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To some extent I would say "breakdown of political norms" is almost defined by the eruption of violence. Facilitating peaceful transitions of authority and changes in social hierarchy are pretty much why political norms exist. SlothfulCobra posted:With monarchic governments things get even more nebulous, since from what I know, it really seems like there's a pattern of decaying systems with deteriorating norms to save a lot of grievances for after the monarch dies so that they can use leverage over a new monarch to get reforms passed. I think one of the foundations of monarchic political systems is the direct personal relationship between the monarch and their elite subjects/lords. Since succession necessarily changes the nature of those relationships, it creates the potential for conflict as vested interests scheme and jockey for proximity to the throne. Any decaying system creates the potential for conflict, succession is just the best opportunity to air grievance and shake things up.
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Sep 25, 2019 23:02
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know of any books specifically on the topic, but it was mostly a trade thing. If the crops failed in one region you could just buy from another and ship it easily given the Mediterranean trade routes. It was routine--Athens got its food from Crimea, Rome from North Africa/Egypt, etc. The Romans didn't really have major famine because of the efficiency of empire-wide logistics. Famines tend to either happen because everything is local so if the local conditions suck you're all screwed, or because of massive government mismanagement. Rome never had a Mao so it didn't see mass starvation. Since I was posting about Chinese road networks recently, I also read an article that suggested China's relatively robust internal transportation system and free movement of trade meant it tended to be much less vulnerable to famine than Europe or India going into the modern period for this exact same reason. A local crop failure might mean prices increase and life get's harder -- but you can still buy food from a neighboring district that wasn't effected. One reason India was very vulnerable to famines during the Raj was that the subcontinent had a very underdeveloped transportation system, which neither the Mughals nor the British had invested in to the same extent as the Chinese government.
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Sep 25, 2019 23:11
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Romans did have a secret police from the late 4th century AD on, the agentes in rebus (“people active in things”) — a militarized bureaucratic courier force immune to prosecution and answerable to the emperor. They had quite a few responsibilities and a nasty reputation, but there were never many, around 1000 at a time for the whole empire, which should remind us that the biggest reason why the empire didn’t have the characteristics of a modern totalitarian state was practical, not ideological. The imperial government, even the late imperial version which is commonly considered bloated and overexpensive, was minuscule relative to its territory. As for concentration camps — why bother when you can just sell people into slavery instead? e: actually my bad, the figure of 1000ish is for the eastern empire only. But still! skasion fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Sep 25, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 23:18
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didn't they also have the grain tax guys act as informants or some poo poo?
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Sep 25, 2019 23:21
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Tunicate posted:didn't they also have the grain tax guys act as informants or some poo poo? Yeah, the frumentarii. They were sort of a spy service but not like the imperial KGB as they sometimes get portrayed.
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Sep 25, 2019 23:31
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Something people forget is that the Roman government itself was pretty small compared to a modern government, and exercised a lot less control over its people...it wasn't big enough to do so, record keeping and communications technology wasn't advanced enough to do so, and expectations about what a government was "supposed" to do were different.
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Sep 25, 2019 23:39
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Tunicate posted:didn't they also have the grain tax guys act as informants or some poo poo? The frumentarii, the guys responsible for grain distribution on the spot to armies in the field, were also used as military intelligence units by the Antonines — Hadrian gets the blame in the sources. They also got a fairly bad reputation, but we don’t really know as much about them as the agentes. e: the other big thing about the Roman secret police or lack thereof is that Romans in the period of the agentes in particular, but certainly at other times as well, didn’t really need a professional group dedicated solely to seizing public figures and ruining their lives by denunciation before the law — rather, most Roman officials did that themselves as a matter of political logic, over and above whatever their duties were supposed to be. It’s scarcely possible to read late Roman sources without encountering an official who connives to get his colleagues disgraced, mutilated and/or slaughtered in the expectation of personal gain. skasion fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Sep 26, 2019 |
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Sep 25, 2019 23:41
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Squalid posted:Since I was posting about Chinese road networks recently, I also read an article that suggested China's relatively robust internal transportation system and free movement of trade meant it tended to be much less vulnerable to famine than Europe or India going into the modern period for this exact same reason. A local crop failure might mean prices increase and life get's harder -- but you can still buy food from a neighboring district that wasn't effected. Well, also the home-grown agriculture/industrial system was dismantled to be under the control of and for the benefit of distant colonial masters
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Sep 26, 2019 03:12
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sullat posted:Well, also the home-grown agriculture/industrial system was dismantled to be under the control of and for the benefit of distant colonial masters There's a theory that was first pioneered by Armartya Sen and developed by Alex de Waal that argues that while crop failures are natural and fairly common, famine is pretty much always a political decision....that its the result of policies by a government to either confiscate food or refuse to provide food to a population for political purposes, and it tends to look at things like the Irish and Scottish potato famines in the 19th century, the Indian famine in the 1870s, the Ukranian Holdomor in the 1930s, the Bengal famine of 1943 and 1974, the Ethiopian famine of 1983-1985, and so on.
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Sep 26, 2019 05:02
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Epicurius posted:Just off the top of my head, check out James O'Donnells "Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity". He talks a little about there and the way that Julian, who was raised Christian and had a Christian understanding of religion, took his understanding of NeoPlatoniam and forced it into a Christian model. Ah, so the Renaissance began in 360AD.
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Sep 26, 2019 06:49
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Julian grew up seeing how Constantine had risen to power by fostering and harnessing the development of a serious ecclesiastical elite class mostly in the eastern big cities (also by gigantic civil wars but Julian lucked out of having to do that bit) and he figured he could do the same thing but with traditional religion. Unfortunately for him he hosed up and died before his project got anywhere. It seems dim in retrospect but had he ended up as a political force for decades the way Constantine did, it’s quite possible he could have succeeded in the sense of getting a permanent organization of pagan religious leaders set up — granted he was obviously not a smooth operator politically and it’s also quite possible someone else would have done away with him if the Persians hadn’t.
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Sep 26, 2019 13:57
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Safety Biscuits posted:Ah, so the Renaissance began in 360AD. O'Connell's basic argument is that Christianity led to a bunch of changes in the Roman world in the way people thought about gods and the relationship with the divine, and our understanding of traditional Roman religion is skewed because of that. (He also argues a lot of the "conflict" between Christian and pagan and the idea of a pagan revival was overstated) quote:We can also see plenty of evidence of the survival of belief, practice, and allegiance in the realm of the ordinary. Most people didn’t care. The town of Harran on the Persian frontier, for example, was widely reputed to have held on to its ancient practices until the time of the Arab conquest—as why not? Old rites of the Lupercalia and the festivities surrounding the opening of the new year in January crop up at isolated points in the fifth century.1 The silence, I say, is deafening by comparison to what we might expect if the self-serving Christian narrative about die-hard resistance were true. The survival of traditional practices never amounted to an expression of a pagan movement. Outside Christian imaginations, there was no such thing as paganism, only people doing what they were in the habit of doing.
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Sep 26, 2019 14:02
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Epicurius posted:O'Connell's basic argument is that Christianity led to a bunch of changes in the Roman world in the way people thought about gods and the relationship with the divine, and our understanding of traditional Roman religion is skewed because of that. (He also argues a lot of the "conflict" between Christian and pagan and the idea of a pagan revival was overstated) This quote seems overstated. Besides Julian himself, there were people like Proclus, who I would call a serious pagan theologian. It does seem fair to say that there were few “devout” (in the sense of our Christian-influenced conception of religion today) believers in the “default” Greco-Roman gods, although there were plenty who were really into Isis, Mithras, and the other “mystery religion” gods in a way paralleling the Christian idea of religiousity.
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Sep 26, 2019 14:25
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Epicurius posted:Something people forget is that the Roman government itself was pretty small compared to a modern government, and exercised a lot less control over its people...it wasn't big enough to do so, record keeping and communications technology wasn't advanced enough to do so, and expectations about what a government was "supposed" to do were different. Even more recent pre-industrial empires had relatively small numbers of officials. I believe the Qing dynasty only had a few hundred of thousand officials at it's peak to govern an empire of hundreds of millions. By contrast, even if you don't count teachers, the US government has millions of non-military employees.
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Sep 26, 2019 19:11
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golden bubble posted:Even more recent pre-industrial empires had relatively small numbers of officials. I believe the Qing dynasty only had a few hundred of thousand officials at it's peak to govern an empire of hundreds of millions. By contrast, even if you don't count teachers, the US government has millions of non-military employees. Interestingly only became large after ww2 and has not kept pace with population since 2000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
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Sep 26, 2019 19:31
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euphronius posted:Interestingly only became large after ww2 and has not kept pace with population since 2000 Add state, county, and city/town employees to that, though.
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Sep 26, 2019 19:33
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT Approx 14% of all workers
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Sep 26, 2019 19:37
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My uneducated guess would be that increased automation allows the government to not keep hiring in pace with population.
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Sep 26, 2019 19:39
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Elyv posted:My uneducated guess would be that increased automation allows the government to not keep hiring in pace with population. There's also the whole, "Work harder so we can hire less people"
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Sep 26, 2019 19:51
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Elyv posted:My uneducated guess would be that increased automation allows the government to not keep hiring in pace with population. looooooooooooooooool Less glib response: the government is dead last when it comes to adopting new technologies and employing them in ways that would lessen the need for workers as you describe. The real limiting factors are budgets and politics, with the latter overwhelmingly influencing the former
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Sep 26, 2019 19:52
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euphronius posted:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT You can see the two big dips named Ronald Regan and beginning of semi-regular govt. shutdowns. I bet the number has also been influenced by the desire for outsourced contractors over direct hires. That said, some old problems are new again. The current college admissions issues with meritocracy and standardized exams are basically the same reasons why the Chinese aristocracy dominated the imperial examinations system.
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Sep 26, 2019 20:38
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I do wonder if the Imperial Examination system allocated 70% of its budget to admin positions and they spent it all on new buildings and real estate schemes.
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Sep 26, 2019 22:16
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Sep 26, 2019 22:38
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researchers describe 3,000 year old baby bottles  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/science/prehistoric-baby-bottles.html
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Sep 26, 2019 23:19
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Geddy Lee would be jealous.
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Sep 27, 2019 02:59
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Ozzy would approve as well.
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Sep 27, 2019 04:25
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I feel like I could wear a replica of those around and no one would question me.
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Sep 27, 2019 15:45
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Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilization in China posted:Liu Chhi wrote, in his Hsia Jih Chi (Records of Leisure Hours) some time before his death in A.D. 1117, that his contemporary Shih Kiang, and other judges, used various magnifying lenses of rock-crystal for deciphering illegible documents in legal cases. The judges also used dark glasses made of smoky quartz, not, as we do, to protect our eyes from the sun, but to disguise from litigants their reactions to the evidence. However, blank spectacles with slits were used from early times as snow-glasses by Tibetans and Mongolians, and the Chinese made use of these too.
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Sep 27, 2019 15:56
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I had a question about ancient augury/religion/superstition. Is there any evidence on what they thought was happening when the oracles read the signs? I'm curious about the force behind what they thought was happening, whether a good omen was that this outcome is preordained, the gods will fight on our side, or something else entirely. Same with superstition, did they think knocking on way cause the effect they wanted to occur, or cause outside forces to intervene to try and make it so.
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Sep 27, 2019 17:30
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Carillon posted:I had a question about ancient augury/religion/superstition. Is there any evidence on what they thought was happening when the oracles read the signs? I'm curious about the force behind what they thought was happening, whether a good omen was that this outcome is preordained, the gods will fight on our side, or something else entirely. Same with superstition, did they think knocking on way cause the effect they wanted to occur, or cause outside forces to intervene to try and make it so. Cicero wrote a fairly interesting book “On Divination”, book 1 of which takes the form of Cicero’s brother arguing why and how divination is valid, while book 2 takes the form of Cicero arguing why and how it’s nonsense. Full of odd anecdotes about prophecies and weirdness, worth a read. tl;dr is that traditional Roman religious thought believed in kind of animistic omnipresent divine forces called numina and they’re what causes auguries to work. Sample odd anecdote quote:What history has failed to record the fact that while Servius Tullius slept his head burst into flame? skasion fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 18:00
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Sunday school drop outs just did an episode on Titus Flavius Josephus. It included an excellent anecdote from the Jewish Wars. Joe was adjudicating a dispute in Galilee, in which some Galileans were accusing their gentile neighbors of using witchcraft to aid the Romans. Joe said: "Rome would not keep so many tens of thousands in arms if it could overcome its enemies by wizardry." I thought that was an astute argument.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:10
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Xenophon on Socrates in Memorabilia:quote:First then, that he rejected the gods acknowledged by the state — what evidence did they produce of that? He offered sacrifices constantly, and made no secret of it, now in his home, now at the altars of the state temples, and he made use of divination with as little secrecy. Indeed it had become notorious that Socrates claimed to be guided by ‘the deity:’1 it was out of this claim, I think, that the charge of bringing in strange deities arose. Bolded the bits I thought was most pertinent to the discussion.
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Sep 27, 2019 18:34
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skasion posted:Sample odd anecdote Servius Tullius's mother knew he would become King of Rome because when he was a baby, a circlet of flame appeared around his head.
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Sep 27, 2019 19:34
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Epicurius posted:Servius Tullius's mother knew he would become King of Rome because when he was a baby, a circlet of flame appeared around his head. Moms knew.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:07
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Epicurius posted:Servius Tullius's mother knew he would become King of Rome because when he was a baby, a circlet of flame appeared around his head. How'd that work out for you, chief?
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Sep 27, 2019 21:08
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Carillon posted:I had a question about ancient augury/religion/superstition. Is there any evidence on what they thought was happening when the oracles read the signs? I'm curious about the force behind what they thought was happening, whether a good omen was that this outcome is preordained, the gods will fight on our side, or something else entirely. Same with superstition, did they think knocking on way cause the effect they wanted to occur, or cause outside forces to intervene to try and make it so. I could be wrong about this, but I believe Xenophon (who was a sacrificin' fool) writes about this, taking the angle that divinations show what is *possible* if we live up to our potential. Bad omens, You're fuxked; good omens, you've got a good chance, but no guarantees.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:21
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 This is an Etruscan liver diagram. There are other examples from Mesopotamia of the same idea. The liver's divided up into sections that correspond to different deities. You'd examine the liver for any blemishes, and presumably consult one of these and whatever region the mark is in tells you what deity is sending you a message. How you interpret that message is is a more difficult question. Given what we know of religion writ large I am comfortable saying that there was no rigorous system and the augur could interpret things as they wished to a great extent. But it's not completely lacking in system. We have these diagrams, we know there are situations where the auguries are more of a clear binary--sacred chickens refusing to eat before battle, for a famous example--but it isn't consistent. Bad omens = hosed good omens = not guaranteed but go ahead seems to be a common way of looking at it. There's also an after the fact aspect to it. If you won the battle, obviously the gods were on your side/your gods were more powerful than their gods. If you lost, welp, clearly you missed the omens and are a moron. When you read about all the terrible omens that happened before a disaster, that's all made up after the fact to make a moral lesson.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:37
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During the consulship of Bibulus and Caesar, Bibulus was able to declare every day Caesar wanted to get something done ill-omened. While this was transparently a political ploy even to his contemporaries I wonder if there legitimately were enough omens and enough ways to game the system that if you wanted a specific answer you could make it happen no matter what that answer was
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Sep 27, 2019 21:43
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sullat posted:How'd that work out for you, chief? He did pretty well until he was murdered.
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Sep 27, 2019 21:43
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cheetah7071 posted:During the consulship of Bibulus and Caesar, Bibulus was able to declare every day Caesar wanted to get something done ill-omened. While this was transparently a political ploy even to his contemporaries I wonder if there legitimately were enough omens and enough ways to game the system that if you wanted a specific answer you could make it happen no matter what that answer was Of course they shouldn't do something on an ill-omened day. What if that was the day Bibulus was correct?
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Sep 27, 2019 21:45
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