Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Relating to ancient stuff being very in-continuity with things, how many old Roman traditions still hang around Italy? Insert Silvio Berlusconi and the Roman tradition of rampant bribery here, but I mean more along the lines of holidays, superstitions, observances--all presumably Christianized but having stuff in common with what we know of Rome.

# ¿ May 31, 2014 05:41

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:09

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Pimpmust posted:

I.13. If the wife of a man go out from her house and visit a man where he lives, and he have intercourse with her, knowing that she is a man's wife, the man and also the woman they shall put to death.

This is the one that gets me. You just know someone chiseled that bit in after some Assyrian lawyer came up with the "well she didn't KNOW she was supposed to be married" defense.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2014 04:07

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Grand Fromage posted:

Note the Roman infantry units that apparently were nuclear armed.

The XIII "Bullseyes" Legion had a very high turnover rate until they realized what the problem was

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 19:31

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Koramei posted:

Well this is more psychology but is that really true? I don't think we naturally focus on skin colour nearly as much as people think, like, look at kids; this is insanely anecdotal but I can't even remember a little kid identifying someone by their skin colour, and they give no fucks if what they're saying might be hurtful or offensive. I get that people will pick up on the most identifiable features a lot of the time, but at least in many cases I don't think skin is that; tan caucasians get pretty dark, there are pale north africans and near easterners etc.

I'd be interested in reading a study on that for sure.

If you haven't seen kids entirely aware of skin color, then you haven't seen many suburban families. The "Mommy, look at the chocolate man!" moment is near universal in those communities that are super-homogenous and don't have easy access to ones that aren't.

So with that established, the question then becomes the (19th/20th-century-defined) ethnic demographic makeup of each Roman city to determine what skin colors Romans from which parts of the empire would find odd, and that will simply never be possible.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2014 05:59

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

FreudianSlippers posted:

I find it somewhat strange how Norse paganism is much better known then Baltic/'Romuva' paganism. When the latter lasted almost 400 years longer.

That's because the Vikings eventually wrote their stuff down. IIRC when Baltic paganism was being stamped out, there was a distinct effort not to record anything about it besides the most superficial details only heard of.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2015 22:53

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

bean_shadow posted:

That's what I was wondering earlier. We don't call the other guys Mark Agrippa, Mark Crassus or Mark Aurelius. It just seems like that with Marcus Antonius.

I'm inclined to blame Shakespeare; Mark Antony fits better into meter in terms of potential placement and not hogging up space than the alternative

# ¿ Jan 26, 2017 05:34

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Cyrano4747 posted:

If you want salacious ancient stuff google "peruvian sex pottery."

The Moche were a really interesting people,

I was just at the Rafael Larco Herrera museum last week!

Skeleton dicks!

# ¿ Apr 1, 2017 20:38

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Grevling posted:

Then again "I love to poo poo!"-type graffiti isn't exactly a controversial statement either but some Romans felt the need to put this thought into letters.

on april 19th, i made bread

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 09:53

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Tunicate posted:

Try putting "The Roman empire fell in the year" as input to talktotransformer. It has some spicy takes.

The Roman Empire fell in 14CAD and its rulers were executed. But the Roman emperor Vespasian returned and in a dramatic coup he sent the emperors, Constantine the Great and his father Trajan, to try and restore order. They failed so badly and their successor, Antoninus Pius IX, declared himself emperor of Rome on 25 May 14BC.

The reign of Antoninus Pius IX was short-lived. He was killed in 15 March 1521 in a private engagement, leaving a legacy to the new emperor who succeeded him as emperor, Valentinian Pope, as well as the Roman papacy.

The rise of the Roman Emperors

There was a strong tradition among the Roman political leaders in the first 50 years of the reign.

It began with Constantine the Great in 325AD, when he came to rule the Byzantine Empire with his father in Constantinople. But by his fifth year in office his father was dead � Antoninus Pius IX was the last of the emperors of the Empire, his father dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

# ¿ May 15, 2019 06:08

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

vaping at genghis khan to own the nomads

# ¿ Aug 15, 2019 00:11

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Jamwad Hilder posted:

I find it interesting that wolves were treated with contempt by hunters. What was the reason? It's a big predator animal, and I realize it's a nuisance to farmers and landowners I'm sure, and maybe I'm looking through a modern lens here, but I would think they'd be a difficult animal to hunt and kill, and therefore worthy of some respect.

Blind guess before the proper answer comes out: pagan/satanic connotations? Werewolves are minions of the devil

# ¿ Aug 23, 2019 01:25

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

"buddy, the flying snakes are the real reputable part"

# ¿ Sep 13, 2019 23:12

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

in the tradition of dumb rome questions:

If Pertinax was respected by the legions--just not the Praetorians--why didn't he flee the city, or announce a grand tour Hadrian-style, or something to get out and into the hands of soldiers that could presumably march in and set the Praetorians straight? Did nobody at the time realize exactly how unstable and greedy they were? Would Pertinax not have been allowed to leave Italy due to some obscure superstition?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2019 06:22

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

there's probably a bit of hindsight is 20/20 here. it's just interesting why the whole "an augustus and a caesar" thing occurred to septimius as an easy method of consolidating support, but it wouldn't have occurred to pertinax to offer that sort of deal to septimius or to pescennius in exchange for saving him from the praetorians

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 05:29

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Wasn�t the reasoning behind age limitations on running for office in the US constitution directly citing the cursus honorum? That strikes me as a fairly �the founders specifically had the republic in mind� element

e: and it also reinforces the proposition that the Roman parts of the US constitution are also the most undemocratic as the primary political fault line in the US is generational

# ¿ Sep 18, 2019 23:20

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

What were the names of those gay priests (?) buried together?

the medieval ones. or early modern?

# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 06:41

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

You sort of get the impression that not just in late antiquity, even all through the medieval empire it might have actually been fine and all stabilized at some point if not for the tendency of plagues to come in and ruin everything when people are taking a moment to breathe.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2019 05:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Nessus posted:

How did ancient or medieval systems of property inheritance and so forth deal with twins, either fraternal or identical? Did birth order matter even if it was only by minutes? Were there any major regional trends, considered lucky or unlucky or just "Hey, two heirs for one pregnancy, good deal."

Not a fully qualified expert, but I think the beginnings of an answer might be that strict "winner-take-all" primogeniture wasn't as strong and absolute a norm as it's generally believed to have been; various kids would have gotten various things no matter where they were. The echoes of lectures past and read information are suggesting to me an example might be found in English royalty where when you go down the line more often than not it wasn't the firstborn that took the throne at all.

In an ancient context my mind goes immediately to good ol Gaius Julius himself. He adopted Antony before Octavian, right? But his will left 90% of everything to Octavian despite that

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Dec 2, 2019

# ¿ Dec 2, 2019 18:40

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

skasion posted:

I can�t even think of a pair of medieval royal twins. Probably most of the time it happened at least one of them died fast. Twins are mostly born premature and low weight which are both big risk factors in societies with lovely healthcare. I�m sure it happened a couple times but...

He definitely did not, or Antonius would never have shut up about it and quite probably would have won the empire in the end. Antonius had been the magister equitum to Caesar so could perhaps have expected to be his heir at one point, but by the time of Caesar�s death this was no longer necessarily true � they had fallen out in 47 over Antonius� disastrous handling of Dolabella�s attempt to cancel debts and only reconciled shortly before Caesar�s death. The fact of being named Gaius Julius Caesar, legal son of Gaius Julius Caesar, was the one big advantage over all other Roman elites Augustus had from the beginning. The big advantage that Antonius had was that with Caesar dead, he was the only sitting consul and held the treasury and the most legitimate power base. Antonius might have expected to find himself named as heir in the will, but maybe not. As the guy entrusted with it he couldn�t very well just sit on it, regardless of how favorable to himself he expected it to be.

This makes sense and my head just immediately went to "well he was pals with caesar longer" as his initial argument just carrying over to inheritance law somehow

# ¿ Dec 2, 2019 19:16

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Now that my memory has been exposed as deeply fuzzy, it does lead to the question: how absolute was primogeniture? I know the idea itself had to take time to gain full traction because you have things like the Carolingians chopping up their estates and titles, but was it ever generally accepted that �most should go to the oldest living son,� and what were the exceptions and details of thar?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2019 19:34

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

SlothfulCobra posted:

I wonder if there were a significant amount of Romans who didn't really understand kayfabe, so they would never be sure if an actor was themselves or if they were just playing their part. They are kind of literally professional liars.

I mean, even Plato used this line of argument well before the Roman heyday, and he lived in a society where acting was at least a respected pursuit. Whether or not he's a major source of it, you can sure bet a lot of later people took this line of argument and ran with it.

Theatre history is actually my field so I do at least know this terrain, for once, and you have to remember--even though the anti-theatrical prejudice comes from Rome and carries through the medieval, there's fundamentally a lot of "guilty pleasure" rhetoric around it. Even though the Roman reasons aren't entirely known, you can easily imagine that part of it is the same psychological complex that makes people lament the bygone days of austere republican virtue while still taking all the cash, slaves, land and feasts they can hold. ("tl;dr, it's bottoms" was a good way of putting this one; there has to be an element of feminine-east versus masculine-west going on too because the Greeks liked it so much)

As far as the medieval goes, you also have to remember that the only surviving material is inherently biased towards religious subjects--it's not like non-religious drama completely disappeared, it was just largely improvised off of stock plots and characters, scripts weren't "worth" much preservation, and that's if they existed much in the first place. But even in the religious dramas we have--at least towards the later medieval, but before something we'd definitively call early modern--you can see the "guilty pleasure" idea (and elements of the "actors are liars" thesis) recurring in things like the N Town banns, where someone who is going through a town announcing a play repeatedly emphasizes that the events to be shown did happen, were absolutely real and nobody is actually lying, just interpreting God's word, the implication being that if it weren't it'd be REALLY sinful.

Of course, our extant examples are so scattered in terms of time and place that you can make a lot of arguments. There are some really interesting pieces from much earlier that seem to have been entirely for "in-house consumption" in monasteries, patterned directly off of Seneca, Plautus and the like, with themes and subjects relevant primarily to the monastic life.

On the subject of Shakespeare, it's also very interesting to look at to which degree each of his plays carries Greek influence vs. Roman influence vs. morality play influence. Things like Puck's speech there are far from the only specifically medieval holdover in Shakespearean--let alone all Elizabethan--drama.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jun 14, 2020

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 21:40

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jun/22/experts-call-for-regulation-after-latest-botched-art-restoration-in-spain

It happened again...

# ¿ Jun 22, 2020 20:58

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

that thing you look at when you think too hard about a word did an article on this

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 08:27

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

I was possessed by an evil spirit and don't know where else to post this

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 9, 2020

# ¿ Sep 9, 2020 21:25

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Spanish is much easier to learn than Latin because the older the form of a language you study, the less sense it makes because it's before a lot of standardization and abbreviation. English is just a very extreme example where it went farther than a lot of other european languages and dropped its case system and grammatical gender entirely.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2020 04:52

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

cheetah7071 posted:

I also question the claim that declensions are inherently more complex. Even in extreme cases you're learning maybe a hundred noun forms--a tiny fraction of the total memorization associated with learning a language. And is that really any more complex than memorizing the prepositions or word order constructions that languages without noun cases use to encode the same meaning?

This is true in that it's probably a very personal difficulty as well as a first-language difficulty. Some people might find learning a bunch of irregular forms and varying cases and declensions harder than, say, learning Chinese or Japanese and having to memorize characters--others may think the other way around. Or English with its wild array of sounds and super inconsistent etymology might actually be the hardest! Very up to how you approach memorization or what you consider "memorization" at all. (And it's also true that the thread just came off of someone claiming an objective sense of 'progress' in history, so the implicit idea that nothing is objective might not be so implicit.)

I may or may not also be particularly frustrated with the ancient Greeks because of their brand of bullshit. It feels like all of modern German in its unwieldiness was just training wheels--it seems like you can almost use the same sort of methods and reasoning, but the way they approach the same systems is different in very crucial ways and I keep tripping myself up, and being told that these are problems very particular to ancient Greek and the modern language is much more 'rational,' but also from the Latin students in the class that something will come up that's similarly awkward or tricky in Latin and there'll be a collective groan--but of course, that's because the two languages had such sustained and intense contact, partially, isn't it.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Sep 12, 2020

# ¿ Sep 12, 2020 05:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Talk about your clash of civilizations rhetoric.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2020 05:47

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

If you have jstor access this might be good reading. The coincidences are pretty funny.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Jan 2, 2021

# ¿ Jan 2, 2021 10:14

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Fixed it in the post

# ¿ Jan 2, 2021 10:40

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Don�t discriminate against clowns

# ¿ Jan 12, 2021 15:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Strategic Tea posted:

someone requested i make this last week and am glad to have an opportunity to spread it

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 07:33

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

euphronius posted:

That is the point of acting yeah.

I wonder who the first playwright in Greece was that got rid of masks

theatre history knower here: it was likely a monk or priest, given that masks were still in use when the romans came through, and when the romans did their own plays they used masks too, up until the early church banned the theatre entirely for its sinful associations, in the process basically absorbing the theatre into itself as monks and nuns would still study old plays to learn rhetoric, sometimes write their own, and eventually write ones to be performed in and around church festivals to teach people the bible. by that point masks were well and truly gone, but that's also an extremely long period of centuries.

that said, not everyone was masked in every performance also; though i take your initial question to be pointing to when masks were abandoned as a whole as opposed to simply being not used for some styles of performance, which was the practice for just as long. some types of comedy were supposedly maskless as a rule, for example.

as with everything else ancient, of course, there are a lot of gaps and debates in this because so, so little survives. the remaining half of aristotle's poetics is at the very top of my "please someone discover this" list

# ¿ Apr 15, 2021 08:22

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

New Testament Greek also has the same relationship with Hebrew names as Latin does with Phoenician names; Mary, Joseph, etc are just undeclined and loaned directly. I don't know Latin though, much less church related Latin so I can't speak to that, but from the existence of, well, "Maria" and "Jesus" in Latinized forms like the examples above I'd assume it's different?

The gap between classical and church is interesting here too. What pre-Constantine liturgical stuff in Latin is there?

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 02:56 on May 22, 2021

# ¿ May 22, 2021 02:49

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

So if you're dragooned into land armies but shanghaied into a navy, what's the term for being forced into flying a plane? Or being made a space marine while drunk?

# ¿ Jul 18, 2021 07:26

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Nessus posted:

This baffles me. Would the average Chinese person have even had much chance to encounter Africans? Isn't the Chinese government trying to butter that area up? Or is this in fact all just free strain insanity which is bubbling up from youtube recommendations infesting the brains of bilingual people with the finest corn-fried memetic complexes of the early 20th century?

your average 19th century european wouldn't have seen an african person outside of perhaps a human zoo at the world's fair, but that didn't stop them from holding those opinions very strongly. just being told poo poo a lot will reinforce it, and hating someone far away is very easy to start on

# ¿ Aug 2, 2022 06:52

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

go whole-hog in transporting all the cultural signifiers of rome to their equivalent context in wherever the production is made. so if it's US based then cato is localized as calling himself Theodore Roosevelt Jr. but going around dressed like thomas jefferson in a horse and buggy talking about the yeoman farmer, while everyone else has smartphones

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Feb 24, 2023

# ¿ Feb 24, 2023 01:08

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

GoutPatrol posted:

Are they picking people they think will fail or think they will succeed?

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Oh we aren't that much better. With this there's a sort of feats-of-strength logic to it, like would a liar go *that* far? In front of God and Everybody?

Meanwhile, "qualified immunity" and "felony murder" co-exist as simultaneously valid doctrines in our system, we try fifteen year olds as adults . . .

There's a pretty cool article on the economic argument for trials by ordeal as a logical system that relies on the psychological intuition of the priest and social pressure on the accused, that guarantees the matter basically sorts itself out with everything around the ordeal itself.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 08:28

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

A_Bluenoser posted:

It is really important to remember that people in the past (or people in other places, or other people in general) are not necessarily trying to do what we are trying to do and what we think is important is not necessarily what they thought was important. Therefore when they do something that seems odd or counterproductive to us it may not be because they knew less or don't have the benefit of hindsight but because their goals were actually different from our goals and in that context what they were doing actually makes perfect sense.

yeah this is a big central thing in the article, that if you understand that all parties involved do believe in their core that hell is real and god will literally be watching them do the ordeal, they're going to have a way harder time convincing themselves that they can fool the system

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Mar 15, 2023

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 19:10

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Tunicate posted:

They just found a sealed bottle of Roman purfume in an urn

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-roman-perfume-smell-patchouli

Neat they can ID patchouli

i mean who couldn't. gotta imagine millenia-old patchouli gets funky, think of how bad grandma's house already is

# ¿ Jun 13, 2023 06:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 19:09

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Ostia is another great one

# ¿ Aug 23, 2023 01:39

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