Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

"I can't believe the Romans built their plumbing with poisonous lead," I think, shaking my head and tutting in disapproval while typing on my plastic keyboard and sitting on my plastic chair, sipping micro-plastic infused water from a plastic cup

# ¿ Aug 11, 2023 18:23

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:15

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

Ghost Leviathan posted:

In general there's a real problem with people, including historians, assuming any kind of entertainment or ritual had to involve gruesome sacrifices and/or fights to the death. It's like that guy in Fallout 4 who assumes that baseball was a bloodsport where gladiators used the bats to beat each other to death and is quite pissed off when the protagonist corrects him.

Well, it's had its moments...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Cent_Beer_Night

# ¿ Aug 26, 2023 19:30

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

skasion posted:

It�s further confounded by the fact that Greeks were inclined to use the name �Heracles� in locations where we might incline to use an abstraction like �culture hero�. So in the same section again he talks about going to see the Tyrian Heracles (= Melqart), who obviously wasn�t originally derived from Heracles to the extent that Roman Hercules or Etruscan Herceler was. Yet in the course of time you can see that very identification become reality as this whole syncretic Hercules-Melqart cult spreads all across the Mediterranean. Basically there�s a bunch of divine warrior demigod types in the myth-history of the Med and a bunch of cultural interchange going on from an early date and not mediated by intellectuals at first, and people slapped all sorts of god names all over stuff.

It's a little like the ancient version of Maciste films getting retitled as 'Hercules' or 'Samson' movies when they got repackaged for sale in the states, huh

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 14:39

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

Telsa Cola posted:

It might be short hand for general maintenance of your shield edge or whatever. Leather can get pretty rough if it dries out or gets weathered,, especially if its a surface that sees lots of contact, and I can definitely see it catching blade edges and arrows more if it's not dealt with.

Here's the top of an old pair of survey boots of mine as an example. Nice pair of boots, shame I wore holes through the bottoms.

There are boot repair places around that can mend & replace the soles on leather shoes and boots if you're ever interested.

I think the oiling the shields thing probably just means keeping them supple so they rebound instead of crack, but I can't stop imagining some Looney Tunes type physics acting on the projectiles when they hit the shield like a greased-up floor

# ¿ Sep 3, 2023 13:22

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1702424043612434939

Yeah? So????

As a woman I also think about the Roman empire every day, but only as a tangential byproduct of thinking about the Sarmatians and Scythians every day.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 14:24

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

Mad Hamish posted:

I wonder what kind of things these people would have fixated on in the ancient world. Aside from the inscrutable and perfidious Jews / Saracens / lepers, I mean. Like, was there some dude who was completely and totally convinced that Antinous had faked his death and was still alive and some guy that he knew said he saw Antinous changing horses several towns over?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Redivivus_legend

You could probably make a fair comparison between these guys and the Q nuts who think JFK is about to come back, if you squint

edit: skasion beat me to it :argh:

Owl at Home fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Sep 21, 2023

# ¿ Sep 21, 2023 13:03

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Cutting through country was a good way to get lost in foreign territory. Or even familiar territory. Suetonius recorded that Caesar got lost trying to find the Rubicon, spent all night wandering around trying to find it, and ended up needing a guide to get him there, and this is a relative big river like 150 miles from Rome.

Me in any open world video game

Tulip posted:

Oh so this is interesting.

The Chinese records are pretty robust and what we have for pre-Tang is 3 instances of Romans in China, one in Eastern Han (~166CE), one to Cao Wei (220CE), and one to Later Jin (286CE). The first of those is in a lot of ways the most telling: the Chinese were really unimpressed. The common theory is that the Romans left for China with some distinctive and valuable Roman goods but lost them in transit, and had to make do with some decidedly less impressive local goods as their tribute. And of course both states were about to enter into some Rough Times, so continuous contact was not a high priority for either and on the Chinese end, the fact that the 3 delegations functionally wound up in 3 different eras shows that setting up an actual continuing relationship was not going to be easy.

Going the other direction, there's a Roman record of a person from Seres (China) in the time of Augustus, but since the Chinese records are quite clear that the first official mission that got as far west as Mesopotamia was the utterly incredible Gan Ying in 97CE, I'd say this was most likely an independent merchant.

Anyway, there were a lot of obstacles to an actual direct relationship between China and Rome, even for individual merchants, that I think can be summarized pretty readily as "the many independent countries between the two that all had a vested interest in protecting middlemen operations." Its POSSIBLE there were some Roman merchants inside China more than those official embassies but they're not well attested. However Roman goods inside China are well attested, especially sea silk, so even if there were some Roman merchants in China, their goods were more often coming through intermediaries.

Am I right in thinking that the Parthians/Sasanians also had a hand in keeping them apart? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they got wind that Rome and China were making diplomatic overtures toward each other and basically said "Holy poo poo, we can NOT let these two become friends"

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 19:37

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

Can anyone recommend a good solid book that outlines the timeline of the Marcomannic Wars and the events leading up to it?

# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 18:22

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 12:15

Owl at Home: Dec 25, 2014; Well hoot, I don't know if I can say no to that

https://x.com/pompei79/status/1774341778981712041?s=20

# ¿ Apr 4, 2024 16:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists