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Older English writers definitely refer to Brutus (especially the Trojan Brutus, supposed first king of Britain) as “Brute” sometimes.
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Jan 4, 2024 20:12
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You think Anglicization is bad, how about Frenchification https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tite-Live?wprov=sfti1 And I’m pretty sure Italians talk about Giulio Cesare etc. Idk but I suspect that basically only within the last few centuries has anyone cared enough about vernacular ancient history to insist on purist spellings of names, and even then there’s limits. Nobody talks about the Ivlii and Clavdii. (Clavdivs, according to Monsieur Tite-Live, is itself a Latinization of the Sabine name Clavsvs)
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Jan 4, 2024 20:28
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cheetah7071 posted:I think older books will call him Gustav Adolph but Adolph is not a popular name anymore for some reason Athaulf the Goth, king of Sweden
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Jan 4, 2024 20:58
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zoux posted:Teutonic tribes did pretty alright for themselves huh That’s what the historians will tell you. But when I want to redistribute the provincial lands to my retainers and establish my own realm within the empire, suddenly I’m “not welcome at Chili’s anymore”
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Jan 4, 2024 21:55
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EricBauman posted:It's obviously hard to tell how people would address each other in daily oral practice, but I would be willing to bet that there was a formalized system of what forms to use when, even if it was never written down in a way that's survived. You could probably check this by comparing Cicero’s letters with Caesar’s commentaries. Obviously not a record of direct speech, and written for different purposes, but the two of them wrote about a lot of the same people while having very different friends. Most obviously Cicero calls his brother Quintus, not by their family name or his own cognomen, whereas to Caesar he’s Q. Cicero or even (since Marcus didn’t go on campaign with him) just Cicero.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:00
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Gaius Marius posted:Some of you like that Historical Fiction, not really all that into it myself but I did read John William's Augustus and I think it should be of interest to much of the thread. By the same William's who did Stoner and Butcher's Crossing. Something of a forgotten author for some decades but is really regaining a following now, especially Stoner for some reason. Also recommend. Read it a long time ago but very interesting book. I remember especially liking his portrait of Julia, and of the downfall of Salvidienus which is rarely stressed by the historical sources b/c the guy got purged and had no powerful friends to keep his memory alive, but which must have been a pretty crazy thing to go through, given his seniority among the future Augustus’ partisans.
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Jan 8, 2024 23:13
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There was polytheism at the root of the Hebrew religion, definitely (the biblical histories themselves make extremely clear that monotheism had to be enforced). But there’s also interesting traces of the god himself being a syncretic figure. When Yahweh introduces himself out of the burning bush (Exodus 6), he prefaces his instructions for Moses by confirming that he is Elohim (literally “the gods”, but treated as a singular personal name), who revealed himself to Moses’ forefathers as El Shaddai (lord of the mysterious mountain titties as discussed above), but whose actual name (allegedly unknown to these ancestors) is Yahweh. He then (after discussing how he’s going to save his people) says that he will be to them an Elohim, and they will know that he is Yahweh, their Elohim—the form of address that he sends in his communication to Pharaoh is “Yahweh, Elohim of the Hebrews”. So right from the start he announces his divinity in a way that encompasses specific past divinities and perhaps the entire generality of his people’s divinities.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:37
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euphronius posted:Why would anyone expect to understand god . bob dobbs is dead posted:thats some orthodoxy poo poo speaking. that wasn't a serious factor for mass religion until the 1500s AD. religion was sanctioned magic until they figured out magic doesn't exist Whoa now. God’s last soliloquy in Job is all about man’s eternal but groundless expectation to know what God’s up to. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.”
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Jan 17, 2024 18:56
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There’s this bit in Count of Monte Cristo where they’re trying to impress Byron’s former mistress at the opera and they ask her about the Count, and she’s like “oh yeah that guy’s clearly a vampire, you better not mess with him. Trust me, I used to date Byron and he knew all about that”
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Jan 25, 2024 15:57
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zoux posted:What about the moon, was that broadly recognized as a sphere or a disc Pliny seems to assume that all the stars (including the planets and moon) are spheres, as he explicitly says is the case with the earth. He says the moon is lit by reflected light from the sun and correctly argues that full moon can only occur when the moon and sun are on opposite sides of the earth. He claims Posidonius calculated the moon is 2,000,040 stadia from earth, which I don’t know how he calculated it but it’s actually not that bad a guess—comes out to around 230,000 (modern) miles, the correct answer is like 239,000. More unfortunately, he also argues that the spots on the moon are bits of earth it sucks up while drinking the oceans, and that the moon must be bigger than the earth, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for the moon to fully eclipse the sun. Source is Natural History Book 2, the whole book is about astronomy and contains many more baffling moon facts!
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Jan 25, 2024 21:17
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I guess you could use parallax to calculate the distance to the moon. You need some kind of star occultation so you can observe position relative to the background, but that’s easy, moon occults various planets every year. If you can do that with angle measurements in two different places at the same time, and you know how far apart the two places are (not too bad with Roman road markers), I think you can estimate the distance with trigonometry. The hard part is synchrony. maybe with fancy water clocks?
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Jan 26, 2024 03:04
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Raenir Salazar posted:Is there a good book on how ancient Rome (Republic?) managed and supplied it armies? Things like procurement of supplies and equipment, and then when out campaigning how armies were managed lead up to a battle? Like the whole process of mustering, equipping, training, keeping replenished, marching, forming up and battling? Logistics of the Roman Army at War by Jonathan P Roth. Covers First Punic War to Third Century Crisis…not really sure why it doesn’t go later since there’s a lot of interesting logistical stuff you could analyze from the later empire. Anyway, awesome book, loads of primary source translations
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Jan 26, 2024 14:14
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Aristotle says the earth attracts stuff because it’s the center of the universe. I found a Plutarch dialogue about the face in the moon! Had no idea this existed. Haven’t finished reading it yet but it seems like they’re weighing in on a lot of other astronomy/physics topics
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Jan 26, 2024 15:30
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Nessus posted:I remember hearing about some Greek who arranged for simultaneous readings to be taken in Alexandria and somewhere in Athens and used that to derive a pretty close estimate of the Earth's circumfrence. Is this the same thing you're talking about? This sounds like Eratosthenes’ calculation (he used Aswan and Alexandria, I guess since measuring overland distance precisely would have been much easier than oversea). Carl Sagan does a memorable demo of it in Cosmos. It has the big advantage that it’s based on measurements of shadows taken at noon on the summer solstice—no clock required, so long as you have people in both cities taking consistent observations on the right day. Calculation made easier by the fact that Aswan is on the tropic (ie, at noon on summer solstice there is no shadow because the sun is at the zenith, dead overhead) so you can conclude that whatever the angle of the shadow is in Alexandria, is more or less the same fraction of a circle as the Aswan-Alexandria distance is a fraction of the circumference of the earth. The moon parallax thing would be a bit harder because you have to compare the angular distance from the moon to your chosen reference star, as taken in two different places at the same time. That will give you a triangle with two long legs, from each viewpoint to the moon, where you don’t know the distance but you do know the angle between. If you know the distance between two viewpoints, that’s the short side of the triangle (technically it would be a line through the curve of the earth, not the measured surface distance, so your calculation will be a bit off anyway, but hopefully not by too much b/c the moon is much farther away than any two points on earth). If you divide that short side in half, you can divide the triangle into two right triangles where you know all the angles and one of the side lengths, and from there you can calculate the distance from the midpoint between your viewpoints to the moon. The big issue here (for me to wrap my head around anyway, I don’t really get how the Greeks did math) is how you make sure that your initial angular measurements of the apparent distance between the moon and the chosen reference star are correct. Even if you’re thousands of miles apart the difference is not going to be a huge angle, and if the measurements aren’t correctly synchronized you’re likely to be way off.
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Jan 26, 2024 16:19
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Grand Fromage posted:The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555 Fully sick. This is gonna make a number of people’s careers FishFood posted:Alas, Suetonius wrote after Vesuvius erupted so we may only get his sources. I'm hoping there's an unredacted edition of Trogus in there somewhere, though. Yeah sadly no Suetonius or Tacitus, but there could be all sorts of stuff in there. My fingers are crossed for Sallust’s History of the late republic. Or complete(r) Livy.
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Feb 5, 2024 21:21
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PittTheElder posted:This is super cool, and everyone should click through to the actual page (ideally bypassing Twitter in the process Also mentions here that there are lower, unexcavated levels of the villa perhaps containing yet more scrolls in addition to the 800 we already have. vvv lol skasion fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Feb 5, 2024 21:59
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Skrill.exe posted:Hardly. They couldn't even fend off 7 dudes. They, in fact, could. Like I see where you’re coming from here, but it’s not called the 7 who took Thebes
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Feb 22, 2024 14:57
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Grand Fromage posted:As far as we know Augustus hunted them all down. We don't have records of all of them, but the ones we do know were either killed in battle during the civil war or found and assassinated by Augustus' agents. This was a joint project with Antonius and Lepidus. Augustus acts like it was all him in the Res Gestae but at the earliest stage, his role was just that of the hype man who bullies other politicians into acting because they’ll lose their following to a teenager if they don’t. the first man to actually start a war was Antonius (against Decimus Brutus), which provided the opportunity for Caesar Jr to steal the armies of the fortuitously dead consuls and make himself a force in the state. The need to get rid of the ‘liberators’ is the ostensible justification for the triumvirate and the proscriptions. Even then, it takes a decade plus for him to get out from under Antony’s thumb. skasion fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 26, 2024 13:38
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Grand Fromage posted:Poor Lepidus. I got a loving degree in this and forget he existed most of the time. Augustus would be gratified
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Feb 26, 2024 19:05
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zoux posted:History is half war and half grain tallies There are also signal follies of mankind. Mostly involving war and/or grain tallies but sometimes just weird sex stuff
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Feb 29, 2024 15:45
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The Illyrian auxiliary revolt was pretty serious. Not just as a military conflict (although it was, it took Tiberius + Germanicus + between a third and a half of the entire army four years to put down) but because the administrative and military structures put in place there after the Romans won provided the basis for the Latinized Danubian military aristocracy which eventually created the later empire.
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Mar 1, 2024 13:20
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Groda posted:Sargon had a similar screed and admitted that he was a bastard whose mom dumped in the river. He was not low born though. Said mom was a high priestess Also the Sargon birth legend is Neo-Assyrian, from like 1600 years after he reigned. Older sources just point out the obvious fact that he was an upstart. skasion fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 16:49
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CrypticFox posted:Even the older sources tend to still be from centuries after his death. We don't have a lot from Sargon's own lifetime, and what we do have from then does not shed much, if any, light on his background. He became shrouded in myth pretty fast, so its hard to untangle even sources that are closer in time to his life. We really don't know anything with any degree of confidence about Sargon's background. Ok, I’ll put it like this: we cannot state with confidence that Sargon himself claimed to have been the bastard of a high priestess who sent him upriver, and the oldest sources on his origins of which I am aware (Sumerian King List) put the matter less fancifully and more flatly, that he was the son of a gardener and the cupbearer to the previous king.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:35
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zoux posted:*cereal eating meme guy* These helmetless, curiassless Germans could NEVER defeat two legions marching in order through a forest. Who’s that pokemon? It’s Arminius!
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Mar 6, 2024 16:44
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zoux posted:Have you guys watched Barbarians (the German produced series about all that business where the Romans speak actual latin) and if so, what did you think Only saw season 1. It was ok Vikings-style fluff until the actual battle plan, which is not only ahistorical but pants-on-head. If the real Arminius had tried that poo poo, they’d be speaking Romance in Poland rn. I’d like to blame it on the budget but yeah, no chance, what they went with must have been more expensive. Whatever. Respect to the linguistic gimmick…not sure I accept the general point behind it, but it’s great to hear, anyway. Thusnelda is very attractive, loved her road warrior look. Didn’t watch season 2
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Mar 6, 2024 18:14
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Gauls had writing. They used Greek letters. There’s tons of material evidence, and also it says so in Gallic Wars. There is no extant literature, and literacy may have been limited in extent before the Roman conquest, but they could definitely write. I think you could also make an argument that the more successful oppida like Bibracte were cities, though that’s more of a matter of opinion skasion fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 19:49
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Koramei posted:
Has anyone checked War After Civilization (2016)
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Mar 9, 2024 13:33
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Egypt fed the east, Africa province fed the west, to oversimplify significantly. The single most important factor in the collapse of the western empire was the loss of Africa to Geiseric and the Vandals. All the other stuff in the 5th century was bad enough, but without the ability to get grain and money from a subservient Africa, western imperial government was no real threat to the independent polities in Gaul and Spain and could no longer afford to support the urban population of Rome itself. In the last 20 years of the western empire, Ricimer’s government largely occupied itself with two big plans to get Africa back and after the second one (supported by Constantinople) failed, both imperial governments were broke and the game was up. Ricimer broke with Constantinople, appointed a Vandal-aligned candidate emperor, and promptly died. His heir, Gundobad, decided this empire poo poo was for dorks and went home to fight his brothers for the Burgundian throne instead. Africa was a big deal
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Mar 14, 2024 16:24
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a reason Rome's most bitter rivalry and brutal wars were with the rival naval power on the other side of the Mediterranean. They did but it was kind of an epilogue to the main event (namely, Rome stomping Macedon, then the Seleucids, then Macedon again). After the Macedon stomp, there was no Roman occupation of Greece (because they were busy with partitioning Macedon and also the Third Punic War was happening at the same time). So the Achaean league decided to pursue an independent course. The Romans sent an embassy to ask them wtf they thought they were doing and when that didn’t bring them under control, stomped them too and annihilated Corinth to make the point. No big deal for them but the Greeks clearly felt it pretty sorely. There’s a brief narrative in the Achaean section of Pausanias’ “Description of Greece”. Also Polybius books 38 & 39, which are fragmentary unfortunately but you can definitely get an idea of what he thought of the league’s plan. skasion fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 00:54
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:The Romans didnt actually ever bother to conquer down the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Red Sea, did they? Augustus sent his prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus in that direction. I don’t think it worked out though.
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Mar 20, 2024 17:57
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Here’s a full account of the campaign complete with Augustan-era spin (“only seven men perished in war”). Sections 22-24. Sounds like a cluster gently caress tbh. I wonder if any of these place names are traceable? https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/16D*.html
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Mar 20, 2024 18:17
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Acts 22 posted:24 The chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging; that he might know wherefore they cried so against him. c. AD 100 I think. I’d want to be a Roman too.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:30
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Nenonen posted:Doesn't sound very servile! Yes, that was the issue. It was a war against servi (slaves). Spartacus and all that
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Mar 22, 2024 17:39
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Mar 24, 2024 19:27
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Mister Olympus posted:Interested in the source on that one, since the Iliad namedrops Hades a few times and you'd expect that to be spoken aloud quite a bit. Is it a matter of different names? The Iliad is also full of people getting pierced, slashed, mangled, crushed with pointy rocks, flung down to the dust by the hand of god, etc. The horror of death and the grave is a major theme from the beginning. It’s fitting for Hades himself to be evoked in such a context…but if you believe the Iliad is a divinely inspired work and its conception of the gods is true or mostly true, you probably wouldn’t want it to happen to you. By historical times the name Plouton had come to be used for Hades. Whence Latin Pluto, for example. I don’t think it was a total taboo to say the original name or anything. But like the Furies (or the fairies, or the devil…) it’s better not.
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Mar 27, 2024 23:50
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School of How posted:I have a general history question. Its not really roman history, but since this is the only history thread I can find, I'll post it here. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History uses BC & AD and manuscripts from the 8th or early 9th century exist. Before that the system was not widely used—Bede didn’t invent it but it was a niche thing before him. Although that is not the same as the oldest written date, just the oldest in the modern/Christian dating system. there are probably a number of Mesopotamian documents that are dated 3000+ years ago, as long as you don’t want a date more precise than “the nth day of the nth month of the year of the eponymy of Grabbu-Assur”
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Apr 15, 2024 21:20
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I’m reading Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts about antique warfare and he casually tosses off a reference to the lasting relevance of epic poetry leading Hellenistic Greeks to build in a pseudo-Cyclopean “Bronze Age revival” style. Which is hilarious I thought. Born in the wrong generation (in 250 BC). Too late to sack Troy, too early to sack Rome  https://www.jstor.org/stable/503176?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents Anyway I tracked the reference to some other references and found this paper which has a lot of pictures of the so called “Dragon Houses”. Pretty cool. they have a slightly different explanation than what I made up based on Lendon, they think Carians did it
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Apr 16, 2024 13:57
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https://www.cnr.it/it/nota-stampa/n-12655/lo-sguardo-tecnologico-legge-i-papiri-carbonizzati Latest finding from the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum: new details on the life and death of Plato! Google Translate posted:Among the most important news, we read that Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academy in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacellum sacred to the Muses. Until now it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy. Again regarding the same philosopher, it emerges that he was sold as a slave on the island of Aegina perhaps already in 404 BC, when the Spartans conquered the island or, alternatively in 399 BC, immediately after the death of Socrates. Until now it had been believed that Plato had been sold into slavery in 387 BC during his stay in Sicily at the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse. In another passage, in a dialogue between characters, Plato expresses himself contemptuously about the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician originally from Thrace. Thracians 
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Apr 30, 2024 13:41
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Silver2195 posted:To be clear, this would have been written long enough after Plato's death that it's historical accuracy is questionable. All texts have questionable historical accuracy! People still argue about whether Plato’s eyewitness portrait of Socrates’ teaching is accurate or not. Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” posted:What uncertainty doe we find in printed histories? they either treading too neer on the heeles of trueth that they dare not speake plaine, or els for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and darke!
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Apr 30, 2024 16:30
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Man if we find an Etruscan to Latin translation that would be huge. All the toasty scrolls are Greek apparently, but now that there is a chance of reading them, maybe Latin stuff will be dug up?
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Apr 30, 2024 16:41
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