Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

How likely was it for the Republic to have been reestablished after the death of Augustus? I understand there was republican sentiment, but was the memory of the civil wars still too bitter?

# ¿ May 26, 2012 05:21

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 09:42

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Grand Fromage posted:

Augustus was an invented name from the Latin word for majestic or something along those lines. It was reserved for the emperor and meant you were super cool. Caesar means hairy, and as a title it was used for the designated successor when there was one. Later, in the tetrarchy the system was formalized briefly, the Augustus was the chief emperor of the east and the west, and the Caesar was the emperor in training who also ruled some territory.

Augustus survived in modern languages as august, but Caesar remained a title for rulers for a long time. Kaiser and tsar are the most notable modern uses of it.

Actually, looking at google, the word augustus is the participle of a verb meaning to grow, lengthen, or extend, and the sense of praising was figurative. I wonder if that had any phallic connotations? Probably not, but it's pretty hilarious if Augustus basically meant Biggus Dickus.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2012 06:47

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

This is more immediately after Rome than Rome proper, but what happened to slavery after the empire collapsed? Did all the slaves basically turn into serfs in medieval manors? Did slavery survive in the Eastern Empire? I remember reading somewhere that the Church got rid of slavery among Christians to the cheering of the general populace, and the word slavery was pretty much hated throughout the middle ages, but feudal serfdom doesn't really seem to different in its effects on the common people.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2012 00:44

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

hotgreenpeas posted:

Regarding all the talk of the Catholic/Orthodox split above, is one closer to the "original" church as it was practiced in the late Roman/early Christian era--the actual rituals and traditions?

I've had friendly arguments with Catholics about which church is older (my family is Orthodox) and they always claim that the Orthodox church split from them. But compared to the Catholic services and churches I've been to, the Orthodox ones seemed much more mystical and maybe even a little pagan: the sing-song chanting, veneration of icons, frescos... Obviously, getting rid of the Latin mass and all that did a lot to modernize the Catholic church, but is all the other stuff I associate with the Orthodox church part of an older tradition that Catholics dropped during the split? Or do I have it backwards?

Disclaimer: I am not religous and actually know very little about Christianity in general.

I don't want to derail this great thread with too much church chat, so more on topic: my boyfriend and I just started watching I Claudius. How crazy/evil was Livia really? I'm guessing it's something like her/her husband's political enemies writing the history, like if archives of the Freep boards were our only records of Hillary Clinton. And how plausible is the show's depiction of Claudius's relationship Herod? It seemed odd to both of us that the Jewish king would just hang out in Rome with the imperial family.

I don't think either one is more "original" because both churches continued to develop on their own after they split. I guess you can say the Orthodox because it actually had the Roman state still intact behind it, and the Catholic and Orthodox (that's the technical title both churches call themselves by, the "Universal Standard Church") church was basically a creation of the Roman state.

However, if you went to a Catholic mass in average middle class suburbia, it would likely be much less similar to the original church than your average Orthodox church service. This is mostly due to the Catholic immigrants in the US being almost completely subsumed into the regular culture, while Orthodox immigrants are often much more culturally distinct (maybe I'm wrong, but in my experience). My family's church (Armenian Apostolic, actually it and some others called Oriental Orthodox broke off from the Orthodox church like 600 years before the main schism) is very much traditional, still does the entire service in medieval Armenian, and is very intertwined with the diaspora community.

The stuff you talk about like the weird chanting, icons, and stuff has been basically abandoned by the Catholic church over the last 75 or so years because it tends to repel the average middle class white person. The frescoes and art style of the Orthodox church is much more similar to the Romans, though, because the west had the whole renaissance thing going on. Also, orthodox priests are allowed to marry, which I'm pretty sure was the way the original church was. The Catholics banned it because people were using feudal law in the middle ages to pass clergy positions to their sons.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jul 21, 2012

# ¿ Jul 21, 2012 05:46

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Grand Prize Winner posted:

How does the Coptic Church fit in all this?

The Coptic church is part of (in communion with) the oriental orthodox churches, like the Armenian. The splits basically happened when some regions refused to accept the findings of the various ecumenical councils. The church of the east only accepted the first two according to wikipedia, the oriental orthodoxes only the first three, and the regular eastern orthodox accept the first seven. The catholics continued to have councils of their own (14 more in fact) but basically didn't even bother to invite the easterners.

The councils were basically meetings of bishops arranged by the Roman state to hash out official theology. Only the first seven councils were actually arranged by the Byzantine Emperor, the rest were just called by the pope. The internet says one was even called by the Holy Roman Emperor.

So the split of the orthodox and catholic churches was more political than anything; The earlier splits of the church of the east and oriental churches was more a fiery religious debate.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2012 20:18

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

It always amazes me how high quality Roman stuff like those instruments were. Not only do they have the things in the first place, but if I saw one of the pairs of tongs in a doctor's office I wouldn't think twice. It seriously looks like it was made in the last 50 years. I'm assuming this stuff would have been prohibitively expensive though, and 90%+ of the population wouldn't have seen anything of that craftsmanship more than once or so in their lives, right?

And I don't know if the collapse of rule of law could really be said to be the death of the Republic. If anything, Augustus instituted probably the most rule of law Rome had ever seen. The Republic was pretty much a constant string of civil wars, competing generals and internal strife.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Aug 8, 2012

# ¿ Aug 8, 2012 02:16

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Agesilaus posted:

Sure, we have regressed in many ways politically, culturally, and socially. Our academic and professional institutions have regressed in certain respects, too. However, when I say we've regressed in these ways (and I'll give examples), I don't mean that the common farmhand or labourer is more or less learned today than he was two thousand years ago.

I don't have much time to write this post (I wrote the latter two responses first, unfortunately), but here are some examples:

Academic and professional institutions have waned where law schools exist and are often necessary to become a lawyer. The schools simply waste three years of your life and place you in an immense amount of debt, despite having very little to do with the practice of law, very little to do with the formation and support of gentlemanly practitioners, and ultimately very little to do with anything of value at all. Law schools are a black mark on academia and the legal profession, and allowing such dreadful institutions to serve as gatekeepers is really a harmful regression from better days.

Politically, culturally, economically, and socially, many modern societies are flawed in certain respects compared to ancient societies like that of Sparta. Modern America, for example, is oppressed by the nobility clause, does not have an explicit class-based society, and in many ways is governed and controlled by low class people given over to money. Importantly, the institutions are designed to be vulgar and are beholden to lower class interests.

Culturally and philosophically, many modern people are in a worse position than learned Hellenes, where they are given to false moral and religious teachings. Christianity is of course ancient, but if we're talking about the heights reached by humans, then it remains that the most correct and helpful moral texts and cultural practices come from Ancient Greece and China. Indeed, the most valuable texts on other topics, such as politics and law, all come from the ancient world; their breadth of experience and knowledge when it comes to such matters is not rivalled [of course the Ancients didn't give a poo poo about spelling] by the rather simple and vulgar modern democrats. In some ways the modern is to be pitied, without the classics he is left a narrow minded and blinkered sort who can hardly imagine a world of such freedom and power as the ancients experienced.

I could go on and on, really, but each example is another discussion in and of itself. There are many times when people will disagree as to whether something is better or worse now, and it will have to be debated. Point is, in some ways many modern societies and people have risen above the ancients, and in other ways many modern societies and people are inferior to their learned ancestors.

You're utterly wrong, and that's almost all I can say in response because there's not much substance to your post.

The point of comparing things isn't necessarily to show that they're identical, so I have no idea why you think it's important that a comparison would show "how much we are not alike." At any rate, I don't know what the significance of comparing the moon to the earth is supposed to hold; classical and modern humans are both humans and subject to all that goes along with being human. The Classics are a rich source of guidance for the here and now, and that we would be "mostly studying the elite of the elite" is an argument in favour of studying primary sources because the elite of the elite produced texts of immense value and insight. As for it being filtered through thousands of years of civilization, that sort of process only increases its value where countless genereations have meditated on ancient words of wisdom, and if the moderns upset you then just stick to primary sources and ignore the latter people altogether.

Anyway, there's no substance to your post, and it flies in the face of common sense and understanding given that billions of people study ancient greek and latin texts in the hopes of improving themselves and refining their behaviour (be it the new testament, plato, or some latin).

That is terrible and harmful advice. Thankfully, the sort of sentiment you offer has been rejected by almost everyone; there is no shortage of people that look to ancient texts to lift themselves out of their lowly, modern station. Seeing as this is the Roman thread, I'll end with an excerpt from Polybius, discussing the Spartan saviour of Carthage, Xanthippos, and his Roman opponent, Regulus. The excerpt is contained in Book One of Polybius' Histories, and begins after the account of Regulus' defeat and capture:

"...There are a number of lessons to be learnt here, by any man of discernment, that should help him improve his life. For example, Regulus' ruin brought home to everyone at the time in the most stark manner the advisability of distrusting Fortune, especially when things are going well. Here was a man who, a little earlier, had refused to pity or pardon people in adversity, and now all of a sudden he was being taken to beg those same people for his life. Then again, the Euripidean tag, long recognised as sound, that "one wise plan is stranger than many hands", was confirmed by actual events, in the sense that just one man, one intellect, overcame a host that had seemed invicinble and irresistible, revived a state that had plainly hit rock bottom, and alleviated the despair that had gripped its armed forces.

I have recorded these events in the hope that my readers will profit from them. Opportunities for changing one's life for the better are afforded by both one's own setbacks and those of others, while learning from personal disasters drives the lesson home most forcefully, learning from others' afflictions is less painful. Rather than choose the first way, then, where the lesson entails both distress and risk, we should always seek out the second, as a pain-free method of seein how to make improvements. And so we see that there is no teacher better at preparing one for real life than the experience of reading political history, because only political history delivers, without pain, the ability to judge the better course of action, whatever the occasion of the situation."

I... see. Congrats on being an authoritarian in favor of a literal slave society run by plutocrats and military dictatorships. The political history of Rome and most of recorded history, at least in the great man sense you're referring to, is nothing more than intellectual masturbation over the personal lives of the elite and privileged.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Aug 21, 2012

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 04:54

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Grand Prize Winner posted:

I have a an inkling that dislike of trade and traders as a societal thing comes from the classes involved. In many societies, traders form a distinct class, separate from the peasantry and the aristocracy. Traders make their profits by buying cheap and selling dear. This process can be viewed as a kind of theft by both peasants and nobles, so merchants end up pissing off both the majority of the population and that population's rulers.

e: ludicrously simplistic, of course. What are the biggest holes in this idea?

Well from my very basic understanding of political economy and history, that's pretty much accurate. However, it's not like they were oppressed too much (well, maybe in China, China loving hated the bourgeoisie), but societal conditions simply weren't right for the bourgeoisie to take power (that's what the merchant class is. The word literally means "city-dweller" in French, as the merchants and craftsmen lived in the cities). In a pre-modern agricultural society, you can only support so many doctors/lawyers/merchants/craftsmen. With the discovery of the New World and the arrival of transatlantic trade and globalization, merchants gained a whole lot more power, which had a whole mess of effects, including (possibly, I'm not an expert, I've read this though) causing the industrial revolution, and the decline of the old aristocracy in Europe and the growth of liberalism.

That more than answered your question though, so yeah, neither the landed aristocrats nor the peasantry liked bankers at all. This continues somewhat to the modern day, hence all the conspiracy theories about Illuminati, Jewish bankers, etc.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 04:06

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Well, it was a popular enough idea for the Soviets to try it in ww2 with German tanks instead of elephants and starved dogs with explosives strapped to them instead of burning pigs. It turned out the dogs tended to run away from the front line instead of towards it, unfortunately, and I have a feeling the Romans found that out as well.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Sep 13, 2012

# ¿ Sep 13, 2012 06:55

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

You'll also notice that many libertarians have a Roman Republic fetish, it ties into their idea of citizenship and patriotism, and they love saying that the republic collapsed into empire because of demagoguery and populism. I've seen people compare Obama to Caesar, saying he was going to take over the country with the support of the filthy masses he attracts with handouts stolen from the noble yeoman farmer-citizen.

The implications of this, namely that America is a country of a few incredibly wealthy plutocrats and a large mass of property-less destitute, and that this is a good thing, fly right over their heads of course. (Or not? :tinfoil:

)

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 02:53

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

This is a counterfactual, but would the development of the Middle East have conceivably been any different if the Eastern Roman Empire had had its poo poo together and not been steamrolled by the Arabs? I imagine it might have turned out the same, with Byzantium having the same role as the caliphates and then the Ottoman Empire, but I don't really know enough about that time. Was the demise of the Byzantines because there was an environment ripe for the Arab conquest/their empire was falling apart or was it just a historical accident?

# ¿ Dec 11, 2013 09:07

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Romans would just leave unwanted babies outdoors to die/be eaten by animals, right?

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 04:47

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

the JJ posted:

But of course they (and the Koreans) alternating between desperately suppressing all that barbarism so they could be refined and civilized like the Chinese and pretending that, no really, we're special snowflakes. Korea had a while where they could have their cake and eat it too by pretending to be the TRUE vessels of culture because the dirty Manchus weren't really Chinese.

Plus the Japanese and Koreans like to slap fight over Korea being suck ups to the Chinese on the one hand and japan never really civilizing on the other. Plus the comfort women thing, there's always that.

Tell me more about differences between Korea/Japan and China culturally, that sounds interesting. I know Japan and Korea both copied the empire thing from China but in Japan it was mostly in theory. Did Japan/Korea adopt Confucianism/Buddhism the same from China? What are Japan/Korea's indigenous religions/shamanism like compared to that of China?

# ¿ Sep 21, 2014 11:32

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

brozozo posted:

Glad to see another China post from Arglebargle. Great as always!

The discussion of "if Rome/Carthage did X then we would be on the moon" got me thinking... I've always been interested how North and South America would have been affected if there was no Columbian contact. Would there have been, say, an Incan industrial revolution? If left to their own devices, I wonder if the native societies would have entered into their own "modern era". It's all very pie in the sky though, even moreso than most counterfactual musings in my opinion.

I don't really think so. IMO the industrial revolution was a one-off event triggered specifically in England, and not really the rest of Europe, by a combination of things happening at the right time in the right place. China and India didn't enter the modern era after being at a roughly steady state of development for hundreds of years. If you say, for example, that native Americans hadn't been susceptible to European illnesses and there was no die-off event, it probably would have ended up similar to Subsaharan Africa, with little cultural contact with Europe/the ME/India/China

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Oct 4, 2014

# ¿ Oct 4, 2014 23:24

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

homullus posted:

I want to be clear here: I am using "alphabet" in the sense of "a writing system of symbols representing consonants and vowels." China has sent a robot to the moon and still has not "advanced" to an alphabet. Egypt would never (really never!) have developed an alphabet without a change to that society. Thousands of years of writing all over the world, and not a single culture (so far as we know) developed a system with symbols representing individual consonants and vowels until the Greeks did.

Technological advancement really isn't linear in the way you are imagining. Yes, those leaps are intuitive in retrospect and some cultures made them, but it's not a track or a race.

Japan/Korea did as well. If you're going to have an objective standard of "progress" I think you can fairly clearly put societies as more or less, but unfortunately advancement seems to be a lot more difficult than just waiting and often seems to require essentially random events to take place. Human society before the Industrial Revolution was pretty much a steady state after you got to an urban imperial level of advancement

# ¿ Oct 5, 2014 01:44

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

Yeah, the whole thing seemed like it was really ignoring the elitist and exclusive nature of democracy in the Roman Republic and the times Cicero violated his principles in the name of political expediency. I would also quibble that most of Cicero's influence on America's constitution mostly came from his influence on the writings of Montesquieu rather than as some kind of glorious direct line of inspiration. I just wanted to see if this kind of narrative was commonly taught since I've picked up most of my knowledge through self directed reading.

It's common among the political right, because the Roman Republic was a heavily aristocratic "democracy" controlled entirely by wealthy landowners, IE the kind of society they want. Caesar used his power base as a man of the people and land reformer to get political support, and land reform/taking poo poo from the rich is the worst thing possible to right wingers, so therefore Caesar and the Roman Republic is a perfect allegory for what they don't want to happen to America.

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

Yeah, the whole thing seemed like it was really ignoring the elitist and exclusive nature of democracy in the Roman Republic ...

Falukorv posted:

You would think, that being a classics student, he ought to know better, but there you go.

So no, it's not ignoring anything. That's the entire point.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Oct 8, 2014

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 05:39

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Halloween Jack posted:

Neopagans, from what I can tell, aren't focused on Greek and Roman gods--nor Egyptian or Mesopotamian ones. It's always the ancient Germans and Celts, or Neolithic tribes, about whose religion we know little and can thus project whatever we want onto it.

It's because they're neonazis. You see similar things with Slavic paganism from Russian/South Slavic fascists

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 05:43

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Do historians actually consider Gibbon to be worth anything beyond the perspective of an upper class Englishman from the 1700s? Doesn't he basically say Rome fell because of moral degeneracy? How is that worth reading, especially since it's like a thousand page tome?

# ¿ Oct 12, 2014 08:00

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

edit: Okay, I think my question was answered, so I'll rework it: How exactly did land ownership work in the Empire? Were the landowners mostly the same as before those regions were integrated into the Empire, or were they replaced by Romans? Did the local aristocrats assimilate into the general Roman aristocracy? Did this vary by region?

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Oct 21, 2014

# ¿ Oct 21, 2014 02:54

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Don Gato posted:

China does actually claim that the Yuan dynasty is a legitimate Chinese dynasty, despite being, you know, Mongol invaders. I've heard some things where they claim that Ghengis Khan was also Chinese because what is and what isn't Chinese changes based on what makes China look good.

What they actually claim is that the Mongols were in fact Chinese, so they can claim the legacy of the Yuan dynasty as having conquered half the world. If you say they don't get to do that because the Mongols weren't Chinese, then it's not a real dynasty anymore

# ¿ Nov 22, 2014 01:29

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Upper houses with power only really make sense in the context of a federal government where the members are elected by the state/provincial legislatures. After the US got rid of that with the 17th Amendment the only countries I'm aware of that work like that are Germany and Austria :godwinning:

. I don't see much point in having on besides, it only serves to make it harder for the government to operate

# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 07:08

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Exioce posted:

That's really weird because I would've thought the Romans would have had their poo poo together enough to arrange street cleaners.

There's not much you can do to keep streets clean when you have draft animals moving through them and making GBS threads everywhere. They're just going to be dirty, period

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 02:23

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Arglebargle III posted:

Wheat and iron ruined man. That's all you need to know really.

I would argue more that it ruined the environment by giving humans the ability to gently caress everything up. People are pretty much the same as always

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 09:25

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

HalPhilipWalker posted:

I'm going to try to delve into some of these.

I know what I asked was an overly broad and poorly worded question. I actually was inspired by a post in the Atlantis debacle about extremely early civilizations, where they started, and what they accomplished. Most of the discussion in this thread tends to focus on Rome, the Greek city-states, and maybe China and Egypt. With the exceptions of the Roman Republic and Athens, those areas all were ruled by kings, emperors, pharaohs, ie one man with almost total power invested in him. Yet hunter-gatherer groups tend to have little in the way of central authority and inequality. I know once farming started, then came property rights, priests, generals, cities, etc. I started wondering how so many different societies ended up with one guy (or even a small group of people) running everything. Obviously it didn't happen overnight. I realize these weren't nation-states as we currently conceive them. Most of them had far less power than any modern government. I know I'm asking about an era where we have no real historical record, even for a later city like Rome.

If you're just wandering around living off the land you don't need to define ownership rights beyond the most trivial level. Agriculture requires infrastructure like irrigation systems, grain storage, trading, record keeping, transportation, etc, and those need to be run by some sort of complex organizational structure. That's basically it

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 24, 2015

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 09:30

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Mitsuo posted:

So I don't think this has been asked before, but are there historical examples of large land swaps in ancient history? Like a king owns some exclave somewhere and trades it to his neighbor in exchange for a border province or something like that. I remember reading somewhere that Finland and the USSR ended things with a "swap" that was really just the Soviets winning a lot of land and giving a tiny bit somewhere to save face, but are there any reasonably "equal" trades that are notable in earlier times?

Well there's this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Bangladesh_enclaves

That wasn't really on purpose though

# ¿ Feb 2, 2015 03:52

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Smiling Knight posted:

I think that one of the reasons was that the writing system was so esoteric and specialized that the elites wouldn't have needed to "keep" anyone else from learning it; why would your average dirt farmer or retainer want to be able to keep track of tax returns or temple offerings? As I understand it, the way Linear B worked was that you couldn't really use it to read or write poetry, for example; it was pretty much a way for scribes to manage administrative tasks. You would need to invent vowels and stuff for it to have more non-elite appeal.

Alphabets(abjads) without vowels survived just fine to the present day, along with full logographic systems, so that doesn't really make any sense

# ¿ Feb 13, 2015 18:51

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

JaucheCharly posted:

That link is burried under lots of kebab.

I'm sure the Romans were big fans of kebab and gyros/doner/shawarma

of course the Armenians are superior to all, because they can claim descent from BOTH Rome and the Sassanids. checkmate, motherfuckers

# ¿ Mar 14, 2015 00:32

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Blue Star posted:

On the subject of China, and also other East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, etc., do they learn about ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc.? Are there Japanese scholars who study Roman history and speak Latin, or whatever?

Yes, but it's obviously not as big a thing as it is in Euro countries. I would say they learn more about it than Western countries learn about East Asia, but not by all that much. In general it's like a reverse of Orientalism, where "Western" stuff is weird and exotic but they don't really quite get what's going on all the way. Just look at anime and medieval Europe / the fantasy genre in general. Part of that is because the fantasy genre is so fundamentally tied to Germanic and European mythology thanks to Tolkien that it ends up with a cargo cult aspect because they do not have the same underlying cultural context. Like how the Catholic Church analogue always, without fail, turns out to be an evil fanatical cult because that's more or less how Christianity and other evangelizing religions manifest in East Asian culture and history, see the Taiping Rebellion, Korean Protestants / Sun Myung Moon, Aum Shinrikyo / the subway sarin gas attack people in Japan, etc, etc, etc

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 15, 2015

# ¿ Mar 15, 2015 21:34

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

my dad posted:

Would be hilarious if it turns out the Greeks themselves were the Sea People.

It was clearly the Koreans

# ¿ Mar 28, 2015 08:57

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Woolie Wool posted:

The Greeks were never under the authority of the Catholic Church.

The Orthodox Church is most definitely Catholic, by its own reckoning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Marks_of_the_Church

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Apr 26, 2015

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 01:15

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Yeah I'm just being pedantic. Greek Catholic are churches/dioces that were originally Byzantine Rite / Greek Orthodox that switched allegiance to Rome and still run the Greek liturgy, mostly in the bits of Ukraine/Belarus the Poles were dominant in and in the Middle East

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 05:07

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Tomn posted:

It seems like the one universal aspect of every history thread is that everyone's history education pre-college/university was somehow poo poo.

I wrote a 15 page paper on Populism and the political economy of the US in the 1860s - 1910s in senior AP History and my teacher said in like 25 years I was literally the first person to pick that topic for the paper. Most other people took stuff like presidential biographies or Cold War diplomatic stuff

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 00:42

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Ofaloaf posted:

What would something more 'pro-byzantine' be? Remove kebab with some text alterations and an oversized picture of Justinian's face in mosaic?

Well it pretty much ends in the 700s and doesn't cover the resurgence in the 900s-1100s or its dealings with and influence on Eastern Europe / Russia

# ¿ May 5, 2015 05:27

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

I think you could argue the Macedonian Dynasty was its own medieval thing with no more or less claim to Roman heritage as the Franks had, but through the Arab conquests at the very least it was the same Roman Empire as existed since the 300s. Classical Rome sort of didn't really exist anymore after the 200s AD

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:26 on May 5, 2015

# ¿ May 5, 2015 21:23

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Obliterati posted:

The Roman Empire fell in ~~395~~293, after the ~~death of Theodosius and the final division~~ initial division of the empire into east and west. Those are successor states both about as Roman as the HRE.

Rome stopped being the actual capital of even the Western Empire as early as 293 when it was moved to Milan. What most people think of as Classical Rome like you learn about in high school Latin class with Caesar and Cicero and Octavian and Mark Antony hadn't existed for 300 years in 476 when the Western emperor abdicated, and 500 years in the 700s with the Muslim conquests. Basically the problem is nobody gives a poo poo about Roman history outside of a 200 year or so window centered around the Punic Wars, Caesar, and Augustus

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:42 on May 7, 2015

# ¿ May 7, 2015 07:38

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Yes, in fact they may have invented fast food since an urban population the size of Rome would have had to rely on food vendors quite a bit.

Street food existed before Ray Croc founded McDonalds in 1955, yes

# ¿ May 30, 2015 05:07

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

sbaldrick posted:

Muhammad also sent a letter to Heraclius as he honestly had some balls on him

The traditional view of this among Muslims is apparently the opposite of Khosrau, that Heraclius praised Muhammad as a wise man and saint and was generally a just and righteous ruler

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jun 6, 2015

# ¿ Jun 6, 2015 00:39

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Blue Star posted:

In ancient Roman religion, what was the difference between a genius and a numen?

Numen just means divinity or divine presence in general. Genius specifically is the divine presence associated with a family or city, sort of its personified god or spirit if that makes sense? The fancy general term for it is tutelary deity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutelary_deity

Jerusalem posted:

Wasn't numen the divine spirit of the Emperor (when they started being treated as living deities) while genius was the living embodiment of the spirit of any particular family? So basically they were both "Dads" - the Emperor as "Father" of the Empire, while the leading male figure in a family-line was the "Father" of that family?

Edit: Or am I just thinking of the general principle of the pater familias?

I think you're thinking of paterfamilias, although the system of genius deities along with everything else about the Roman religion was fit into the concept of paterfamilias

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 23:14

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Greece was important culturally but it was never particularly important economically or politically. Like Greece is today, sort of, but to a lesser extent. It would be moving from a modern day penthouse in NYC to Thessaloniki

# ¿ Jul 9, 2015 06:26

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 09:42

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Guildencrantz posted:

Which always baffles me. I know it was a deeply hierarchical society with no concept of egalitarianism, but that's a really counterproductive norm to have for a society that tolerates homosexuality. "I really like to gently caress other men in the butt, but if you let me gently caress you in the butt you're a goddamn disgrace and I loathe you" - how do you intend to convince people to let you gently caress them in the butt if you go around saying poo poo like that? Hypocrisy aside, it's an obvious disincentive! I know we still have slutshaming and whatnot today, but those guys went pretty far with it.

Lots and lots of rape

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 19:42

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

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