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euphronius posted:It was professional under Marius and they were paid way early than that I think the siege of veii. Hence "formally". Early Republican army was levied (this is the original meaning of the word "legio") and up until Marius this didn't change a whole lot except for the fact that came to be a whole lot of Italian allies in the ranks as part of their treaty obligations. Soldiers were paid from Veii onward but only in terms of compensation given to citizens for being kept away from their real jobs for years on end. Marius took the crucial step of recruiting people who didn't have trades or properties to be kept away from, developing army service into a job you did for a number of years before getting paid out with a slice of ager publicus to farm. In practice this is basically a professional army, but in theory the idea was still these are citizen farmers defending the republic and then going back to their farms. Of course from there a state of near-constant war persisted to the end of the Republic and eventually Augustus formally changed this all over to you sign up, you get a bonus, you do your sixteen years, you get your retirement bonus or your land in a colonia somewhere, you leave. But while he didn't pull this change out of his rear end, it was still a change from an ostensible state of conscripting the citizens temporarily to a state of accepting volunteers for a career.
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Jan 8, 2017 00:43
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fantastic in plastic posted:The Latin word magicus comes from the Greek magikos which comes from the magi, the Persian priests of Zoroaster. The Greeks credited Zoroaster with being the first wizard, but that might be a recognition of the Persians as having the ability to influence the divine realm more than anything else, since it's difficult to determine what's "magic" and what's religion in a world where divine power is taken seriously. We don't need to take ancient writers' word for it, either, since we have many surviving "curse tablets" - sheets of lead, probably made by professional wizards or mediums, which bore prepared magical formulas of various types addressed to deities: to kill someone ("the thief who stole this [money], may you consume his blood and take it away, Lord Neptune"), to ensnare someone with love, to gently caress them up overall ("...so long as someone, whether slave or free, keeps silent or knows anything about it, he may be accursed in [his] blood, and eyes and every limb and even have all [his] intestines quite eaten away if he has stolen the ring or been privy [to the theft]"), to make someone lose a lawsuit, what have you. The target's name would then be filled in by an aggrieved customer and the tablet would be ceremonially pierced with nails and buried/immersed. Magic!
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Jan 8, 2017 01:24
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Canemacar posted:Quick question that I know has been answered before but I can't find it in the thread. It's Cupid, another famous descendent of Venus. That's the point. You can think of it as symbolic structural support. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:That was Titus Tiberius rather. The Jewish traditions regarding Titus contain some salaciousness, but the Romans loved him.
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Jan 17, 2017 13:58
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He's an interesting choice for Augustus but I have to say he works. Graves' Augustus is very jovial and avuncular with the odd freakout, which is right in Blessed's wheelhouse even if he doesn't exactly look the part of the "historical" Augustus who looked 20 when he was 70.
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Jan 22, 2017 01:07
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bean_shadow posted:Finished Rome, again. Always sad when I do, as I would rather have one more season of that show than ten of Game of Thrones (and I don't dislike GoT). Nearly everyone was perfectly cast, especially Mark Antony and his grief about Cleopatra was good. Don't think it's Shakespeare's fault specifically, but might have to do with the fact that the names Marcus and Antonius both have modern English descendants which were in relatively common usage during the time when ancient history began to be translated into the vulgar. His major source for Julius Caesar was a 1579 translation of Plutarch's Lives which at a really quick glance uses Anglicized forms of some names, Horace rather than Horatius for example.
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Jan 25, 2017 01:50
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RedSnapper posted:Man, did it take forever to catch up with the thread... It's extremely difficult to say, since when we speak of barbarians we are not speaking of people who all lived in one time, or one place, or spoke one language, or indeed necessarily shared religions, cultures, ancestry, or anything else besides not being Roman. I'll give it a shot though. A very cool book to read on this subject if you can find a copy is Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West by Guy Halsall, but I'll try to give short answers. Gallic: probably we know the most about these, but only from what Caesar recorded, and he was not exactly an unbiased source -- that said, he's what we've got. He says Gallic society was divided into confederations of what had at one point been clan groups -- he refers to the confederations as "tribes", but it's important to remember that the Romans themselves were divided into tribes as a form of political and administrative organization (albeit not literally physically divided by territory) before you go thinking of any unwashed men in fur coats. Each of these groups claimed some amount of land centered around an oppidum. This would be a walled, defensible site (usually on a hilltop) where trade was conducted, political decisions were made, and the tribe could retreat in time of war. Most seem to have been permanently inhabited as well, making them more like permanent fortified towns than just fortifications. He says that there was a professional class called druids responsible for organizing religious and legal ritual who were exempted from military service. This was the province of a nobility who were politically organized into senates, dominated other free men in what might be termed patron-client relationships, and held what might be called civil magistracies, chief among them the role of vergobret. This was an annual position that entailed defending the tribal land, which the vergobret was not permitted to leave; within the land they had quite a lot of power during their term of office, but not to an arbitrary extent, being forbidden from elevating their close family members to magistracies for example. If this sounds somewhat similar to Republican Rome itself, it's worth remembering that Caesar's source for this is the political dealings he had with his allies the Aedui, who had been allies of Rome for a while and were surely politically influenced by Rome. For all that though, this office of vergobret seems to have been common-ish in some parts of Gaul, even in the early days of the Roman province. Among the Belgae in the north, kingships seem to have been more common before Caesar's campaigns. But again, it's worth remembering that Caesar was operating under the point of view that the closer you were to Rome, the more civilized you no doubt were, and if you were away in the north or on the dark side of the Rhine, you were probably a smelly unshaven axe-murderer slaving away under a tyrant. Gothic: very little until they crossed into Roman territory. When the Tervingi and the Greuthungi showed up on the Danube in 376, each was a large migrant group led by a pair of leaders -- chiefs or kings, it's hard to say. A couple of years before, the Tervingi had been led by a king named Athanaric, who fell foul of the Romans -- some later sources allege over the question of whether Goths could be Christians or not -- and was deposed. A generation before that, apparently all the Gothic peoples had been united under the rule of one king, Ermanaric, though there's more than likely legend at work there. After the Gothic wars and the settlement of the Goths in the empire, Goths were settled on Roman lands which they farmed and raised troops from in exchange for freedom from Roman law. They seem to have maintained political organization under their kings as well. They clearly didn't have a developed or even rudimentary urban culture when the Romans let them in in 376, but that's because they were refugees fleeing their lands -- it seems like before they moved towards the empire they were more probably pastoralists than a settled agricultural society with a lot of food surplus, but it's hard to say for sure. Anyway, while Romans continued to piss and moan about them being barbarians, it didn't stop some Gothic leaders from reaching important positions in the Roman military and government. Halsall suggests that many of the settled Goths initially considered themselves to be proper Romans and that they only chose to forsake Roman identity and set themselves apart from it as western Roman government authority disintegrated in the mid-5th century. Again, the impression from the sources is that these weren't like dim-witted cavemen. Even if Roman elites complained about their barbarousness, it's entirely possible that the wider Roman society -- particularly the military -- was culturally meeting the Goths halfway. Frankish: we have little about Franks from Roman sources, because they frankly weren't very prominent until after Roman authority collapsed in Gaul. They were a number of Germanic groups settled by the Romans in the Low Countries as federates, in the aftermath of the fall of the empire they consolidated under a united kingship, conquered a lot of Gaul and the rest is history. What they were like before the Romans settled them, we have no clue from the sources and I'm not familiar enough with archaeological evidence from this region to say if there's any evidence there. tl;dr the image of scruffy rear end beardies in the woods scratching themselves and wiping it on their furs is probably inaccurate, but a lot of Romans thought that way so it's understandable that we have this image. Some barbarians were more like Romans than one might expect, and in the end some Romans were more like barbarians than they might have expected. Read Halsall's book, it's really interesting.
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Feb 4, 2017 15:20
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Kassad posted:I think the Romans might have had less caricatural views (at least those who left written testimonies behind...) and that it got inflated over time after the Middle Ages. I especially blame the Renaissance Roman fanboys. Some Romans were definitely more nuanced than others in their opinions on barbarians, but as a whole antique writers seem to have pretty much thought of them as savages - noble savages, when it suited them, but savages nonetheless. Of course the tale grew in the telling, but it's not hard to see where the images of barbarians as fur-clad subhumans squatting around the campfire plotting human sacrifice came from when you read poo poo like Ammianus Marcellinus' description of the Huns. While it's true that Gaul was neither poor nor especially primitive (and Caesar would not have wasted his time subduing it unless he figured it was going to make him good money), it's very clear from archaeological record that there were people out there beyond the Roman frontier who were both. What's now Germany, particularly east of the Elbe, had very little permanent political structure or development of any kind as far as we can tell -- while closer to the Roman frontier there were richer, more settled groups, the more distant cultures didn't have oppida, and may not even have had towns or villages at all. Caesar claims the Germans had no or very little agriculture, went mostly unclothed, were pastoral nomads who had no organized religion or fixed leaders but were animists led by chieftains. Mind you this is right before the infamous passage where he claims elk sleep standing up and people hunt them by cutting down the trees they're leaning against to sleep, so he might be bullshitting (even Julius Caesar can't convince me that anyone who habitually lived through a German winter went mostly naked), but his basic point -- that whereas Gaul proper was rich, populous, and settled, Germania was none of the above -- is as far as we know correct. Come to think of it, by the time the Romans started taking over parts of Gaul, the locals had been trading with them for quite a while too. The Romans did an extremely rich trade of wine for slaves with the Gauls -- I think Caesar makes a comment to the effect that the fiercer, more barbarous Belgae were so because they were further from the wine markets (and thus freed from this civilized habit). And hiring barbarians to fight for you was a long-term motif in antiquity -- the Romans did it constantly themselves, both on the justification that savages were bolder and better individual fighters than civilized men even if, as a unit, civilized men were superior, and more cynically on the assumption that whereas Romans might always have their own loyalties and opinions, a bunch of hired Germans would be loyal to you exclusively as long as you paid them.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:11
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Jazerus posted:I've always felt that Caesar was going to end up pulling a Sulla and retiring after fixing the republic (but much more radically than Sulla did, of course), but it's impossible to know. On one hand, there's no real evidence that the fear that Caesar wanted to be a king/emperor was anything more than a paranoid fantasy cooked up by the optimates - who were going to end up being the ones eating the price of JC's intended reforms, you see. Why would you do a bunch of constitutional reforms if you didn't really intend for the system to be functional at some point? On the other, the symbols used by his administration get more gaudy, regal, and self-absorbed over time, and JC was always a guy to believe that he was the only one who really knew what he was doing, so maybe he never steps down after all. Caesar called Sulla a political illiterate for resigning the dictatorship. I don't think he had any plans to willingly diminish his power.
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Feb 6, 2017 15:17
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cheetah7071 posted:The vast majority of our sources from the period are basically Caesarean propaganda, right? Both Caesar himself and Augustus had a huge vested interest in portraying Caesar as the best guy ever. Not really. It's a mistake to think of Roman republican sources as being state or government propaganda, even the most adulatory recorders are a long way from the spin-doctor bullshit of late imperial panegyrists. Augustus didn't suppress anti-Caesarean writers (Livy apparently favored Pompey though we don't have enough of his history to be sure) or even writers overtly opposed to his own rule (Asinius Pollio for example), though subsequent emperors were a apparently less open-minded about it. Cicero is a major source for the period and certainly did not write Caesarean propaganda! FAUXTON posted:I mean you can exist as dictator within the confines of the republican system, but I would say the assumption would be that you'd resign or at least divest yourself of the powers once the poo poo was no longer spraying into the fan. Caesar was dictator in perpetuity and since, as you point out, he would have been legally vulnerable only once he left office, I can't imagine why he would ever have stepped down from the dictatorship.
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Feb 6, 2017 18:00
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) until you left office but you could be held liable afterward for actions you took during. So retaining power until death became a solid way of evading any kind of culpability for any crimes you commit, but also a way of avoiding the frivolous cases brought by your opponents.
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bean_shadow posted:That's the feeling I get from reading about people like Atia or Octavia. Not much is known except they were the model Roman women. Perfect in every way. Yeah, Livia and Julia (Augustus's daughter) are colorful but I'd like to know more about the others. Virtue in Roman women consisted in large part in keeping your head down and not inviting comment from historians and other passers of judgment. Just about every woman from the ancient world we do know more than a few things about, it's because they famously slept around or did dumb poo poo, or both at the same time. Livia is the only real exception because she was so important for so long. Even then she got an undeservedly nefarious reputation out of it despite pretty much living as blamelessly as any politician could ask of his wife.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:05
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FAUXTON posted:I read in a lot of places that Mattis holds incredible loyalty from the USMC. Granted that probably means the three branches that aren't cannon fodder will take any reason to ignore him but that's that. Mattis doesn't pay the Marine Corps. Mattis doesn't get to say whether any individual marine has a future and property waiting for him when he retires, or will just become a pauper. Mattis doesn't get to tell the Marine Corps to do whatever he wants; hell, he can't even tell any individual marine to do whatever he wants. He is not an amateur general whose only reward for his service is the plunder and glory he can attain by military conquest. He doesn't have grand unlimited legal authority over whether his troops live or die, if he gets angry with them he can't just demand that some of them be executed and expect to see it done. He's not struggling for dominance over the political system with other generals who pay their soldiers themselves and can count on them to serve as backers in any civil war that might erupt. He's not even an active military commander, but a civilian; he doesn't have any troops of his own. But even if he were an active and not a retired general, if James Mattis were dismissed from his post by the president, there is not a chance in hell that the Marine Corps might join him in rebellion against the presidency. In every time and place successful generals who aren't assholes, and some who are, have gained the loyalty of their men, because that's kind of a big point of military systems, encouraging soldiers to put faith in their leaders. The problem with republican Rome wasn't just that men were loyal to generals, it's that because there was no difference between civil and military leadership, the oligarchs who ostensibly served the state as generals realized they could maintain their political power arbitrarily long outside the confines of the law or against the interests of the state by exploiting that loyalty. Adrian Goldsworthy posted:At the time of writing the Republican and Democratic Parties in America are selecting their presidential candidates. Before this book is released this process will be complete and someone will have been elected and installed in the White House as president. We do not yet know who this will be, but we can at least be sure that the defeated candidate will not try to rally part of the United States Armed Forces and plunge the country into civil war.
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Feb 7, 2017 15:43
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Roman soldiers were paid in money, not salt. "Salary" certainly does seem to derive etymologically from salt, but while we're playing that game, we get the word "soldier" from the name of Diocletian's gold coin, the solidus. It's not clear what Latin salarium has to do with salt: it's been said that it was the name of a soldier's allowance for salt, but I don't know that there's any evidence whatsoever to support that. Meanwhile there's absolute poo poo tons of evidence to the effect that if you didn't pay soldiers money, they would probably kill you and find someone who would.
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Feb 22, 2017 02:03
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homullus posted:Getting salt from evaporation is time-consuming and low-yield. It's essential for life and for food preservation, and humans have also NOT lived near salt water coasts for millennia. Yeah, I would assume rock salt is a much more efficient source than seawater even if moderns think it's only good for roads in winter. People at Hallstatt in Austria were mining salt and trading it to Mediterranean peoples for booze for hundreds of years before there were emperors in Rome.
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Feb 22, 2017 02:52
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Jack2142 posted:Where was that list of what your favorite roman emperor says about you? It was cool and good and I want to know what is wrong with me for liking Diocletian. It could be, but a lot of things could be. There is no clear answer to how the word arose, it seems safe to say that it had something to do with salt but we simply don't know.
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Feb 22, 2017 05:14
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Grand Fromage posted:It is valuable, it's just exaggerated a lot in modern history myths. Related to this, I took a look at Diocletian's price edict and he says salt should be at most the same price as wheat: 100 denarii the modius. That's reasonably expensive but then again, a modius is a lot of salt and you won't go through it as quickly as wheat. So it's not like he conceived of it as some insanely valuable poo poo worth its weight in gold. Then again, the edict on prices is dumb as hell so take it with a grain of salt 
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Feb 22, 2017 13:39
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The vigiles were both firefighters and watchmen.
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Feb 23, 2017 20:48
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bean_shadow posted:I thought one of the ways he made money was not only buying the property of burning buildings at low prices but also controlling the fire brigade and making people fork over money in order for them to put out the fire. Not exactly. There wasn't a public fire brigade in Rome at the time, so he would wait until the building was about to catch fire, negotiate to buy it from the owner for extremely cheap, and then have his slaves and hirelings move in to put it out. If you didn't like his price, tough poo poo, Crassus will gladly buy the smoking rubble for an appropriately low price and redevelop it himself. However it is slightly disingenuous for that page to say that he made money by seizing the property of convicts. The "convicts" were the many, many people proscribed by Sulla for the chief purpose of grabbing their wealth for himself and his supporters. A number of them were proscribed at Crassus' actual instigation and he made a fortune on the proscriptions, having not been born into an especially rich family. It's like saying that Leopold II became rich by employing cheap labor in the rubber industry. Like yeah technically it is true, but kind of leaves out an important bit.
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Feb 25, 2017 13:34
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Stilicho's barbarian ancestry was Vandal rather than Gothic, but yeah he was extremely similar to Gothic leaders of the period.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:21
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Aetius was a chump. He's like the anti-Crassus, dude saw that the building was on fire so he went around selling the burning bits off a bunch of random bystanders so it wouldn't be his problem anymore. Also his failure to do anything about Gaiseric's seizure of Africa directly caused the collapse of central Roman power.
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Feb 26, 2017 03:12
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Jack2142 posted:I know I vaguely mentioned it before, if I ever were to for some reason go to grad school for history degree, I think it would be interesting to do a dissertation digging into the impact of losing North Africa to the Vandals had on the Western Mediterranean, while its obvious this was a big loss my personal thoughts have been it might have been the biggest of the turning points in the late Empire, more than normal Roman bullshit. Modern commentators disagree on just how important it was, but the disagreement mostly hinges on whether it was merely "extremely important" or "ahhh what the gently caress are you guys doing holy poo poo Rome is doomed". By the 420s it was the only Western region other than Italy that hadn't had barbarians troop in and alienate a bunch of the land from central control, and it had always been the most productive Western province in terms of grain. The Romans knew it was massively important too, they made two very major naval expeditions to retake Africa from Gaiseric in the 460s. The latter was actually an eastern Roman expedition which our more reasonable sources say involved over 1000 ships; they spent tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds of gold and silver on the fleet. Then Gaiseric set all the boats on fire and within fifteen years there was no longer a Roman Empire in the west. Even the more optimistic assessors of the late empire generally agree that once Africa was permanently occupied by the Vandals, Rome was hosed.
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Feb 26, 2017 14:48
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DangerousDan posted:A question about the Senate as an institution. How long did it maintain itself after the 'fall'? Do we know how its function changed over time? I kind of have a vague impression that it degenerated into a municipal body that survived for a long time after imperial institutions collapsed. I like the idea of a bunch of ancient Patrician families acting like they're rulers of the world while they argue over petty local issues. The senate survived more or less unscathed from the fall of the western empire up until Justinian's Italian war basically. It's important to remember that the senate had already been politically irrelevant for a couple centuries at that point, more of a club for rich old men of Rome than any kind of power. Ironically they probably had a bit of a renaissance as a result of the collapse of imperial rule; in the closing decades of the western empire the "barbarians" showed themselves more open to the idea of senators as emperors than had any Roman since the Antonine dynasty. The Ostrogothic kings were actually pretty friendly to the senate but the war with Justinian put paid to that, on top of armies devastating Italy and Rome itself the last Gothic kings became decidedly unhappy about these rich people and their propensity to support the invaders and killed more than a few senators. The senate still existed in the late 6th century because they begged the eastern emperor to send help against the Lombards, but probably not long after that it disappeared. In the early 7th century the last senate house was converted into a church. There was also a senate in Byzantium which retained a good bit more prestige and power into the high Middle Ages, but I know very little about it.
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Feb 27, 2017 15:42
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cheetah7071 posted:You gotta admire how Diocletian, in an attempt to end civil war forever, constructed a system literally guaranteed to cause civil war If we just destroy the civitas, there won't be anything to have a civil war about!
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Mar 2, 2017 21:51
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Jack2142 posted:So you support domestic violence? Diocletian, study economics?
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Mar 3, 2017 01:39
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There's something very poetic about the fact that the oldest regular guy known to modern history was a petty rear end in a top hat
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Mar 9, 2017 20:24
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Safety Biscuits posted:What were the negative consequences it didn't have for you? It removed a heritable source of income from you to become a fraction of a percentage of some senator's latifundium. Maybe you'd have enough money to get on in Rome for a while, but would your kids? How about their kids? How about the kids of the other ten thousand legionaries who said the same thing you did? Give it a couple generations and that's a lot of kids. How are they all going to eat? The senators who bought your farm and thousands like it control all the grain supplies after all, they can charge whatever they want. Don't you think it would be better if the state just used some of the grain it collected as tax to sell to these unfortunate Romans at subsidized prices? Re-elect me, Gaius Gracchus, to the office of plebeian tribune, and I will do whatever is in my power to achieve this goal and obstruct those senators who want to take the very bread out of your mouths! The collapse of small farming made the relatively poor poorer, their descendants poorer still, and the rich (and their descendants) richer. It led to a bloating of the population of Rome with the unemployed, who still had to be fed, a massive problem for an ancient state to cope with. It also put senators in an antagonistic position to the masses, making populism seem like a good way to gain power for those who didn't love senatorial elites. It turned government against the people and individual members of government against one another in a vicious cycle of ambition, reaction, and political violence that culminated in decades of brutal civil wars that all but extirpated the old Roman nobility and god knows how many other people.
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Mar 12, 2017 14:36
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sullat posted:Yes, lol, it was the fault of the poor that the rich slave-estates grew so powerful and antagonistic to the needs of the populace. Thing about farming is that having some land isn't enough, you have to have some cash as well. Cash for seeds & equipment, cash to survive during the off-seasons. And where are you going to get it? Well, the local noble is offering favorable rates. And he's the one that buys most of the harvest anyway, so he sets the prices. Harvest was bad this year, can you front me some more cash? I see he just bought 1000 slaves, wonder what's that about. Oh, you're calling in the mortgage? I can't pay it and I don't want to be enslaved for debt, well, the only asset I have is this land... This is very true, of course. Discharged soldiers didn't sell out because they were dumb and bad, but because major landowners incentivized it very strongly (and the government often turned blind eye to this because 1) it was made up of the major landowners and 2) "Big Agriculture" in the form of massive slave farming operations was more productive than a couple thousand little farms run by randoms). The whole system of land grants was atrociously broken and that's why so many Roman leaders attempted to fix it (invariably to suit themselves best) with so little success. Jeb Bush 2012 posted:uh how were all those descendants going to live off your one-family-sized land plot anyway Why, by joining the legions, doing their
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Mar 12, 2017 18:25
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Fo3 posted:People. In a shocking twist, people were also responsible for the downfall of the Roman republic, the Roman Empire, the fake Roman Empire, the Third Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire. In conclusion, it is my opinion that people must be destroyed.
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Mar 16, 2017 14:47
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Depends when exactly. Ethnically, southern Italy and a lot of Sicily were Hellenic in the early Roman period - the Romans referred to it as Magna Graecia, greater Greece - and this certainly persisted to some extent into the imperial period even though technically speaking by that point everyone in Italy was a Roman citizen. Ironically these days the North Italians look down on the South Italians, but given the reputation Greeks had with Romans the Romans thought whatever Greek heritage the south had was pretty cool. Conversely, what's now northern Italy was inhabited by Gaulish people who the Romans considered scarcely better than total barbarians right up until Julius Caesar's day. So perhaps the answer is that in the republic it wasn't homogeneous at all, with a progressively greater degree of homogeneity being achieved over the course of the imperial period which broke down most, but not all, of the major regional identities that had existed before Rome. The Greek heritage of Magna Graecia was one that survived. To Romans, Naples was a Hellenic cultural center and a resort town where rich people often holidayed. I think but don't know for sure that any modern reputation Naples has for being a shithole full of thieves probably has to do with the unusual degree of poverty southern Italy has relative to the North, which is a relatively modern phenomenon.
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Mar 26, 2017 12:52
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vintagepurple posted:Isn't there still a few greek-speaking communities in southern Italy and Sicily? There's Griko ethnic community in Salento and Calabria who speak Greek dialects, but it's unclear whether it's a community and language continuous since antiquity or is the product of medieval or post-Byzantine migrations, or some of both.
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Mar 26, 2017 15:20
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I feel that cuts both ways. It's easy to say "why don't you have a little historical perspective and stop romanticizing the past, geez  " when you are a rich, healthy, educated westerner posting to others of similar sort and not a coltan miner or child soldier or HIV-stricken beggar or dirt-poor Pacific Islander whose homeland is literally going to be overwhelmed by the sea. Plenty of people today have grossly lovely lives, probably quite a lot more people than even existed in the 17th century or antiquity or whenever. When people say "id rather be alive today than Back When", it's implicit that they mean they'd rather have their present, pleasant life than one of the ones that doesn't involve health insurance, toilet paper, takeout, and internet porn.
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Mar 31, 2017 19:27
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Gay sex between women was generally not super heavily condemned in medieval Christian Europe, definitely not to the degree of gay sex between men. Early medieval penitential records show that it was considered sinful in about the same degree as masturbation. There was definitely a social bias against it and particular against penetrative sex between women (since this was seen to be usurping a male prerogative) but it wasn't like insanely taboo. The 15th century is actually right around the time where you first start seeing it getting women in trouble with the law. This whole essay is a really fun read, but I'll just quote extensively:quote:Moving into the 15th century, we start finding records of legal actions against women for lesbian practices and other associated social crimes. Despite the clear social opprobrium, the amount of data of this type is far less than that for corresponding male transgressions. Those who have combed the legal records have found not more than a dozen examples from the 15th century -- none earlier: 7 women in Bruges in the 1480s, 2 women charged in Rottweil in 1444, and two cases that are interesting in their detail. [Bennett 2000, Boone 1996, Puff 1997] They drowned this last one in the Rhine -- but in view of the circumstances it obviously wasn't just because she was having sex with women. Anatomy of Melancholy (another great read if you have a spare week) also treats of sex between women. Burton thinks of it as a form of what we would call mental illness.
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Apr 1, 2017 16:19
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Does anyone have any recommendations for a good narrative history of the eastern Mediterranean from the end of the Bronze Age through to the Hellenistic? I realize it's a really broad and heavily studied timeframe but is there anything out there that covers all or most of it without being super basic or general?
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Apr 6, 2017 19:03
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Also, unrelated, how likely is Cleopatra's suicide-by-snake to be a real thing? Are there other people supposed to have died that way? Every ancient source agrees that she died of poison, and the story that the poison was delivered by an asp appears very early, within a couple years of the event itself. Some sources, including Strabo who was a contemporary, were open to the possibility that the poison may have been delivered some other way (i.e. orally or by a poisoned oil on the skin). Some also thought (Strabo again) that she could have been poisoned by someone else rather than committed suicide. It's hard to say for sure what happened because she didn't die in public, but the snake story definitely isn't imperial spurting semen-tier scholarship, it was the accepted version of events throughout the ancient world so far as we know. There isn't anything innately implausible about her smuggling a snake into her house-arrest to kill herself and it's as well attested as anything in antiquity, so might as well believe it.
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Apr 6, 2017 21:38
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cheetah7071 posted:I wonder if they used the super tacky bright colors because they actually liked them, or if it was because those paints were the easiest/cheapest to produce with the technology of the time We frankly don't know that they did. It's clear that statues were to some extent painted (or gilded, or decorated in other ways) but the notion that they were all painted in the same sorts of super bright flat color has limited basis in reality. We're talking about centuries of artists each working in their own way here, but the only visual representation of it that we have are the results of some guy analyzing the scraps of pigment that still remain nearly 2000 years later and attempting to extrapolate that to the whole artwork.
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Apr 10, 2017 21:21
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I definitely feel like I recall someone in this thread making some kind of Roman recipe. I want to say it was like ancient Roman ice cream or something though I could be way off base there. The only thing I remember about it is that the poster was not enthusiastic about it.
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Apr 16, 2017 11:35
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Hamlet442 posted:Back to food. The idea of making some Roman foods sounds pretty interesting. Does anybody have any cookbooks that are authentic? Some quick Googling is giving me lots of Italian recipes or only delicacies like dormice and bird tongues. Someone earlier in the thread linked Apicius, which is as authentic as it gets. Not much in the way of precise measurements so you'd need to play it by ear a bit, but it's something.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:53
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LingcodKilla posted:Perhaps they watered it down because while it got you drunk (the goal) it also tasted terrible and vinegary. Some probably did, like the third-pressing poo poo Cato recommends buying for your slaves. But the goal of drinking wine for rich Romans was because they liked drinking it, not only because they wanted to get shitfaced. Wine was important to (rich) Romans, they wrote a lot about how to make it and how to make it well. They spent a lot of time, money and effort on enjoying it.
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Apr 19, 2017 18:21
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cheetah7071 posted:...what am I looking at here, exactly? It's a portion of the Peutinger Table -- the far eastern end of a medieval copy of a late Roman itinerarium. The giveaway is "Insula Taprobane" (i.e. the isle of Sri Lanka) at the bottom right. The point of it is not to portray the world to any sort of scale, just to show the major roads of the known world and the landmarks they connect. Ancient geographers had much "better" maps than that, Ptolemy's for example
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Apr 20, 2017 00:28
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Hogge Wild posted:Did Romans blaze for fun? Smoking hemp is for Scythians. Real Romans do opium.
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Apr 21, 2017 02:50
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 15:32 |
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Painter would be useless. Romans did loads of paintings and many were quite realistic, but panel painting just doesn't last that long. Even if you tried to innovate painting on canvas I wouldn't expect it to last from antiquity to the modern day. However, going by the examples of mummy portraits we have from Fayum (which certainly were not made by the most acclaimed panel-painters of their age) Romans didn't need anyone to teach them how to paint realistically.
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Apr 21, 2017 15:13
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