *Roman liberal*: to*
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Mar 17, 2019 19:01
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If she didn’t want to get “raped” she wouldn’t have left the compound. I hate humans.
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Mar 17, 2019 19:23
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Koramei posted:Were there protections against rape for non-enslaved women (and men I suppose) in many of those societies though? It was pretty mixed, and laws were often focused heavily on violating a marriage rather than violating the victim. While there typically were laws nominally outlawing rape, circumstance and status could easily prevent prosecution. If you were an unmarried girl who went to a festival and got raped by a young noble, it might well be ignored. Women could even find that they were declared married to their attacker without their knowledge, mooting any punishment (rape within a marriage was generally tolerated). All that being said, the more urbanized the society the more likely women would have political and personal rights. Women in 2nd Century Rome had a variety of marriage rights, personal rights, and legal rights that gave them far more sexual autonomy than their contemporaries. Even slaves had a degree of sexual rights, with legal penalties for causing injury and opportunities for emancipation in certain circumstances such as forced prostitution. This sort of thing might not seem like a big deal to a contemporary Westerner, but it certainly was for women of that era. Even now there are a variety of societies that offer much less in the way of women's rights.
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Mar 17, 2019 19:43
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years quote:In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a “baris”.
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Mar 18, 2019 00:59
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So there really were giant ants Edit: this doesn't work, because that actually seems to have been based on very real marmots. Herodutos gets a bad rep... Party In My Diapee fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 01:45
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Silver2195 posted:If anything, raping one's slaves was probably more normalized in the ancient world than the modern world. "Take hold of your slave girl whenever you want too; it's your right," reads a graffiti from Pompeii. Actually, the very fact that this was written down as graffiti suggests that the raping of slaves was in some form a controversial topic at that time. Because rarely does one write graffiti about topics on which the vast amount of society agrees upon, for example, writing "eating the flesh of your children is bad" as graffiti would probably not occur unless after great famines or something where that topic could have been brought up in public discourse.
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Mar 18, 2019 02:53
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