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Anne Whateley posted:I'm curious about socks, too. I don't know if they had knitting in the way we think of it. All their textiles I know about (not an expert) are woven. I'm having a hard time imagining good woven socks. Assuming that the information on Wikipedia is accurate, then they've been a thing as far back as classical Greece. But I guess they were foot wraps more than anything else. Though I do remember when I was in high school, we were watching a video on Pompeii and one of the historians speaking mentioned something about a sock that was worn by a little kid or infant. This was way back in 2003, so I don't remember much about it. That's also the same video I saw when I learned that the Romans regarded the people of Britain as loving crazy and got the hell out. I don't look back on my high school world history class very fondly. I had to take a year of Latin (where I learned the wonderful story of how vestal virgins were punished for being tainted) and a year of art history classes to undo an awful lot of the damage. My US history teacher was even worse, but anything I learned about Rome was whatever was going to be on the test and not anything of interest. I do remember him musing about the idea of what could of happened if Rome and China had ever ended up in a fight. And speaking of bullshit about Roman history, something I want to know is how in the hell did Joseph Smith come up with the idea of Rome having contact with Native Americans when he was writing the Book of Mormon? I imagine that he made it up from whole cloth, but was it purely his own idea or was there some kind of weird, romanticized (hurr hurr) idea of Rome in the American mindset in the 1830s? I mean, I think it's plausible that Rome could have ventured into the Americas the same way Leif Eriksson ended up in Newfoundland by sailing from mainland Europe to Iceland, then to Greenland, and then to Canada (though their boats probably never could have handled the voyage or the climate). Star Man fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Oct 31, 2012 |
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Oct 31, 2012 06:54
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You're right, it would have been converted Jews. Whenever I think of Old World contact the the Book of Mormon claims to have happened, I keep misremembering what the story is from what I watched in this video, which depicts people that look like stereotypical Roman centurions fighting Native Americans*. *god dammit, I'm from Wyoming and the norm is to say Indian, even though I know the difference and that calling them Indians errs on the side of racism. Native American/Amerindian just feels so unwieldly.
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Oct 31, 2012 07:40
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I thought so. Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon during a time when other batshit crazy ideas like a hollow earth were being kicked around. I was more curious if he made it up himself or if someone or something he read planted the idea in his head. And speaking of a hollow earth, while I was reading the lengthy backlog of this thread, I came across your post that the Roman idea of the extreme south was hot. Obviously, they got that idea because their concept of the far south was the Sahara, but it reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The second half of the novel deals with the exploration of the extreme southern latitudes, and while the novel was a hoax, it did describe the land that is found there to be really hot. I doubt that Poe had the same concept the Romans did of the far southern latitudes in mind, but it was one of those moments where I could think to myself, "hey, I've heard of this idea before."
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Oct 31, 2012 07:57
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ptk posted:Anything interesting known by archaeology about prehistoric Latins? I second this question. I remember my Latin teacher telling my class that sometimes, the Romans would want to build something in the same place that their ancestry or an earlier people in the area that the city was in was. The attitude was to leave it alone because it was put there by the ancestors and to build around it or over it. They would even go as far as completely burying the object, but would still try to preserve it.
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Oct 31, 2012 09:28
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So perhaps there is something to that whole stereotypical look of the Romans in movies. And speaking of movies, I won't be surprised if a person like yourself eats a whole hat store whenever you watch The Passion of the Christ. I remember one of my two teachers in a film and religion class mentioning that one of Pontius Pilate's aids said something like "will you get my laundry?" to him rather than what the caption said in Latin.
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Nov 2, 2012 05:51
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Grand Fromage posted:Going to encircle us? Surprise, we built a fortress around your entire city before you arrived. Walls? gently caress walls. Ain't got poo poo on us. I'll add, "going to encircle us? That's fine, we carry walls on our backs and defend ourselves with them. These scutums are pretty sweet!" Things like building a ramp from the materials nearby to overtake a city sounds so cartoonish, but at the time, it was a sound plan. 
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Nov 30, 2012 06:37
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Amused to Death posted:Above anything, as an American, I'm just fascinated with the idea a city can construct something but have to continually keep stopping because there's 1,500 year old history that was found and needs to preserved. I mean there's plenty of native American finds here, just not on the same scale as the Roman world. The Romans were probably pretty impressed they had a solid network and hold on an area stretching from Turkey to Britain, and centuries later I'm still kind of awestruck in the fact if you wind up in the right place, people in both Britain and Turkey can unearth a whole bunch of Roman stuff. It's a bit of a corner case, but from what I'm told, finding things underground in Hawaii is a common occurance because Hawaii has not been inhabited for very long, so all of the things found were put or left there within around 1,500 years.
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Dec 1, 2012 08:53
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Grand Fromage posted:Did Jesus exist? Maybe. I was looking at the citations on the subject of the existence of Jesus, and it makes it sound like that the academic consensus is that Jesus was a real person. But then I scroll down and the evidence of the earliest known written references are all at least thirty years after he died. Is that what's considered proof enough that there was such a person? Because I'm of the opinion that mentioning someone who died thirty years before is not proof that someone was ever a someone. Not that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I'm not buying it based on writings that happened far after the fact.
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Dec 6, 2012 01:59
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Mr Havafap posted:And vaguely related, Jupiter is from 'Zeus Pater' (Father Zeus) if you ever wondered. Not quite. The classical Latin words deus and Iovis and the classical Greek words theos and Zeus are all descendants of the same root word from Proto-Indo-European. All of them mean essentially the same thing--god or sky. The Latin word for day, dei, is related. The Latin word Iuppiter does descend from the archaic Latin Diespiter and it is a compound word that combines deus and pater, meaning father god or father sky. The word Iovis descends from the archaic Latin word Diovis. Either way it's spelled, the word Iuppiter is really meant to be used in the vocative case, "o father Jove". Otherwise, it's normally Iovis and its set of declensions. Interestingly enough, the word deus never really shows up in Roman writing until the translation of the New Testament from Greek to Latin. They seem to have used all of the word forms but the masculine nominative singular. Because the declensions of deus all follow the same rules for second declension masculine nouns, it wasn't a hard solution to come to. My guess is that in the Roman worldview, Jove was God and that's how you referred to him, similarly to how Islam prefers to call God by the name Allah.
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Jan 18, 2013 04:01
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Something interesting to note about the letter X in Latin is that it's often used in place of the digraph "gs" or "cs" because Romans really hated consonant clusters in writing. It explains why you have an X in the third declension nominative singular word rex and its declensions all begin with reg-.
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Apr 18, 2013 08:26
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't have a source handy to show your friend. But the thing is the average is low because it's factoring in infant/childhood mortality. You had maybe a 50/50 chance of getting to adulthood if you were lucky. But if you did get to adulthood, reaching your 60s was perfectly normal barring the usual disease/injury. 70s wasn't uncommon. If you were a man. The mortality rate for women was much higher because of the dangers involved with being pregnant and childbirth.
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May 11, 2013 20:25
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Does anyone know of any good sources to go to regarding the structure of Roman politics and law?
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Jul 13, 2015 05:13
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Tao Jones posted:Lily Ross Taylor's various books (Party Politics in the Age of Caesar, Roman Voting Assemblies, The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic, etc) have a lot about the structure of the Roman political/voting system and are a tolerable read in terms of style, assuming you're a weirdo like me and get excited about electioneering rules from two thousand years ago. Well, even though I've taken three semesters of Latin and am registered for an upper-division class this autumn called "Rome and the Caesars", I would like to know what the gently caress I'm talking about when I base characters in fiction around the Roman political system.
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Jul 13, 2015 05:35
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So was there ever a case where you'd lose a battle, survive, and not be considered dishonorable? Or was it really just a winner-take-all kind of thing? Because nobody can win every single fight in the most badass way imaginable. There's a reason why people like Heracles are myth.
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Jul 27, 2015 04:25
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Doesn't Cicero mean "big nose"?
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Aug 2, 2015 22:12
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FreudianSlippers posted:It's Latin America. Who doesn't eventually get tossed out by a coup? Hugo Chavez?
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Aug 5, 2015 19:58
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The medical procedure that I was given birth with is named after a guy that got stabbed by thirteen people. Sounds about right.
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Jan 8, 2016 11:11
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Sleep of Bronze posted:Between Suetonius, Plutarch, and Nicolaus, the crowd of assassins is numbered between 60 to 80, and the wounds from 23 to 35. Where's thirteen from? I don't remember where I got that number. Oh wait, duh. Shakespeare.
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Jan 9, 2016 06:00
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"I took three semesters of Latin, so...."
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Sep 15, 2023 22:30
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Having taken up stargazing the past few years of working outside at night- it’s amazing how instantly you pick it up. I can name stars and constellations in the sky of places I know and tell directions from them. I can tell what time of year it is too. That’s not a humblebrag- I think everyone would figure it out if it was necessary these days. When that’s critical because there is no gps, and without immense light pollution, well gently caress I’d like to see that I memorized them out of a book in 1997. I still have that book. It comes down to learning your major landmarks like the Big Dipper, learning how to use it and Orion to find other constellations, and beating them into memory. In the thirty years I've had the nickname Star Man, I learned early on how utterly impossible it is to get anyone to look up.
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Sep 28, 2023 07:57
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I've managed to fool a few people into thinking jackalopes are in fact real.
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Oct 7, 2023 23:26
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Hippocrass posted:I mean that's because they are. It's true! 
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Oct 8, 2023 00:10
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There aren't any movie stars under the age of fifty, that's why.
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Nov 14, 2023 13:42
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Sure there are. They just all do the Marvel movies made for babies (I would too, for that kinda paycheck) and its hard to imagine them in a more serious/period piece type of role. Ain't no one going to see Captain America because of Chris Evans, just like no one went to Batman because Micheal Keaton was in it
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Nov 14, 2023 14:41
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Zopotantor posted:What do Americans think about Lafayette? There's a guy worth making a movie about. "Who?"
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Nov 14, 2023 21:48
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skasion posted:The soft C thing is general Romance thing I think. In Spanish you say César which exhibits the same tendency. Greeks (and through them Persians, Arabs, Turks etc) kept the hard C. The Germans too, which is kind of a weird outlier Probably because C is a Latin letter and K is a Greek letter.
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Dec 21, 2023 15:27
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Does anyone have any juicy sources on archaeoastronomy? Amateur naked eye astronomy was my starting point to getting into classics. I had to memorize it all out of a book in the late nineties, and helped me get a handle on myths related to constellations, stars, and the planets. That knowledge base has made me the weird humanities kid among a group of amateur astronomers with STEM backgrounds in my local amateur astronomy group. Which to my surprise makes me stand out as one of the few people at star parties that knows where anything is without reference, how any of it correlates to other nearby constellations, and anything outside of Greco-Roman myth. So I would like to know more about anything, whether it's Greek, Roman, anywhere else from Europe, Egyptian, Chinese, Native American, etc.
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Jan 17, 2024 22:44
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I can produce a short book named, "Archaeoastronomy." oh gently caress there's a distinction between archaeoastronomy and astroarchaeology
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Jan 18, 2024 00:23
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Many people throughout history and all over the world managed to get some things right about the natural world, even if it was the result of the wrong conclusions, local religion, or philosophical conjecture.
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Jan 26, 2024 01:18
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Jan 29, 2024 18:22
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Another clerk at a post office I used to work at told me they were a kemhetist. Like with total sincerity.
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Mar 27, 2024 01:05
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