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Question about Latin, so many of these translations of people poo poo talking or graffiti use the word "gently caress." Does Latin actually have a word like gently caress? An extremely vulgar way to say "have sex"? Or are they just saying "soandso had sex with soandso" and it gets translated to gently caress because of the context? Does Latin have swear words? How vulgar were they, what did they mean and what made them swear words opposed to just rude language?
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Apr 2, 2013 15:51
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Sure, every language has swear words. It's hard to directly translate them, so usually they're translated by intention, but I do believe the Latin word that's translated into gently caress is the same sort of sex vulgarity as it is in English. Good excuse to repost Catullus 16! 1 Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, I will sodomize you and face-gently caress you, 2 Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, pussy Aurelius and catamite Furius, 3 qui me ex versiculis meis putastis, you who think, because my poems 4 quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. are sensitive, that I have no shame. 5 Nam castum esse decet pium poetam For it's proper for a devoted poet to be moral 6 ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest; himself, [but] in no way is it necessary for his poems. 7 qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, In point of fact, these have wit and charm 8 si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici if they are sensitive and a little shameless, 9 et quod pruriat incitare possunt, and can arouse an itch, 10 non dico pueris, sed his pilosis and I don't mean in boys, but in those hairy old men 11 qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. who can't get it up. 12 Vos, quod milia multa basiorum Because you've read my countless kisses, 13 legistis, male me marem putatis? you think less of me as a man? 14 Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. I will sodomize you and face-gently caress you.
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Apr 2, 2013 15:56
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Grand Fromage posted:Sure, every language has swear words. It's hard to directly translate them, so usually they're translated by intention, but I do believe the Latin word that's translated into gently caress is the same sort of sex vulgarity as it is in English. I'm not an expert in Latin, but face-gently caress is a pretty good translation there. Oral sex basically came ( and still comes) in two flavors. Everyone knows of fellatio, which is where the person whose mouth is involved is the one in charge and is in control of all the motions. Irrumatio (a word which obviously comes from irrumabo above) is where all the motion comes from the guy whose dick is being sucked and is the kind of thing you'd see on Max Hardcore. If you really want to see the difference, look up videos for blow jobs (fellatio) and gagging (irrumatio), though I warn the latter is generally not a pretty sight.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:23
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Kassad posted:I agree with your main point that bringing down the Persian empire was something huge but I think you're massively oversimplifying history by ignoring that it was almost 2000 years after Alexander that Europeans actually started dominating the rest of the planet (starting with the colonisation of the Americas after 1492). Even the Roman empire didn't have that much influence outside of its borders. The "west" didn't exist in his time, true, but the West that came to be adopted the Classical Greeks as an integral part of their history. It isn't actually important that your average Englishman is as Greek as pork pie, he's a part of a culture that considers the Greeks important, and that's contingent on Alexander displacing the greatest empire in the world 2000 years ago. Rome doesn't actually hold unquestionable superiority until the battle of Pydna which is around 180 years after Alexander. Not that they would have lost that war, but it's the fact that the Antigonids thought they could actually take the Romans on that indicates they didn't have a Med hegemony yet. Not that it matters, since the Romans had the greatest respect for the Greeks, and most of that was because of Alexander. How much would Greek culture have supplanted Roman culture if the Eastern parts of the empire weren't hellenized?
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Apr 2, 2013 17:10
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Not that it matters, since the Romans had the greatest respect for the Greeks, and most of that was because of Alexander. How much would Greek culture have supplanted Roman culture if the Eastern parts of the empire weren't hellenized? That's another thing, without Alexander there's a possibility Greek culture--at least its ancient form--would be as dead as Gallic or ancient Egyptian. It would've been a fairly small area that was culturally Greek, rather than half (and the wealthy, powerful half) of the empire. Modern Europe would be a very different place. E: Let's not forget Alexander was a megalomaniac who killed massive numbers of people in an endless war of conquest. His legacy has many positive aspects, and I don't think it's entirely fair to judge past figures on modern morality, but regardless we can't forget the bad sides. I'm thinking of Dan Carlin's Mongol series, his unease over Genghis Khan being rehabilitated in a lot of modern books despite being one of the biggest mass murderers in history. He pointed out this is inevitable with time, and eventually someone is going to write a revisionist history of Hitler doing the same thing. And he's right. I'll even make a bet on the angle: if Europe's current peace continues for a while, Hitler will be viewed as a figure who, as an unintentional consequence of his war of conquest, caused European culture to shift irrevocably towards cooperation, rapidly changing it from one of the most historically violent places on Earth to one of the most peaceful. Please don't take that as defending Hitler in any way, but when we talk about the good that people like Caesar or Alexander or Genghis Khan did, it is the same sort of thing. The difference is Hitler is recent and the evil is foremost on our minds. Think about asking some Gauls about Caesar in 40 AD. Give it a thousand years and the viewpoint will change. I don't think Alexander was evil, but he wasn't a good person on a noble quest to create western culture and spread Greek enlightenment either. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 17:12
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I too listen to Hardcore history haha.
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Apr 2, 2013 20:18
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Oh that's a good way of putting it GF; I've been mulling around that analogy for a while but hadn't had any luck not coming off as a neo-nazi  .It does make me wonder though; while we should definitely credit Philip with much of Alexander's success- and Alexander's conquests would have been impossible without him- would Philip have really been able to achieve the same kind of greatness? So much of the fuel for Alexander's conquest was his ego, wasn't it? There wasn't really any reason to go all the way to India, he just did because he felt he was the greatest and could achieve anything. Youthful ambitions and all that.
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Apr 2, 2013 20:27
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Grand Fromage posted:Please don't take that as defending Hitler in any way, but when we talk about the good that people like Caesar or Alexander or Genghis Khan did, it is the same sort of thing. The difference is Hitler is recent and the evil is foremost on our minds. Think about asking some Gauls about Caesar in 40 AD. Give it a thousand years and the viewpoint will change. The "Alexander was a megalomaniac" school of thought is a pretty ancient one itself. Dante, in The Divine Comedy portrays him as an inmate in Hell. On one level this is absolutely right, and he clearly didn't invade the Persian Empire for selfless reasons, but I would still argue that he can't be put on the same level as Hitler. Alexander thought Greek culture was superior and aimed to impose it on his new subjects, but not purely through violence and genocide in the way that Hitler did. He wasn't out to exterminate and/or enslave the Persians as a race. He's more comparable with Napoleon or with the people who created the Roman or British Empires. They weren't nice guys by any means, but they weren't blood-crazed psychos either. Any good that Hitler did was both indirect and unintended. "Being a motivation for greater international co-operation" was kind of the opposite of what he was trying to do.
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Apr 2, 2013 21:39
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There's a substantial difference between Alexander&Co versus Hitler: They won.
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Apr 2, 2013 21:39
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A more relevant modern-day comparison might be Stalin, then.
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Apr 2, 2013 21:43
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Aureon posted:There's a substantial difference between Alexander&Co versus Hitler: Also that Alexander wasn't a genocidal fuckhead who wanted to exterminate entire ethnicities, but sure, only difference is that Alexander won. 
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Apr 3, 2013 00:10
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think Alexander was evil, but he wasn't a good person on a noble quest to create western culture and spread Greek enlightenment either. I don't think he was a good guy either, I'm just saying that it's dumb to dismiss him as someone who didn't impact the world. He impacted the world something pretty radical. I can't accept any equivalency between him and Hitler though. To follow your post, you're saying that Hitler will be remembered for being so evil that nobody else wanted to be as bad as he was. That's contingent on him being regarded as a shitheel, where's the positive image of him coming from? Aureon posted:There's a substantial difference between Alexander&Co versus Hitler: This is the dumbest thing. I don't think Alexander even did anything outside of the moral compass for his time, he just had a big ego and fought a lot of battles. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Apr 3, 2013 |
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Apr 3, 2013 00:19
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Hitler being absolutely insane is probably the largest factor of why he didn't win. A better comparison might be between Alexander and Napoleon.
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Apr 3, 2013 00:28
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Also that Alexander wasn't a genocidal fuckhead who wanted to exterminate entire ethnicities, but sure, only difference is that Alexander won. How can you justify the thirst to conquer the world, though? Considering the masses of casualties, there's no way to make it any more ethical than genocide.
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Apr 3, 2013 00:32
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Not the ONLY difference, but the most substantial. I'd like to remind that racism wasn't out of the moral compass of the 1940s, and i'll stop there because oh my god i'm defending hitler The moment you lose, especially in older eras, everyone goes on to pour hate on you, to gain favor with the victor. And it gets recorded; we've seen it countless times. History is written by the winners, and all that. Just imagine how the US would've gone down in history if the allies lost the war, all with having thrown the history's only military use of a nuclear weapon. Alexander perhaps is a bad comparison (Still someone who started a war for basically fun and giggles, but doesn't employ offensive scorched earth tactics), but i don't really think Hitler is any worse than Genghis. The problem exposed is that personalities such as Genghis are being re-evaluated as positive figures, instead of the civilization-killing scourges they were. And by that i do not mean that Hitler is anything good; I mean that Genghis is, quite literally, the scourge of the world: A style of conquering that certainly isn't the Roman's or Alexander's.
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Apr 3, 2013 00:39
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Ras Het posted:How can you justify the thirst to conquer the world, though? Considering the masses of casualties, there's no way to make it any more ethical than genocide. Er, yeah, the targeted extermination of civilians based on notions of ethnic purity is far less ethical than attempted world conquest. Alexander's not a great, benevolent guy by any means, and I'm not justifying any world-conquering, but comparing him to Hitler is completely asinine. Talking about Alexander and the Macedonians, what was it in particular that made them so capable of such a massive conquest? They seemed to be rather irrelevant in the time of Philip's father, but within two generations had become masters of most of the known world - what caused such a metamorphosis?
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Apr 3, 2013 00:45
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I think at the end of the day, killing loads of people in a mad quest to rule the world is more morally acceptable than slaughtering loads of people to purify the human species.
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Apr 3, 2013 00:47
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Ras Het posted:How can you justify the thirst to conquer the world, though? Considering the masses of casualties, there's no way to make it any more ethical than genocide. While we can definitely brush a lot of Alexander's motivations off as his ego it's very silly to apply modern moralities to people from more than two thousand years ago. Conquering the world was not the same kind of deal then as it is now. Aureon posted:i'll stop there because oh my god i'm defending hitler This is sort of the point of the analogy (and while it definitely works better for Genghis I don't think it's undeserved for Alexander either)- a thousand years from now there won't be that clause when analyzing the effects of WW2. Did Hitler mean to unite Europe in the wake of WW2? No, he wanted an ethnically homogenous Greater-Germany. Did Alexander mean to thrust Europe into the forefront of the ancient world and spread hellenistic culture all the way to Japan? No, he wanted glory. Did Genghis Khan mean to open up trade all across Eurasia? No, he wanted to crush his enemies, see them driven before him and bla bla bla. The analogy is to analyze their benefits when their atrocities are long out of living memory, not to say Alexander is as bad as Hitler. That there are only a few people in all of history that we can compare in this way is surely a good thing?
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Apr 3, 2013 01:05
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Koramei posted:While we can definitely brush a lot of Alexander's motivations off as his ego it's very silly to apply modern moralities to people from more than two thousand years ago. Conquering the world was not the same kind of deal then as it is now. And the Holocaust was not the same kind of deal in the 1940s Germany as it is now... We idealise the ancient world in a way in which we never would, say, Cromwell or the Mongol conquests. Why shouldn't we be able to talk about this sort of moral questions? Roman society was hosed. Greek society was hosed. Senseless war for the purposes of glory is hosed. We can admit that and still be fascinated by the ages. Roman history in particular has a lot of slobbering nigh-fascist fans, which isn't always very pleasant. AdjectiveNoun posted:Er, yeah, the targeted extermination of civilians based on notions of ethnic purity is far less ethical than attempted world conquest. "Far less" is an exaggeration. Maybe in the sense that in the former the systemic murder is inherent, in the latter it's merely unavoidable.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:06
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Don't make me regret the analogy.  I'm not saying Alexander and Hitler are the same kind of guy. I'm saying that the bad things done by major historical figures get flattened out over time and change the way they're viewed.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:10
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I'm happy to keep debating with you in PMs, Ras Het, but let's stop the derail here. So about the Macedonian rise to power: What was it in particular that made them so capable of such a massive conquest? They seemed to be rather irrelevant in the time of Philip's father, but within two generations had become masters of most of the known world - what caused such a metamorphosis? I know that's been the case with a couple of civilizations - the Persians only had a few generations between just being the Medes' vassals and ruling an empire larger than the Medes ever had; the same with the Mauryans starting with almost nothing, but conjuring up an empire that covered most of the Indian subcontinent over the course of three generations, but I'm curious in particular as to why the Macedonians were able to accomplish such a feat over such a short time.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:30
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Ras Het posted:And the Holocaust was not the same kind of deal in the 1940s Germany as it is now... We idealise the ancient world in a way in which we never would, say, Cromwell or the Mongol conquests. Why shouldn't we be able to talk about this sort of moral questions? Roman society was hosed. Greek society was hosed. Senseless war for the purposes of glory is hosed. We can admit that and still be fascinated by the ages. Roman history in particular has a lot of slobbering nigh-fascist fans, which isn't always very pleasant. Actually part of what spurred the analogy (at least when I was thinking about it, I can't speak for GF) is from Dan Carlin talking about how the Mongols are being idealized. I know that's very true in my generation, actually. Most people my age don't know they committed atrocities at all (those that know anything about the Mongols at least). And you shouldn't be able to condemn Alexander uniquely because his ideas did not differ much from the norm. Yes the Greeks were hosed, yes the Romans were hosed, but everybody was hosed. Everybody was an expansionist rear end in a top hat, everybody was a genocidal maniac, everybody was a racist pig. These are common ideas at the time and Alexander's treatment of his victims was all things considered not so bad. Genghis and Hitler were both monstrous in their time, and you can see this especially clearly in Genghis, who won (that fact being why it isn't so clear in Hitler) and whose descendents ruled over China for a long time (long enough to spin propaganda at least) and yet was still viewed as evil by his former subjects and their descendants for what he did. It's valid to criticize idiots like  that think Greek culture is superior to modern culture, and it's valid to criticize idealization of Greek and Roman virtues, but it isn't so valid to criticize an individual, a lauded individual, based on perceptions that were not even remotely present during his time.on the ancients being assholes though: Can someone go deeper into Greek oppression of Women? People talked about them being forced to be veiled and escorted everywhere, but I think it was just an addendum to another point. I'm very interested to hear more- because in reference to this discussion, while most people are well aware the Romans are jerks, I think the Greeks are idealized far too much.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:32
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AdjectiveNoun posted:I'm happy to keep debating with you in PMs, Ras Het, but let's stop the derail here. The organization of the Persian empire was very decentralized. It was a gigantic state that encompassed a million different languages and religions, there was no serious bond between the emperor and any given minor ruler. Alexander only fought two battles against Darius III before he was offed by his most trusted satrap, and the empire was just handed to Alexander. Again, the feat of conquering the Persian empire wasn't an enormous affair, although a ruler with more sense might have held back. What the Romans did was far more impressive, where you can see a definite cultural impact of their expansion. Under the Persians, most of the myriad ethnic groups in the empire were left unmolested. Under the Greeks, several cities are founded and the surroundings thoroughly hellenized, but most of the place is left to its own. Under the Romans, Latin becomes the foundation of future languages, everyone becomes a Roman, and they all enjoy it. Grand Fromage posted:Don't make me regret the analogy. I don't think the fundamental nature of Alexander and our perception of him has really diverged. We don't remember him for anything besides toppling the Achaemenids, because that's really all he did. The actual bad things that he did (I'm assuming that's all the looting and razing) we still regard as bad things, but they aren't the most notable things he did. I know the Romans thought he was a swell dude, but does anybody know about what the Parthians thought of him? Or maybe even the tribes in Europe? Conquering the Seleucids would definitely have brought them into contact with all those towns and monuments dedicated to him, did they destroy them? Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Apr 3, 2013 |
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Apr 3, 2013 02:32
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I know the Romans thought he was a swell dude, but does anybody know about what the Parthians thought of him? Or maybe even the tribes in Europe? Conquering the Seleucids would definitely have brought them into contact with all those towns and monuments dedicated to him, did they destroy them? Best as I can tell, just about everybody idealized Alexander. It would be hard not to when you come from a martial culture like most of these were. Guy conquers everything in a dozen years and is virtually always the underdog in all these battles that he wins handily. If you equate military prowess with glory and respect, Alexander's going to be on your list of heroes. AdjectiveNoun posted:What was it in particular that made them so capable of such a massive conquest? They seemed to be rather irrelevant in the time of Philip's father, but within two generations had become masters of most of the known world - what caused such a metamorphosis? I am not an expert in this field so I could be wrong, but my understanding is there are two basic reasons. The first is that the opponents were somewhat unprepared. Greece is divided as it always is, but is also unusually weak because they've been fighting each other a lot more than usual. The Persians are powerful but complacent. Nobody is expecting those mountain hicks in Macedonia to come knocking. Second, the Macedonian army's equipment and tactics are new. The sarissa is a hell of a weapon in phalanx formation, making the Macedonian soldiers stronger, and the division of the phalanx into individual units that can move independently makes them a lot more reactive and mobile than a traditional phalanx. The Macedonian soldiers are also very well trained and disciplined. It's not as revolutionary as the legions but it's a similar leap, and the powerful Macedonian soldiers are able to walk all over armies five times their size. They also had a cadre of very capable generals in command--there are no weak links anywhere in the Macedonian army. Except eventual supply and morale issues, but they get all the way into India before that stops them.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:45
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Another big impetus was Xenophon's account of the 10000, which basically laid open the Persians as a paper tiger and eminently beatable. They'd been a boil on the Greeks' rear end for a long time, and the idea of destroying them became quite tantalizing. Alexander accomplished what a couple of generations of Greeks had believed was possible.
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Apr 3, 2013 04:50
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Alexander the Great chat is a great excuse to liven things up by posting "The Legend of Alexander the Great" by Jack Handey, famous for his Deep Thoughts. I hope I haven't already posted it in this thread, it's pretty much awesome and amazing. quote:Alexander the Great hung his head. He had conquered everything, and there was nothing left to conquer. “What about this area over here?” he said, pointing to an unshaded part of the map. http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/03/12/120312sh_shouts_handey?printable=true
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Apr 3, 2013 06:22
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Grand Fromage posted:The inspiration factor can't be underestimated. And I doubt you'd be finding legacies of Greek culture as far away as Japan without Alexander. This. Aside from giving us the idea of a Buddha statue, Alexander's influence touched everything from the development of Vedic astrology to entirely new diplomatic frameworks.
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Apr 3, 2013 07:32
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Koramei posted:on the ancients being assholes though: Can someone go deeper into Greek oppression of Women? People talked about them being forced to be veiled and escorted everywhere, but I think it was just an addendum to another point. I'm very interested to hear more- because in reference to this discussion, while most people are well aware the Romans are jerks, I think the Greeks are idealized far too much. As with lots of Greek stuff, there's likely to be plenty of polis-to-polis variance, and probably class differences too. You can go down the veil track, where you run with the argument that the fully-concealing niqab-esque headdress was expected and common, and that this essentially points towards women being as secluded as they can be in extreme Islamic areas, but I understand that that's under some debate. Otherwise, that part of Perikles' funeral oration with its sentiments about modesty can be a way to begin. I think it can work because it doesn't say 'here's someone with weird ideas about what the definition of a good woman means', which most people can kind of get, but because it really goes the 'we don't want to know about women. At all. Just don't make us notice you'. It's stranger, I guess, and that helps get people actually into the investigative mindset.
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Apr 3, 2013 09:30
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I'm late to the Hitler Party, but where I live there's a middle class housing development called Tamerlane. "Attention Adolf Hitler Station, this is Deep Space Ore Miner #193, requesting docking priviledges."
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Apr 3, 2013 14:01
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I'd also try and defend Genghis, I mean, yeah the guy put whole cultures to the sword, but he at least gave them an opportunity to surrender, and a lot of the times the whole conflict was because they killed his diplomatic envoys. Guy went from eating rats and dug up roots after his father got whacked to setting up the largest continuous empire the world has ever seen. I've even heard that some historians feel that his tactics were so brutal they actually saved lives, as cities that may have intended to fight back decided otherwise after hearing about what his army did to the last one that did. Remember, a lot of the worst press that he got was from his enemies, he scared the crap out of basically of Europe because their strategy and tactics were basically revolutionary.
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Apr 3, 2013 17:02
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Bit hard to defend if your argument comes down to "he could have slaughtered more people!" His tactics weren't especially revolutionary, just relative to European tactics. The advanced fighting style they used had been popular around China and the East (the parts that habitually fought steppe nomads) for centuries. United steppe nomads had always been the boogeyman for the Chinese. It happened every once in a while and they would continue to curbstomp the established nations until they either integrated into them as the ruling class or the tribes got bored and disorganized again. Also don't forget when a Mongol scouting party wiped the floor with the united Russian principalities.
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Apr 3, 2013 17:10
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The Mongols killed somewhere around 10% of the entire world's population. It was, percentage-wise, the largest destruction of human life in history. And they probably (admittedly unintentionally) brought the Black Death to Europe, killing half of its population on top of the wars. This was not all personally done by Genghis but the Mongol Empire was the most brutal and murderous regime in the history of the world. Unsurprisingly, it was also the most militarily successful.
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Apr 3, 2013 17:17
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Grand Fromage posted:And they probably (admittedly unintentionally) brought the Black Death to Europe, killing half of its population on top of the wars. It should be noted that the plague is attributed to the Mongols only because they promoted safe and effective trade over large swathes of Europe and Asia.
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Apr 3, 2013 17:28
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Genghis Khan's achievements were organizational. Steppe nomads had fought the same way for centuries before, and many of the settled cultures that the Mongols conquered had plenty of experience fighting them. You might make the case that the Polish-Hungarian army had no clue about what to do, but the European end of the Mongol conquest was minor. Places like China, Russia, or Persia had nomad neighbours for as long as they existed, dealing with horse archers and light cavalry was common knowledge to them. Dealing with a highly organized horde with powerful siege ability was new to them. The timing of his conquests was pretty good too. The mongols caught China in the middle of a North-South slapfight, the Khwarezmian shah was about to be ousted, the Rus were as divided as can be, and the Cumans were a doddering old khanate that was well past its prime.
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Apr 3, 2013 18:04
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The steppe hordes were a bit like bees. A hive here and there but nothing threatening to a kingdom. Now the big fear was if all the bees started working together and suddenly going right at ya. Practically unstoppable. In the past you could always hide away in your car (city), safe from the horde and free to wait it out. Now imagine if you got attacked by a horde that figured out how to rip apart metal (succesful sieging) and there you have it; bee archers.
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Apr 3, 2013 18:11
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Namarrgon posted:The steppe hordes were a bit like bees. A hive here and there but nothing threatening to a kingdom. Now the big fear was if all the bees started working together and suddenly going right at ya. Practically unstoppable. In the past you could always hide away in your car (city), safe from the horde and free to wait it out. Now imagine if you got attacked by a horde that figured out how to rip apart metal (succesful sieging) and there you have it; bee archers. This analogy is the best thing ever.
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Apr 3, 2013 18:37
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Namarrgon posted:Also don't forget when a Mongol scouting party wiped the floor with the united Russian principalities. If that's the one I'm thinking of, it was more of a scouting army . Scouting party makes it sound like five Mongols and their dog kicked the rear end of thousands of heavily-armed Russians or something. Kaal posted:Mongols and the plague The true historical case for "the Mongols spreading the plague" is probably, indeed, that they made trade easier in the regions they controlled, but there is also a specific story that they were besieging a Genoese port called Caffa in the Crimea, fired plague-ridden corpses over the walls with their catapults and that as a result the plague broke out and was spread back to Genoa itself by ships returning there. Admittedly, I wouldn't like to bet much on the accuracy of that story, given that there were people in mediaeval Europe prepared to believe that the Black Death was spread by a Jewish conspiracy.
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Apr 3, 2013 20:27
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Grand Fromage posted:The Mongols killed somewhere around 10% of the entire world's population. It was, percentage-wise, the largest destruction of human life in history. And they probably (admittedly unintentionally) brought the Black Death to Europe, killing half of its population on top of the wars. Isn't the Black Plague rather incidental to the Mongols? Wasn't it essentially the same as the Plague of Justinian, and likely to happen so long as Western and Eastern Eurasia were able to trade? Also, thanks for the information on the pre-Philip Macedonians. I know you said it wasn't your specialty, so no worries if you don't know, but I just have to ask - what made them unify in the first place, rather than fall to the internecine squabbling that the rest of the Greek world had? I know they weren't exactly Greek, but they seemed to be rather influenced and affected by them politically and culturally.
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Apr 3, 2013 20:36
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Isn't the Black Plague rather incidental to the Mongols? Wasn't it essentially the same as the Plague of Justinian, and likely to happen so long as Western and Eastern Eurasia were able to trade? I'm not very familiar with the details of either plague, but why would east-west contact make them likely to occur? Are the kinds of bacteria relating to those plagues only native to east Asia?
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Apr 3, 2013 21:05
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AdjectiveNoun posted:Isn't the Black Plague rather incidental to the Mongols? Wasn't it essentially the same as the Plague of Justinian, and likely to happen so long as Western and Eastern Eurasia were able to trade? What unified them was Philip conquering them. The Macedonians considered themselves Greek, while the Greeks considered the Macedonians to be barbarians. The only way the fractious Greek city-states were ever going to unite was via outside conquest, and Philip's action was basically, "How do you like me know?" Philip set himself up as the king of all of Greece, even hiring Aristotle to be Alexander's tutor. Philip was planning action against the Persians, and there is speculation that his sudden death was an assassination at their hands. Little did they know that his son would be an even more capable military leader than him. Part of Alexander's (and Philip's) motivation was buying their way into the family, so to speak, by taking on the Greeks' longtime foe.
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Apr 3, 2013 21:23
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