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OctaviusBeaver posted:Speaking of which, has there ever been a movie set in the Eastern Roman Empire? It is so depressingly neglected. Though given how awesome the Rome HBO series was I would take some regular old Roman Empire movies, last big one I remember was Gladiator. There were some great characters and great stories in Byzantine history - you can imagine the life of Belisarius as a Charlton Heston-type epic very easily, for instance. I don't think they've ever got past the prejudice of Western Catholicism against an Orthodox empire that they faced throughout the Middle Ages; later on you also got a lot of Enlightenment-era people like Gibbon who weren't keen on the church full stop and so preferred Rome before it went Christian. For 1500-odd years, influential cultural figures have been telling everyone else about how great Rome was. The Eastern Empire has never had that fanbase.
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Nov 12, 2012 20:08
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InspectorBloor posted:Thukydides estimates the Skythians to be the greatest military force in the world at his time - if they were ever united. Mind you that the term skythians is a synonym for all kinds of different tribes and people. Studying the history of ancient China, you will find that there were individuals who were actually able to do that. Every few centuries some chanyu would go and let the poo poo fly at everybody around there. The impact of these events would be felt in the west. Think of the migration periods. Even building the Great Wall of China didn't end the invasions of China from the north. The last successful one was the Manchu invasion of 1644 that overthrew the Ming dynasty (although the Manchu had help from Chinese leaders who were tired of the weak government of the time). Basically, "Oh, hell, here come some more nomads from the steppes" is a major theme throughout history.
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Nov 13, 2012 20:40
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Besesoth posted:Thucydides. Depends what you mean by "modern". There are Robert Graves' Claudius novels from the mid-20th century, and more recently Steven Saylor's written several detective novels set in late Republican Rome (and I think he isn't the only one to have done Ancient Roman detectives, either). Besesoth posted:Speaking of destruction layers, the archaeology of Troy/Hisarlik is about the most
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Nov 16, 2012 20:07
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More seriously, I honestly don't know of a lot of modern fiction set in classical Greece or Rome.
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Koramei posted:While things like the movements of people and languages, the origins of religious and cultural prejudices and so on can all be very useful today, what reason is there to learn that most legionaries actually wore chainmail instead of lorica segmentata, or who Cicero would be meeting in Brundisium on Sunday? It's also worth bearing in mind the evidence that's available. Cultural and religious changes are big and ill-defined, they take a long time and often happen to people who can't write or aren't in the habit of writing, so they often aren't well-recorded in literary sources. What prominent individuals get up to is more likely to be recorded, because it's easier to get a handle on, because they're prominent and because they themselves write things down or associate with writers. This is a tendency throughout history, and it's one of the reasons archeology doesn't just become redundant when you're dealing with literate societies.
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Nov 23, 2012 20:27
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House Louse posted:That's pretty cool, though given the long sea voyage and the way the Yuan empire was run, I'd bet it was Chinese troops and boats with a few Mongol officers, rather than shenanigans with junks full of horses... Yes, I think the "Mongol invasions/incursions" mentioned here are basically "Chinese military involvement from when there was a Mongol dynasty ruling China", so this is more likely how it went down, rather than horsed archers setting off on ships to charge into the jungle.
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Dec 2, 2012 15:47
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sullat posted:There was a counterfeiter who became emperor, though. Wasn't a bad one, either, despite being illeterate and epileptic. Since Greece is on-topic now, it's also worth mentioning that the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope was exiled from the city of his birth for, amongst other things, debasing the currency. Everyone was at it! Someone once reminded Diogenes that his own people had sentenced him to exile. "Yes, and I sentenced them to staying home," he is supposed to have replied. The guy, according to his biographers anyway, was something of a master of  .Most famously, Alexander the Great once met him and asked Diogenes what he (Alexander) could do for him. "Stand out of my light", replied Diogenes.
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Dec 6, 2012 20:52
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Grand Fromage posted:Law enforcement was very spotty and there was never any kind of coordinated empire-wide system. Generally the local nobility handled it through their system of clients and employees, there were also some police forces in a few cities, the urban cohorts, and if there were military nearby the army would take care of some of it. You could also hire thugs anywhere! It's also worth remembering that most people, even in large cities, lived in fairly tight-knit communities where everyone knew everyone else. Undoubtedly, a lot of petty stuff was dealt with informally at a local level (i.e. if there was a series of thefts, local people would have a good idea of the likely suspects and if the thief carried on with it, they'd risk being beaten up by a bunch of outraged victims.)
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Dec 8, 2012 12:10
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Fly Molo posted:I don't know if they were technically dry cleaners. The guys who used the urine, IIRC, were called fullers, and I think their trade is part of the process of dyeing cloth rather than cleaning clothes as such. If you're interested in charlatans/conmen, a very  example was a guy called Eunus, who led a slave revolt in Sicily in 135-131 BC. He claimed to be a magician/fortune-teller and used to convince his followers of this by hiding a nut full of sulphur in his mouth and using it to "breathe fire" with.To be honest, I'd probably vote for the politician who'd do that myself.
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Dec 11, 2012 21:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Can you explain why "she-wolf" was a euphemism for a prostitute? Scortum I at least understand, vulgar as it is. Fun fact - allegedly Messalina, Claudius' empress, enjoyed sneaking off at night to work in a brothel under the pseudonym "Wolf Woman." It's probably about as reliable historically as your average piece of salacious celebrity gossip, but for what it's worth...
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Dec 12, 2012 22:02
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sullat posted:The allegation that empresses (and queens and other powerful women) liked to do night-work on the side is a very popular and common accusation. Somehow I doubt many of them have anything approaching "truth" to them, however. Yeah, this is true, and the extent to which a lot of the ancient historians are reliable sources or just purveyors of gossip/tall tales has been a bit of a running theme in this thread. I think the conclusion is "Well, they're what we've got." Paulywallywalrus posted:Professional armies. This is a big subject, but I think the large armies ultimately disappeared for economic reasons. Big armies need a sophisticated economy where you can spare lots of men from agricultural work for long periods and which provides large tax revenues with which you can pay them. The Romans and the Hellenic kingdoms had that and mediaeval Europe didn't, generally. But I don't think the professional army ever completely went away. The Anglo-Saxon kings had their housecarles, who were like an elite bodyguard of professionals, for example. Even in the Middle Ages, when in theory you had the feudal system and knights who were obliged to turn up and fight for their overlord, you would still get armies or parts of armies that were paid professionals, especially in the later centuries. Most knights were basically landowners and it was a pain in the neck for them to have to turn out to war, let alone lead off peasants to fight when they were needed to grow food. Hiring people to do it for them was easier.
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Dec 13, 2012 20:16
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sullat posted:Especially her; we know that she was an "actress" before she became empress, but after? Procopius was just being a dick. He made some pretty outrageous claims about Justinian too; IIRC that his father was a demon and everyone knew this because he only slept four (?) hours a night. I'm not sure anyone's ever worked out what his beef was with them, given that he was the court historian, but at some point Procopius seems to have decided Justinian was baaad, m'kay? Grand Prize Winner posted:Italian city states. A lot of the well-known ones, like Naples, Milan or Florence, were to some degree significant cities in Roman times (Milan was the imperial capital for a while) and just stayed that way. They probably started taking on wider European significance in the early Middle Ages when the barbarian invasions were over, commerce became easier and there were monarchs and Popes looking to borrow money.
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Dec 14, 2012 23:52
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TracyFentonHS posted:A friend told me a story about a guy who essentially made up a god, conned a bunch of people, and got famous for it. So I'm curious if that's true or not. What do you know about Glykon, and the guy behind it? I think that was the name anyway. Sorry, this is a pretty old post, but I think I mentioned the guy behind Glykon earlier in the thread. He was called Eunus and led a successful slave revolt in 135 BC in Sicily, successful enough that he ended up having to issue his own coins, on which was Glykon - a snake. I think the use of the snake was connected to Aesculapius, the god of healing and medicine, who was a well-established Greek god that the Romans imported into their religion. Aesulapius' symbol was the snake coiled around a branch that you still sometimes see as a symbol of the medical profession. The "conman" aspect of Eunus wasn't so much using this divine symbol as that he used to claim magical powers to inspire his troops and use various tricks to "prove" his powers (e.g. hide a nut full of sulphur in his mouth so he could breathe fire). It worked pretty well for him. The Romans eventually crushed the revolt, but unlike Spartacus later on, Eunus was allowed to die in captivity and the slaves were returned to their owners rather than crucified.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:11
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sullat posted:More recently, wasn't Marshall Ney loyal to Napoleon until the end? Unlike that snake Tallyrand? Yes and no. Ney was one of several marshals who told Napoleon, when he had his back to the wall in early 1814 - "That's it, we're not fighting anymore, this is over." Napoleon was then packed off to Elba and Ney took up employment with the restored Bourbons, only to defect back to Napoleon when he made his comeback in the Hundred Days. He had actually been sent by Louis XVIII with an army to suppress Napoleon's landing in southern France. After Waterloo, the Bourbons decided they'd had enough of this and Ney was executed. He died for his Emperor, I suppose, but by then he didn't have much choice.
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Jan 4, 2013 21:07
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Koramei posted:Did calling them the princeps actually fool anybody? Particularly just the masses; would they have thought that it really was just the Republic as usual (if they cared at all) or were they well aware times had changed? It's always difficult to tell what the masses were thinking, because whatever ordinary Romans wrote down about such things hasn't survived. My guess is that it would gradually have become apparent to everybody that this was more than just another dictator like Sulla because of the sheer concentration of power in one man's hands and because it became obvious that Augustus intended this to continue after his death. Most of them were probably just glad to see the end of civil wars and the restoration of order. Rome was never truly a democracy, so it wasn't as if the ordinary citizen was really losing much in terms of political rights through one man rule. In effect, the aristocrats in the Senate had been calling the shots in politics for a long time. quote:... actually on that, how much of an effect did the change to concentrated power actually have? Had Rome remained a republic for the rest of its history, would it have likely had the same achievements as it did under an Emperor? They acquired most of the Empire under the Republic. It's a moot point whether they could have hung on to it with constant political instability and infighting, which is what the Republic had become by the time it ended.
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Jan 5, 2013 23:23
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Doctor Tupac posted:What was roman pornography like? I recall hearing that pornography has basically existed in some form since man could draw. Was there some equivalent of a dirty magazine? Part way through his reign, Tiberius took up more or less permanent residence on the island of Capri, and among the things he took with him were the books of Elephantisis, which I think was basically a collection of ancient Egyptian porn. I assume it was a bit like the Kama Sutra, but I don't think we have details beyond that the Roman historians thought it was some I suppose you could also include under this heading the famous wall paintings of couples in various sexual positions in one of the buildings in Pompeii, which I think may already have been posted in the thread. So there was erotic art and writing, but not really commerical pornography in the modern sense, because of social disapproval and also because most people who were literate had a sexual outlet anyway. Everyone married as soon as they could, there was a lot of prostitution and wealthy men who owned slaves sometimes had female slaves as mistresses in the same way that plantation owners in the American South sometimes did.
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Jan 6, 2013 22:26
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FWIW, the wikipedia page gives the impression that Hermes was named for the herms, not vice versa, but that intuitively sounds wrong to me. More interestingly, it also mentions the famous incident in 415 BC when Alcibiades, the Athenian statesman, was accused of mutilating some herms. He was allowed to go off and lead the Athenian invasion of Sicily, which was a disaster and lost them the Peleponnesian War, but eventually got sentenced to death in his absence. I think he spent the rest of his life in exile as a result. It was largely a politically motivated trial, but it does show how seriously the Athenians took these things.
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Jan 10, 2013 19:42
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Not My Leg posted:I stated my question poorly. I didn't mean that the dialogs were actual transcriptions of conversations or anything like that. Rather that the dialogs up to the Phaedo (or some other dividing line) represented some kind of Socratic philosophy viewed through the eyes of Plato (and undoubtedly colored by his own philosophy) while the later dialogs likely represent purely Platonic philosophy unrelated to anything Socrates believed. Again, something I vaguely (and probably incorrectly) remember from Ancient Philosophy classes and was wondering about. For what it's worth, Stephen R.L. Clark in the Oxford History of Western Philosophy states that "The presently conventional account is that the early dialogues, typified by a relative simplicity of diction and uncertain outcome, may show us something of the "real" Socrates." But, as other people have said, the evidence for that is debatable and ultimately we don't know how far we can distinguish between Socrates' views and those of Plato. The quest for the Historical Socrates is as elusive as the one for the Historical Jesus that used to be popular with theologians.
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Jan 11, 2013 22:28
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Pimpmust posted:Not a Roman example per se (but seeing as they were big fans of the ol' Greeks...) just look at the Ages of Man ideas. Here's an actual Roman example, from the poet Horace: Horace posted:
The idea that "it was better in the past" is very ancient. Baron Porkface posted:Romans and the time. They would not have had as precise an idea as we do or been quite so time-obsessed, but they did have sundials and (even more commonly) water clocks to tell the time with, they did divide the day up into hours and there were conventions that "at the X hour, you should be doing Y thing." In particular, the law courts were open at particular hours and it would basically have been impossible to run this system if the Romans had only had ever very vague ideas of what the time was.
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Jan 13, 2013 00:37
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Tao Jones posted:As for the other question, political prosecutions were very common by the end of the Republic. In the Empire I think they'd largely be redundant, since assassination was more the rule of the day in political matters. I think the emperors still had a tendency to get rid of people they didn't like by formally accusing them of treason though. IIRC, however, a lot of that was done through having them condemned by the Senate rather than tried by the regular court system, presumably because the outcome was more certain. The Romans tended to regard a trial as an opportunity to judge someone's character and actions generally, rather than just whether they were guilty of a specific offence. Nowadays, (in theory anyway) you can be the biggest arsehole imaginable and still walk out of the courtroom if the prosecution can't prove all of the elements of the offence you're charged with. In Ancient Rome, they were often less fussed with the technicalities if they thought you were a prick anyway. In that sense, all trials were more politicised - it was the community's verdict on you, the accused. As has been said, that was more in the Republican period and during the Empire, things became more legalisitic in the modern sense. A lot of what is now known as "Roman law" comes from the 100s-200s AD and the writings of the jurists, who were a cross between academic lawyers and legal advisers to the emperor. That's the law that went on to be the basis for the modern law codes that are regarded as Roman law systems, like the continental European ones or the Scottish system.
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Jan 18, 2013 20:39
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Tao Jones posted:Maybe virtue is a thing that can't be taught. One of Plato's dialogues (Meno) is about that question, and Socrates uses the fact that virtuous fathers can have bad sons comes up as evidence that virtue might not be teachable. So I think your question about how Commodus could have turned out so bad is a philosophical one, even if you might not have intended it to be. (For instance, if virtue can't be taught, consider what that would mean for the various parts of society that claim that they do, in fact, teach or build character.) That last line of Socrates must be the first recorded instance of "U MAD BRO?" in history. I suppose you could make a case for Socrates as history's first troll. As for all the emperors who went bad young, I think the old quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely is probably the ultimate explanation. A lot of emperors, young or old, were corrupted by power. Gabriel Pope posted:Greek, Egyptian etc. justice I suspect that DIY "justice" would have been part of all of these cultures, and indeed of Ancient Rome, especially outside the cities. It wouldn't necessarily have been pure vigilatism; more like the village elders resolving the community's disputes. A lot of that would have gone on whichever empire was nominally in charge at the time. It's just a feature of all peasant cultures.
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Jan 24, 2013 22:10
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Pinball posted:Do we have any Roman women's writings? I think there are some letters, but not literary writing that I can think of. Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I remember reading an article in a history magazine that argued that one of the great limitations of feminist history for this period was exactly that we see women through the eyes of men, and often men who weren't just giving a neutral description of what they did. One of the examples used by that writer was a story by a Roman writer (sorry, I've forgotten who) describing how a Roman divorced his wife for drinking after smelling wine on her breath. The point is that the writer in question was penning anecdotes to be used in speeches by orators, like a joke book for after-dinner speakers, and the fact that he said this was done (by one of those noble ancestors the Romans used to love going on about) doesn't really allow you to conclude that Roman men actually did this on a regular basis and that women weren't allowed to drink.
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Jan 29, 2013 20:37
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Grand Fromage posted:Appointed by the Senate, and later the emperor. It was a popular post on the way up the political ranks, since you got to squeeze the province for money. One year terms with the possibility of further appointment. There weren't any officially hereditary posts in the government until we're talking about the Middle Ages, even the emperors had a whole legal fiction thing going on. This developed somewhat as the empire grew. In the Republican period, the governors were always men who'd reached the top of the tree in Rome, served a term as consul or praetor, and then got sent out by the Senate for a year (or more) to rule a province, and also frankly to raise some cash to pay off the massive debts they usually built up whilst getting to be consul. The expression "proconsul" for a governor comes from that system, and the core Roman provinces continued to run on that basis. Augustus later took direct control of some provinces, mostly newly conquered frontier ones which had a heavy military presence, and the emperors ran them through officials called legates. Britannia, for instance, was run that way. They'd probably have liked to do that everywhere, but taking long-established privileges from the Senate wouldn't have been politically wise. The emperors also "reserved" a few small provinces for the knights (rich Romans who weren't quite rich or aristocratic enough for the Senate) - I suppose it was a way of letting them in on the action. Pontius Pilate in Judea, for instance, wasn't a senator, but a knight, and he wasn't a proconsul or even legate, but a procurator. It ended up as quite a complicated system.
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Feb 8, 2013 11:56
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physeter posted:To put things in perspective, looting temples was a mainstay of the ancient world. Many of them, in addition to being independently wealthy, operated as banking concerns. Last wills and testaments were lodged with them, royal heirs often stashed away among the priesthoods to keep them safe from palace intrigues. Certain Greek areas were like the offshore Caymans of the modern world. The first thing any conqueror did was hit up the local temples to empty out the accounts, and if they were being kind of dickish, grab the decorations & sell them, maybe grab VIPs and ransom them for cash/favors. I think it was also pretty common for the city treasury to be kept in one or other temple. There were often close connections between the priesthood and the government bureacracy in the ancient world (including in Rome, where a lot of aspiring polticians would serve a stint as priest of one or other god on the way up the ladder).
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Feb 18, 2013 21:58
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Halloween Jack posted:I remember reading an account of a Roman men's bath that included mention of the gasps and complaints that accompanied the professional hair-plucker plying his trade. That's written by Seneca (unless there's another one I don't know about), using the persona of someone who lives above the public baths. I wouldn't do that personally, but then some people live above takeaways, and I wouldn't do that either. It's not clear from the passage exactly what part of the body the hair is being plucked from. Grand Prize Winner posted:Ancient standards of beauty and grooming. Going to the barber for a shave was a big ritual for Roman men, but it took ages and could be as uncomfortable as hell. I don't think they'd developed modern scissors yet, so they used to rely on bronze cut throat razors of varying degrees of sharpness wielded by guys with varying degrees of skill but without shaving foam. It's not surprising that Roman men often grew their beards (although they went in and out of style, too) and even when "clean-shaven" they probably wouldn't be as clean-shaven as we manage today. Apart from the practical side, the barbers' was also something of a social hang-out for men, although to be honest that's still true in parts of the world today.
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Feb 21, 2013 21:34
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Of course, during the late Roman period you start getting the Christian philosophers, like St Augustine, who were usually priests, monks or even bishops. A lot of them tend to be regarded primarily as theologians nowadays, but as was said in the previous post, the distinctions weren't so hard and fast at the time.
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Feb 26, 2013 21:34
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I.W.W. ATTITUDE posted:This is unrelated to the discussion of ancient Roman computers (and I'd add that checking out Roman Systems Engineering for more information about Roman technology is a good idea Regarding the Celts, the current thinking seems to be that we can't assume that they were all either genetically related or had a common culture just because they spoke related language(s). So there may be a fundamental error in the question, in assuming that they all came originally from one place and "spread" across Europe. The whole question of "where did Europeans come from" is bedevilled by that difficulty, really. Just because we (mostly) speak Indo-European languages doesn't necessarily mean we have a genetic or cultural connection to whoever it was who spoke Proto-Indo-European (if anyone actually did, since there's no evidence that the language even existed beyond what linguists can work out from the common elements in the words of the modern languages). The Bryan Sykes theory (based on DNA testing of the modern British population; he's the guy who wrote The Seven Daughters of Eve and various other books on the genetic evidence about European origins) is that most of the modern population of Britain can show a link back through their maternal DNA to either the earliest humans here in the Paleolithic or Mesolithic, or to a later wave of settlers who seem to have come from Iberia up the Atlantic seaboard in the Neolithic, and that those were the Celts so far as the British Isles are concerned (i.e. the people who ended up speaking Celtic languages). There doesn't seem to be much evidence of a direct genetic connection between the British/Irish Celts and those in what's now France or Italy. And the genetic evidence for the later Saxon or Norse settlements is mostly in paternal DNA, suggesting that those that left descendants to this day seem to have had children with local women. So at the moment, the endless "invasions v. continuity" debate seems to point towards a lot of continuity.
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Mar 3, 2013 00:08
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I.W.W. ATTITUDE posted:So there was (as close as we can tell from genetic evidence) a population of humans living in the British Isles that predated the "Celtic" peoples that are the first known cultural-linguistic group to be historically recorded as living there? That's very interesting. Absolutely, the oldest known remains of homo sapiens in the British Isles a skeleton called the "Red Lady of Paviland" found in a cave in South Wales in 1823. It's 26,000 years old (and isn't actually a lady). However, there's quite a major break in the fossil record after that because of the Ice Age, which basically buried most of the country under glaciers, then humans returned about 12-13,000 years ago. As well as the land bridge over the Channel someone has mentioned, the whole southern part of the North Sea was dry land at that point and could be walked across. Ancient Egypt hasn't come up much yet, so I have a question on that. Akhenaten is one of the most famous/infamous pharaohs for abandoning traditional Egyptian religion in favour of the worship of a single sun god, the Aten (the Egyptians reverted after his death). He's been called the first monotheist, the first individual in history and there are some rather  theories about his connection to various figures in the Old Testament and the origins of Judaism.But why would anyone want to abandon a presumably popular and "successful" religious system? Has that ever been worked out?
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Mar 4, 2013 21:06
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canuckanese posted:I had a professor who compared Roman trials to be almost like rap battles at times. I think the analysis of the evidence did often come second best to the sickness of your advocate's burns on the other side and the noisiness of the crowd you brought with you. Which sounds very like a rap battle. And they were also a form of popular entertainment, although to be honest trials nowadays can sometimes be that too. In fairness, the ones we know most about are the ones that involved politicians or other well-known people. They probably didn't roll out the big guns quite so much when Lucius was suing Sextus because a loose tile from Sextus' roof hit him on the head.
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Mar 5, 2013 21:08
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Eggplant Wizard posted:It all got a bit silly in the Empire though. Claudius got to be a consul for all of two months at one point, and it was the only serious political position he held before becoming Emperor himself. His family didn't think much of him, but still - can't have a relative of the Emperor who doesn't get to be consul!
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Mar 13, 2013 14:21
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Ras Het posted:You should also consider the possibility that the Jews taken to Babylon could've been counted in dozens or at best hundreds, rather than thousands. Holding the aristocracy of an unruly country captive can be a sensible policy. The Biblical account itself is to some extent internally inconsistent as to whether the Babylonians removed the aristocracy/officials, the population of Jerusalem or the whole population of the kingdom of Judah. Generally speaking, The Bible as a historical source is as problematic as hell. This is no exception.
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Mar 14, 2013 21:30
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Instead why doesn't someone tell us of the most Machiavelli characters of the ancient world sans Augustus; everyone loves to hate an effective but brutal figure. "Effective but brutal" probably covers most of the Roman emperors who didn't fall under the heading of "short-reigning and murdered." If you want a really Machiavellian figure from the ancient world Alcibiades would probably fit the bill, though. He was an Athenian politician of the fifth century BC, when Athens was at the peak of its power, and he was legendarily slippery. He was a leader of the Athenian military expedition to Sicily during the Peleponnesian War, which was mostly his idea. However, he was accused by enemies of desecrating various religious shrines in Athens and so had to go home to stand trial for that (he won, of course, as well as it probably saving his life because the expedition was a disaster and nearly everyone died). Alcibiades later defected to the Spartans, and gave them some useful advice which helped them gain the upper hand against the Athenians militarily. Then he fell out with them, possibly through an affair with the wife of one of the Spartan kings which left her pregnant, and defected to the Persians, regarded as the enemy of all Greeks. Ultimately, the Athenians got desperate enough to ask him back and he won a number of battles for them against Sparta, before finally being defeated and exiled again. He was assassinated in 404 BC in murky circumstances; no-one's quite sure who did it. Frankly, he had a lot of enemies by that stage.
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Mar 18, 2013 21:48
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physeter posted:The primary reason for the contempt in which most entertainers were held is that most of them weren't Romans. In the case of theatre, at any rate, it may also be relevant that it was originally a Greek art form. The Romans had a deeply ambivalent attitude towards the Greeks and Greek culture. They admired and mistrusted the Greeks in about equal measure. It's almost comparable to the attitude the British used to have towards the French. "On the one hand, they have culture; on the other hand, they're slippery, conniving and untrustworthy. And anyway, who wants culture - it's for wimps anyway, real men get out there and conquer empires!"
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Mar 25, 2013 20:45
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Grand Fromage posted:Please don't take that as defending Hitler in any way, but when we talk about the good that people like Caesar or Alexander or Genghis Khan did, it is the same sort of thing. The difference is Hitler is recent and the evil is foremost on our minds. Think about asking some Gauls about Caesar in 40 AD. Give it a thousand years and the viewpoint will change. The "Alexander was a megalomaniac" school of thought is a pretty ancient one itself. Dante, in The Divine Comedy portrays him as an inmate in Hell. On one level this is absolutely right, and he clearly didn't invade the Persian Empire for selfless reasons, but I would still argue that he can't be put on the same level as Hitler. Alexander thought Greek culture was superior and aimed to impose it on his new subjects, but not purely through violence and genocide in the way that Hitler did. He wasn't out to exterminate and/or enslave the Persians as a race. He's more comparable with Napoleon or with the people who created the Roman or British Empires. They weren't nice guys by any means, but they weren't blood-crazed psychos either. Any good that Hitler did was both indirect and unintended. "Being a motivation for greater international co-operation" was kind of the opposite of what he was trying to do.
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Apr 2, 2013 21:39
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Namarrgon posted:Also don't forget when a Mongol scouting party wiped the floor with the united Russian principalities. If that's the one I'm thinking of, it was more of a scouting army . Scouting party makes it sound like five Mongols and their dog kicked the rear end of thousands of heavily-armed Russians or something. Kaal posted:Mongols and the plague The true historical case for "the Mongols spreading the plague" is probably, indeed, that they made trade easier in the regions they controlled, but there is also a specific story that they were besieging a Genoese port called Caffa in the Crimea, fired plague-ridden corpses over the walls with their catapults and that as a result the plague broke out and was spread back to Genoa itself by ships returning there. Admittedly, I wouldn't like to bet much on the accuracy of that story, given that there were people in mediaeval Europe prepared to believe that the Black Death was spread by a Jewish conspiracy.
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Apr 3, 2013 20:27
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Azathoth posted:The first outward sign of something horrible to come came in 1315 when a cold, wet summer led to crop failures in many parts of Europe. However, while this was difficult to endure, it was not uncommon. What made this situation so much worse is that the following two summers repeated the same pattern. By the time 1318 came and the weather returned to normal, a significant portion of the European population had been on starvation diets. In desperation, people had eaten their seed stock and, coupled with recurrent disease helped on by weakened immune systems, it wasn't until 1325 that the food situation stabilized. The population had been weakened and when the Genoese trading ships fleeing Caffa brought a new and particularly virulent strain of the plague with them, the worst-case scenario was basically playing out. After three cold, wet summers, and cold, snowy winters, in (Northern) Europe, this is mildly disturbing reading.  Bluff posted:Epaminondas. He contributed to the careers of Philip and Alexander more directly than just by weakening the Greek states so they could take over. A lot of his tactical innovations were adopted by the Macedonians, such as the oblique attack (where you deliberately leave one part of your army weak and let it retreat, to draw the opposite part of the enemy army on, whilst hitting the part opposite you with a very strong force). Philip spent time as a hostage in Thebes when young and may have even discussed this stuff with Epaminondas in person. Unfortunately, the biography of Epaminondas that Plutarch wrote is missing, so there aren't great sources for his life. If it weren't for that, he'd probably be better remembered.
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Apr 4, 2013 20:13
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Oberst posted:Did Caesar have epilepsy? The short answer is that no-one really knows. It has been suggested he had it by some historians but posthumous diagnosis of the ailments of historical figures in general is a minefield, especially from the ancient world because the sources are scantier. Basically, you have to go off descriptions of symptoms the person showed written by some guy who probably didn't have any medical training even by the standards of the day and likely as not lived a couple of hundred years after the events he was describing anyway. If they say "He had a fit", that could be epilepsy or it could be a lot of other things that can cause you to have seizures. I would approach all of those kinds of diagnoses with caution.
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Apr 12, 2013 21:19
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Xguard86 posted:More seriously, a lot of these guys ended up in positions where if they didn't take the purple they'd be killed as a threat to whomever did, no matter how much they swore second was good enough. Well, the world is still full of politicians who say, if they get asked, that they "have no ambition to be Prime Minister/run for President because I'm completely focused on my current job", and I suspect the Roman emperors were as cynical about that sort of statement as we are.
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Apr 17, 2013 19:31
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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. It's probably worth remembering that, throughout this period, urban life was very much a minority experience, and (although most people in towns weren't rich) it was the life of the elite. The urban elite depend economically on the wealth created by the rural majority, so that once it began to be a problem to do that, because trade was being disrupted by civil wars and invasions, it got increasingly difficult to sustain it. Taxation was also crucial here. A lot of what you're talking about was public property sustained by public money, so as the central Roman government gradually lost control of parts of the empire, it lost its tax base and couldn't pay for the public buildings. You then get the transistion from Roman provinces to "barbarian" kingdoms whose rulers either didn't have the money to keep up towns of the same kind because they weren't running a huge and wealthy empire any more or just didn't share the Roman cultural tradition as to what a town should be like, or both. "Economic decline" may sound a bit pat, but a lot of these things do come down to money, and the rest come down to culture.
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May 2, 2013 19:38
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Grand Fromage posted:My pet theory has always been that slave societies have little incentive to work on labor-saving devices so they tend not to industrialize. Suetonius has an anecdote about Vespasian being offered a machine that would transport heavy columns and declining it because "I must always ensure that the working classes earn enough money to buy themselves food." So it would seem that the availability of a lot of cheap labour had something to do with this, whether slaves or the free poor. It's also fair to say that the education of upper class Romans gave practically no space to science and that they tended not to respect any profession that involved working with your hands, except maybe farming or the military. It's a stark contrast to the Victorians, who tended to turn engineers and scientists into hero-figures and made major efforts to improve scientific education. The culture, as people have said, just wasn't ready for it yet. Cicero posted:All mechanics are engaged in vulgar trades; for no workshop can have anything liberal about it.
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May 13, 2013 19:10
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That depends on how you define Ancient Greeks! The Greek kingdoms that existed in the north-west of India after Alexander the Great's conquests do appear to have engaged in direct trade with China, although the historical sources aren't great here, and certainly Chinese goods would have passed through the other Hellenistic kingdoms on their way west. I don't know if the Greeks had any dealings with the Chinese before then, however. The Persian Empire was in the way.
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May 15, 2013 19:38
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