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FAUXTON posted:Didn't Cruz win the Iowa primary/caucus? He did. And ultimately came to nothing in the face of Trump.
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Jul 15, 2018 00:30
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Oberndorf posted:He did. And ultimately came to nothing in the face of Trump. so in other words, "arguing the point" on corn subsidies had nothing to do with cruz failing to win the nomination
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Jul 15, 2018 00:37
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Oberndorf posted:He did. And ultimately came to nothing in the face of Trump.  
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Jul 15, 2018 00:44
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Holy loving poo poo I'm dying
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Jul 15, 2018 03:20
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No Trump in here please.
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Jul 15, 2018 04:03
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Pseudocereal sounds like an obscure 90 alt-rock band.
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Jul 15, 2018 04:21
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Every youtube video of Alexander The Great is filled with comments of people arguing over wether he was Greek or not. Seems to be people from proper day Greece and slavic people from eastern europe.
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Jul 15, 2018 07:42
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What was the Roman attitude to the factual/historical status of the Aeneid and the Aeneas myth? Did the Romans have a pre-existing folk culture mythically linking them to the events of the Iliad, or was it pure invention by Virgil? How literally would the Romans have read the Aeneid? I think I can understand how cultures can rely on myth in the absence of a historical record. But it's incredible to me that myths can be invented as self-flattering fan-fiction and for it's contemporaries to not recognize it as an invention. I think I'm also asking how the Roman way of reading myths in fiction would have differed from ours. In ancient times, did an acceptance of the themes and politics of myth require a literal acceptance of the historical truth of myths? Would it have been seen as unRoman to doubt the truth of the Aeneas myth?
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Jul 15, 2018 08:21
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There's always a range of opinion and it's hard to tease out what an average person believed, but it does certainly appear from what we have that the Romans genuinely believed they were the descendants of Trojans. Virgil did not make the story up (at least not entirely--the form he wrote may have been original, but it was compiled of existing pieces), much like Homer himself he's the writer of a pre-existing story. Major difference is Virgil was definitely a real guy, Homer may not have been. The Roman tradition from the very beginning claimed they were not natives to the area and the Romans made effort trying to figure out where they were from, which largely settled on the Trojan story. The fact that they spoke Latin in the midst of an Etruscan cultural zone does suggest there's some basis for this belief that they weren't native to what became Rome. There's no evidence of an Anatolian connection though. Myths were generally taken seriously. You do find disagreement about their veracity--Herodotus mentions being dubious about various myths, and there are other writers that try to analyze them and figure out what they mean and what is real. The more familiar version of this is Christian theologians working through Biblical myths, that comes out of the same intellectual tradition. We're certainly more skeptical in the post-Enlightenment world than the Romans were. There's really very little evidence to support any position other than the Romans, in general, taking their myths seriously. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Jul 15, 2018 |
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Jul 15, 2018 08:38
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Their manifest unwillingness to grant citizenship to the surrounding Italians seems to bear that out.
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Jul 15, 2018 08:42
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What were the other places that Romans who thought they weren't from Trojan colonists favored instead?
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Jul 15, 2018 23:48
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fishmech posted:What were the other places that Romans who thought they weren't from Trojan colonists favored instead? I don't know of any specific alternate theories. This did remind me that apparently there's a myth that the first Malaysian kingdom was founded by an exiled Roman general, which is weird. I've never been able to find the original story, there was a bad movie based on it some years back.
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Jul 16, 2018 03:10
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know of any specific alternate theories. lol that movie was so bad, I couldn't get through the first 10 minutes. It seems like practically every Malay dynasty and petty noble had a bizarre origin story situated in the Middle East. Insofar as their stories resemble real history it might as well be Middle Earth. I'm just going to repost this bizarre one about Alexander the Great: quote:In the beginning there was only the Light of Mohammad, through which God created the universe. From the Light came angels and Adam, and from Adam descended Alexander the Great, whose wife was a nymph from Paradise. Upon his death, the three sons of Alexander the Great, Diraja, Alif, and Depang, set sail around the world, taking with them their late father's crown. Some say the princes argued rightful owership; some say their ship ran aground. But the crown was lost in the sea. A follower of Diraja, a trickster and master gold-smith, fashioned a replica of the crown and urged Diraja to tell his brothers he had found the original. Diraja did so, claiming the crown as his own. At this, the brothers parted. Prince Depang sailed off to the Land of Sunrise, becoming Emperor of Japan; Prince Alif traveled to the Land of Sunset, where he proclaimed himself Sultan of Turkey. Prince Diraja found the Land between Sunrise and Sunset, finding himself at the top of a mountain. It was there that the Minangkabau world began, with Maharajah Diraja as its first king.
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Jul 16, 2018 03:57
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Reminds me of the story of Lech, Czech, and Rus, who were three brothers who were said to have founded the Polish, Czech, and Russian people respectively. Nowhere near as flashy and bizarrely impossible though.
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Jul 16, 2018 04:53
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My favorite old story (which I think I read in some book of Slavic fairy tales when I was a kid) is the one where Czechs introduced cats to Germans. Involves a bilingual pun (Was) when the Germans ask in bad Czech what the cats are going to eat after they've eaten all the mice and the Czech thought they said something in German.
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Jul 16, 2018 05:01
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Squalid posted:lol that movie was so bad, I couldn't get through the first 10 minutes. this sounds like a co-opting of a story about the diadochi passed through several languages and cultural contexts
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Jul 16, 2018 05:04
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Stringent posted:Their manifest unwillingness to grant citizenship to the surrounding Italians seems to bear that out. "Their" is bit a simple, since it makes it sound like that was an united Roman front denying citizenship do Italians, when it was a big divide right through Roman society with both side fighting it out verbally and physically.
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Jul 16, 2018 05:50
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Decius posted:"Their" is bit a simple, since it makes it sound like that was an united Roman front denying citizenship do Italians, when it was a big divide right through Roman society with both side fighting it out verbally and physically. Ah, yeah i only really consider the patrician side as being authentically "Roman" in that kind of stuff, dunno why.
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Jul 16, 2018 05:56
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Stringent posted:Ah, yeah i only really consider the patrician side as being authentically "Roman" in that kind of stuff, dunno why. 
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Jul 16, 2018 06:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Let's not ignore that corn is also a spectacularly good and productive crop. There's a reason why it's so widely grown globally. This is true. China grows a shitload of corn, something like 2/3rds of what America produces. Ethanol and HFCS subsidies are a case of trying to use the absurd amounts of corn that Iowa and the other Corn Belt states produce than vice versa, but it's a self-perpetuating cycle unfortunately. I personally blame cornbread being so drat easy the make and really tasty.
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Jul 16, 2018 06:30
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Grand Fromage posted:The Roman tradition from the very beginning claimed they were not natives to the area and the Romans made effort trying to figure out where they were from, which largely settled on the Trojan story. The fact that they spoke Latin in the midst of an Etruscan cultural zone does suggest there's some basis for this belief that they weren't native to what became Rome. There's no evidence of an Anatolian connection though. I do sometimes wonder if the entire patronage system derived from the natives needing a translator to conduct business with the newly arrived patricians.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:15
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By no evidence I mean there's been DNA analysis that turns up no evidence of a connection to Anatolian populations. Latin isn't related to Anatolian languages beyond being Indo-European. The Romans also were not more technologically advanced than the Etruscans, that's pretty clear from the archaeology. Much of Roman culture comes directly from the Etruscans, which IMO is enough to explain why they're distinct from their Greek neighbors. The Etruscan influence is so overwhelming that plenty of classicists think they're just Etruscans, who like the Greeks were not a unified group. I don't buy it though, I think they're a distinct group that adopted much of Etruscan culture in the first of many Roman instances of borrowing cultural attributes from the peoples they interacted with. The Romans just don't act like Etruscans, and there's that language difference again. The problem is that pre-Etruscan Roman culture is painfully hard to tease out. There's nothing written since they got writing from guess who, and it's such a long time ago that finding archaeological evidence is tough. I do think the native Roman religion is a pre-Etruscan thing. The world of spirits and semi-animism, not the more familiar named gods.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:34
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physeter posted:I'm actually inclined to favor Troy given that wherever the patricians came from, they (i) were probably culturally and technologically more advanced than the Italian natives, and (ii) were probably not Greek or Punic. If they'd been either one, they'd have set up yet another Greek/Punic city-state situation, or been at least aware of their heritage. But the Greeks and Punics remain "other" to the Roman mindset for a staggeringly long time. Once we cross Greek and Punic origins off the list, it's a much shorter list. I don't think there's any linguistic evidence that could support this theory But on the topic of linguistics and Etruscans, it's interesting that Etruscan was clearly related to Lemnian, spoken on Lemnos in the Aegean in 6th century BC. Chances are that they were part of a larger pre-Indo-European Mediterranean language family; a more remote chance is that there was some kind of a migration connection between those two cultures specifically
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Jul 16, 2018 16:50
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Isn’t the “we’re descended from Trojans” thing just because there’s this universally read epic poem about them so they’re the highest-status “ancient” people anyone thinks they know anything about?
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Jul 16, 2018 17:11
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Agree as to no linguistic evidence (that I've ever read, anyway). But the cultural evidence of the patricians being a distinct group of outsiders to the region is pretty heavy. Differing marital customs to the point of miscegenation laws. Different burial procedures. Not only were they a different population, but some of them wanted to keep it that way. I doubt they shared a language at the beginning.
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Jul 16, 2018 17:24
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Ehh, the Medieval European nobility didn't need to be foreign invaders to impose brutal social stratification either, they just needed to be wealthy in the right place at the right time. If the patricians actually had an ethnically non-Latin origin, you would see that in the historical record
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Jul 16, 2018 17:34
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Is there any chance at all of ever finding a copy of Claudius' Etruscan history?
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Jul 17, 2018 01:45
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I think the poster is 100% wrong, but I'm reminded of how all the Italian nobles of the 13th-16th century were German invaders who made up faux-Roman origin stories for their ancestors.
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Jul 17, 2018 01:52
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No, you're not descended from senators, you're a Lombard whose people came down in the 600's and made everybody build them a nice castle.
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Jul 17, 2018 01:54
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There was plenty of influence from the natives on their conquerors in one way or another, especially since Italy was pretty densely populated, but after the fourth round of invasion and setting up a new dominion, it had to be wearing a bit thin.
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Jul 17, 2018 02:18
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Ras Het posted:I don't think there's any linguistic evidence that could support this theory That's interesting, and weird. It seems like there really were a lot of strange and unique cultures spread across the Mediterranean at the dawn of history, but so few of them left any records of their own.
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Jul 17, 2018 06:17
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I just finished A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities and here are a few stories I bookmarked: "Theology by flatulence: the Arian theologican Aetios illustrated the various theological positions regarding the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit by farting. Three farts of identical volume stood for the theology of his opponents, while three farts of decreasing volume signified his own." "Scandinavians They have sex in unholy ways, especially men with donkeys; they are the vilest of all people." "Armenians The terrible race of the Armenians is deceitful and extremely vile, fanatical, deranged, and malignant, puffed up with hot air and full of slyness. A wise man said correctly about them that Armenians are vile when they live in obscurity, even more vile when they become famous, and most vile in allways when they become rich. When they become filthy rich and honored, then to all they seem as vileness heaped upon vileness." "The court of Nikephoros II Phokas was outraged in 968 when emissaries brought letters from the pope addressing him as 'emperor of the Greeks.' Doesn't that idiot of a pope know that Constantine the Great transferred the imperial capital and senate here, to Constantinople, and left behind in Rome only slaves, plebeians, and common types?" "Sofia of Montferrat was the second wife of the imperial prince Ioannes Palaiologos. She was tall and had a body to die for, and her flowing blond hair reached to her ankles. But there was something grotesquely disfigured about her face. The people of Constantinople called her Lent from the front but Easter from behind." "At an imperial banquet, the patrician Himerios the Boar--called that because of his beastly face--let out from his belly such a loud noise that it extinguished a torch. Michael III awarded him with a hundred pounds of gold for performing such an extraordinary feat. We are unfortunately not told from which end of his belly this mighty roar came." I'm also looking for an English version of a book called the Katomyomachia, which is an epic about a war between cats and mice. Only found German and Greek versions.
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Jul 17, 2018 09:08
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Was there ever a pets in rome post? I'm sure they kept to some degree the typical working animal pets (dogs and cats) and the super rich had some more exotic ones (including the weird guy with lampreys) but I don't know exactly where to find it.
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Jul 17, 2018 09:45
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I don't know if there's been a post. They did have pets, cats and dogs as you say. We have a few named dogs in household art. I'm sure I've read about rich people with cheetahs since they're a good combo of exotic and also the chillest of big cats, quite rare for them to decide to tear your face off at random. Bird keeping was also a thing, and exotic fish.
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Jul 17, 2018 10:02
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't know if there's been a post. They did have pets, cats and dogs as you say. We have a few named dogs in household art. I'm sure I've read about rich people with cheetahs since they're a good combo of exotic and also the chillest of big cats, quite rare for them to decide to tear your face off at random. Bird keeping was also a thing, and exotic fish. They could have their doggies play with the cheetah kittens :3
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Jul 17, 2018 10:07
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There's a story by Macrobius that, when Augustus returned to Rome, a guy presented him with a raven that said "Hail, Augustus, our savior, hero of Actium!", and Augustus paid him a whole bunch of money for it. The guy's partner got upset because the raven trainer ripped him off, so he told Augustus, "Make him show you the other raven." Turns out the guy had a second raven who he had trained to say, "Hail Antony, our savior, hero of Actium!" Augustus just laughed and told him to share the money with his partner. Macrobius went on to say that, when somebody else heard about this, he trained a raven to praise Augustus, but he had trouble getting it to say anyrhing, so he shouted at it, "All my time and money for nothing!" Eventually, though, he got it to talk, and brought it to Auguatua, who just said, "Thanks. Already got a talking raven." At which point, the raven just said, "All my time and money, for nothing!", and Augustus bought it.
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Jul 17, 2018 12:37
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Grand Fromage posted:"At an imperial banquet, the patrician Himerios the Boar--called that because of his beastly face--let out from his belly such a loud noise that it extinguished a torch. Michael III awarded him with a hundred pounds of gold for performing such an extraordinary feat. We are unfortunately not told from which end of his belly this mighty roar came." Begs then question when people started setting their farts on fire.
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Jul 17, 2018 12:46
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Power Khan posted:Begs then question when people started setting their farts on fire. within days of learning how to create fire or fermented drinks whichever came last
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Jul 17, 2018 12:54
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As a financial crime investigator I just wanna know what made that dude hate Armenians so much.
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Jul 17, 2018 12:55
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FAUXTON posted:As a financial crime investigator I just wanna know what made that dude hate Armenians so much. Dudette. It was Saint Kassiani, the famous Byzantine abbeys and hymnist. But there was a bunch of anti-Armenian sentiment in Constantinople. A lot of Armenians had come onto the empire and become pretty important, which led to a lot of resentment. Plua, Armenians tended to be pretty iconoclast, and she was a fanatic iconodoul who ended up being forced into exile because of it, so I'm sure that played a pretty big part.
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Jul 17, 2018 13:12
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