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BrainDance posted:If it's ok, I actually have a question about Roman historians (and... Ancient historians? Or is that just what we call people now who study ancient history?) Does the media in your country always agree 100% on the interpretation of events and whether they are good or bad?
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Nov 6, 2012 16:13
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Alternatively; Shakespeare's 'historical' plays. People are biased for the same reasons that they've always been biased.
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Nov 6, 2012 16:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:How clearly defined were the separate domains of the roman gods? Was it as simple as one god for each individual aspect of life, or was there a lot of overlapping? That's kind of the wrong question. The Roman/Greek conception of the gods is to imagine an episode of Jersey Shore where all the characters have super-powers.
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Nov 12, 2012 17:22
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EvilHawk posted:I have a question about a Roman weapon that may or may not have existed. When I was a kid (about 10 years ago) my school went on a trip to a local museum (in Winchester, so very Roman Britain). I half-remember an object, that for some reason I think of as a "Roman mine", but I've never seen it since. It had a wooden base, cylindrical with a spherical bottom, and coming out of it was a spike. From what I remember it was designed so that it would be buried in the ground leading up to a fort, the attack would tread on the spike, driving it into his foot, and then would be unable to remove it without causing more damage. If it would help I can probably sketch up a rough estimation of what it looks like, but can anyone help me identify it? You are describing a Caltrop and while I don't know anything about Roman ones they're a fairly obvious and simple device so there's no reason to suspect the Romans didn't use them.
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Dec 17, 2012 16:02
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Huskalator posted:Some ancient battles were decisive but other times the opposing army was able to retreat and live to fight another day. How? How did 10,000+ blood thirsty maniacs just disengage from battle and run off without getting hacked to pieces? People who thrown away their weapons and armour can run faster than people still carrying theirs. Being able to hack a routing army to pieces requires having a mobile reserve in place that you can commit. Don't have any cavalry? Tough. Your cavalry went off to fight their cavalry and is now several miles away going god knows what? Tough. The key thing to remember is that an army that disintegrates and isn't able to rally on a convenient base is usually effectively wiped out - surviving levies are going to take the chance to get the gently caress away, mercenaries might decide the contract isn't worth it, minor nobles will defect etc etc. You don't have to kill everyone to destroy an army.
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Dec 28, 2012 19:57
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Not My Leg posted:This is absolutely true, and I didn't mean to make it sound like I was minimizing his accomplishments as Emperor. Plenty of people would have been killed or deposed much earlier in their reign, and plenty would have failed to ever make it to Emperor at all. It's just interesting that he was skilled, incredibly long lived, and he was first. You might have expected a few more false starts along the way before things either settled down or collapsed. Augustus actually establishes a dynasty.
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Jan 5, 2013 01:23
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Big Willy Style posted:I don't know if this question is really stupid or what but when did gold and silver become so important and why is used for currency? How did this come about? They're inert metals that can be made pretty but aren't useful for anything practical and are somewhat rare (but where it does exist is easily recoverable) and are difficult to fake. In other words they are absolutely perfect as the basis of an intermediary good that nobody actually wants but everyone can accept the value of. e: oh seriously?
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Jan 28, 2013 19:03
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Gabriel Pope posted:From what I've read of classical Chinese stories, they used champion duels as more of a warm-up round. The stories are full of "their guy and our guy rode out and fought, and our guy won so we were totally pumped when it was time for the whole armies to meet." I'm pretty sure most people in the classical era did this sort of thing. The exceptions are the people with a special appreciation for the value of discipline in their armed forces, and they tended to do very well as a result.
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Feb 6, 2013 18:09
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euphronius posted:I suppose the stone temples would also have been relatively fireproof. Bricks are also relatively fireproof, but that doesn't stop houses burning down (these buildings are full of flammable objects).
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Feb 19, 2013 15:30
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This is what I really love about end of the Republic history - you have this series of exceptional leaders in a political system that encouraged individual achievement and winner-takes-all and you can see starting with Marius and Sulla the whole thing just starts to spiral more and more out of control until only one person is left.
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Feb 25, 2013 20:30
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I think it's telling that when Cicero prosecutes Verres he highlights in his charges the murder of two Roman citizens, neither of whom were from the city of Rome. Sack an entire province and nobody cares. Murder Roman Citizens and you need to get out of Italy fast before the mob tears you apart.
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Feb 25, 2013 22:53
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Pron on VHS posted:What do you guys think of Tom Holland's books on Rome, specifically Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic? I believe they are the same book, and he presents an extremely compelling and accessible narrative of how (as I've put it earlier in the thread) the Roman Republic had a meritocratic winner-takes-all political system which starts spiralling out of control for the 50 or so years before the end of the Republic as the natural checks and balances caused by the interests of the patrician class disappear, until you come to the moment where Caesar is standing on the Rubicon and the system has left him with the choices of Civil War and ruin and no other way out. He manages to tell a story that's about 'great men' but at the same time gives you a sense of the system that inevitably produced these men.
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Mar 18, 2013 18:49
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physeter posted:Are these beginner books or more advanced? I'm increasingly interested in anyone doing any work that looks at the breeding habits of the Roman upper classes leading up to the wars. One thing that isn't usually accounted for in trying to diminish the Great Man nature of the period is the breeding. Not only do you have a tight biological sample interbreeding for centuries in a society that openly values military leadership, but the system actually allowed for successful commanders to divorce their wives and remarry the daughters of other successful Romans who might themselves have been successful military commanders. These women were societally valued not just for their family connections, but for their individual ability to bear offspring. A noble woman with children from a prior marriage was a plus, not a minus, because they knew she was fertile.  How about you start over and consider that this was a society in which military service was a requirement for any kind of political career.
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Mar 18, 2013 21:41
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I understand why people want to shift away from blindly glorifying western history, but dismissing Alexander as somebody who didn't change world is pretty silly. In the end, it was still European who dominated the world, and guess who started the whole shebang? And then a bare 40 years after he's dead, the Pyrrhic War happens and Rome starts its upwards trajectory.
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Apr 2, 2013 12:03
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DarkCrawler posted:Well, the North Americans didn't. What kind of bloody-minded culture builds its cities on the top of a mountain? Oh.
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Jul 1, 2013 11:39
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Blut posted:In addition to this point, I imagine the current societal place of "aspiring actors" is about similar to how actors were viewed in Rome. If youre at a dinner party full of 35 year old managers, doctors, lawyers etc and you told them you were an aspiring actor you'd probably receive a similar dose of condescension/pity for your occupation to that you would have in Roman times. Its only the very small massively successful minority that have lost the stigma. It might be relevant to note that 'aspiring actor' really means 'street entertainer and sock-puppet theatre'(hell, for most aspiring actors it means things like that now). Another important thing to note in the context of this issue is that the Romans loving loved rhetoric and oratory skills. The law courts worked in the forum remember. People with aptitude for acting would simply be applying those theatrical skills at the forum in the Senate, but with a different label on them.
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Jul 3, 2013 15:55
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Why did the Romans have such a large (or seemingly large) population in comparison to their neighbours? I know that as time goes on they get access to manpower and auxilia from further and further afield, but it's so strange to think of an empire encompassing the known world originating from a single city-state. Where do the men to replace the losses at Cannae even come from?
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Jul 18, 2013 17:07
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euphronius posted:Julius Caesars entire campaign in France was basically what today would be called a war crime. Except he won. And winning still counts today. The fact that the primary account of those campaigns is Caesar's own and that it was written to increase his popularity with the people of Rome suggests that perhaps his conduct was not that unusual or unexpected.
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Jul 18, 2013 23:32
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euphronius posted:Did you miss the part of my statement where I said "using the tools they used then". It's not like Physics was different back then.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:01
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plushpuffin posted:He didn't mean it literally, he meant "today" as in "we couldn't start right now and do it well or at all, we would need to do some prep work and research and probably some trial and error attempts first". He was just unclear in his first post, a bit too absolutist in second post, but he cleared it up in his third post. But it's not like the Ancient Egyptians had that knowledge either. Pyramids were essentially a one in a generation thing, every pyramid would have had a similar prep time to what you are describing.
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Jul 25, 2013 00:12
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What kind of prestige did the Roman cavalry have? On the one hand the Equites is where all the rich and nobles served, on the other hand everyone must have known that the infantry is where the power of the Roman army was.
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Aug 6, 2013 23:43
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Romans were pretty pragmatic about their lovely cavalry and did their best to use auxilia instead. Later in the empire, the cavalry becomes much more important as border defence becomes the main concern for the military. I mean more when a dude comes home and he's all 'I served in the cavalry', are people impressed because he's a noble doing his military service or is he scoffed at a bit because the cavalry is poo poo?
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Aug 7, 2013 01:18
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Giodo! posted:I imagine it varied tremendously as the makeup of Rome's armies changed. From my limited knowledge, cavalry went for being a force composed of people wealthy enough to own horses to a primarily foreign auxiliary role to a core rapid reaction force, with I'm sure plenty of other transitions. So there wouldn't have been a single reaction throughout roman history. I'm guessing I'm asking about mid/late Republic, the point at which anyone wanting to do anything in politics has to go and do military service of some kind the moment they hit adulthood.
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Aug 8, 2013 01:01
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'An august occasion'. 'The august presence of the monarch'. August.
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Aug 15, 2013 21:38
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PittTheElder posted:Maybe, but 150 years on, I'm amazed at much respect there still is for the old CSA. Yeah, the 'lost cause' myth started right away and people still take it seriously.
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Oct 18, 2013 18:23
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Halloween Jack posted:Even if we assume that Titus Pullo happened to be in the Jewish temple where Jesus began his "ministry" as a child, that's 30-odd years after the end of the series. It's an interesting show because despite discarding realism all the time in favour of visceral storytelling, they start with a foundation of things that are true and then change them (as opposed to just using 'hollywood Rome' as their starting point and adapting). It feels a lot like what the Romans would have produced if they'd made a TV action drama.
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Oct 30, 2013 14:25
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Halloween Jack posted:I have a question of my own. The human race has definitely improved over time thanks to better nutrition, medicine, and other technology. Are there places in the record of ancient human remains where we can see that people were much less fit than their ancestors several generations before, due to something like the Bronze Age collapse? Actually the industial revolution was pretty terrible for your quality of life if you were part of the social class expected to start working down the mines instead of in the fields.
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Nov 5, 2013 15:32
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Arglebargle III posted:Yup China is like this too. Chinese people under 30 average maybe 2-3 inches shorter than the average western European height, but a lot of them are pretty big. It's not too unusual for teenage boys (or the occasional girl) to be taller than me, and I'm bog-standard North American average male height. Over 30 I have seen a handful of people taller than me in my whole time in China. Over 40 and they're 6-12 inches shorter than NA average. Over 60 and they rarely reach 5'6". There was this world event covering the mid-30's to mid-40's where many people's livelihoods were disrupted. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 16:43
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tekz posted:I'd like to thank whoever first pointed me towards Dan Carlin. The fall of the roman republic series is really good, and the comparisons to American politics are entertaining if a little wacky. I basically imagine Obama now as the Marcus Livius Drusus the Elder of our day haha. Tom Holland's Rubicon is excellent.
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Nov 5, 2013 19:03
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tekz posted:Can't really say either way, addressing the causes of the infighting and civil war might've stopped more coming in the future while still maintaining the Republic. Sulla murdered the wrong people IMO, he should've just done in all the idiots getting in the way of needed reforms like citizenship for the rest of Italy, unemployment due to the slave economy, land ownership etc because it cut into their bottom line. The problem wasn't Sulla murdering people, the problem was that Sulla and Marius between them demonstrated that it was possible to seize absolute power in Rome and only lose it if someone showed up with a better army and displaced you. After that everyone started playing to win.
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Nov 6, 2013 17:21
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Jazerus posted:Sulla paving the path for Caesar shouldn't necessarily be looked upon as necessarily leading to the death of the Republic, either - Caesar had cogently identified many of the real problems with the Republic's government and treatment of non-citizens within the Republican empire. I have always suspected, though there can never be any proof, that Caesar fully intended to step down like Sulla once he had completed a vast, semi-revolutionary revamping of the Republic's constitution. Would he have effectively reigned in the potential for marches upon Rome, as Augustus later did (for a while)? Who knows. Caesar's dictatorship is a muddled and confusing mess from this much historical distance, vacillating between rank nepotism and narcissism on one hand and genuine attempts to prevent future constitutional crises by coming down on the side of the people/non-citizens on the other. What happens if Crassus doesn't get himself killed? What happens if Pompey doesn't back Caesar into a corner? I think it's important to remember that Caesar doesn't choose to have a war - it's forced on him.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:06
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Captain Postal posted:Well, what I was trying to get across is that the catholic church squashed all scientific research for 1500 years, and refused to allow science to move forwards from around the time of Christ (give or take a century or so) for purely dogmatic reasons. Galen, Ptolemy etc were still the cutting edge 1500 years later because the church said "this is true and any disagreement is heresy which will be punished". This isn't really true at all.
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Dec 30, 2013 01:28
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physeter posted:When a Republican Roman commander did something very impressive he would be hailed as imperator by the (surviving) troops, which probably boiled down to guys smacking swords against shields and yelling "Imperator!" over and over. Later on, this being hailed on the field became a prerequisite for being granted a triumph, and since the commander could control things like bonus pay for the troops, and commanders really, really liked triumphs, well. You get the idea. And then the Emperors sort of make it dangerous to be hailed as Imperator, since Imperator is the Emperor, and it wasn't a good idea to try and be a second emperor unless you were Vespasian. One of the conditions for a Triumph was being hailed Imperator by your troops.
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Mar 24, 2014 22:28
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WoodrowSkillson posted:After the slave revolts culminating with Spartacus, the Romans shifted their treatment of slaves to a more humane system, and then as the slaves gained in the conquests of new regions got old and died, they did not have nearly as many anymore, so it was sensible to keep them relatively healthy and productive. Life as a farm slave was probably not all that horrible, at least compared to chattel slavery as practiced in the new world. Moreover theres all the doctors/tutors/clerks/chefs who were slaves. If you had the good fortune to be an educated slave then (comparatively) life could be quite good.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:23
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e: you know what, I'll just go with welp And yeah, anyone who was anyone had a Greek slave tutor. I wonder what socialisation between upper class Roman children was like. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 18:50
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Why did the Romans get lazy naming months halfway through? I know January and February were added later, and July and August were renamed later, but March-June were named after gods and festivals while September-December (and originally July and August) are just "month 7, month 8, etc." Do we have any idea why they only gave special names to the ones they did? I would like this question given some attention and not forgotten because now I've noticed this I can't stop thinking about it.
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Dec 28, 2014 13:48
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Jazerus posted:I have always imagined that in the background, large sacks of gold are being unloaded from an ox cart and pressed into the jurors' hands as they vote on the verdict. He didn't claim he'd had sex with her, just that the reason he was spending a suspicious amount of time in her presence was to try to get her property.
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Jan 12, 2015 14:37
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Charlie Mopps posted:The Romans liked to use Greek athletes during games, even though they would disapprove a Roman spending as much time exercising as the athletes did. Just like they loved gladiators but I don't think there's a contradiction here. There's a big difference between 'soldier fit' and 'bodybuilder fit' - the Romans expected you to be lean and physically fit, but thought that spending 12 hours a day in the gym and packing bulging muscle all over was excessive and indicative of someone lacking in the brains department. Not only is there no contradiction there, it's basically identical to modern attitudes towards fitness. Bodybuilders are not stereotypically know for being master chess players.
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Jan 23, 2015 14:26
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if you decided to become one yourself.
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Ithle01 posted:When people say plundering a province they usually don't mean through force of arms and more like through economic or legal means. Brutus (the one that stabbed Caesar) got very rich while governor of Cyprus by lending money at >40% interest. You also expect the natives to 'reward' you whenever you settle their disputes. In other words, whenever you take a bribe to give one guy permission to screw his neighbor over. Force is usually not as effective as setting up a system where your subjects create wealth and then willingly transport it to Rome for you. Eventually you end up with Night of Long Knives situation, but that's the next governor's problem. Plus armies are expensive and soldiers get to keep some of the loot. Consider that when Charles Wilson was secretary of defense in Eisenhower's administration he didn't give up his GM stock and a lot of people were upset by the conflict of interest this created. The Romans would have laughed themselves silly at the idea that he would be expected to give up his stock. A major plank of Cicero's prosecution of Verres wasn't merely that he'd plundered Sicily, but that he'd done so in a way that had utterly ruined the economy of the province and thereby screwed his fellow Romans out of future wealth to be extracted from it.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:24
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Popping back to the bankruptcy for political position stuff for a moment do we have any evidence of rich guys financing young politions on a "maybe you dont have to pay it all back but you do have to make sure such n such a law gets passed" basis? Crassus bought out entire elections, that was his contribution to the first triumvirate.
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Jan 31, 2015 12:31
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