|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes that would be best practice but, as a shitposter on the internet, I don't have jstor access. Personally, I blame capitalism. The relevant publication for the female viking warrior burial site that I imagine that show was talking about can be found here without jstor or any other access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...905D27E049FADCD
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2020 05:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 16:30 |
|
|
Another thing to keep in mind with regards to the frequent lack of natural sons for Roman Emperors, the Romans were truly awful at infant/child care. Given what they did to infants and children, its a miracle any of them lived to adulthood.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2020 21:33
|
|
|
mmkay posted:You can't just leave a post like that without elaborating. Roman writings on the care of infants is sometimes pretty wild. A bunch of different Roman era medical texts talk about the importance of "moulding" newborns, a process that called for pushing still flexible bones and vertebrates into the "correct" posistion. For example, Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome in the second century AD wrote that: quote:One must anoint freely and at once massage and model every part so that imperceptibly that which is as yet not fully formed is shaped into its natural characteristics. quote:smoothe out the spine by both straight and circular movements. Then..make it hollow by pressing upwards along its length with the thumb..so that the arrangement of the vertebrae may be perfected, and with it comeliness and ease of movement...gently push away the parts overlying the highest vertebra of the spine..and in the same manner down the back and between the shoulders so that these parts may not easily be distorted nor become deformed. quote:With the thumbs she should massage the eyes [and] shape the nose, raising it if flat, but pressing it if it is aquiline Galen, another 2nd century Roman doctor also wrote that: quote:The child is born; but even at this stage it remains extremely wet, not just in its vessels, organs, and flesh, but even in its bones, which are the driest part in us. These bones, and with them the limbs as a whole, are then moulded by the infant’s nurses, in the manner of wax objects. Plutarch also wrote about "moulding" babies as though it were a common and accepted practice that needed no explanation. Another area where Romans had questionable ideas on infant care was with breastfeeding. Soranus wrote that babies should be starved for the first days of their life, and then only after that should they be breastfed. Another doctor, Rufus of Ephesus, disagreed with this, saying that instead they should be fed honey and Hydromel (alcoholic beverage) for the first four days of their life before milk, so Soranus's starve the babies idea at least wasn't universally accepted the way "moulding" of infants was. Pliny's Natural history also records a number of potentially harmful treatments for infants and children. The treatment of varicose veins in children, Pliny writes that the child's leg should be rubbed with lizard blood while the child is fasting. To prevent epilepsy, infants should be fed donkey liver for 40 days. If an infant had trouble digesting breast milk, they should be given a vinegar mixture. Infants experiencing constipation should be given various animal types of animal dung, both to ingest and to sleep with on their skin. There were also a number of poisonous plants used by the Romans as medicine. Hellborne was used in Roman times to treat epilepsy and fever as a "purgative" because it induces diarrhea (something that will only make a fever worse). Doctors were divided on giving Hellborne to children, but it is clear that is was at least sometimes given to children. Galen wrote that he could treat fevers in children "without the use of hellborne," which implies that it was often given out to them. Another second century doctor, Antyllus, fully endorsed the use of hellborne on children, even though he acknowledged it could be hazardous. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Dec 11, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I seem to recall that there was an ancient (even by late republican standards) law requiring the pater familias to consult with his neighbors before exercising his (ultimately absolute) power of life and death over his family. Suggesting that even if infanticide was legal, doing it without thinking it through and talking it over was seen as a problem, as least by some people. The actual extent to which infanticide in Rome was practiced is contested. There is limited evidence for actual practice of many of the rituals around infanticide that are described in certain texts, leading some scholars to question whether the texts that claim a father had full right to kill an infant reflect actual practice.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2020 23:46
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Dunno, never heard anyone try to act in classical Latin before. It's not a criticism, Romans sounding like Italians wouldn't be like, weird or anything. One could even argue Romans were Italians. The German show Barbarians that came out this year has all the Roman characters speaking in latin. Not sure how well they pulled it off since I don't know latin myself, but here are some clips of them acting in latin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojC-zTXSAsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqJvxeWl8ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBIZ4VirQHI
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2020 21:48
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:This guy (Cybersmith) is famous on tumblr for thinking it should be legal to keep humans as pets. That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2020 02:59
|
|
|
Ola posted:The persecution of the Christians starts when they refuse to sacrifice, not because they didn't believe in Jupiter. This is a super important point to emphasize. Trajan's letter to Pliny the Younger said that accused Christians should be let go if they are willing to sacrifice to the gods. Under the emperor Decius in 249, all residents of the Empire were ordered to conduct sacrifices, a measure targeting Christians who refused to do this. The defining feature of Roman "pagan" religion was not ritual practice, not belief. Roman religion operated under a very different framework then modern monotheistic religions do. The idea that the imperial cult undermined Roman religion and laid the groundwork for the rise of Christianity is a common pop-history myth, because that makes sense to modern religious sensibilities. It's not actually true though. Another important point to emphasize is that non-Jewish Romans had a far more flexible idea of divinity. Jews obviously also held this view, but they were fairly insular, practiced sacrifices that could be adapted to appease Roman authorities, and also frequently clashed with Rome. The exclusivity of divinity only became a common idea in Rome with the rise of Christianity. Prior to the rise of Christianity, the dominant viewpoint was that there were many gods. This seems well known, but what people often assume is that this means there were a fixed number of gods, like the 12 Olympians and some others that go with them. It was much more flexible then this. Romans, especially later in the empire as things became more cosmopolitan, frequently worshipped all sorts of gods beyond the ones we usually think of as "Greco-Roman." There was even a temple in Rome devoted to unknown gods, so they could give sacrifices to gods they did not know about yet! Not all of these many deities were equal though. Hundreds of deified (non-emperor) humans were worshipped as gods across the empire, sometimes across the whole empire, sometimes locally. These formerly human deities were considered less important then major gods, like Jupiter, but that was fine. Many other gods and goddesses straddled this line. Not all deities had to be equal. In this environment, sacrificing to the emperor as a minor deity seemed reasonable. Some, or even possibly most, people no doubt viewed this as a political maneuver. However, that didn't mean that they would have also viewed it as illegitimate or heretical. There was no distinction between religion and politics in Rome, or most ancient cultures for that matter. And not just in the sense of a lack of the modern idea of separation of church and state. It was widely believed that gods regularly interfered in the lives of humans and in the affairs of state. The gods were deeply concerned about, and involved in, the politics of the empire. A god did not have to be above the fray in order to be divine. Sacrificing to a short lived emperor like one of the Gordions who was immediately deposed did not undermine the system. It actually fit right in, as strange as that may seem to modern eyes. After all, Jupiter only became the chief god after overthrowing his father.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2020 02:30
|
|
|
Almost all Linear B tablets have been discovered in palace complexes (I believe there has only been one discovery of them outside a palace), so it makes sense that with a rapid and dramatic collapse of the Bronze Age palace system, writing would vanish along with the palaces. Ancient writing systems tend to be quite restricted in who used them, but Linear B writing was even more restricted then most. One theory to explain this, is the idea that in Bronze Age Greece, all (or nearly all) scribes would have worked for the palace. The palaces may have even had a monopoly on training the scribes. This would fit with the highly focused nature of the contents of the Linear B tablets, which are almost exclusively administrative texts. In contrast, in the Near East, scribes were trained by a variety of parties and worked for both government and private employers, making literacy much more durable.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2021 00:42
|
|
|
Reconstructing Sumerian phonology is a lot harder then Mycenean Greek though, since Mycenean Greek can be compared to Attic and Modern Greek. There is no modern language that is even all that similar to Sumerian, so figuring out how that language would have been spoken requires a great deal of guesswork. Egyptian is actually somewhat easier (in some ways, the lack of vowels are still a major issue), even though its about the same age as Sumerian. A direct line can be drawn from Ancient Egyptian to the Coptic language, which is still (barely) in use today.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2021 04:04
|
|
|
Another thing to note with regards to the lack of written vowels in some ancient scripts is that this practice is most commonly seen in Semitic languages (like ancient Egyptian or Hebrew). These languages emphasize vowel sounds less then other languages do, such as the fact words in almost never begin with vowels in Semitic languages. Certain words in English, such as "I," or "oil," or "era" lose all meaning if you remove the vowels, but words that are structured like this do not generally exist in Semitic languages.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2021 09:15
|
|
|
A similar transition took place in Athens during their democratic reforms. Family and tribe based revenge was replaced with courts that could adjudicate those kinds of disputes, with tribal systems that caused blood feuds and cycles of murderous revenge being dissolved. These courts could and did assign the death penalty for murder, so its not totally the same, but it does show how this issue comes up again and again in different societies.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2021 02:53
|
|
|
I found a really neat interactive map of the City of Rome as of 14 AD through one of my classes, I thought people in this thread might appreciate it: https://www.digitalaugustanrome.org/. A fun experiment to try is to think of all the famous Roman monuments in Rome and try to find them on the map, you won't find most of them, since a lot of the best known monuments were built in the later imperial period.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2021 10:19
|
|
|
This thread seems to have slowed down a lot lately, might it be a good idea to make a new thread? With over a thousand pages of posts in the current thread, it may be intimidating people.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2021 04:10
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:I also seems to remember that gold was more or less worthless In Ancient Egypt because they had so much of it. Its more accurate to say that gold was less valuable in Ancient Egypt then it generally has been in other places, especially in comparison to other items which have usually been considered more valuable then gold. Gold was still plenty valuable in Egypt, especially because they could export it to places where gold was far less common. Gold was Egypt's largest export during the bronze age, and it was the primary way they bought foreign products that couldn't be acquired in Egypt. For example, Egyptian wood is basically useless for building anything, so Egypt bought lots of cedar wood from modern day Lebanon, often with gold. A letter from the King of Babylon to the Pharaoh Amenhotep in the 14th century illustrates how valuable gold was for Egyptian foreign trade. quote:Why do you send me only two minas of gold? Now, my work on the god’s house is extensive and I am seriously engaged in carrying it out. Send me much gold. And as for you, whatever you desire from my country, write to me and let them bring it to you. The Babylonian king was willing to offer the Pharaoh anything he wanted in return for gold, because Egypt had such a chokehold on the supply. If you wanted to acquire large amounts of gold, you had to buy from Egypt, because no one else could supply very much.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2021 05:04
|
|
|
There are a lot of other examples of other 14th century BC kings asking for/begging for gold from Egypt in the same archive of diplomatic letters. (The other kings used "brother" to refer to the Pharaoh if they ruled an independent kingdom and "father" if they were a vassal of Egypt).quote:EA 3 quote:EA 4 quote:EA 7 quote:EA 10 quote:EA 16 quote:EA 19 quote:EA 24 quote:EA 44
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2021 05:43
|
|
|
sebzilla posted:Yeah, most expensive would probably be one of those dinks who was emperor for like two months. Yeah I have been looking at emperor Gordian coins as a gift for my dad (who is named Gordon), and Gordian I and II coins, who jointly ruled for 21 days will cost you hundreds of dollars, whereas Gordian III coins, can be had for less then 50 dollars. Gordian III ruled for six years, soon after Gordian I and II. My initial plan was to try to get one of each, but a Gordian I and II coin will cost an absurd amount.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2021 20:48
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Interesting question. I do not know if a regular apartment would have had interior doors. As far as I know there are no surviving upper stories of insulae to study, we just have ground floors and very rarely a second floor. The ground floors were for businesses and/or richer people, they do have doorways. I would guess the cheap apartments at the top were single room situations. They may have had doors dividing apartments from one another but probably not inside. The middle ones... ??? According to the professor of my Roman Social history class I am currently taking, upper floors of insulae often used fabrics hanging from the ceiling to divide rooms apart. I can't find a reference to this in any of the course texts, but he may have pulled that fact from a textual source we have not read for the class.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2021 08:29
|
|
|
Another thing to keep in mind about Sparta is that in addition to the Spartiates and the Helots, there was a third class called the perioikoi, who were neither citizens nor slaves. We don't know exactly how many of them there were, but it was probably a lot. They also needed food.
CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Feb 7, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2021 20:19
|
|
|
euphronius posted:I think the archeological record shows cuneiform developing wholly in (above ground) southern Iraq but I don’t know for sure The development of Cuneiform writing is quite well attested. There are a lot of proto-cuneiform tablets from the 4th millennium BC that show the very early stages of cuneiform writing developing. A visual example of the development of cuneiform: Tablet dating to 3500-3350 BC:  Tablet dating to 3350-3200 BC:  Tablet dating to 3200-3000 BC:  Tablet dating to 2900-2700 BC:  Tablet dating to 2700-2500 BC: 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Right so they were already in post flood Iraq for thousands of years before they started cuneiform If we are defining "post flood" as starting around 9000 BC with the beginning of the Holocene, then yes, its much later then that. The earliest proto-cuneiform goes back to around 3300 BC, maybe 3500 BC if you are very generous about how you define proto-cuneiform.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 22:35
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:F’htagn. It’s certainly a plausible hypothesis that there was a traumatic flood event somewhere in prehistory, given the frequency with which it pops up among unrelated cultures. But it might just be that floods happen everywhere and everyone hates them. Evidence in favor of the latter theory is the presence of flood myths in Andean cultures, which have no connection to the middle east.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2021 08:50
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:yeah next time I have a thousand spare hours I'll definitely spend it on that For a more serious answer, the Oxford Classics edition is another good option if you can't get ahold of the Landmark edition. I don't have their version of the Anabasis, but their other works are always good. Their version also includes the Indica, which I don't think the Landmark edition does. https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Anabasis-Indica-Classics/dp/0199587248
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 08:03
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Oh Landmark has just had it as "coming soon" on their website for years and I just looked it up and it's finally coming out this December. I'll just wait after all. Are we talking about the same Anabasis? The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian has a landmark version that has been released under the name "The Landmark Arrian." the forthcoming landmark work is Xenophon's Anabasis, which is a separate work not about Alexander.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 22:37
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I was talking about Xenophon's, yeah. Thought it was clear from context. Ah, I thought we were talking about Arrian since your first post was right after the conversation about Alexander's army. My bad.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 22:42
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:I do have to caveat all of this by the fact that I haven't read a good analysis of it. I feel like there should be enough legionary graves that somebody's done it, but I don't know the paper. There is analysis on how many soldiers were in the army that I've read, but how likely you were to get stabbed... ??? Poking around a bit, I found someone who did a really extensive study of the question of mortality in the Imperial Roman army. The book Measuring sex, age and death in the Roman Empire: explorations in ancient demography by Walter Scheidel has a ton of statistical work on this topic. The book is really dense and I didn't read the whole section on army mortality, but he did summarize the key points relevant to the discussion in this thread in a much shorter paper https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110509.pdf. quote:Empirical information that would permit us to improve on this generic assumption is rare. [The previous paragraph gave a general rate of 40% mortality for Roman men between the ages of 20 and 45] In an earlier study, I made use of epigraphic rosters that list the number of soldiers who were discharged from a particular legion in a given year. In three out of seven surviving documents from the second century AD, anomalies caused by military events forestall further analysis. The other four rosters (from the lower Danube, North Africa and Egypt) all point to annual rates of between 100+ and c.125 discharges, and in fact mostly to 120-125 cases per year. The underlying median of 120 annual discharges per legion needs to be related to the typical size of a legion and the length of service in order to calculate the rate of attrition during active service. Reckoning with an effective troop strength of slightly under 5,000, twenty-five years of service, and an average enlistment age of twenty, we may project an annual intake of 250-260 recruits and an annual discharge of 120 veterans per legion. In this scenario, slightly more than one-half of all recruits would not complete a full term of active duty. If correct, this estimate suggests that even in peacetime, the imperial legions lost approximately one-and-a-third times as many soldiers as predicted by mortality models alone (say, 50-55% instead of 40% over twenty-five years). Due to the probable margins of error, it is impossible to be more precise. Even so, this apparent discrepancy between predicted and observed attrition rates may readily be explained with reference to early discharge – either dishonorable (missio ignominiosa) or, perhaps more often, for medical reasons (missio causaria). Desertion and transfers to elite units would have added to the drain. Hence, in the absence of major combat operations, actual mortality in the legions need not have been dramatically (or at all) higher than in the civilian population. Interestingly however, his work suggests that the Praetorian Guard during the second century suffered much high mortality rates then normal legions did. quote:Records pertaining to the military units stationed in the capital itself create a very different impression. Discharge rosters for the Praetorian Guards suggest much more rapid attrition than in the legions, of some 58% during seventeen years of service (in the second century AD) and of 45% during thirteen years (in the early third century AD). These rates are similar to those among legionaries who served for much longer periods of time, and therefore imply bigger losses overall. Much the same is true for the equites singulares Augusti, who appear to have suffered 60% attrition within twenty years of service. Various factors may account for this imbalance, including elevated levels of combat mortality in the emperors’ campaigns of the Antonine and Severan periods, a greater degree of outward mobility in the form of promotions into the officer corps, and the notoriously severe disease environment of the city of Rome.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2021 04:08
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:Thank you. I was just listening to the book last night in a random mood and everything in the intro made me go "...he's right. Augustus is a remarkably minor figure in the public consciousness compared to Rome itself." I don't think that point is unreasonable, its just that your initial post was worded in a way that made your argument sound much more radical then you intended. Augustus certainly is remembered much less vividly in the public consciousness then other ancient figures, which is an interesting topic.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 07:50
|
|
|
In a similar vein, its a real shame that Ptolemy's history has been lost. We are missing out on all the stories of how Ptolemy single handedly slew elephants, defeated 1000 men in single combat, and how everyone else except him (and Alexander) was stupid.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 20:57
|
|
|
Athens very frequently overthrew oligarchic governments that were rebelling or looking to rebel in the Delian League and replaced them with pro-Athenian democratic governments. After Samos rebelled in 440, the oligarchs of the city were thrown out and replaced with a democratic government that was pro-Athenian.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2021 05:57
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Wasn't the proximate cause of the Peloponessian war Athens sailing to defend a fledgling democracy? I'm not sure what you are referring to. In addition to the Megaran decree, the other two proximate causes for the Peloponnesian war would be the battle of Sybota and the siege of Potidaea. The battle of Sybota occured after Athens agreed to an alliance with Corcyra, a polis based on the island of Corfu in the Ionian sea. Corcyra was at war with Corinth at the time over control of the city of Epidamnus, which was a colony city that could trace its origins back to both Corcyra and Corinth. To my knowledge, no source attests to Corcyra being democratic, but you may be thinking of the government of Epidamnus. The war between Corinth and Corcyra started when a popular and possibly democratic revolution occurred in Epidamnus, throwing out the ruling oligarchs of the city. The now exiled oligarchs allied with some Illyrian tribes in the area to raid and attack Epidamnus, hoping to restore themselves to power. The new government of Epidamnus appealed to Corcyra for aid, but was refused. They then asked Corinth for aid, and they received it. This led to a war between Corinth and Corcyra, with Corcyra aiding the exiled oligarchs, and Corinth aiding the new government. Athens ultimatley comes in on the side of the Corcyrans, so in this sense they are actually backing the oligarchs of Epidamnus, although they were not motivated by concern for Epidamnus. After initial Corcyran victories, the Corcyrans became concerned that Corinth was going to overwhelm them with its ability to call on allies for aid and resources. Corcyra then reaches out to Athens, the biggest naval power in Greece, for aid. Corinth tells Athens not to help Corcyra, as this would upset the fragile balance of power in Greece and violate the treaty that Athens, Corinth, and Sparta had signed 12 years prior, ending their previous bout of war. Athens ignores Corinthian warnings, enticed by the offer of allying with the powerful Corcyran fleet, and agrees to aid Corcyra in its defense against Corinth. In the ensuing battle of Sybota, Athenian ships join Corcyran ships in fighting the Corinthian fleet that was sailing towards Corcyra. The Corcyran fleet suffers terrible losses, but with the arrival of additional Athenian reinforcements, the Corinthians flee. Athens claims they have not violated the treaty, since they were acting only in defense in an ally, which was explicitly permitted in the treaty. They let the Corinthian fleet withdraw without pursuing it, and Corinth's war with Corcyra ends. However, Corinth is outraged at Athens, and believes that Athens's intervention in the war with Corcyra was a violation of their rights under the treaty to punish their own allies, because Corcyra was itself originally founded as a colony of Corinth. Shortly after this battle, Athens becomes very suspicious of the city of Potidaea, a member of the Delian League located near Macedonia. Potidaea was a colony of Corinth, and maintained close relations with the mother city. Potidaea had Corinthian magistrates that helped run the city, and lots of Corinthians lived in Potidaea. I am not aware of any details of the government of Potidaea, but we can reasonably assume that Potidaea was also not a democracy, since they received Corinthian magistrates and Corinth itself was not a democracy. Believing Corinth and the Macedonian King to be plotting to foment revolt in Potidaea, Athens demanded that Potidaea expel Corinthian magistrates, tear down their walls, and send hostages to Athens. Potidaea refused to do so, and reached out to Sparta and Corinth for support. A small Corinthian army travels to Potidaea to aid the Potidaeans, and Athens lays siege to the city. Both Athens and Corinth accuse the other of violating the treaty, Athens arguing that as a Delian League member, Potidaea was theirs to deal with as they saw fit. Corinth argued that Potidaea was their colony giving them rights to it, and that the city had large numbers of Corinthian and Peloponnesian citizens trapped by the siege. War doesn't break out immediately after these two events, but not that long after the siege begins, when the war conference of Sparta and her allies is called, the Corinthians loudly call for war, saying that Athens has been violating the treaty and trampling on Corinth's rights. However, at no point in here is Athens defending a fledging democracy. There may have been other events going on I am not including, but I don't think there were any other major proximate causes to the Peloponnesian War that would involve Athens defending a fledgling democracy.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2021 06:45
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:I think I was misremembering the Corcyra stuff. It's been a while and all the details got mixed up in my head. That makes sense. There may have been a fledging democracy involved there, although I don't think its actually explicitly stated in any source. All Thucydides says occurred is "the expulsion of those in power by The People (demos)," which could mean they set up a democracy, or it might mean they set up with a new set of better-liked oligarchs, or even a tyrant, although if they had a tyrant Thucydides probably would have mentioned it. Regardless, Athens was on the other side, so it doesn't matter that much for the question.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2021 06:55
|
|
|
The best part about the Assyrians is how they kept precise records about exactly how many people they killed, how many skins were flayed, and how much plunder they took from the people being flayed and killed.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2021 01:39
|
|
|
We were talking about mortality in the Roman army a week or two ago, archaeologists in Bulgaria recently discovered a marble gravestone that shows a man who served 44 years in the Roman army. https://twitter.com/archaeologymag/status/1368244992439853067
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 07:57
|
|
|
I am also struggling to think of an example of a Greek or Roman work that fits Tolkien's description, because ancient literature relied so heavily on divine characters and divine intervention in the story. Things don't feel very inevitable when divine characters are pulling strings in the story, especially with how often those divine characters resolve the stories with deus ex machina.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2021 08:21
|
|
|
Lawman 0 posted:What did the black sea greeks do for a living? A lot of them sold grain to Athens. Most of Athens's food supply in the 5th through 3rd centuries BC was imported from the Black Sea region.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2021 01:02
|
|
|
Rodrigo Diaz posted:Also, are there any good resources for reading about urban life in the late republic outside of Rome? Somewhere like idk Philippi or Massilia or Syracuse? There is an excellent book about Ptolemaic and Roman Alexandria called Alexandria Rediscovered. Its a British Museum publication with lots of big pictures, so it is a little bit pricey, but a lot of the images are pretty spectacular. It's not particularly focused on the Late Republican era, but it certainly discusses that time period. I poked around a bit more for anything else that could more directly answer your question, but there doesn't seem to much in English about that subject. Finding stuff on cities outside of Rome and its vicinity, Egypt, and maybe Jerusalem/Judea from that time period will be difficult, since there is a major lack of written sources coming out of other places in the Roman world in the late republic. There is probably some archaeological stuff out there about this topic, but a lot of that will not be in English.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2021 01:40
|
|
|
Rodrigo Diaz posted:Thank you! This seems like a good starting point, given that my ulterior motive is to run a role-playing game set in a fictional second-string city, in a fictionalized Roman imperial holding. The roman stuff is partly set dressing but I think to have it work as set dressing it needs a lot of the functional components. If that's what you are looking for, I'd also recommend looking into Pompeii. Due to the city's unique level of preservation, we have a fantastic amount of information on what life was like in Pompeii in the 70s AD. In fact a lot of our knowledge of urban social life in the Roman world comes from Pompeii, and the not the city of Rome. There are many things that are preserved in Pompeii and nowhere else that shine light on daily life in Roman cities, like street graffiti, advertisements for gladiator games, brothel wall paintings, and restaurant decorations. I didn't mention it initially, since you won't find much specifically about Republican era Pompeii, but culturally and socially, things didn't shift that dramatically in Italy between the end of the Republic and the destruction of Pompeii. If you want to know what life was like in a second-string city in the Roman world, Pompeii is the best resource we have.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2021 04:54
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1373692614172667908 https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1373693029362626568 https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1373693468690747397 https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1373693818562871300 https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1373696236054777859
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2021 09:57
|
|
|
Koramei posted:When cities get burned down over and over again (as they did in Korea and I'm sure Russia too), it's staggering how much gets lost. This applies to the Greeks and the Romans too, almost no original manuscripts from classical Greece or Rome survive, with the exception of some fragments of papyrus preserved by the desert in Egypt. For everything else, we only have copies of copies made by medieval monks. Unless a well developed process for manuscript copying exists, anything written on fragile materials like paper or papyrus will be lost eventually. This is why we should go back to writing on clay tablets. Anything we want to preserve for future generations should be inscribed in clay, fired, and buried in the ground. We know so much more about the most eras of the cuneiform-era Near Eastern world than we do about any ancient period, except maybe Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome, because such a relatively large number of their documents have survived, since fired clay tablets are much less fragile then paper or papyrus. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Mar 25, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2021 21:46
|
|
|
Tulip posted:So I'm looking for two recommendations reading-wise: Life and Society in the Hittite World by Trevor Bryce will be your best bet for Hittite social and economic history. I haven't read much of it, but its very well regarded. I have read Bryce's book The Kingdom of the Hittites, which is a political and diplomatic history of the Hittites, and it's very good and generally easy to follow, so I'm sure Life and Society is too. I haven't read enough about Egypt to give a good answer on that subject, but I'm sure someone else will be able to help there. CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Mar 28, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2021 02:18
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 16:30 |
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:My understanding is that Caesar had his supporters (or slaves? idk) read his works aloud in the forum, to make sure his exploits stayed fresh in the minds of the citizens who he was trying to woo. Definitely not the same as printing a hundred thousand copies for all the middle class inhabitants of the city, but it was a mass market work. In a similar vein, Ancient Greek works (generally poetry) were frequently read aloud at festivals to large crowds. This wasn't just limited to a couple of classic works like the Iliad either, although those were probably the most popular and most common. There was one philosopher who's name I am forgetting (possibly Xenophanes but I can't find a citation for that), who complained that the Olympic festival was filled with bad poets trying to get you to listen to readings of their works. The ancient world had a mass media culture, it was just experienced in a very different way than a modern person who sits down to read a novel.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2021 20:48
|
|