Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

It's another instance of amazing things you can do when you have 20,000 dudes available for labor.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 20:00

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:28

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Please take slapfighting to the slapfighting thread.

Note: I do not know if there's a slapfighting thread but I know it's not this one.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2024 18:14

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Maniples would make more sense.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2024 18:22

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Crab Dad posted:

Finding old porn caches in the forest and selling them to your buddies in middle school doesn�t make you a professional.

It's professional if you document it appropriately. Like how it becomes science if you take notes.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 01:09

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

We were in Cumae and cleaned out the wine shelf at the shop we could walk to in the first week.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 18:48

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

The price differences in Italy are wild too. At least when I was there, a bottle of good wine in Campania was cheaper than a can of Coke in Rome.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 18:59

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Arglebargle III posted:

I love how Stargate made the pyramids a landing pad for an alien spaceship because it sounds cool and then when you think about it for two seconds you realize how insane that is.

And yet who turned out to be right? Checkmate, Apophis. :smug:

# ¿ Feb 24, 2024 01:16

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Egypt was going for a cultural victory not domination.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2024 02:25

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Tunicate posted:

yeah it's crazy because their spaceships have three sides on the bottom and our pyramids have four

Those are Ha'taks. The Cheops class has four sides and lands on pyramids. Read a history book, christ. :rolleyes:

# ¿ Feb 24, 2024 03:35

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Tunicate posted:

they land a hatak on a four sided pyramid in Double Jeopardy, presumably there was a lot of scraping

motherfucker

cheetah7071 posted:

I haven't watched stargate but I hope the tetrahedron aliens won. Tetrahedrons are far superior to square pyramids

You should, it's a good show. The first season or two has a lot of fun archaeology stuff that unfortunately disappears, but it's still good after that.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2024 04:02

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Yeah Augustus has the lasting legacy in actually accomplishing stuff, but Caesar's story is a far more dramatic tale of adventure. Augustus was a stupendously talented political schemer and administrator. Different kind of interesting.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 04:09

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Getting assassinated at the height of your power is also a pretty good way to be interesting. How much would people think about JFK if Bernie Sanders hadn't pulled off that shot?

# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 04:15

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

As far as we know Augustus hunted them all down. We don't have records of all of them, but the ones we do know were either killed in battle during the civil war or found and assassinated by Augustus' agents.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 04:50

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Poor Lepidus. I got a loving degree in this and forget he existed most of the time.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 19:02

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Oh sure. I picture Romans as dudes from Staten Island all the time.

It's not like there have been no changes in 2000 years, but it's also not an enormous span of time and it's not like everyone in Italy was wiped out and replaced.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 06:43

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

FAUXTON posted:

hey let's hear more about what your idea of progress looks like

Orbs posted:

*looks at current world* Not like this? lol

Let's not do this in here actually.

# ¿ Feb 29, 2024 18:27

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Some of that in this thread is just that it started Rome focused, and the Romans were essentially always at war. Hadrian's about as close to a good peacetime leader I can think of in the Roman context.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 09:01

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

I would agree that it's wrong to say they didn't build cities. They were certainly much smaller than Mediterranean ones, they weren't an urban civilization the way the Romans or Greeks were (that being relative of course, the majority were always farmers out in the countryside) but they had permanent settlements with buildings and roads and walls, sometimes even made of stone. I can't think of a primarily agricultural civilization that didn't build cities to some extent. It's a natural thing to emerge if you're not moving around.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 20:07

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

zoux posted:

My assumption is that organized tactics would be invented almost immediately after you had groups of 30+ dudes fighting each other, is that true? Or was there a period in which polities dominated their rivals because only they figured out "arranging guys in a line is better"?

Doing anything beyond individual combat requires at least some training as a group. In general, the militaries of premodern societies were just Some Guys who you pulled off the farm and went to fight with. There was very little training involved, not enough to get good.

The thing is that "stand together in a line and fight" sounds extremely simple and it is not. It requires a lot of drill and training to do it properly, and even more to be able to keep doing it during battle. There just aren't a ton of non-professional militaries that have the training. They do exist; the Romans, notably, are able to do this with the citizen militia. But the Romans are also not typical of ancient societies at all.

Does that mean we should view these mostly untrained armies as just a mob? No, sticking together in a formation is pretty obvious and people do that. It wasn't just a field of individual fights. The difference is being effective at complex formation fighting. A good illustrative example is the Greek phalanx, actually. A phalanx requires forming up in a roughly equal spacing and being able to advance forward while maintaining that spacing and fighting. More or less everyone in a Greek militia has enough training/experience to do this. When you get professional, well-trained phalanxes like the Macedonian model, suddenly your phalanx can do all kinds of crazy poo poo like changing direction while maintaining formation. You can move backwards, can turn, and the Macedonian one is broken into smaller formations that can maneuver somewhat independently, not to the extent of Roman maniples but in that direction. Being able to do this requires a lot more training, as well as a relatively high number of officers to issue orders throughout the ranks and keep stuff organized. And, generally, a professional force that is just training for war rather than farming most of the time.

The movie thing of two armies running into each other full speed and devolving into a chaotic melee is a movie thing. If a real battle turns into that, poo poo is not going the way you planned it. It's not like it never happens but that's not what you are intending when you head in to fight.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 22:54

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Yeah the scabbard is higher than you think, the hilt is around the bottom of your rib cage IIRC.

That is for Europe though. There's a fair amount of art of people in east/southeast Asia carrying swords on their backs. A lot of Asian swords were shorter than the typical European size so it would've worked better. I just tried back scabbarding with my gladius and it's no problem. A spatha wouldn't work.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 23:28

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia_opima is relevant to the dueling.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 01:50

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Koramei posted:

I remember reading recently (here??) that it's theorized many foraging societies had truly staggering per capita deaths from human-human violence. Like, 25-50%?
It honestly all sounds kind of terrifying.

There's, unsurprisingly, a lot of debate about numbers since all we can do is estimating from extremely incomplete information. Some of the more documented stuff, like medieval England's murder rates, have been overcounted because of not understanding how crimes were recorded at the time (a lot of counting the same murder multiple times for example). It's well accepted that premodern violence rates were shockingly high compared to what we live with though, plenty of evidence of that. The Night City murder rate would be fairly peaceful for most societies in the past.

I've seen the ~25% male deaths from violence stat for foraging societies quite a few times. I dunno what the current thinking is on it.

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 9, 2024

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 17:36

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Fuschia tude posted:

That's over an entire population, for individuals' entire lives, 25% of them would eventually die of violence, right? That seems reasonable for foraging societies. But also I have no idea how you would go about estimating that, because generally such societies wouldn't keep extensive records.

Yep. You're right about the records, which is part of the problem. The estimates are mainly from population size (itself an estimate, though we have a decent idea of this) and finding bodies that died from violence, which is of course a very incomplete source. What we can say for sure is a surprisingly large number of remains are found where the guy was murdered, far more than you would expect if violence rates were comparable to today.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 18:37

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

I don't think there's an objective comparison or any point in even trying to come up with such a thing. Even if you desperately wanted to, just saying the United States or Spain or whoever is not useful because we're talking centuries, where policies shifted many times, and then treating everything as formal central government policy is incorrect. Starting right from the beginning--Columbus got up to all kinds of poo poo the Spanish government did not approve of and tried to stop. And then later Spanish governors are doing more or less the same thing without serious objection.

Imagine if you could, somehow, scientifically assess the Spanish were 18% more horrible in their colonies than the French. Okay. Does that tell you anything of value? I don't think it does.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 22:49

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Definitely read 1491 and 1493. I know nothing of Beyond Germs.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 23:39

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

It was basically the same as now. The Sahara was of little interest since you couldn't farm there. Fortifications were built to deal with raids from desert nomads, and there were a handful of expeditions across the desert looking for gold, but that was about it.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 04:53

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Nessus posted:

I thought the big "moneymaker" was Egypt which has something special about it, in the form of the Nile.

Egypt was the richest part of the classical world but the Roman province of Africa, which is roughly Tunisia + some neighboring stuff, was also a very productive and important farming region. Sicily, Africa, and Egypt were the super productive grain producers that fed the cities that couldn't feed themselves.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 15:48

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

I picked up a few ancient coins, should probably take pics for the thread.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2024 03:52

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Deteriorata posted:

Come over to the Christianity thread and we can set you straight.

Yes this is a topic better suited for the religion thread.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 01:07

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

The Romans didnt actually ever bother to conquer down the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Red Sea, did they?

That's Arabia Felix, which was sort of in Roman control though considering it Roman territory is maybe a bit much. The Red Sea was a vital trade route so there were outposts all along there, both trade ports and military to keep the area safe. There's a port on the Egyptian side that connects to the Nile, Socotra and Yemen were vaguely subject to Rome, and a couple of Red Sea islands that had Roman forts.

For the most part Arabia was just such a brutal environment without anything there of value that Rome didn't hold it directly, but they had a whole web of alliances in the area to keep it under control.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 18:13

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

That map is just being very uh, generous with Rome's borders. The entire empire was surrounded by areas that were not really part of the state, there was no direct Roman control, but were under Roman domination through a combination of threat and alliances. Sphere of influence I suppose. Roman power extended over much of Arabia without it actually being part of the empire.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2024 18:19

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

It's one of those things where we'd need much better and different sources than we have. But as you say the circumstantial evidence is very strong that for the most part, people liked being Roman. There are very few rebellions with the explicit purpose of not being Roman anymore, and most of those happen relatively soon after the Roman conquest of an area. Even the Social War wasn't about leaving Rome that much, the socii were mostly mad that they weren't being given the Roman privileges they thought they were due. They rebelled because they wanted to be more Roman.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 01:16

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Peasant revolts, yeah that's a good point. Rome had very few things that would qualify. The Conflict of the Orders has some similar conceptual vibes, though that's a long political struggle and never really turns into full revolt, the closest is the plebeians basically going on strike. I think there's like one or two proper, though small, peasant revolts.

There were the Servile Wars which I suppose in a Roman context you could consider being equivalent to peasant revolt.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 07:43

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

The Shang oracle bones are kind of like that too.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 19:14

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

Yeah it's hard to draw too detailed a conclusion. What you can say is for a while we thought wholesale population displacement didn't happen, and now from genetic evidence we can see that oh no it absolutely did happen sometimes. How much is sometimes? Probably not enough evidence exists to ever get a good answer to that. Certainly not enough right now.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2024 20:27

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

If you're going outside the AD system there are specific Roman dates pretty early on, ignoring legendary specific dates like April 21, 753. The earliest one I can think of is November 25, 571 BC for a triumph of Servius Tullius, who probably was real.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2024 21:33

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

zoux posted:

I wonder who Servius Tullius thought Christ was

Earliest thing with an AD date is going to be medieval so outside my field, but if we're just going dates there are tons of Roman ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasti They kept a lot of calendar-type situations around and we have many surviving examples.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2024 21:40

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

School of How posted:

In my opinion, it has to be an AD date. Yes, you can convert a date from one calendar system to another calendar system, that conversion is not perfect, especially when that calendar system is from pre-history. A date written in AD doesn't have to be converted, and therefore can be assumed to be completely accurate.

This is not true. Even if you stick just to AD, anything going from the Julian to Gregorian calendars requires date conversion. There are also plenty of fixed events you can use to calibrate conversions to ancient calendars, like solar eclipses. It's not perfect, but with cultures that kept accurate timekeeping and records (Romans and Chinese for two major examples, though it depends on period--both have some pretty wild times when the records get iffy) you can be sure you're within a few days.

And to be nitpicky there's no such thing as a calendar from pre-history. Calendars are written so they are, by definition, historical. I'm sure people kept track of months prior to writing, you need to have some idea where you are in the year to do agriculture and a basic lunar calendar is pretty easy to do, but I'm not sure if there's archaeological evidence for it.

E: What the gently caress am I thinking of course there's archaeological evidence for it. I'm dumb and being honest in my dumb by leaving it for you to enjoy.

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 15, 2024

# ¿ Apr 15, 2024 22:31

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

1177-ish

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 03:10

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:28

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

There are also lots of other dating systems that are unaffected so it's not that big a deal. Low-background steel is for use in instruments that involve extremely precise and fiddly radiation detection. It's also not that important anymore since the elevated radiation from nuclear testing has mostly decayed.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 18:34

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

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