Grand Fromage posted:

For a naval game, you'd clear out the whole understructure, open up the valve and flood. The sources claim it was incredibly quick, as if the water just appeared and disappeared. Judging by the size of all the pipes and holes this is not unbelievable. Afterward, open the gates to the sewers and let the water recede.

cheerfullydrab posted:

So I'm currently reading "Count Belisarius" by Robert Graves. I think it would make an amazing miniseries, just like "I, Claudius", and I hope I get to see this happen in my life. I've previously read "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God" and own copies of both those books. Has anyone who reads this thread or post in it read "Count Belisarius"? If so, what is your opinion of that book? So far it seems extremely dry but enjoyable and very much in the style of the other two.

Negligent posted:

Did the Romans have any kind of town planning/zoning restrictions, or could Joe Plebeian build his fish sauce factory pretty much anywhere?

Halloween Jack posted:

Population density was very, very low during the Paleolithic, and people had a lot of leisure time to gently caress around. That goes a lot further toward explaining cultural development than the benefits of raw vs. cooked meat. That, and rapidly improving nutrition in infancy, which is crucial to brain development.

veekie posted:

If you're a powerful god clearly you'd be a bigger rear end in a top hat than weaker gods. What's the point of power if you can't bully everyone with it.

Jerusalem posted:

Sulla had a personal secretary who basically turned it into a giant moneymaking scheme (even moreso than it had already been), and people both took advantage of it for financial reasons as well as to settle personal feuds. People were added to the list because they were rich or because they had a great estate that somebody wanted to buy at auction for rock-bottom prices or because their granddad pissed of somebody else's granddad etc. When Sulla found out he was not pleased, to put it lightly, but the whole thing was designed initially to remove political impediments to Sulla's reforms/political way of thinking. So guys who had even potential power and influence that could be used to rally support around an anti-Sulla group might have been added even if they showed zero desire to actually rock the boat, and RICH guys in that boat were even likelier to be targeted.

The Second triumvirate was a way to make money, settle political scores AND draw the three closer together by proving their loyalty by throwing some of their own favorites under the bus (Antony insisted on Cicero being added to the list and Augustus was forced to accept).

Comrade Koba posted:

https://youtu.be/RUcDdUG22JU

This is worth watching if you're interested in the proscriptions. It also has a young, hugely Cicero in it, which makes it even better. I believe it's based on one of his actual cases.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Slaveowners were mandated to provide certain living conditions for their slaves. You would need to be rich to feed and house a living breathing person that you owned. That wealth was probably impressive enough on its own. Being a pleb didn't preclude you or your family from being rich though, it just meant you weren't a member of the established patrician lineages.

Any preference for slaves from a specific region would be some kind of personal thing for the individual slaveowner. In general, most educated slaves were Greeks, and "barbarian" slaves were big brawny dudes, but that's essentially the same stereotypes for a free man from the same region. I don't know of any writings that talk about slave purchases.

Grand Fromage posted:

The social class thing depends on the time period. At one point slaves were so cheap that slaves owning their own slaves was a thing.

Tao Jones posted:

Sort of. Roman slaves had their natio (origin; whether it connoted race, tribe, region, whatever) displayed on a sign at the market, and there were definitely connotations between certain natios and certain types of activity. Cicero makes a remark to his friend Atticus in a letter that the new slaves from Caesar's invasion of Britain are completely untalented in the ways of literature or music (presumably there were bagpipes, even then). The poet Martial has a passage where he is evoking the ideal dreamy -- male, naturally -- sex-slave and picks an Egyptian.

There were also suggestions that owning too many slaves from the same natio was bad because they'd know all of the old rivalries and one day Quintus would shank Sextus because eight years ago Sextus called his sister a pigfucker, that kind of thing. But I think the ideal is that whatever your natio was before you were sold into slavery was only important to the buyer -- you'd be kind of subsumed into the culture of where-ever you ended up. Which is different quite a bit from how American slavery worked out.

Arglebargle III posted:

The Bactrian camel is a disgrace to life on Earth, and its continued existence as a species is as inexplicable as it is shameful.

Smoking Crow posted:

I want to believe he was a pug

Deteriorata posted:

That both helps and hurts. Cutting stone is hard work, so it's a whole lot easier to reuse stone that somebody else cut centuries earlier. You could have a piece of stone cut 5,000 years ago that's been a part of six or more great buildings since then. The past gets recycled into the present.

The limestone cladding of the Great Pyramids in Egypt was scavenged to make much of downtown Cairo, for example. There are also a bunch of mosques and temples from the first millennium with mismatched or even inverted columns because the builders reused a bunch of stuff left over from the Greeks and Romans.

HEY GUNS posted:

ZELL IS NOT A VILLAGE IT IS AN IMPERIAL CITY YOU CAN SEE BY THE COAT OF ARMS THEY ARE VERY IMPORTANT

HEY GUNS posted:

ok but like

this place had castles that were owned by multiple micro-polities at once

Waroduce posted:

I'll be in Vienna for 3 days and have added the Austrian National Library to my very short list of things to do. So far the lists consists of:

1. Schoenbrun Palace
2. Austrian National Library (globe/papyrus)
3. Mozarts Place
4. Walk around and drink

I've added the Austrian National Library because way downstream in the thread some one mentioned it had the Tabula Peutingeriana. I'm also interested in seeing their globe collection.

Any other cool things to see or recommend? will post pictures.

I'll also be in Barcelona for 3 days but not sure if theres things of a similar vein but not sure if that ask is a match for this thread

Zopotantor posted:

Ratgeb later took part in the Peasant's War and was executed for that by being torn apart by four horses.

Tree Bucket posted:

I sort of wondered how that works, and then I decided that I really really don't want to know.

Grevling posted:

Go back in time to visit Galen in the middle of the night, pretend you're Asclepius explaining germ theory to him in a dream.

Zopotantor posted:

One snake. Two is for Hermes.

chitoryu12 posted:

I've never heard of this specifically. The codex replaced the scroll very rapidly once it was refined late in the Roman period, as it made storage and reading of long texts and the copying of text into a new book infinitely more practical.

Grevling posted:

In a philology course I took I actually was taught that the Christians were early adopters of the codex format. From what I can remember there is no consensus on why though.

Epicurius posted:

How do you say, "Be kind, rewind.", in Latin?

Deteriorata posted:

The initial value of the Copernican model wasn't accuracy, but simplicity. The Ptolemaic model had hundreds of epicycles by that point and was a mess to try to calculate anything based on it. Putting the Sun at the center gave them the same numbers (specifically, the correct date for Easter) with far less hassle.

It did take Kepler's elliptical orbits to make heliocentrism actually superior.

Arglebargle III posted:

Grand Fromage posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Maxentius

Power Khan posted:

Seeing the real size of this thing was phantastic

tildes posted:

I have an economic history question which may or may not be ancient history - I’m not sure what time period this would be. Basically I’m curious when the concept of depreciation of capital became a thing, as well as measurement of human capital. Are these present this far back, or did they really truly only appear until much later on? Most histories I find talk about 20th century versions which are very close to modern conceptions, but it feels like this concept must be older than that even if the words used to describe it might be different.

Strategic Tea posted:

And it has come full circle at least in the UK. HMRC (the IRS) won't let you use your accounting depreciation as they don't trust you not to estimate ridiculous useful lives for tax puposes.

Best ancient tax fraud planning is of course the Roman who built a mansion with a tiny tomb for his pet flea, then claimed the whole thing was tax exempt sacred ground.

One weird trick (quaestors HATE it)!!!

Nessus posted:

Does the jizya count?

AFashionableHat posted:

Hang on, I gotta go buy a chicken for this one