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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Why do you write like an imbecile? posting does not require APA format
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Feb 21, 2024 19:53
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 22:01 |
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Skrill.exe posted:Hardly. They couldn't even fend off 7 dudes. i feel like a lot of thebans could handle 7 dudes
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Feb 22, 2024 15:28
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PittTheElder posted:Julius' career is almost custom designed to make for a good narrative. Augustus on the other hand makes way less sense without the context of Julius, plus he has decades of boring old imperial administration following the classically "exciting" bits with Antonius and Cleopatra, very few people care about that. Also Agrippa is nearly integral to his success, the bro of all time.
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Feb 26, 2024 04:19
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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 i watched the first season and its ok but has at best a basic understanding of the historical events and plays wildly with them to no real end. i did not bother with season 2
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Mar 6, 2024 17:09
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Bongo Bill posted:Shut up, Uncle Ray! It's the style! You could not wear your hose any lower so you made tiny hose for each leg SAY IT
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Mar 6, 2024 18:00
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sorry to get all jared diamond but its also the nature of the mediterranean vs northern europe. having a large relatively calm and easily transversible sea where fishing villages and later trading towns could flourish lends itself towards cities far more than dense forests that get covered in snow for a giant part of the year and seas that are dangerous and subject to intense storms. plus just the proximity or distance to the fertile crescent, the silk road, and the connections between china and the persians.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:39
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zoux posted:I had always heard that the phalanx didn't work on open ground, that you needed the rocky terrain to guard your flanks Ghost Leviathan posted:Also come to think of it, related given level, flat plains are the kinda terrain where phalanxes would absolutely eat poo poo to more mobile forces even without the near cheat code that is horse archers. Like, the entire premise of The Three Hundred is that a small pass in mountainous territory is perfectly ideal for Greek phalanxes to hold ground with their signature shield wall against a much larger force. Phalanxes did just fine in big open ground, see Alexander. The greek city-states fighting in valleys were not stretching their phalanxes out from mountain to mountain, and the Romans abandoned the phalanx after eating poo poo against the Samnites in the central Italian hill country vs the flat terrain around Rome itself. The key for those major engagements was combined arms, notably cavalry and non-phalanx troops on the wings to guard the flanks. Alexander's phalanxes were also extremely well drilled and the sides would just rotate out to address a flanking threat and now its a tercio. So in those battles the phalanx was not some slowly moving behemoth that could not address flanking. Another point is there was a degradation in the quality of phalanxes between the time of Alexander and then the successor states and their eventual losses to Rome. They fought each other for a century and over that time the overall amount of training and such afforded to their soldiers was drastically reduced, and to compensate for that, they made their phalanxes deeper and their sarissas longer, going from ~17 feet to as much as ~23 feet long. Their shields also got smaller to accommodate the added weight and encumbrance on the soldier. This made the phalanx more unwieldy overall, and those were the ones the Romans ended up fighting against Macedon and Seleucia. The amount of cavalry and screening troops was also reduced by that time. Obviously they still had all those things, and had good well trained phalanxes as well, but overall the quality had reduced and by the time Rome showed up they were not going to win full on wars. The idea that the legions were some kind of hard counter is also totally wrong as we have plenty of accounts of legions getting wrecked when they are forced to fight phalanxes head on, with accounts of sarissas just punching through scutums and whatnot. They still did their jobs just fine, it was that once something went wrong, the greeks no longer had the same ability to respond. and over the course of a campaign, weaknesses got exploited by the more mobile and capable legions. WoodrowSkillson fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 16:35
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Carillon posted:My understanding is that this isn't the case, it's just that the successor states had to get really good at fighting each other, not that their quality declined per se. It was because they had to fight against a copy of themselves that changed the tactics, but individually we don't have evidence that they were worse by any stretch. My understanding might be outdated then, I'm certainly not a historian.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:44
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Re: hollywood back scabbards and the like, more than anything its continuity and ease of use on set. It keeps them up and out of the way, and they are always in the same place so reshoots are easier. It also knocks over less things around set, etc. it also means the cool sword hilt you paid someone to make is right there in the shot all the time. Tod from Todcutler has worked with TV shows and such, notably forging the hero versions of Geralt's swords for the Witcher tv show, he breaks down some of that stuff here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF1VFlCnLQ4 for shield walls, i think there are shield walls and there are Shield Walls. Standing near your buddies and trying to keep close is one thing, having the discipline and cohesion to have the dude in the 2nd rank step over his neighbor's body and replace him in the wall when he gets an arrow in the eye is another. It is also the intent to cover part of your buddy with your shield, and to trust the guy on your other right to do the same. That requires specific training and the right kind of weapons to use with it, spears being the obvious choice. The Romans notably did not use a true shield wall (the testudo is different) since a scutum literally can't overlap the guy next to you. So yeah "everyone charges in and fights 1v1 is not accurate at all, but not everyone was using shield walls for a million potential reasons. Or they only used it sometimes and fought differently at other times, with again the Romans as a decent example where they had their standard deployments but also a ton of other ones, like the testudo or the weird /\/\/\/\/\ wedge shape that they used against Boudica.
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Mar 8, 2024 19:15
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Yeah I was guarded in my initial post but as a young man that book did a lot to help me deconstruct the racist ideas I was raised with. And yeah I know enough not to treat anything as gospel but the general concepts seem pretty well supported and accepted by actual scholars
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Mar 10, 2024 18:54
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Yeah, the kelp highway along the alaskan and siberian coasts in the north atlantic went along a coastline that no longer exists. there are likely settlements after settlements going all the way down the coast that are now deep underwater.
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Mar 18, 2024 17:45
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euphronius posted:We should bring back the Chi Rho Catholics still use it all the time you really do not seem to know much about any type of Christianity
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Mar 19, 2024 17:56
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Nessus posted:Yeah if you’re basing your whole critique of Christianity on American right wing evangelicals, you’re sort of backhandedly endorsing their claim to be the one true faith, not an obnoxious sub variant with undue influence due to historical contingencies Nearly all forms of Christianity do suck though, i guess the unitarians are ok, if silly.
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Mar 19, 2024 18:02
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Oh interesting, thanks. I figure the Romans may have had some interest in what was out that way considering their trade ties in the Indian ocean, but the Arabian peninsula is just so desolate and mountainous I'd be surprised if they actually did anything permanent. I'd imagine there were outposts or something, waystations for ships and stuff, but afaik Rome never really "owned" that land. but back then that is a far more nebulous concept anyway. There was no bigger dog there to enforce like, taxes, on a Roman outpost so I'm sure were countless tiny Roman "settlements" scattered outside the actual borders.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:14
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Orbs posted:Random and/or horrific violence can happen in any era, I think studying history bears that out. There is no societal or technological advancement that takes that possibility away, because other people still make their own choices, regardless of our own. to me i think its the conflict between human altruism and limited resources. In the prehistorical period, people were absolutely altruistic. They cared for the sick or the disabled and they valued old and infirm members of their tribe/band/village. however when they are forced to migrate, or some event causes resources to no longer be as prevalent and other groups are now direct rivals, its literally a survival situation. That same willingness to protect their own will lead to taking very drastic and harsh actions against rival groups because there is no safety net, no one to look out for your tribe if poo poo goes south. if things are not too desperate, border clashes and skirmishes might settle disputes over hunting/foraging grounds, or access to chert or other resources. but if one or both groups have their backs to the wall, doing something as nasty as killing the rival group in their sleep becomes a valid and "necessary" act. Not doing so might mean your loved ones starve, and if the rival band is similarly desperate, its a matter of when, not if, one of those exceedingly violent acts is done to you.
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Apr 8, 2024 14:53
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FreudianSlippers posted:ACAB need to be careful with that second one lol
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Apr 9, 2024 14:15
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hell yes
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Apr 11, 2024 15:50
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Man if we find an Etruscan to Latin translation that would be huge.
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Apr 30, 2024 16:37
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The Lone Badger posted:How does maintaining heavy leather (used for protection against weapons) differ from the relatively thin and supple leather we use for clothing and low-grade protection? Arms and armor dork radar has been alerted. tl:dr leather for armor is stiff like rawhide. The maintenance of that would be to maintain the waterproofing used, be it oiling, wax, shellac, whatever was used by that culture/time period. "Leather armor" is a misnomer and mostly a creation of modern/victorian people. Hide armor absolutely was a thing, but in all cases it is akin to rawhide in terms of its flexibility. The most well known version used in the west was "cuir bouilli" aka boiled leather. Another word could be "molded leather" in that it is animal hide that is extensively treated and worked and then pressed into a form. This would be a rigid piece of armor. It was used well into the modern period for various things. Modern reproduction of a muscled cuirass for example  It was also commonly used in other parts of the world, and europe, for "scale mail" or lamellar type armor where the individual plates were of hardened leather instead of metal. The Mongols used it extensively since animal hides were much easier to come by than steel, which you want for swords and spears and arrowheads.  "leather armor" as depicted in media is entirely fictional, as leather supple enough to wear comfortably will easily be stabbed/cut through by any weapon. Sure, anything over your body is better than nothing. To accomplish that though, heavy clothing was far more common as a casual defense than some kind of purpose built soft leather defense. No point in spending a bunch of money on leather when wearing extra clothes you already have works just as well. The biggest source of hollywood confusion seems to be "studded leather" armor, which is most likely just misinterpreting old paintings that show brigandine, which is metal plates riveted to fabric or leather.  
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May 7, 2024 15:09
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PittTheElder posted:Re: leather muscle cuirasses, assuming you were wealthy enough to have access to it, would you have a layer of mail (plus a textile base layer in either case) underneath as well? In the medieval period, cuir boulli was used as supplementary armor by all kinds of people, knights included. In the period before metal plate armor was commonplace, hardened leather was a rigid defense that could help address mail being a poor defense against blunt impacts, or being penetrated by a sufficiently hard thrust that could break the links. In the classical period, this is unlikely, since the guys wearing that were not on the front line. However the concept of "if one armor is good, 2 is better" is hardly the kind of thing that needs a societal revolution, so someone wearing both is entirely plausible, if not documented. Maybe a lower ranking general/officer we don't have records of did that since he was fighting more often than normal on the frontiers, or had a habit of charging in himself and ended up dying before he became notable. Some of those were also ceremonial as noted above, so if they were light enough and the guy really thought he was in danger, its a thing that plausibly could be done. Keep in mind muscled cuirasses were also made of bronze, and that would have been suitable protection in the classical period. Hardened steel was not being used for the most part, and standard swords or spears would not just thrust right through it in a way that mail would stop. So any general/officer that would wear that kind of cuirass and wanted better armor would have a bronze one. Potentially also a fancy set of segmentata, though afaik we have not found any yet. Generals wearing a high end version of the soldiers kit is extremely common worldwide, so a set of segmentata with higher end steel, decorations, etc is not implausible either, though again we don't have direct evidence of it unless there is artwork I'm unaware of. Late period (357 CE) Reenactor i just found while googling instead of working.  As a corollary, there is little evidence of significant undergarments being used with mail until the medieval period. The romans had something called a "subarmalis" but from what tiny amounts of evidence we have, it was not a thick padded garment like a gambeson, but just some kind of linen of or other cloth worn for comfort, maybe slightly thicker than normal clothing for some scant added protection from wounds if the mail failed. Same for the migration period, everyone was wearing mail but we do not have good evidence of significant padding worn underneath.
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May 8, 2024 15:05
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Important note about the Romans looking down on the Carthaginians for human sacrifice, after Cannae the Romans did it too. That's the central part of my own personal and likely incorrect opinion that if Hannibal had marched on Rome,.he could have taken the city, regardless of whether or not Rome had the troops to withstand a siege.
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May 9, 2024 01:50
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 22:01 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Hey now, there's The Jakarta Method. everyone should read The Jakarta Method
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May 9, 2024 14:36
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