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DarkCrawler posted:The King of Bithynia bequathed his kingdom by will to the Roman Senate, that was pretty easy. Well, Caesar was the Queen, so it was the only thing to do.  The King of Pergamum willed his kingdom to Rome as well - apparently, willing your kingdom to the nearest empire if you had no heirs was all the rage in Anatolia. The Greeks in general were pushovers to initially conquer since it was done by coming into Greece to "protect" the independent city-states from Macedonia and just never leaving. The Alexandrian successor states were probably the easiest military conquests, honestly - even Hannibal commanding (maybe; he was certainly in the Seleucid court advising the king about Romans, at the very least) a Seleucid army, having long since been exiled from Carthage and seeking revenge on Rome, went down easily. To be fair, they'd just had most of their territory stripped off by the Parthians and others, but it is still kind of amazing how these kingdoms that, not long before, were at the top of the world were the easy conquests for Rome. Judea went down pretty easily too - the Eastern Empire overall was won at a much lower initial cost than the West. On the other hand, the Romans often paid later for that easy initial conquest - the Mithridatic Wars, the constant Jewish revolts, etc.
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Dec 1, 2012 16:32
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Paulywallywalrus posted:I assume this was true of Naval commerce as well? One of things that I always imagine being a headache is Rome protecting all those merchant vessels. Was it the same with them too; just hire guards to work on the ships or was it more that the crew was just as much pirates as the pirates were? Piracy was a serious problem until the late Republic and then essentially nonexistent on the Mediterranean for the rest of the life of the unified Empire. Once the Mediterranean was a "Roman lake", pirates had nowhere to hide. Of course, pirates were still a problem in distant foreign trade, but that wasn't a state matter most of the time.
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Dec 8, 2012 00:02
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danquixotic posted:Following this period; Irish influence on post-Roman Europe is pretty profound. I'm curious - do you have a source on a monk teaching Charlemagne to read? I have always heard that he was never really able to reliably read or write, but the emphasis is always on his inability to write (the famous wax and stylus under the bed story); his inability to read is just assumed or briefly mentioned. I'm definitely not saying you're wrong, just that this is a question that is obscure and undecided enough that I'd love to see evidence either way concerning it.
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Dec 22, 2012 04:16
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Grand Fromage posted:Nothing. Years were named after the consuls. Year of the Consulship of Gaius and Gaius. As you can imagine this was rather confusing when the timeline was being figured out by later historians. The Romans did very rarely use Ab urbe condita (AUC), "from the founding of the City" - it was used to time the saecular games for every 110 years or so and the idea of a fixed, numbered-year calendar wasn't considered new when AD/BC was invented mostly because of this. 1001 AUC, 248 AD, became a symbolically important date in early Christianity, which made the introduction of AD/BC relatively smooth in the 500s.
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Jan 13, 2013 07:14
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As everyone's been saying, the West certainly wasn't poor - the mineral wealth stripped from Western Europe by the Romans was immense. The unfortunate reality, though, was that it was rich in a different, much less sustainable way than the East. The East's wealth primarily came from renewable goods (food, crops, cloth, etc.) versus the West's unrenewable goods; obviously this is a simplification, as (for example) Gaul produced a great deal of wine. On the whole, though, the trade imbalance that the Romans worried about having with China due to the outflow of metals in exchange for silk was reproduced within the Empire as well - metal tending to flow to the East in exchange for its products. The mineral wealth also grew harder and harder to economically extract as the Romans moved away from the slave economy, so the East began to gain a significant advantage over the West as the Empire aged.
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Jan 28, 2013 23:41
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Fo3 posted:I'd be interested in other's opinion on him as well. I know he categorizes himself only as an amateur historian, but I've listened to his Rome, Mongols and WW2 podcasts with interest for entertainment purposes, and they have been mentioned here as well before. He is pretty serious about his factuality. Often his shows will spark an interest for me and I'll go looking for additional information; I can't say that I've ever found anything much to contradict the narrative he constructs in the shows, nor did my fairly extensive pre-existing knowledge of the Fall of the Republic before I listened to his podcast. Sometimes he approaches events with a somewhat controversial interpretation, but he's not factually incorrect in those cases - just not in agreement with the vanilla version you'll get in a textbook or a class, and usually with an actual historian backing that view up. The most serious problem with his podcast is inherent in the format - loss of some detail, which can lead to inaccuracy by omission if the wrong detail is accidentally forgotten. Most of the time this isn't really an issue, but I felt, for example, that the recent Mongol series suffered from this somewhat.
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Feb 3, 2013 01:44
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Squalid posted:What did Germanic tribal "government" look like just prior to or during the invasions at the end of the Roman Empire? How do you organize the movement of an entire nation across thousands of miles through hostile territory? I was wondering how much of medieval social structures own their origin to Roman or Germanic systems. So far I have elective monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire for the Germans, and I guess monarchy in general. For the Romans I have the centralized bureaucratic Roman Church, but I'm not sure about much else. It's often said that feudalism had it's origins in late roman attempts to bind workers to their parents professions but I confess I don't follow why that leads to peasants tied to their land. I am not qualified to answer your first question, but I can briefly summarize your last one. After the slave economy began to collapse, tenant farmers were the primary agricultural workers in the Empire. This was expensive but sustainable during wealthy times. However, the Crisis of the Third Century saw immense inflation and generally awful economic conditions, which lead to widespread bankruptcy among tenant farmers. Many of these guys "voluntarily" sold themselves and their descendants into proto-serfdom in order to stay alive. Some lucky people were able to buy out their contracts later and regain their freedom, but only a few decades later all tenant farmers were legally tied to the land. I believe Diocletian was the primary agent of change here, and later in his reign he did indeed bind workers to their parents' professions after he rationalized the economy; this was intended to maintain the proper balance of labor between professions. Serfdom was the status quo long before the fall of the West, as was the self-sufficient manor; late Roman manors still had more trade with the outside than medieval ones, though.
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Feb 11, 2013 16:51
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cheerfullydrab posted:If you had modern knowledge you could do all sorts of things in old Rome. Why, you could distill liquor, produce a regular newspaper, and even build a mechanical telegraph. That's pretty unrealistic, don't you think? It's not as though you'd be able to get a loan easily from a Syrian banker or anything like that. In any case, speculation about the potential for a Roman digital computer is silly when they built some very impressive and real analog computers.
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Mar 2, 2013 16:53
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Another factor in Augustus being portrayed as young in sculpture is that he was still quite young when he came to power in Rome, although it wasn't until he was in his mid-30s that Antony had finally been taken care of and his formal position as princeps confirmed. It is unsurprising that the depictions of him therefore remained youthful even as he aged. After Augustus, it varies quite a bit and we don't have enough busts and such left to know whether any of the old-fashioned "dignitas et gravitas" busts were made alongside more youthful depictions. Some statues blend the Greek and old Roman styles and show a small amount of imperfection rather than cleaning the face up entirely, though. The bust of Vespasian above is a good indicator that the old style was still relatively popular after the fall of the Republic, too. At least for the more down to earth emperors, anyway (there were not very many of those). Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Mar 25, 2013 |
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Mar 25, 2013 23:15
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How do present-day politics and economics affect antiquarian studies? I mean, there are scads of Roman and earlier/later sites all across Syria, Egypt, and Libya--and other presently-unstable countries. Are there any factors aside from the danger of the sites getting shelled and trouble with the local regime that affect their excavation? Well, you should also include "can't get any funding". There are, as you might expect, an awful lot of unfound, unexcavated Roman sites in any former core Roman territory, but few nations devote very much money to digging them up to be honest. This means that even Europe is not really fully explored for Roman stuff.
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Mar 31, 2013 14:45
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thehoodie posted:And he absolutely despised his brother, Geta. Caracalla couldn't even last a year as co-emperor with Geta before assassinating him he right in front of their mother. What a dick. He then tried to erase his brother's memory from record, which resulted in this: To be fair, Geta probably would have done the same thing. Septimius Severus seems to have had trouble raising decent sons.
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Apr 14, 2013 00:03
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AdjectiveNoun posted:What were the major reasons for the breakdown in City Planning during Late Antiquity? Every source I've looked at thus far just mumbles about 'social chaos, economic decline', but that seems pretty vague to explain how, for instance, big landmarks were abandoned, the main roads were encroached on chaotically, or common meeting places like the Baths/Gymnasia or Forums/Agoras/Big Open Squares disappeared. Think Detroit. Once a city begins to decline, the process begins to snowball and affect major parts of the city that a few decades before seemed indestructible. The urban farming projects which grow crops on disused and overgrown properties in Detroit today are a good example of the kind of transition processes which would have been occurring as government resources dried up and tax collection became difficult. Grand Prize Winner posted:Are there any records of the last Roman pagans? I mean after Christianity became the state religion and paganism was outlawed, there must have been a century or two worth of holdouts. Do any specific records survive? There are stories of small pagan villages in the Appenines and really all around the former empire for hundreds of years, but little evidence for how long they resisted conversion - they understandably did not wish to draw much attention to themselves, so we have no idea when the very last pagan village fell to a plague or whatever. As far as I know though, Roman pagans were not really a high priority for either the nobility or the church after the fall of the west, anywhere - the pagans outside of Christian Europe were much more dangerous after all. It's important to understand, though, that conversion away from traditional Roman paganism was well underway by the time Christianity became a major religion in the empire. Mystery religions and other alternative to the state cults picked up a lot of converts during the Crisis of the Third Century, when traditional polytheism was perceived as having failed, so Roman paganism was already in a bit of a tight spot before Christianity was instated as the state religion.
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May 8, 2013 03:28
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Dedhed posted:I came across a passage a while back by Tacitus and this thread may be think of it. Its from the annals and is a record of persecution of christians. But I thought the most interesting part was something he says about his countrymen. Tacitus was not a fan of the empire in some ways, and Rome was famous for attracting the "dregs" of the entire empire because of the grain dole. He wasn't being anti-Roman, just commenting on the state of the city itself.
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May 11, 2013 14:36
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Phobophilia posted:My question is, was this kind of charity was distributed via patronage networks instead of any sort of formal bureaucracy? Because I'd be even more suspicious of any kind of welfare coming with political strings. Yes. As has been said a lot in this thread about patrician culture, the closest thing to it now is the Mafia - a non-state entity that performs state functions on a local scale, such as protection and welfare. In return, the wealthy man got votes and a network of professionals/trade experts to draw upon. You can see the resemblance particularly in the violent political clashes of the late republic between Clodius and Milo - it's all very Capone. The incentives which maintained this dedication to civic duty from the wealthy became progressively less compelling throughout the life of the empire, as did the number of wealthy men who weren't the emperor who could provide the money necessary; the breakdown of the patronage of civic maintenance and so forth was one of the contributing factors to the Crisis of the Third Century for example.
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May 22, 2013 03:02
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karl fungus posted:How did Christianity spread far enough into the imperial power structure for there to have ultimately been Christian emperors? Were there intermediate steps, like Christian senators or other public figures? Yes, the senatorial class began to convert and Constantine saw which way the wind was blowing. You'll notice that it takes about a hundred years after Constantine before the emperors are willing to bet 100% on Christianity by making it the official religion. Greeks were always seen as a bit different from everyone else. The Romans accorded Greek and Egyptian culture a higher status than other subject cultures, sometimes even higher than their own within limited bounds - Greeks were widely recognized as better doctors, teachers, etc. This preserved their cultural integrity because the Romans weren't aggressively resettling Greek areas, and Greek had already been the common language of the east as Grand Fromage says. In many ways the Romans conquered the east "by accident" - they poked the Alexandrian successor states which then folded with comparatively little effort, granting them vast tracts of land quickly and easily. Unlike in the west, where conquest almost presupposed destruction of the local culture, the Greek east came as a pre-urbanized package whose inhabitants likely equaled or outnumbered the Italians. Assimilation was slow and hadn't completed before the empire was divided and suddenly Greek speakers were a majority in their own land again. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Jun 24, 2013 |
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Jun 24, 2013 14:13
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Grand Fromage posted:The joke is that the dude's dad hosed Augustus' mom. It's not as far down the rabbit hole as you're exploring. If there's one thing I've learned from HBO's Rome, it's that this is not an unlikely event  I wouldn't be surprised if this joke was an inspiration for her highly ahistorical personality in Rome actually. There's so little to go on about the real Atia that it's possible something so seemingly obscure could color the entire character's portrayal.
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Jul 6, 2013 08:02
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karl fungus posted:Why did they bother retaining a senate for so long during the empire? They even kept it in the east after the fall of the west. In fact, even the barbarians kept it in the west after the fall of the west. The Senate was functionally powerless as a body, but senators were not individually powerless nor was it taken 100% for granted that the Senate would never have influence in the future. It served as an upper class diversion, which combined with the symbolic importance of the institution allowed it to continue to exist. Diocletian effectively neutered it completely, but the "upper class diversion" aspect never went away. By the end it was just basically a rich man's networking club and membership just an affirmation that you or your dad or whoever was totally hot poo poo. It served as the governing body of Rome itself for a short period during the Gothic kingdom and had some political power as it still represented the wealthy Romans who hadn't left. With all that said, it basically survived because you're never going to get rid of organizations that represent the wealthy without a lot of expense and trouble that generally wasn't worth it compared to letting them pretend to have influence.
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Jul 17, 2013 03:40
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Alchenar posted:Why did the Romans have such a large (or seemingly large) population in comparison to their neighbours? Rome did not, at the time of the Punic Wars, have very many soldiers in proportion to its population - new manpower could be raised simply by loosening recruiting restrictions. I think that if the Romans had lost many more battles at the crucial point in the Second Punic War then even that would have been entirely exhausted.
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Jul 18, 2013 19:06
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karl fungus posted:How did the Roman Republic last for so many centuries without someone making himself sole ruler? How were the circumstances special for Octavian? Loss of senatorial power was something that was a long time coming honestly. The lower class had been trying for a very long time to elect strong populares-aligned tribunes of the plebs. This was an incredibly powerful executive position meant originally as a fig leaf rubber stamp sort of position that would lobby for the poor while having no real power because it was a dead end career that no ambitious Roman would want, but somewhere along the way guys like the Gracchus brothers discovered that if you were an upper class politically connected pleb and willing to dead end your career, it was actually the strongest office in Rome other than consul. It held veto power over the Senate, could convene them essentially at will, and had the direct backing of the poor, who might riot if you hosed with a tribune. Moreover, tribunes were considered sacred and unharmable (though this was not really true in practice). If this list of powers and protections sounds familiar, it's because the office of tribune is the most important office held by the princeps emperors. Octavian basically just (illegally) assumed the powers of the tribunate as a super powerful consul that could back up those powers with force. The poor had been trying to cut the Senate out of the loop as much as possible on lower class issues with powerful tribunes for the last century or two anyway, so most non-senators were entirely willing to see the Senate get hosed. The emperors and the widespread acceptance of them were sort of a culmination and combination of two trends in Roman government that had been stewing for a long time - Sulla-esque strong men and Tiberius Gracchus-esque tribunes.
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Aug 2, 2013 18:01
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karl fungus posted:Did any senatorial families survive the collapse and become some of the noble families of feudal Europe? Where did those families come from, anyway? Yes, almost certainly - the manorial system predates the collapse and many wealthy families probably just kept going and integrated pretty easily into the semi-romanized Germanic nobility. I don't know of any noble families that have a specifically credible claim to such a lineage nor did any of them retain identifiably Roman names rather than local ones to my knowledge. The records have big enough gaps and claiming ancient descent was common enough that it's hard to find the facts of this.
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Aug 5, 2013 01:35
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sullat posted:How is it a bad idea? Extends the manpower pool and simplifies the legal framework of the empire. Sure, Caracalla was a dick, but as far as reforms go that's not bad. (and at least caracalla's no elglabus) Caracalla was a lot worse than Elagabalus. Elagabalus was a young, probably terribly religion/sexuality-confused kid who was not culturally Roman, raised to be a priest in a totally different eastern religion, who was thrust into emperorship at the worst time possible for his grip on reality. Do you know many 14 year olds who wouldn't ask for all the booze and women/men if they were suddenly ruler of a huge empire? I can't really blame him for acting like a hedonistic lunatic in the eyes of the Romans, he had a totally different value and belief system and was a teenager besides. Caracalla on the other hand murdered his brother in front of their mother, extended the citizenship to everyone just to expand the tax base (which led to a lot of tax evasion, so it didn't really improve the empire's finances and encouraged the lawlessness of the soon-to-come Crisis of the Third Century), pillaged Alexandria because they called him a brother-killing rear end in a top hat, and was such a murderous douche to his guards that they killed him. I'd rate Caracalla not far above Maximinus Thrax or Caligula, which is not good company to have in the emperor rankings. Elagabalus is more of a Nero. Not good, not really awful, just immature and mostly incapable of decent leadership. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Aug 5, 2013 |
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Aug 5, 2013 21:27
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Slantedfloors posted:Don't forget organizing a union between Rome and Parthia with a royal wedding to the Parthian King's daughter, then having her and all the guests in the wedding party butchered. How could I have forgotten the stupidest diplomatic mistake in Roman history to that point? Jesus. Caracalla was just really bad. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Aug 5, 2013 |
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Aug 5, 2013 22:30
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Jerusalem posted:Yeah, a little while back when I first found out about Caracalla I asked if there could have possibly been a worse Emperor and people said just wait till I got to Elagabalus, but when I did I have to admit he didn't seem anywhere near as bad. Sure he was a terrible Emperor, but he was pretty much doomed from the start by his age and background. Caracalla was just a huge loving rear end in a top hat who should have known better. This is always what gets me about Caracalla. Unlike most really bad emperors, he had previous imperial experience and had watched Septimius Severus, his dad, work his mojo for over a decade as a pretty decent emperor trying to restabilize the empire. He knew what he was supposed to do and how he was supposed to do it very well, and he should have known that even if Geta was still alive it wouldn't really be any impediment to his power if they split the empire between them for administration. He was just a giant bloodthirsty dick who couldn't keep a lid on his murderous impulses for any reason. I would not be surprised at all, if we ever found his corpse and could examine it in super-high tech detail, to find evidence of an adrenal tumor or something along those lines. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Aug 5, 2013 |
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Aug 5, 2013 23:38
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Could you guys elaborate on the bad effects of the extension of citizenship throughout the Empire? I'd always assumed that extending the citizenship throughout the Empire was definitely A Good Thing (TM), but hadn't really looked into it deeply due to that assumption. Besides the military implications, citizens had to pay a lot more tax than non-citizens. Many non-citizens just simply could not afford the extra tax, and since citizenship was now universal, it gave absolutely no income/opportunity advantage to make up for the tax any more. Combined with the really horrible economy of the early third century, this eventually sent the empire and the new citizens into a massive debt spiral, resulting in the colonii and ultimately proto-serfdom for most people. Among those who couldn't pay the tax there was also a lot of tax evasion, which is never good for maintaining order and led to ultimately less tax from these people since they would have paid the non-citizen rate with minimal grumbling. Edit: A decent analogy is a modern bachelor's degree and the devaluation it has undergone. If it's not that common of a commodity, having it is quite valuable because it elevates your social status even if you also incurred a lot of debt getting it. If everyone has one then it's not nearly as valuable and the debt is still an albatross around your neck. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 16:41
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Namarrgon posted:About the way to track years, with "year of consul1 and consul2", surely they must have some way to keep numerical track of them? Even for bookkeeping it would be incredibly efficient to only write names of consuls and just assume everyone remembered them in the right order. Yes, they used ab urbe condita (AUC) numerical years, with year 1 being the year Rome was founded (supposedly). This was, however, very rarely used. It was certainly tracked but tracking by consul names was by far the more common method. AUC was primarily used, as far as we can tell, to track centennial celebrations. It seems weird to us that they had the concept of a numerical calendar and didn't really use it, I admit, and it is possible that it was more common than we realize - but doubtful. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Aug 7, 2013 |
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Aug 7, 2013 02:16
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Gravedancing posted:And what social obligations did magistrates have? iirc Julius Caesar was a quaestor when he was fighting in Spain - shouldn't he have been off in Rome or somewhere managing public finances? He was a military financial officer when he was quaestor. He later returned as proconsul, which is the more famous of his expeditions in Spain.
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Aug 7, 2013 19:35
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Fader Movitz posted:One more question, did the Romans smoke weed? Absolutely. We've found Roman hashish paraphernalia with remaining residue quite recently in I think Albania, though I don't have the source at hand.
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Aug 8, 2013 19:12
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However, Hadrian brought the philosopher's beard back into style. Also, a primary visual distinction between Romans and Gauls/Germans/etc. was that Romans did not under any circumstances wear only a mustache, while the "barbarian" style was to have the most baller mustache possible. This distinction existed for the entire imperial period even among, say, Romanized Gauls - they would often retain the mustache as the only real evidence of their heritage. Late in the empire when barbarians begin to be actively discriminated against there emerges a Roman youth counterculture that is totally into mustaches and pants.
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Aug 9, 2013 01:08
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BurningStone posted:I believe it turned out to be a non-issue, because you had to physically show up on the right day to have your vote count. Well, sort of - electable guys tended to be able to pay for people to come to Rome. As with most Roman electoral issues, this one was solved with gerrymandering! The Italian allies were all grouped into only a few tribes if I recall correctly, which were the Roman equivalent of a House district basically. This neutered them pretty badly. Edit: This was done pretty sneakily too. The Italian allies, both the winners and losers of the Social War, didn't read their new contracts very carefully. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 21:10
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karl fungus posted:Was Latin consistent throughout the Republic/Empire or do we have evidence of dialects? There certainly were regional dialects, and some of their character is preserved today in the romance languages. Gallo-Latin, for example, was influenced by the pre-Roman language of the Gauls and I would bet a lot of money (though I've never seen any scholarship on this) that the final x in many modern French words is a relic of pre-Roman Gaul (e.g. Vercingetorix) which made it into Gallo-Latin and then was preserved as that mutated into French. The real divide, though, was class-based. Vulgar Latin, the language of the masses, diverged quite early from the formal upper-class Latin we tend to read today. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Aug 13, 2013 |
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Aug 13, 2013 01:15
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PittTheElder posted:I don't know that's there's all that much of the Gallic language preserved in it. What is a big part of French is a crapload of German though, according to some linguists I know through the internet. I was asking why modern German and modern French aren't much closer, but it turns out there's a lot of similarities. Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that there's much of the Gallic language left in French, just that there may be a bit around the edges. German is definitely the larger influence! The 1931 chart is incredible and really shows how much scholarship on the ancient world has changed in the last century.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:10
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Drunkboxer posted:Yeah, I always liked Cato. That's why I was confused as to why someone before said that they liked he died painfully. I mean, I like it too, but I like it because it's badass. Your opinion of Cato will necessarily depend on your opinion of Caesar. If you are looking at the story of the fall of the Republic from a Caesar-centric point of view then Cato is an absolutely infuriating figure, loving up every good thing Caesar ever did, pushing him to violence due to the fear-mongering and political marginalization Cato deployed against Caesar at every turn, ruining his attempts to reform the government and ensuring its collapse. On the other hand, Caesar's career is legitimately worrying with the precedent of Marius and Sulla looming in the background and attempting to check his rise was obviously a high priority for anybody that did not trust his intentions. Cato was still a total dick in just about every aspect of his life though, no matter what your opinion of his political stances. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 04:17
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Cingulate posted:I think that's been the claim all along. It's the school kid part. Caesar became a story as well known to the educated as George Washington is to an American child, as many of the common Latin texts which are read during education are from the fall of the Republic era.
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Aug 17, 2013 17:08
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Deteriorata posted:It's easy to forget that Latin was a standard part of American education at least into the '50s, later in some places. My Dad went to high school in the '40s and read Caesar as standard curriculum. I believe he said the Gallic Wars amounted to most of his Latin II class - and this was at a little high school in rural southern Michigan. De Bello Gallico is still the standard text for high school Latin II today - I went to a school that offered it as a language and that has not changed at all. Namarrgon posted:We can probably summarize it with that Latin was the language for the educated until not very long ago and Caesar's text where he gets to talk about himself was one of the Latin works to learn? Not just Caesar, but Cicero and other figures from the fall of the Republic (and the early Empire). In many ways that story is the central feature of basic Latin education. Caesar, as one of the major players in the era, pops up all over the place in, for example, Cicero's orations on the Catiline Conspiracy and the trial of Clodius for sexual/religious impropriety. Lord Tywin posted:So I finally got around to watching I, Claudius and all I can say is Wow Clearly it was all Livia. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 00:51
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, the number of people who died prematurely in the Imperial family truly is spectacular and while I know that it is fiction based on history but it seems to be way too many deaths to simply be coincidences. So I wonder are there any sources that indicate that Augustus got suspicious after the early deaths of Marcellus,Gaius and Lucius?
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Jerusalem posted:Actually now that I've thought about it, I'm curious what caused the shift in personal hygiene standards in the West after the fall of Rome? Europe seems to have gone from bath-obsessed under Rome to not giving a gently caress/never bathing for the next 1000+ years or so. Was it the rise of the barbarians and the formation of their own empires? Simply the lack of adequate plumbing after all the Roman stuff fell apart/broke down/was destroyed? People in the middle ages bathed, it's a misconception that they didn't. There was some Church backlash against the "un-Christianness" of public bathhouses and the prostitution, etc. that occurred at them but that varied from place to place and time to time. Standards of hygiene did fall to an extent since the elaborate and sophisticated Roman bathhouses broke down, but it never fell to the "once a year bath" that Renaissance writers try to make you believe in. It became largely a function of class since a hot bath was expensive and a cold bath isn't pleasant, so the poor did not bathe quite as often as they had when the Roman bathhouses still operated. Guys who were writing as the Renaissance got into full swing really played up how lovely the medieval period was compared to the classical period because they often had academic and personal axes to grind. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 06:19
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the JJ posted:There's that one Arabic author who talked about Rus Viking hygiene with some distaste, and I know there was one record of an English(?) commentator complaining that the Norse, because they had better hygiene, were seducing all of the local girls. Can't remember the details though... The Arabs during the golden age had a Roman standard of hygiene, so I'm sure bathing once a week seemed positively barbaric, but it's still much better than the popular perception of medieval bathing. The Norse were pretty dedicated to hygiene from what we can tell, but not necessarily due to bathing frequency. They also brushed their teeth and cleaned their ears often, which might well have been uncommon in England - I'm no expert on medieval bathing, just relaying what I've always heard from medievalists.
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Aug 19, 2013 21:22
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cheerfullydrab posted:That the final destruction of the Republic, which was a largely undemocratic oligarchy of the richest among Roman citizens, has a lot to do with Caesar and was a bad thing. One man rule lead to a lot of bad things. Caesar cynically courted the people and supposedly acted in their interests but despotism wasn't in the end actually in the interests of the people. A better way would have been a Republic that grew more democratic as time went by. But that's a complete and total pipe dream for so many reasons. I should probably cool it with the Falernian. We will never know what Caesar intended to do with his powers, to be honest. He could well have been another Sulla, stepping down after reforming the system - being proclaimed dictator for life never meant that he would hold on to it. You can make a case for either Caesar or his assassins being the agents that made the principate inevitable.
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Aug 20, 2013 17:47
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mediadave posted:When did the convention for Augustus = Senior Emperor and Ceaser = Junior Emperor develop or first appear? Caesar and Augustus were solid and different ranks, though a former Caesar might retain it after becoming Augustus. It began immediately after the fall of the Julio-Claudians during the Year of Four Emperors, 68 AD, when several of the emperors, including the final victor Vespasian, used it to designate the heir while retaining Augustus for themselves. Essentially, it began as a transparent grasp on nonexistent legitimacy and was then just the way things were. Use of Caesar for junior emperor instead of heir was instituted with the Tetrarchy.
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Aug 26, 2013 04:23
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PittTheElder posted:What was the name of that Once In a Generation party I think we've discussed in this thread before? The Saecular Games. It was quite literally once in a lifetime.
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Aug 27, 2013 02:23
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the_rhino posted:Yes, Claudius held his own in 47AD to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of Rome. Quite a few people attended the one under Augustus, so they got a double dose of one in a lifetime action. Messed things up a bit too. The problem was that "saecular" can be interpreted in two ways - once per (societal) lifecycle, or as a centennial celebration. As a result, two separate series of Saecular Games were ongoing, and most long-lived people who were young during the Augustan games could count on seeing Claudian games in their old age.
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Aug 27, 2013 06:16
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