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Pope on fire posted:Which Caesar of Rome has the shortest reign? Probably one of the Gordians, though they were co-emperors. poo poo was whack in 238. If this is a trick question regarding the Tetrarchy, keep in mind Caesar was a thing since Julius Caesar - It was given to Augustus/Octavian when he was adopted by Julius Caesar, and the same with Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, and Caligula, who succeeded Tiberius. Claudius was the first to actually assume it as a title as opposed to an adopted name, and from there it stuck. The Tetrarchy basically codified it as a specific "Emperor in training" type of post.
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Jun 21, 2013 11:09
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benem posted:Sorry to dig this back up from a few pages ago, but how do archaeologists figure out the Sumerian word for "fart?" I get how you can puzzle out the words for "king" and "grain" and whatnot, but where do you even work from to figure out the more colloquial stuff? I imagine it's a little bit of creative substitution on both ends.
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Jul 6, 2013 00:01
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karl fungus posted:In some of these ancient cultures we've been discussing, what were your options if you didn't fit into the cultural gender norms? Have there been any studies done on transgender people in ancient history? Primarily from a sociological/anthropological stance. Wasn't there a Native American culture that basically had a specific (non-pejorative) word for a biological male who stayed around camp and did traditionally feminine duties?
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Jul 6, 2013 06:10
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Phobophilia posted:Amphorae always weird me out, to my eye, they look like a horrible shape for optimal packaging. But I guess the point is that they're so solid and durable for sealing valuable goods, and also so cheap thanks to a massive cottage industry of potters churning out hundreds of the thing per day. If I recall from some documentary, one of the reasons they had that vaguely arrowheaded shape was that between that and the relative uniformity of shape, they could be packed into holds in a sort of interlocking pattern to increase the haul and keep the cargo stable. I imagine the pointy bottom made it easier to plant into whatever Romans used as packing peanuts. I'd love to have someone come across a sealed amphora filled with something like 1700-year old wine or olive oil or (as long as I'm not anywhere nearby) garum.
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Jul 17, 2013 00:49
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E:/\ The part about imperial hubris (and for that matter, republican hubris earlier on) is important. It's hard to point at any one aspect or event and say "if Rome had done/hadn't done this they wouldn't have collapsed in the West," but you would be hard pressed to say their treatment of people who weren't Romans (within the city) wasn't a part. Even during the Republic it was a problem.PittTheElder posted:Yeah, this definitely happens. There was a sealed cask of some sort of alcohol pulled out of the Baltic within the last year or two. Not Rome old, but still pretty damned old. A little further back they found an old ship filled with cognac barrels - though I am fairly sure they had all been contaminated with seawater and were worthless unless the company who hauled them up has managed to get the seawater out. New question: I have always wondered where Romans came from. Were they just a splinter of Etruscan society? Greek settlers? Trojans fleeing the Hittites? Literal feral children? Or is it one of those tough things like the Sea People where they seem to have just showed up from nowhere and stole a bunch of Sabine women to fix their de facto penal colony sausagefest problem? FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 05:20
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karl fungus posted:How many ancient acts of war would be considered genocide in the modern sense of the term? I don't know but the answer is probably many, if you look at the Roman efforts to 'wipe out' cultures like the Cimbri. Given, the Cimbri showed up and they were massive scary motherfuckers from (probably) around Finland (that's the one on the South, right?) who got decimated by Roman tactics and strategy despite being apparently legendary in their fighting prowess individually. Later travelers would write that they were reduced to basically a broken minuscule gaggle of people huddling along the coast. E: Rome did a lot of the whole cultural sublimation thing even before they became an Empire. Oh, and they crucified every last Spartacus, which makes me feel kind of good about how Crassus died. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 19:02
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sullat posted:Eliminating 12 million taxpayers and laborers because you don't like the cut of their jibs? This is a beautiful circumcision reference.
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Jul 19, 2013 22:27
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Install Gentoo posted:If I remember right, ways to make cheaper red and purple dye were developed towards the latter part of the Byzantine's rule. Purple and a certain shade of red had both only been possible to make for clothing-suitable dye in a certain expensive and rare way, hence why they were reserved for high-ranking people originally. Once ways to make them without that were developed, the new dyes were much more common and it lost a lot of its prestige, so it became ok for common folk to wear it. I had been under the belief that it was more like blaspheming Dear Leader by making His Purple Dye seem anything but His. Like, once the place got deep into the imperial godhood stuff (Elagabalus notwithstanding) a la Pre-Meiji Imperial Japan if you went around wearing purple robes and you weren't a Caesar or Augustus, you got dragged in before the Caesar or Augustus so you can apologize before the Praetorian Guard turns you into kibble for the hounds. Is that the case, or was it just more of a "I have a JD so call me Doctor" kind of overreach?
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Jul 25, 2013 16:45
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Were there ever any known examples of the Eastern empire using cannons? I assume it would be against the Ottomans in the exceedingly late, almost not-an-Empire era of the 14th/15th centuries?
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Jul 29, 2013 08:35
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know really anything about the Roman army by the time cannons were around. I would assume they adopted them the same way the western European armies did, but earlier since they would've had access before. By the time cannon are getting to Europe the empire is in pretty dire condition, though, so they probably didn't have the resources to exploit them properly. Okay, now would their proximity to China lend itself to knowledge of gunpowder? Or was it like silk in that it was a heavily guarded secret? I highly doubt trade from China wasn't going through Constantinople prior to Ottoman control, but was it just that gunpowder primarily got exported in applied form like fireworks and not in big explodey barrels and sacks so some smartass can discover "holy poo poo we can use this to blow holes in Turks from 50 yards away or at least scare the poo poo out of them!"
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Jul 29, 2013 14:22
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SnoochtotheNooch posted:I haven't had a history class in awhile, but someone I know told me recently in a very pretentious tone that I should absolutely NOT call the Byzantines, "the Byzantine Empire". And instead it should be referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire. I'm just curious if something else has been developed or if he is just speaking out of his pontifical rear end. Some people take it as a misnomer. Others don't give a gently caress. It isn't as bad as calling Asians 'Orientals' or anything pejorative like that, it's just one of those nomenclature divisions that plagues most fields of study. It's referred to as Byzantium, but is also the Eastern Roman Empire, or simply the Roman Empire for a good portion of history. It isn't like someone is going to see 'Byzantine' in historical context and not know what you're talking about.
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Jul 29, 2013 16:27
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Is it a point of great contention (or any contention at all) whether Julius Caesar or Octavian/Augustus or even someone afterwards was considered the first Emperor? I can't really find a way to justify a consideration that Caesar was an 'Emperor' per se when he basically was just a guy who was operating somewhat within the rules, albeit the rules of an already broken system. Yes, he was a strongman, but to be honest poo poo was already going off the rails by the time he went to war with Pompey, so asserting dictatorial rule could be seen as a reverse Sulla move in which he returned power and representation to the populares but got murdered before we got to find out whether he really was going to step down. Augustus on the other hand, went full-bore with the deification and 'princeps' stuff. Hell, he took the name Augustus for gently caress's sake.
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Jul 29, 2013 16:55
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EvilHawk posted:I've just realised that Byantium:Byzantine = Rome:Roman and now I feel really dumb I think slaves, once freed, were allowed to travel as any citizen would, though they would otherwise be considered a very low class. Escaping slaves, though, I don't know. I never read much into it, but weren't slaves treated differently from, say, black slaves in the US or Jewish slaves in Egypt? As in they weren't worked to death/beaten for getting tired, they got steady food and shelter, and under some pagan festival they even got to order their master around for the day. Still very clearly a slave, but more like an in-house laborer rather than the incredible abuse typically associated with slaves. I could be wrong, though. If I recall it was bad form to be cruel to slaves and quality rather than quantity was a status symbol.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:32
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No idea where I thought the name came from. I swear I'm usually very good at figuring these things out. 
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euphronius posted:I am sure you could have been a pirate without much issue. They are kind of free. Until they ran across a pair of young lads named Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, that is. That was sort of it for freely pillaging the Mediterranean.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:45
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Halloween Jack posted:Um, it depends. I wouldn't want to be a slave in Cato the Elder's vineyard, as he made no bones about working slaves like livestock until they were no good for labour, then selling them to whoever would have them for whatever he could get. A whole family of assholes.
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Jul 30, 2013 02:02
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I assume the manual labor slaves were more likely to be non-Roman (either as in the city or the Republic/Empire) but were there entire families of slaves, with children being born into slavery? How would a free person (Romans/allies/client states) enter slavery outside of being taken essentially as a war prize? Is it just like "Gaius Albinus lost a bet, is now a slave until whenever?"
FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 13:36
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Halloween Jack posted:Varro encouraged childbearing among his slaves, whereas Suetonius says that Cato prostituted his female slaves to the males as a means of controlling them (Cato was a dick). Well now we know where that shithead grandson of his got it. Actually, Cato (the intermediate?) was an rear end in a top hat as well. The Entire Universe posted:A whole family of assholes. As for Spartacus, Crassus deserved Carrhae for that poo poo. E: Crassus. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Jul 31, 2013 |
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Jul 31, 2013 04:03
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karl fungus posted:How did the Roman Republic last for so many centuries without someone making himself sole ruler? How were the circumstances special for Octavian? Hope, basically. Even Octavian and many after him had their powers 'granted' to them by the Senate. People had a lot of faith in a system that was hopelessly broken yet held together by the stoicism of Roman society or some crazy poo poo that made people believe baked-in class warfare (hey thanks Sulla) and repeated good-intent-awful-precedent (thanks Marius) legislation were somehow part of a system still able to work in their favor. Figleafs on top of figleafs hiding the awful truth that the "PQ" of SPQR really didn't matter and hadn't mattered since like 120 years before Actium. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Jul 31, 2013 |
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Jul 31, 2013 12:30
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Third Murderer posted:I'm not so convinced that the people of Rome would have had many illusions about how the government had changed. The fiction of the Princeps being appointed by the Senate and being merely the first among equals would have gone a long way toward keeping people mollified by making the emperors look semi-humble about their role, but I doubt that people failed to understand that they were now living in a dictatorship. I didn't mean to say they thought they would just up and elect the next Consul once Augustus or Claudius or whoever stepped down, just that they didn't necessarily feel oppressed, or at least no more oppressed than before. That was, as you said, because of the attempts to seem humble, as though the Princeps was the result of the Republican process, knew his power was granted at the leisure of the Senate/People of Rome, etc. Basically, people knew it wasn't the pair of consuls they had in the past/heard grandpater mumble about but this new guy wasn't hacking everyone's head off and sending half the Republic's military into war against the other half so they went along with it. Sure, some (at first) knew how completely broken beyond repair or recognition the system was but a) its name was Rome and b) there was a sense of stability. And outside of the few that were invested in the existence of the consulship it really didn't matter to anyone because by the time 'Princeps' became a hereditary title (again as you said) most people who knew anything else were either dead or had made peace with the new paradigm and trusted Augustus to pass power to someone who would keep things running smoothly. As for the system "working for them" I meant it working for any given Roman personally. They could take their pouch of Denarii/Asses/Sestertii and buy food and clothes and whores at roughly stable prices and that was good enough, the wheat and cloth wasn't all hosed up in price due to some rear end in a top hat loving around with trade routes from Egypt, and the whores were fresh since they weren't being passed around the legion barracks as spoils for taking the city. Life didn't change much unless you pissed off someone in power and the best way to keep from doing that was not to ask any questions. I should have said apathy instead of hope, in retrospect.
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Jul 31, 2013 14:50
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euphronius posted:Before Octavian you had JC, Marius and Sulla, don't forget. This was (very broadly) how Julius Caesar gained a good deal of his power. In addition to being a drat genius in the realm of military strategy he was one hell of a politician. Leveraged highly populist policy against his political enemies and dropped the sickest of burns on Cato.
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Jul 31, 2013 21:22
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Squalid posted:Apparently Roman coin collecting become popular in Renaissance Europe so there has at been some recognition of archeological value for at least 500 years, they even started drawing up lists of who ruled when. Hordes of Islamic silver in Viking age Scandinavia suggest to me merchants probably didn't worry much about who or what was printed on gold and silver, they probably just checked for purity and weight. Rome knew it was debasing its currency with copper over time, so it would seem there was some kind of accounting for the metal value of at least some of the coins. It also seems there's evidence people (as in people other than the emperor whose face was on the coins) cared about whose face was on the coins, so perhaps there was a system set up to melt coins down and re-mint them with, say, Claudius, so that someone didn't have to have some rear end in a top hat like Caligula looking at them every time they paid for something. Probably couldnt go and get your coins reminted with Claudius under the rule of Nero, though. The currency was a split system, with small denominations (copper/bronze for example) under local authority and the larger (silver/gold) minted in Rome only. That also indicates some kind of destructive circulation process, since the debasement over time meant more and more copper got into the 'silver' coins. Obviously coins got lost or thrown into lakes/wells/seas but long story short I imagine there was some circulatory system by which coins were taken out of circulation, melted down, separated/combined if needed, and minted again. Rome had problems but they loved their standardization and systems.
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Aug 1, 2013 13:00
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physeter posted:Class relations were grounded in the tradition of plebian/patrician relations, which got kind of complex. Wherever the original patricians came from, we can reasonably speculate that they didn't have the power and/or inclination to completely subdue the presumably pre-existing plebians. By the early Republic we see the plebs exercising a remarkable degree of power, including going on strike and moving out of the city for awhile whenever their "overlords" got too annoying. This sort of sets the tone for the future: they didn't really like each other, but they needed each other. A patrician wasn't going to shoe his own horses or repair his own roof, and a pleb didn't much give a poo poo what the patrician was doing as long as the granary was filling up. Over time, social choices (like, limiting the senatorial ability to make money) combined with the natural course of economics led to increasing pleb power and the emergence of the equites and then the plebian senatorial class. By the end of the Republic, we see superheavyweight plebs like Marius, Pompey, Cicero and Antony, more powerful by far than most any true blood patrician. Then again, Sulla.
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Aug 1, 2013 16:20
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Sure - though I'm going to bring up another Roman too, Gaius Marius, because he's kinda integral to story of Sulla. A lot of what Sulla did was as a direct response to actions of Marius. The funniest thing about it is that the Marian reforms of the military allowed for a general to tie the fates of his soldiers to his own - it became the norm for soldiers to have much of their rewards for service (land, wealth, etc) guaranteed by the general once back in Rome, which meant that those soldiers had an interest in making sure their general got everything he wanted and more. If the army told the general to gently caress off and enter the pomerium all by his lonesome (legally a general was required to disband the army before entering the walls) the general would be likely punished and the army would get jack poo poo. You would see this seesaw back and forth, much like the immunity privilege of the Consul. Consul/General does something illegal, but can't disband the army/step down lest he be brought to account.
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Aug 2, 2013 01:54
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Things you shouldn't forget: 1. Quote is not Edit. Sorry for the double post. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 05:20
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/\ What's funny is that what is called Colchester today was called Camelodunum back in Roman times. It has been conclusively proven not to have been any sort of inspiration for Camelot as nobody knew it was called Camelodunum in the past since it had been called Colchester for hundreds of years prior to any possible Arthurian era and wasn't even in the right place to begin with. Assuming Arthurian legend isn't just some mish-mash of known place names and culturally significant lore from all over Britain of course. The Entire Universe posted:Things you shouldn't name your spa after:
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Aug 6, 2013 05:35
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Jazerus posted:However, Hadrian brought the philosopher's beard back into style. Also, a primary visual distinction between Romans and Gauls/Germans/etc. was that Romans did not under any circumstances wear only a mustache, while the "barbarian" style was to have the most baller mustache possible. This distinction existed for the entire imperial period even among, say, Romanized Gauls - they would often retain the mustache as the only real evidence of their heritage. Late in the empire when barbarians begin to be actively discriminated against there emerges a Roman youth counterculture that is totally into mustaches and pants. Oh, speaking of counterculture youth - back when Julius Caesar was a young man he apparently rolled with the hipsters of the day. Wore his belt loose, mocked the old fudds, the whole nine.
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Aug 9, 2013 04:40
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Halloween Jack posted:How old was he? After he lost his priesthood he probably wanted to let it all hang out, wearing belts with knots in them and rings with actual gemstones on them. This was a few years after losing the priesthood, I believe - when he came back from his first bout of military service after hearing Sulla died he hung around and played Denny Crane for a while. It was his early 20's and he was trying to make a sort of comeback, I imagine, considering Sulla had initially wanted to purge him due to the fact that he was a) Marius' nephew and b) Cinna's son-in-law. E: My local art museum had an ancient Egyptian exhibit visiting for a bit, it was interesting to see how Egyptian sarcophagi were all nicely carved and painted, whereas after you get around to Greek/Ptolemy and Roman control they're just coffins with relatively flat covers, with the faces of what I assume are the dead guy/gal inside just painted on top. It was neat to see how detailed some of the art was for being several thousand years old. It's easy to forget that after humanity started settling into metropolitan existence art started looking really, really good. Like going from childhood clay sculpture to art study. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Aug 9, 2013 |
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Aug 9, 2013 12:45
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"DIIS MANIB ANTHIL. IULIUS.GAMUS.PATER.FIL.DULCISSIM" "To the departed spirit of Anthus. (Set up by) his father Lucius Julius Gamus to very sweet son." 
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Aug 10, 2013 07:22
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karl fungus posted:Was Latin consistent throughout the Republic/Empire or do we have evidence of dialects? Given the differences between the romance languages today the dialects were probably more like regional accents rather than something like Mandarin vs Cantonese.
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Aug 12, 2013 21:27
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The Cato story always makes me feel good because of what an rear end in a top hat he and his family were. Motherfucker didn't get to go easily and (as the story goes) had to rip himself open a second time. Even as a tall tale it's still nice to think it happened that way. Crassus is another one of those characters that got the death they deserved - chased down in the desert, taken prisoner, beheaded, and the head (allegedly) filled with gold because of what a greedy fuckface he was.
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Aug 14, 2013 18:27
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Drunkboxer posted:What did Cato do that was assholish? I mean, more than any other Roman politician in those day. Touted himself as some paragon of incorruptibility while lambasting reformers of the horrendously graft-infested system within which he flourished. It may not have been "his signature on the checks" so to speak, but he knew that the entire structure of vote-buying, bribery, and shady-rear end dealings was what kept him high on the hog, and his schtick was giving some milquetoast acting critique of it without any effort to reform. On top of that he gave the most saccharine lip service to the idea of the republic, acting as though poo poo like the dueling purges of Marius and Sulla weren't the putrefaction of the corpse of the republic. Sulla's "gently caress all of you, maybe you should have chosen another vagina to come from" neutering of plebian power turned that poo poo into an unabashed oligarchy and Cato, ever the dusty sycophant, called it the republic and guarded it viciously. He was like goddamn Rand Paul. Always the sanctimonious prick acting all holier-than-thou while neck-deep in the shitpile all the same.
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Aug 15, 2013 18:12
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Would there be a linguistic connection between Greek and Roman suffixes like -oulos -> -alus? The languages share some things but considering the length of the cultural interplay I don't purport to know which has the original and which has the loan words. Romans were  over Greek poo poo for a while, but then Rome took over the peninsula for several hundred years. Is there a migration theory regarding the Italian peninsula being populated by Greeks/some common ancestor? Or are those similarities merely an effect of the relationship between the two as it progressed through time?
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Aug 19, 2013 16:26
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I listened to Dan Carlin's Decline/Fall of the Republic series a while back and am wondering if anyone else has listened to it and/or can weigh in on it. It wasn't nearly as in-depth as the History of Rome series, but the guy was a former broadcaster and throws a pretty good Orson Welles dramaticism on there that makes it pretty enthralling. I'd recommend it on the narrative alone, but I can't vouch for accuracy. He cites quite a few of the usual texts - Appian, Livy, etc. But I am not sure if the accuracy is free of being made subjugate to the "story."
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Aug 27, 2013 03:36
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On Charlemagne: Hasn't it been theorized that he wanted to read and write (It's known that he tried to learn as an adult), but was unable to, with some evidence pointing towards being dyslexic? He reportedly spoke multiple languages of the region, could keep reasonable pace with a Greek speaker, and had one hell of an intellectual curiosity. If that's the case, you kinda feel sorry for the guy. Went around fostering the growth/preservation of knowledge but because writing never looked anything but a jumbled mess (the script of the time notwithstanding - poo poo looks Arabic, but you can make out the letters once you know what it says) to him, he had to roam the empire like a total busta with his scribe, and everywhere he went, seeing that his work had granted people a gift of literacy he would never obtain.
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Aug 30, 2013 23:12
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Eustachy posted:What's wrong with it? It's the definition if not the literal translation. Similar to how the various middle eastern languages indiscriminately called all Western Europeans 'Franks'. Not to mention the Eastern Empire was vastly more Hellenised compared to the Latin West due to the local Greek influence. People in the Eastern Empire were probably tough to distinguish from Greeks without asking - in Greek.
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Sep 2, 2013 21:54
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How do historians tell they aren't just being taken for a ride by someone writing something under the guise of reality but actually making poo poo up? What if Xenophon and Pliny are basically L. Ron Hubbard and Harry Turtledove for their respective societies and what we are reading is total idealized bullshit and really most ancient civilizations were staunchly egalitarian among the genders? I can see attempting to reconcile several sources, but look at our goddamn society - from the level of proliferation of books, future historians will think we are all wizards who murder each other in the forest by day and engage in crazy fetish play by night.
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Sep 3, 2013 01:21
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/\ How mucH, if any, trade did Rome/Romans have going on with China directly? I don't recall any references to dealings with the Chinese/Romans in their respective materials and there's a shitload of deadly inhospitable terrain between even Constantinople and China, but I imagine they knew of a place where various trading intermediaries got their silk and whatnot, right?Grand Fromage posted:There was quite realistic and accurate painting. We don't have a lot of paintings because they fall apart in a way that statues don't, but look up places like the Villa of Oplontis or the House of the Vettii for some incredible preserved paintings. This is the one that apparently has a big painting of Priapus  weighing his gigantic dick against a bag of coins, right there in the entrance.Of course the image is , it's a painting of a dude with a wang the size of a cricket bat. I would imagine most people in the thread would see "Priapus" and get what's going on, but you never know who strolls in and clicks a link saying "weighing his gigantic dick..." expecting kittens.e: Lord Tywin posted:What the Saudis have done with Mecca is pretty loving atrocious. The best part is who they contracted out to do a lot of that construction. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 12:03
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There's a lot of evidence they were setting bones and pulling teeth, like, thousands of years ago. Sure, they had to deal with draining pus from just about every wound but so did everyone prior to the 1920's pretty much.
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Sep 11, 2013 12:42
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I've had wine that (when in quantity) is a very deep purplish color. I could see it being considered an ocean-like color under certain circumstances. I would lean more towards linguistic fuckups or dramatic license on part of the original writer before claiming some biological characteristic on part of ancient people who (in aggregate) have distant ancestors today that as a population do not seem to display abnormal rates of colorblindness. Besides, most colorblindness just causes a shitload of trouble discerning certain shades of colors when placed next to each other, not complete replacements of one primary color with another.
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Sep 12, 2013 20:49
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Cingulate posted:Well, there were some important changes in our genome, such as the development of lactose tolerance in some populations. I love the "scenery" aspect of linguistic development. Greece was heavily into sea commerce and as a result Greek likely developed numerous different terms for specific shades of blue because there was a practical need - describing the sea or the sky for example, or explaining which fish you want to keep and which you toss, etc. It's the basis of that old adage about how the Inuit have a couple dozen words for snow but probably none for cattle, or how maybe a linguistic group such as Germanic didn't have a word for the concept of a Savannah and had to borrow from a language that did once they started trading.
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Sep 13, 2013 12:48
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