|
Grand Fromage posted:The Aeneid is a good way to understand the Roman point of view. Imperium sine fine--empire without end, promised by Jupiter. Isn't it more 'power/authority without boundaries/limits'? Imperium does not necessarily mean empire, per se (the word predates the Empire by quite a way in fact) and finis can be either geographical or temporal. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 21:41 on May 30, 2012 |
#
¿
May 30, 2012 21:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 00:28 |
|
|
BrainDance posted:I dont know enough about Roman culture, or that anyone does, but how much of that survived to the present? Sorry, another really vague question, but how much is my culture as an American Roman? Ever wonder why your upper house is called the Senate, or why you have eagles all over your poo poo?
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2012 21:11
|
|
|
DarkCrawler posted:Isn't it true that a SHITLOAD of Roman writings were lost? Like a vast majority of the stuff written during their era? Yep. Same with Greek literature. We have the Iliad and the Odyssey to tell us of the Trojan war, for example, but there were like half a dozen other stories from the same cycle that have been lost to us apart from the occasional quotation in later writers. It's depressing, because the Iliad mostly just covers a few days at the end of the Trojan war and the Odyssey its aftermath for one of the combatants; the whole rest of the story has been lost. I have dreams that someday someone'll dig up an intact ancient library in Alexandria or somewhere with a ton of the stuff we know that's out there from references in extant works but that is currently unknown to us. What tended to survive best is the things that spoke to Christians, who then preserved them through the middle ages. Un-Christian stuff tended to get intentionally obliterated (see the library at Alexandria, for example. by some accounts at least). When I did my history degree, I remember my tutor telling me he considered the early modern period to be the ideal period to study; there's too much documentation of modern stuff for any historian to get through in its entirety, and too little survives from the mediaeval period or earlier to be satisfactorily sure of what was going on, whereas the renaissance was just about right. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 23:12 on May 30, 2012 |
|
#
¿
May 30, 2012 23:00
|
|
|
FullLeatherJacket posted:The statistic I've heard is that no more than 10,000 words of primary source Roman material have ever been discovered (although I would assume this doesn't cover the Byzantine era). That sounds waaaaaaaaaay low. I'd have thought Cicero alone for example would be more than that.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2012 20:31
|
|
|
physeter posted:It makes Latin class go faster when you realize that the two consuls you're reading about, leaders of the most powerful nation in Antiquity, were legally named Marcus the Animal and Elephant Ears Sextus, or whatever. And let's not forget that Cicero, legendary foremost orator of Rome, was actually Mr Chickpea.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2012 23:43
|
|
|
Comrade Koba posted:Could someone please write a post about the publicani? Can't elaborate about the Romans in particular, but tax farming along these lines was a common thing right up until the modern era - it was one of the causes of the French revolution for instance. It's basically an early form of public/private partnership or outsourcing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2012 23:45
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:No, the pronunciation that the Legion uses in New Vegas is the classical Latin pronunciation. What we're used to is medieval church Latin. Kai-zar is the proper classical pronunciation of Caesar. See-zer is the ecclesiastical. Kai-sar technically isn't it, i.e. c->z isn't correct. Edit: not talking about how they pronounce it in New Vegas - I don't remember and they may very well be Evil, Bad and Wrong - so much as how Keekerow would have pronounced it  feedmegin fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Jul 5, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2012 14:32
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:Scandinavia was long a huge white spot on the map. It wasn't until after year 1000 that a monk travelled there to explore and see if there were any Christians there and he probably didn't make it further than Denmark. Considering the Vikings were not just raiding but conquering parts of the British Isles quite a bit before this, that seems a bit unlikely. I mean Beowulf is set in Scandinavia, even.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2012 19:12
|
|
|
Sure. This is half a millennium before 1000 ad. That's a long loving time.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2012 23:17
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:Those Romans, they had good ideas. Fun fact, the very term fascist goes back to these dudes - http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/b/bronze_figurine_of_a_lictor.aspx See that bundle of sticks he's carrying? That's what Fascism is named after. Mussolini was very big on 'Fascist Italy is Rome reborn'. Given how the actual Romans thought, early Imperial Rome is probably actually not that bad an analogue to fascism if you discount the anti-Semitism in the German variant.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2012 15:25
|
|
|
Moist von Lipwig posted:I thought it was more that Urine had a lot of Industrial uses and he tried to institute a tax on the sale of it to Tanners and Launderers? Your translation's a bit ropey. Pecunia non olet means money doesn't stink.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2012 19:32
|
|
|
Gazpacho posted:Wait, so this means that what Jesus is described doing at the Cana marriage is what anyone serving wine in that culture would have done (pouring water into casks and then pouring out drinkable wine). Well, no, if I recall they ran out of wine altogether. The authors of the Gospels weren't quite so dumb as to claim as amazing something that everyone did. 'And then Jesus performed a miracle; he feed the 5000, by going down to Costco and buying a poo poo-ton of hearty Italian and getting a bulk deal on frozen cod!'
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2012 12:17
|
|
|
Comstar posted:Didn't literacy disappeared from mainland Greece for several centuries? Whatever happened it took reading and writing with it - presumably everyone who knew how died out and things were so bad no one really noticed. Bear in mind that very few people (probably) knew how to read and write before it; mostly scribes/administrators working for the big palaces, which were large enough organisations to need written records. The texts we have from those times are mostly things like 'Delivered to the palace today, 20 vats of wine, 30 bushels of wheat'. The palaces destroyed, noone really had a reason to read and write any more.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2012 21:23
|
|
|
EvilHawk posted:I suppose that makes sense. I just have this mental image of a Roman in 1st century Britain dropping a pot in the kitchen and going "gently caress picking that up" A ton of these things are actually found in the Roman equivalent of the trash can. Break a pot? Chuck it in the rubbish pile out back.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2013 21:04
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:Yeah, they did. And basically all the states that emerged out of the Roman West made claims to legitimacy based on Roman authority (which was long gone). This continued until the 6th or 7th century, at which point they had enough self confidence to let the claim die away. Well, sort of. Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor (as in literally Augustus), after all, and the Holy Roman Empire was claiming legitimacy derived from that all the way until the 19th century; so in their own way were the Tsars.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2013 17:58
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:This was a funny example because there actually are Iberian Celts still. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicians Uh. I'm prepared to believe you but nothing in that link says those guys are actually in any distinctive way Celtic, any more than an Englishman is related to an ancient Briton.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2013 06:22
|
|
|
The Entire Universe posted:I believe the loss was estimated to be approximately 10% of the empire's possible strength at the time. I.e. equivalent to the death of 150,000 US Army personnel in a single battle; about three times as many as died in the entire Vietnam war. Kind of a big deal!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2013 19:02
|
|
|
veekie posted:Though it's worth keeping in mind that the population of a million people in one city is more or less held up by the resources of the empire, whereas in the modern world, even a small country would be likely to have one or two urban centers of a million people. Less likely than you think. Norway is a small country for example; Oslo proper is a bit under 1 million people, Bergen being the next city down is like 250,000. Even the UK, which most people would consider more medium sized, basically has London and Birmingham over the 1 million mark (and London is a massive outlier).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2013 20:46
|
|
|
Lewd Mangabey posted:As Koramei says, this happens in popular science writing (my area of expertise) all the time, and it's the price you pay. But it sounds like the guy hasn't kept up with any scholarship of pretty much the whole 20th century. What would you think of popular science writing that espoused Lysenkoism or the aether, or dismissed quantum physics by quoting Einstein saying 'God doesn't play with dice'? Not being bang up to the latest research as of 2013 is one thing, not reading anything more recent than Gibbon is rather another...
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2013 20:05
|
|
|
Thwomp posted:I think it was covered earlier in this thread but the reason they are so similar is that they are both descended from a proto-indoeuropean skygod religion. Early Rome was heavily, heavily influenced by Greek culture though (what with all those Greek colonies in southern Italy). I think it goes a bit further than just both descending from PIE religion.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2014 22:00
|
|
|
homullus posted:It was also heavily influenced by Etruscan culture, what with them being neighbors. Yep, and said Etruscans were also influenced by the Greeks! I'm not saying Roman religion = Greek religion with the serial numbers filed off or anything, but saying 'oh they were both descended from proto-Indo-Europeans and that's why there are resemblances between them' is going a bit far in the other direction.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2014 22:09
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:Also as a small strike against non-metric, I should note that Standard and Imperial Cups, Pints, Tablespoons, etc. are actually slightly different volumes, which can make translating US recipes interesting if not just converting to metric and assuming the same term means the same amount. A bit more than 'slightly' in the case of the pint if by Standard you mean Standard American (Imperial is 'Standard' hereabouts you know ;p)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2014 21:37
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:Although my favorite part of the whole time traveller thing is the language barrier. Sure I know a few Latin words here and there, but could I really learn it fast enough to demonstrate I might be useful to people? Would I have to find the ancestors of the East Frisians to really be able to have a conversation? Go look up some Old English/Anglo-Saxon and see how decent a conversation you think you could manage...(only even worse because centuries earlier). Learning Latin would probably be a better bet. (At least there are a reasonable number of people around these days who do understand a useful amount of Latin. I wonder if modern Greeks would have an advantage in this scenario, too, at least when it comes to the written language).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2014 20:41
|
|
|
TheHoosier posted:I can't imagine what kind of utter havoc would be caused by the equivalent of Kenny Powers being transported back in time and having to explain to Caesar that his namesake would become a poo poo pizza chain. Or even what pizza is. I seem to recall focaccia was already a thing that far back. Explaining what a tomato is would be a bit more of a problem, I suspect...
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 19:58
|
|
|
Falukorv posted:How far did Roman laws extend throughout the empire? You hear alot about, at least in Western Europe, how great of an influence Romans were to our civilization partly because of the judicial system they had. The really big factor here is not a direct inheritance from Roman law, but the Corpus Iuris Civilis, a codification of late Roman law drawn up for the Emperor Justinian. It was rediscovered in the late mediaeval period at a time when states were trying to harmonise and codify their legal systems and had a big influence on that effort; most of continental Europe (and Louisiana, being an ex-French colony!) have a legal system based on it as opposed to Anglo-American common law.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2014 20:13
|
|
|
Berke Negri posted:Most people never interacted with any kind of rulership outside the cities (and though the cities contained comparable modern populations most people didn't live in the cities) so whoever was in charge was just a different person the tax collector paid to. This pretty much describes a lot of 19th century colonialism too, though. Joe Bloggs in the village in Africa or India probably never interacted directly with a colonial administrator; he had the same village chief and much the same life as always, it's just the taxes went somewhere different.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2014 15:29
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:He also is insanely misogynistic though may not be racist since slavery during the Constitutional Convention was a really heated issue and he may side with the guys that essentially kowtowed to the southern states. He'd probably still be racist. The guys who didn't want slavery still didn't think black people were equal to white people. That was just pretty much par for the course in the 18th century.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2014 19:35
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:You have someone taken by force from their home hundreds of miles away, spent years making them submit to you, and after they've had decades to form a strong desire for revenge, it's totally cool to just leave members of your family alone with them? Worked fine in the American South, don't forget, and that was a rather more brutal system than Roman house slavery. Doubly so if the person in question wasn't taken from anywhere but raised from birth knowing they're a slave because their parents are slaves.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2014 18:49
|
|
|
Suben posted:So I came across this on Tumblr (surprise surprise) earlier and, uh, this doesn't seem right? Also, uh, Indo-Aryan Arabs, what? Arabic is a Semitic language. Near as we can determine ancient Egyptian is related to it - they've both got the consonant-root, mutate-the-vowels thing going on. Indo-Aryan at its widest is basically most European languages plus the Sanskrit-descendent languages of India.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2014 20:49
|
|
|
Kaal posted:It's a false dichotomy, borne of our historical perspective as Britain as a modern nation. By the time the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain in the early 400s, they had governed the territory for close to 400 years. It's like thinking of the United States as being chiefly inhabited by Americanized-Brits. The people living in Britannia were Romans, and were just as Roman as any other citizen living anywhere other than Constantinople. I'm not sure that's true. In particular, I'd love to see evidence that Latin was the vernacular of the British people (as opposed to a second language acquired by its elites) prior to the Roman withdrawal. I'd suggest that places like Hispania and Gaul that weren't horrible isolated border provinces were assimilated to a much greater degree than Britain. (i.e. the reason Latin died in Britain as a popular language is that it never really took over to begin with, and of course as a language of the Church it didn't die until the early modern period).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2014 11:23
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, if the Saxons wiped out the locals For what it's worth, surely the expectation would be that the Saxons wiped out the local men and then shagged their women. So not quite literal ethnic cleansing, and not a total genetic replacement of the locals. (Though you'd still expect to see a difference I guess)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2014 11:27
|
|
|
fuzzy_logic posted:Looks like this isn't on the curriculum at UC Riverside, but the faculty member is a Prof Emeritus in the entomology department? Do you actually mean entomology? Because if so it's not surprising he's a bit suspect on ancient languages. (Entomology is the study of insects...) Edit: re Mediterranean religion, well, yes, but on the other hand as far as we can tell Minoan religion was woman-based. Bare breasted women/goddesses waving snakes, mind, but still women. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 6, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2014 20:22
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:It's because they're neonazis. You see similar things with Slavic paganism from Russian/South Slavic fascists Some of the Germanic/Scandinavian groups certainly trend that way. The Celtic ones are generally just hippies (see the guys who have that ceremony at Stonehenge every year, etc)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2014 19:15
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:This is my point, if you were a black man whose parents were from Ethiopia but was born in Egypt you were just as Roman as a white man born to Pict parents in Britain. The only way for racism to come into it is to use the most liberal definition of the word race to mean any group with shared history or heritage, which when you talk about racism in the western world in 2014, is normally not how it is used. People think of racism as discrimination by white people against other colored people first, and then against other religious groups next, and normally only nonwhite members of those religions. So when you say "The Romans were racist" is creates an incorrect assumption of how the Romans acted. Dude, Indian princes sent their sons to Eton. Class trumped race. The British Empire was indeed racist but it wasn't, by and large, 'brown people aren't even human beings' or slavery would never have been abolished. Things aren't that black and white (as it were).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 21, 2014 20:41
|
|
|
A Renaissance Nerd posted:Veering from fart chat for late antiquity question I don't recall being asked before. I'm not convinced post Roman Britain spoke much Latin outside maybe some of the elites. It was a peripheral border province after all.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2014 20:17
|
|
|
GhostofJohnMuir posted:Is there evidence for this or is it supposition? Because I see a possibility of plenty of Celtic speakers in places outside of the large towns or cities. I mean mutually unintelligible regional dialects and remnant languages in the countryside remained a thing in a lot of countries up until the early 20th century with the advent of mass communication. Not to mention Breton is a thing. (Present tense, just)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2014 18:10
|
|
|
physeter posted:That character in particular is a "miles gloriosus", a "most glorious soldier", a Roman stock character which represented a returning legionary. Well, or 'boastful soldier'...
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2014 18:45
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:This, incidentally, is one of the reasons itinerant monarchy became A Thing for a while in Europe after Rome (the other is to make the locals pay for you and your absurd entourage). Not really that absurd when it's literally the entire central government, though. Imagine half of Whitehall or Washington DC stopping by Bumfuck, Whereveryouare for a month.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2015 21:53
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:Lastly, Britain is an old-world country, and America is not. Kind of amusing that actual Roman Britain was the arse end of the Empire, really. It'd be like going a thousand years into the future and all depictions of historical Americans are Sarah Palin.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2015 20:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 00:28 |
|
|
sullat posted:If he had survived though... And if he had heirs who were more like Julian's cousins than he was. Yeah, he didn't persecute Christians, but he did stop them from receiving official state funding which was almost as bad. Um, is it? How? Ooh, let me see, either I stop getting Roman welfare money, orrrr I get burned to death as a living torch at the Emperor's parties. Tough one. 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 21:28
|
|