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I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? As another question there are a lot of stereotypes in Roman literature about Greeks and Barbarians, but how did they feel about the Parthians and their stubborn instance on not dying?
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Nov 8, 2012 16:26
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Big Willy Style posted:I am pretty sure I read in this thread that Octavian had Alexander the Great removed from his tomb so he could look on the body of a true king. I think they asked him if he wanted to check out the Ptolemies tomb but he said something like 'I wanted to see a king, not corpses. Indeed, the quote is actually a couple of pages back. I know they kind of saw it as unattainable, but the way they demagogued the "Persians" (whichever dynasty happened to be in charge) has always interested me, I wish we knew a bit more about pre-history in that area "from the horses mouth" especially about Zorastrianism and the various mythologies. Its just a shame that there don't appear to be many sources for the info.
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Nov 8, 2012 21:17
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Yeah, the Parthians did not have the same kind of obsessional record keeping the Romans did, plus they were constantly fighting one another. I just wish we knew more, about all of the ancient peoples. As is everything we have has passed through the hands of Romans or the notoriously grubby hands of enlightenment era historians. I still can't get over how much of history has been disorted in the public mindset by people like Gibbon basically saying "the Greek empire doesn't count because it let  females into the mix".
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Nov 8, 2012 21:47
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So as a minor question guys, how much do you all dislike Cato? On a scale of one to ten?
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Nov 19, 2013 18:47
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The Younger, I thought that was the only one you even had the possibility of liking, everyone agrees Cato the Elder is a poo poo right?
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Nov 19, 2013 19:02
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Jazerus posted:I don't know, the Elder at least had (as mentioned) great recipes. Cato the Younger, on the other hand, ran entirely on spite. But it seems to be a magnificent sort of spite.
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Nov 19, 2013 22:26
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WoodrowSkillson posted:People are people, the average Roman who had a dog would have treated them near identically to how we do now. Upper class Romans indulged in crazy (to us) beliefs and behaviors like not loving your wife and stuff, but the dude on a small farm in Gaul would have been out there tossing sticks for his dog like we do now. Its a worrying facet of human behaviour that no matter how repugnant a culture it always knows the answer to "whose a good boy!", the answer is always "you are, yes you are!" obviously.
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Nov 22, 2013 15:38
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Tao Jones posted:The real ancients were completely unfathomable and left no traces. Scholars from Harvard and Oxford made up the entire corpus of antiquity starting in 1926. Ahhh BPRD, how I have missed you and the talk of the lizard people of Mu. WoodrowSkillson posted:It really is weird to me that despite my hobby of ancient history, I still stop and get flabbergasted that ancient people really were exactly like us in all ways but obvious cultural differences. Its such a simple concept that somehow always gets pushed away, only to reappear as a seeming revelation. Its kind of terrifying in its own way, you look at all the stuff you do and look back in history and think "thank god I am not an arse like back then!" and then suddenly realising that a lot of the stuff that we call horrifying is so only from a cultural context. Its kind of scary really.
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Nov 22, 2013 16:37
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Ainsley McTree posted:Fracking for a start Not even Fracking. Imagine if in less than a century there are people proudly proclaiming that "Furry is okay!" for mayoral elections or higher, or that suddenly keep pets is considered an act of slavery. I mean it could happen, societal mores are changing pretty god-drat quickly. And yeah, what? Does Achilles have a long chat in the midst of butchering people about the problems of a one party state?
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Nov 22, 2013 17:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:There was a scene cut from the movie Spartacus where Spartacus would've been doing a celebrity endorsement of olive oil. I personally would love to see the equivalent of the crazy "come and worship at our mega-church" style adverts done with Roman Gods, I mean you'd have to have used most of the beef territory of south america to make white bulls, but still.
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Nov 22, 2013 17:49
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Pimpmust posted:Moloch hungers He's kept bloody quiet about it since his city burned down in that case.
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Nov 24, 2013 21:10
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Back To 99 posted:tea bag?  On a slightly off topic topic, do we really know why Opium caught on the way it did in China? All I have found are lots of things saying "lack of opportunity for advancement" and "dissatisfactions with Manchus" but those do not seem a reasonable enough explanation for the sheer explosion of shitfacedness that came out before and after the Opium wars.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:01
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Ynglaur posted:Or maybe Mexico. I just hope he doesn't get captured. Ironic punishments have really fallen by the quayside in recent years, I hope that they are brought back.
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Jul 21, 2015 07:00
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I read, in my big book of Chinese History, that Yongzheng and Qianlong had very different approaches to how things should work in the Empire. I wonder if it would have been better had Yongzheng lived a bit longer and gotten a really good set of ideas down.
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Aug 3, 2015 22:32
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Well you could always refer back to the founders if you needed a decent reason to murder your brother and take his stuff.
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Aug 4, 2015 22:34
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Hey there guys, I don't suppose anyone has any good ideas for cool books on mythology and ancient history that aren't full of "woo"? Asking as its my birthday coming up and I'd like some cool books.
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Apr 27, 2016 19:59
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Sorry to barge in guys, but does anyone have any good ideas for decent books on faith and ritual in the roman/celtic world that aren't irredeemable fluff about "cosmic rays" and "crystals". Like a scholarly book? That or one about faith in pre imperial/ early imperial china? Or just any decent books on the subjects of religion in a pre-Christian setting. Layouts of temples and so on.
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Nov 25, 2016 21:59
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fantastic in plastic posted:Arcesilaus, a famous Platonic philosopher, once fielded a question that was something like "Why do so many philosophers from various schools eventually become Epicureans, while no Epicureans ever seem to leave their school?" He answered with "Men may become eunuchs, but no eunuch can ever again become a man." How freaking salty does this guy sound about people leaving his club.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:37
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Cnidario posted:I've been reading up on some primary sources on the Pre Socratic, and, man, the Pythagoreans were weird dudes. Swearing by the number four, 3,000 year cycles of metempsychosis, etc. Its the weird emphasis on beans that gets me.
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Dec 30, 2016 16:12
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Tias posted:Tell me about Militum Flavius Stilicho! Gibbon seems to credit him with 'celestial gift', and a (otherwise uninteresting) history light show on TV says he basically fought back two barbarian invasions on his own Well Stilicho was (sort of) half "barbarian" himself. The guy was basically the nemesis of Alaric the Goth and the two spent a lot of time opposing each other despite being fairly similar in a number of ways. For starters Alaric was looking to become more Roman than the current crop of Romans and find a place for the Goths to settle, whilst Stilicho was appointed Magister Militum by first the eastern and then the Western Emperors to prevent that, or any other barbarian attacks, from happening. The thing was Alaric was sometimes employed by the Romans too to do similar things. I think he was even put in charge of Iliriya for a few years. The difference was, in the book that I read anyway, that Stilicho was working inside the Empire. His mother and father had been given special dispensation by the emperor to marry because his father was a Visigoth. However he had, essentially, abandoned any claim to "gothness" during his rise through the Roman ranks. Alaric on the other hand was both a Gothic king and a Roman functionary. The problem was that the Roman political establishment would not trust Alaric with anything and so kept giving him territory and then declaring that he was an outlaw. Stilicho was usually the guy to go and beat the crap out of Alaric when that happened. Unfortunately it didn't end particularly well for Stilicho, a rumour started in the Western part of the Empire that he was planning on removing the emperor and appointing his own son. This lead to his troops mutinying, and handing him over to the Emperor before a progrom was launched against the "barbarians" living in Italy. The majority of whom then went to join Alaric and got to join him when he sacked Rome.
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Feb 25, 2017 20:57
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extra stout posted:I'm going back to the olden days when I could own a bunch of land, feed my cat You would own nothing. Maybe less, and you would probably have to kill and eat your own cat at least once during your lifetime.
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Apr 2, 2017 21:59
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Hey guys, just as a quick thing but what is the name of the guy who does the really good History of Rome podcast?
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Aug 4, 2017 13:28
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Isn't the problem also that "Civilization" is almost a loaded term by now, as it has come to represent a "better sort" of living style.
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Aug 9, 2017 07:42
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skasion posted:^^^Halsall's "Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West" maybe? Or Wickham's "Inheritance of Rome" if you want to focus less on the barbarian role in the fall of empire and more on what the sub-Roman barbarians were like. What is the general consensus on Wolframs "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples?"
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Aug 21, 2017 20:40
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skasion posted:Haven't read it but Halsall dunks on Wolfram a lot as a "Germanist". In this context what does that mean?
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Aug 21, 2017 21:43
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When does the Iron age end and the early medieval period begin?
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Sep 1, 2017 09:41
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I thought it went Stone- Bronze/Antique- Classical - Iron - Medieval. Have I been getting it in the wrong order?
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Sep 1, 2017 10:47
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Do we know the main social differences between the Bronze and Iron age in and around the Med? I am not talking technologically I am more meaning stuff like whether there were Empires or wider social structures. Would Cyrus I count as an iron age monarch, and would the rise of empires be considered a shift point between the iron age and the classical age? I realise all of these terms are subject to revision and change and are as inexact as you like, I just wanted to ask quickly. Thanks!
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Sep 1, 2017 18:55
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Thwomp posted:It's hard to say because a couple hundred years separate the end of the Bronze Age from the start of what we'd recognize at the Classical Age. The Mycenaean Greeks were very different from the later Classical Greeks. Mycenaean Greece was Minos and the like, if I remember correctly? I knew about the Bronze Age Collapse, but after being told that it went to the Iron age and then the classical age, that the Iron age must have had some stuff written about it/dug up by this point? Or was it a relatively short amount of time (and/or lack of sources) unlike the later Classical period. Grand Fromage posted:The ages are originally determined by technology so it's hard to not talk about that at all. But the primary social difference is bronze age culture was interconnected and urban, while the iron age was not nearly so much. Egypt was the only major bronze age state to survive the collapse and it never recovered the kind of power it had before. The post-collapse world is one of smaller, independent city-states slowly recovering and rebuilding the networks and larger structures that were lost. Got it, and as it looks as if there was a lack of written sources for that time period too.
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Sep 1, 2017 21:16
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fishmech posted:Like you might see someone talking about Classical Romans versus Iron Age Germans and be referring to the exact same time period. Got it, I think this might be where my confusion is coming from. Thank you. Koramei posted:Minos was contemporaneous with the early Mycenaeans (other than being a myth and all), but was part of the Minoan civilization(s) based on Crete, which was a different thing from the Greeks at the time. For Mycenaean Greece, think the Trojan War. Other than bull jumping, was there much to seperate the Minoan from the Mycenaean? They both had those big temple/palace complexes? Sorry I am being really pig ignorant here I just wanted to ask.
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Sep 1, 2017 21:55
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