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TildeATH posted:
Those come from the Republican period, and were the name of two poltical tendencies that a lot of politicians associated themselves with - the optimates were the supporters of the rule by the traditional aristocracy that made up the Senate, the populares advocated more power for the Assembly of the whole Roman people and the tribunes that represented it. They usually went for populist measures in a general sense too - I seem to remember cancelling debts was one of them. This makes them sound a bit like modern conservatives and liberals, but the reality of Roman politics was that most of it was driven by personal and family ambition rather than ideology. These guys would often simply advocate whatever got them votes at the time with total cynicism. There weren't any political parties in the modern sense. As someone mentioned (correctly) the importance of Greeks in the Roman Empire, I'll just add that "Greeks" often weren't ethnically Greek, since Alexander the Great's conquests had expanded Greek culture over a wide area. A lot of them were people from various parts of Asia Minor and the Near East who spoke Greek and were influenced by Greek culture. Also, whilst they were heavily influenced by the Greeks, the Romans were capable of outright racism towards them. There's quite a well known passage where the writer Juvenal goes off on a rant about Greeks corrupting honest Roman youth and basically does everything but accuse them of "taking our jobs."
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May 24, 2012 19:53
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Grand Fromage posted:Basically dick, it's a big gap in my knowledge that I need to fill. To be honest, I think there are big gaps in the understanding of post-Roman Britain by historians generally. One of the big features of that period is the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, for instance, yet I get the impression that it's still very much open to debate whether this actually involved large numbers of people from northern Germany and Denmark migrating to settle or whether it was just a case of a change in the ruling elite.
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May 26, 2012 19:35
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meatbag posted:In your opinion, does Nero get way more poo poo than he deserves? Don't want to upstage the OP, but a few years ago now the BBC did a dramatised documentary about Nero that portrayed him as more of a rational but misguided figure than the eye-rolling fruitloop from I, Claudius or Quo Vadis . I don't know how accurate either version is. Amusingly, they picked Michael Sheen to play Nero. Since he's played Tony Blair at least three times, it was a bit like "Tony Blair reacts to the Great Fire of Rome/argues with Seneca/whacks out his mother."
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May 27, 2012 20:39
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Alhazred posted:Wasn't he the guy who was more interested in feeding his pigeons than defending Rome? Not sure about that, but I think he was the emperor who got defeated and captured by the Parthians and ended up spending the rest of his life being the Parthian king's footstool whenever he wanted to get on his horse. Either way, not a great success.
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May 28, 2012 19:19
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euphronius posted:The Romans also built bridges better than anyone. Fun fact - the chief priest of Rome was known as the Pontifex Maximus, or "chief bridgebuilder." It's now a title held by the Pope, which supports what people have been saying about the Roman Catholic Church as a Roman survival. On the darker side of Roman influence on the modern world, a lot of dictators have adopted Roman elements into their iconography and style. The most obvious was probably Napoleon, who after all made himself an Emperor, wore a crown of golden laurel leaves, called his son the King of Rome and tried to conquer most of Europe. More recently, Mussolini was also very prone to speechifying about the glories of the Roman empire and also tried to expand Italian rule (with limited success until he tagged on to Hitler's coat-tails). His own title Il Duce is descended from the Roman dux, for a military leader, as is the English title of Duke.
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May 30, 2012 18:00
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Alhazred posted:Consuls wore togas with a purple trim, people who were candidates wore a bleached toga. The English word "candidate" actually comes from that practice, as "candida" is (I think)Latin for "white."
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Jun 6, 2012 20:25
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Would anyone be so kind as to write a bunch of stuff about how the Eastern Romans basically got screwed by modern Western history? I know I'm hardly alone here when I say that I think the Medieval Romans fail to get even a fraction of the credit they deserve. But why is that? Grand Fromage has already touched on it, but a lot of it boils down to the mediaeval attitude that "they are heretics and outside the One True Church," and when that ended, the 18th/19th century attitude that Byzantium was just an appendix to the story of the Roman Empire, and an appendix basically consisting of decadence, intrigue, endless decline and obscure religious disputes at that. I think that's more or less Gibbon's view of it. I think sometimes historians like to write, and readers like to read, about states that they know are on their way up. This is why you get more books about Republican and Augustan Rome than the later imperial period or about mediaeval Florence or Venice than 18th century Florence or Venice. The Byzantines get caught up in that too, regardless of the fact that they kept going for about a thousand years.
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Jun 8, 2012 19:04
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Mithra6 posted:Here's a nice little PDF showing different Latin pronunciations: But if it's a dead language, how can we be sure of how Latin was pronounced anyway?
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Jun 10, 2012 16:35
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Paxicon posted:This is going to cause a bit of bickering I'm sure, but the Holy Roman Empire isn't really the Roman Empire... An old joke goes that the HRE "Isn't Roman, Isn't an Empire and certainly isn't Holy". I always thought that Claudius was thought to suffer from cerebral palsy rather than Asperger's syndrome, but opinion may have shifted and, after 2000 years, who really knows? Determining the illnesses of people from history is always a tricky business. They're still arguing about whether Henry VIII's main health problem was syphilis, scurvy or just being a big fat slob and whether Napoleon died of cancer or arsenic poisoning.
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Jun 13, 2012 20:49
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nothing to seehere posted:Why did Britian (and the Germanic tribes which invaded it) not Romanize, when the rest of the WRE did? The Anglo-Saxons ultimately became Romanised in the sense that they adopted Christianity and its (Rome-based) institutions, Latin as a language of learning and culture and so on, but they didn't go for it wholesale e.g. English is still a Germanic language, Roman law never influenced the legal system much and the Anglo-Saxon system of government used the old Germanic institutions. I think the timing is key in that the other Germanic peoples who came into the Empire had a long history of contact with the Romans or turned up at a time when the Empire was still a going concern and the Romans were still the elite, and worth imitating. The Anglo-Saxons didn't have that contact and didn't have the experience of moving into a country that still had a functioning Roman administration or aristocracy.
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Jun 14, 2012 18:40
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euphronius posted:English is still incredibly influenced by Latin. The legal system as well. Though that is mostly due to the Normans. And not just the Normans. People have been creating or importing Latin-based words into English ever since 1066, expecially in areas like science and technology. However, the central vocabulary of basic English words is still mostly Germanic in origin. The legal system in English-speaking countries still uses Latin terminology a lot (although there has actually been an effort to reduce that in recent years in England itself, for greater accessibility). However, the point I was making is that it isn't, by and large, derived from Roman legal concepts. Continental European legal systems and those based on them often are.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:51
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Octy posted:On the subject of baths, would they not have been a breeding ground for all sorts of horrible bacteria or things like that? Isn't that why we put chlorine and all sorts of things in our bathing pools today? The hot pools at Bath, as used by the Romans, were closed from 1978 to 2006 because of infectious organisms in the aquafier, although that's a natural hot spring rather than the usual man-made bath house. I suspect that by modern standards those probably were a breeding ground for germs. Regarding the earlier post comparing modern swimming pools unfavourably with the Roman ones, of course, the Roman political system, especially under the Republic, was based on having ambitious aristocrats spend a ton of their own money on public facilities, including baths, as a way of winning public support. It's as if Mitt Romney or David Cameron decided to win elections by dipping into their own pockets and paying for new leisure centres for all. Later on the Emperors themselves took over this role, as part of all that bread and circuses stuff. If they'd been paying for the baths out of general tax revenues paid by all voters, in the same way that we do now, they might not have been quite so lavish with them. It's also a lot cheaper to run something when most of the "employees" are slaves anyway.
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Jun 17, 2012 21:44
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Girafro posted:What were the Romans relations like with the Middle-east? Seeing as how they had extended all the way to Egypt there must have been some sort of contact and Persia (Was it still Persia by the time the Romans had expanded that far?) would have been nearby too, you'd think there'd be a lot of conflict. Especially is Persia was still kicking around since the Romans would have expanded right into their back yard, or whatever replace Persia. Whilst the Romans were in power in the Near East, Persia was controlled by the Parthians, and the Romans did indeed come into conflict with them and regarded them as formidable enemies. Amongst other things, there were always disputes over whether Armenia should be ruled by a Roman or Pathian puppet. The most famous episodes were in 53 BC, when Crassus (famous for being incredibly rich and defeating Spartacus' slave rebellion) crossed the Euphrates but was defeated and killed at Carrhae, and much later at the beginning of the 2nd century when Trajan actually temporarily conquered the western part of the Parthian kingdom, Mesopotamia, and made it a Roman province. That cemented Trajan's status as a True Roman Hero, but they couldn't hold it. Hadrian, his successor, pulled back. Ultimately, the Romans never quite managed to subjugate the Parthians. The logistical problems of operating in the Iraqi/Syrian desert must have been immense for them.
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Jun 19, 2012 19:01
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Kaal posted:A lot of television shows like Rome or Spartacus really like playing up the "crazy immoral pagan" angle. Romans weren't puritanical, and they didn't have the same kind of fixations about Christian sin, but they weren't the blood-thirsty party animals that we depict them as either. But it's good television that serves our modern fantasies. There were individuals who could certainly be described as "blood-thirsty party animals", notably certain emperors like Tiberius, Caligula or Nero, but they weren't exactly typical (or approved of) - and that's if you believe all the stories Tacitus or Suetonius wrote down about them. It's a bit like someone in the future making a TV series about life in the 21st century and portraying everyone as having a lifestyle like Kim Kardashian or something, if Kim Kardashian was also into poisoning people regularly.
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Jun 22, 2012 20:01
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Where did the Ecumenical Patriarch move to after the fall on Constantinople? He stayed in the city. At the time, there was a massive split in the Greek Orthodox Church over an ill-fated attempt to re-unite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, and the existing Patriarch Gregory Mammas, who supported the project, had been forced to flee to Rome in 1451 and effectively abdicated. Sultan Mehmet simply had the surviving bishops elect a new Patriarch, Gennadius, after the fall of the city. Mehmet had an interest in having a Patriarch in place because he wanted someone to, in effect, act as the leader of his new Greek subjects and that was what the Patriarchs did throughout the period of Turkish rule. Initially, the Patriarch's new headquarters was the Pammacaristos church.
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Jun 23, 2012 22:06
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FizFashizzle posted:All to keep a bunch of drunk nords from burning the place down. Which they eventually did anyway, during the "Fourth Crusade" in 1204. The quotes are pretty much deserved - the crusaders never got anywhere near the Holy Land, just took advantage of political infighting in Constantinople to depose the current Byzantine emperor, sack the city and set up a Frankish emperor on the throne. Relationships between the crusaders and the Byzantines were always pretty tense. Both groups saw each other as religious heretics for a start, the Byzantines saw the Franks as basically backwoods hicks reliant on crude military tactics and driven by religious zealotry and the Franks thought the Byzantines were cowardly, egg-head intellectuals and soft on the Muslims. It's actually horribly reminiscent of how some Europeans look on the US (and vice versa). Cheese-eating surrender monkeys!
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Jun 26, 2012 20:10
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Vigilance posted:How would Rome deal with serial killers? Did they have serial killers? They didn't have any that we know of, at least in the usual modern sense of "person who kills a whole series of other people for basically sexual/psychological reasons". Whilst they may not have had any forensic science or a police force in the modern sense, they did have a society where it was pretty difficult to be anonymous, even in a big city like Rome. People lived in large extended families, families tended to stay in the same neighbourhoods and, up to a point, everyone knew everyone else. If you start murdering people in that environment, you're unlikely to get away with it for long. Serial killers really start in the 19th century, when you start getting more urban anonymity and the weakening of traditional communities. There were people in the Empire who will have repeatedly killed for profit, like bandits or pirates, and ultimately would have called down a military response. Also plenty of murderers for political reasons, but that's not really serial killing as such.
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Jun 27, 2012 19:46
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Jazerus posted:I'm not so sure about this. Gilles de Rais is an example of a pre-modern serial killer in the modern sense - and he was only ever caught because he was a major figure in the aristocracy and a dick to the church. As I understand it, Gilles de Rais and that Hungarian countess who killed girls to use their blood as a beauty treatment are about the only pre-modern serial killers we have records of. I still have my doubts, but then there are people here who know a lot more than me about Ancient Rome and disagree. Maybe the best answer is that we don't have the necessary historical evidence to determine the question one way or the other.
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Jun 28, 2012 19:25
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Count Chocula posted:Can you talk about the Roman gods and goddesses? The big distinction in Roman religion was between the official, government-sponsored cults, which as Eggplant Wizard has explained were a mixture of traditional Italian gods and the Greek pantheon and the mystery religions like the worship of Mithras or Isis. The former were more to do with showing your support for Rome and its traditions, the latter more about answering private spiritual questions like "what is the meaning of life?" and "what will happen when I die?" (although that's inevitably an over-simplified interpretation). It's also worth remembering that in the provinces, the conquered peoples generally kept to their existing gods, and sometimes the Romans picked up on those religions (Isis, for instance, was originally an Egyptian goddess). In Britain, the Celts kept right on worshipping their Celtic gods. Generally, the Romans only got into religious persecution if they saw the religion as some kind of subversive threat to the Empire - which was why they suppressed the Druids, had endless conflict with the Jews and eventually persecuted the Christians.
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Jun 29, 2012 19:26
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Mixoux posted:So I'm assuming the word 'vandalism' is derived from the Vandals, but what's the backstory behind that? Was it just propaganda that stuck throughout history? Not entirely, in the sense that they did wreak enormous damage on the Roman Empire. The Vandals were one of the Germanic tribes who followed the rest into Roman territory in the fifth century AD and, having fought and plundered their way across Gaul and Spain, crossed into North Africa and established a successful kingdom there. In 455 they sacked Rome itself, largely due to the Romans themselves being involved in a civil war and one side having asked the Vandals for help. The Vandal kingdom was eventually destroyed by Belisarius, the famous general of the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian, in the 520s AD, and the Vandals disappeared from history, either mixing in with the locals or with other Germanic tribes. They were clearly warlike, but I don't think you can fairly say they were more destructive than the other Germanic peoples, or, to be honest, the Romans themselves. Also, I think the term "vandal" for someone who destroys property for kicks developed much later. Not so much Roman propaganda as the creation of writers educated in classical history, perhaps.
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Jul 4, 2012 20:14
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Just Another Lurker posted:A Nero? I think that was Seneca. Whilst Roman men of the late republican/Julio-Claudian era do seem to have been generally clean-shaven, a lot of statues from the later imperial period are bearded. It may just have been a case of changes in fashion, much as beards were "in" in the late 19th century, revived in the 60s/70s and seem to be sort of back "in" again today (or is that just with neckbeards?)
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Jul 6, 2012 13:48
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Kaal posted:To expand on this a bit, the Roman use of metal is only small when compared to the modern-day where the world produces 2.4 billion tons per year. They used it far, far more than any contemporaneous society. The conservative estimates were that Romans produced 82,500 tons per year, compared to 5,000 tons from China (their nearest competitor). I would imagine that without modern technology actually mining anything was probably really difficult and dangerous, too. Even if you were prepared to expend a lot of slave labour doing it, there must have been limits to how much ore the Romans could physically get out of the ground.
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Jul 9, 2012 19:34
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Grand Prize Winner posted:
The Romans famously faced Hannibal's elephants during the Second Punic War, although there's a lot of dispute as to how many he actually managed to get over the Alps, if any at all, and they don't seem to have lasted too long in his army in Italy. He certainly deployed them at the last battle at Zama, where Scipio dealt with them by having his men open lanes in their ranks through which the elephants could charge without causing any damage. They were then subject to a hail of spears and missiles from all sides by the Romans until they panicked and fled back to Hannibal's line, causing havoc as they trampled through it.
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Jul 12, 2012 19:57
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Base Emitter posted:That region actually is geologically active. Vesuvius and Etna and many other volcanoes in Italy have been active for many 1000s of years. Vesuvius appears not to have erupted for nearly 300 years by 79 AD. There were several writers during that period who referred to the mountain as having erupted in the past, but it's not clear how far the local people would have been aware of the past activity, still less appreciated it potentially being a risk for the future. They were used to earthquakes of various sizes, but they didn't have the scientific knowledge that we now do to link those to volcanic activity. For the average person in the street, all these phenomena were the doings of the gods, and that idea must have made the eruption even more terrifying.
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Jul 13, 2012 19:15
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Mister Gopher posted:Plus the Romans had naval superiority, so Hannibal had to go over the alps. It was Hasdrubal (I think). Hannibal started out in Spain because his family, the Barcas, had basically developed the Carthaginian empire there as almost a family business. Throughout the Second Punic War there was ongoing tension between Hannibal and his relatives and the leadership back in Carthage about the war and how it should be run, to the extent that you wonder how far it was his private war. The Romans had established naval superiority in the Mediterranean by beating the Carthaginians in the First Punic War. Hannibal did not want a re-run of that.
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Jul 14, 2012 12:18
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Grand Prize Winner posted:You're not. Care to spare some words on the Romanization of the Muslims? I seem to remember that the Ottoman sultans carried the title of 'kaysar-i-rum' or something similar until the late 19th century, but what of the rest of it. I don't know about the Ottoman sultans, but during the 12th-13th centuries the Seljuk Turks established a kingdom in Anatolia that was generally referred to as the Sultanate of Rum, the name coming from it being a former Byzantine heartland. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Ottomans revived the title when they came along in the 15th century.
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Jul 15, 2012 17:40
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Vigilance posted:What are the most important lost Roman texts that we think are out there but just don't have? Are there accounts of some really important ones that texts we already have mention that scholars would pop a huge boner to find? It would be interesting if someone found the histories that Claudius wrote before he became emperor, if only because they might have some insights into whether he was anything like Robert Graves imagined him as being in I, Claudius .
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Jul 16, 2012 22:26
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Jazerus posted:So, this is something I've been wondering for a while and I can't find any sources that even mention it in any detail. In her introduction to an edition of Livy's histories on the Second Punic War, Betty Radice says that "the Romans did not travel for the mere pleasure of sight-seeing" (as a partial explanation for why Livy isn't always a very reliable historian i.e. he never visited the places he was writing about). Whilst there will have been people who went beyond the Empire to trade or as soldiers, it seems that they didn't write about it or that the writings didn't survive. There are writings by Romans who travelled within the Empire, usually on official business. Cicero, for example, wrote letters during his stint as governor of Cilicia (south-eastern Turkey). Unsurprisingly, he thought he was a jolly good governor, and made sure to point this out to all the people he was writing to. Shimmra Jamaane posted:Socially progressive Romans The concept is pretty anachronistic in the context of the ancient world. For example, there were apparently some Stoic philosophers who came close to regarding slavery as unnatural, and some Romans (e.g. Seneca) said stuff like "Well, we really should be nice to our slaves", but no-one really challenged slavery as an institution. Seneca also criticised gladiatorial contests, which I suppose would count as progressive. General Panic fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jul 17, 2012 |
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Jul 17, 2012 20:32
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Frosted Flake posted:Are there any references to the beginnings of the Jewish Revolt in the Bible? Well, one of Jesus' disciples was called Simon the Zealot. More generally, it's pretty clear from the Gospels that this was a country where the occupying power was very unpopular and there was a lot of social unrest e.g. the Pharisees try to trick Jesus into saying whether or not the Jews should pay taxes, so that he shows himself either to be a rebel or a collaborator, Barabbas in one Gospel is said to have committed murder "in the insurrection", there are references to other prophets who were briefly popular but then were killed and had their followings forcibly dispersed.
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Jul 18, 2012 20:08
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icantfindaname posted: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. In the final years of the Byzantine Empire there was a rather desperate attempt to re-unite the Catholic and (regular) Orthodox Churches, largely as a means of securing Western support against the Ottoman threat. In fact, after a Council of Catholic and Orthodox bishops and theologians in Florence in 1438, union was officially proclaimed. It got nowhere in practice due to the hostility of most of the clergy and laity of the Greek Orthodox church and practically everyone in the other Orthodox churches, especially in Russia which was by that stage the main Orthodox country not under Muslim rule. The Russians didn't like Catholicism, amongst other reasons, because it was the religion of the Poles. Poland was a major world power and a serious rival to Russia in those days.
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Jul 21, 2012 20:57
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Frosted Flake posted:Back on topic, did the Social War have long term repercussions? I'm interested in the social issues of the republic, since there really was a difficult situation with regards to the labour market. Well, it resulted in the extension of Roman citizenship or Latin status to a large group of non-Roman Italians, so you can see it as the beginning of the trend towards a wider Imperial citizenship, not one that was limited to Rome itself. Having said that, in AD 47 there were just under 6 million Roman citizens (including wives and children) and the total population of the empire was maybe 70-90 million, so it was still an elite status. Becoming a citizen was a big deal, especially outside Italy. It was a bit like becoming a made guy in the Mafia - nasty things could be done to you, but only with sanction from the top. You were protected from some of the arbitrary treatment dished out to non-citizens by local officials, soldiers and so on.
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Aug 26, 2012 21:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Europe is not well suited for large cavalry armies. Most of the horse archer armies come down off the Eurasian steppe because that's prime horse land, endless seas of grass. You can just let your horse graze off the land. In Europe (except the plains in the east) there's not a ton of good grazeland and cavalry armies will eat it up surprisingly quickly. I once read a book by David Chandler about warfare in the age of Marlborough. That's a long time after the Romans (early 18th century) but it gets across pretty clearly how much the pace of campaigning in European wars then was dictated by having to get hay for the horses - the draft horses, as well as the cavalry ones. I think there may be reasons why it's not that great for horses to solely subsist on grass, but I'm not a horse person myself, so don't quote me on that. Every so often you had to stop the army, send out foraging parties to cut the hay, make sure they were properly guarded because they were a prime target for enemy raids, get the hay back and distribute it, and so on. Plus, you could only campaign at certain times of year - when the grass was ready to cut for hay. The fewer horses you had, the less of that problem.
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Aug 27, 2012 12:45
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Awesome thread, thank you. Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino is also pretty good on this subject. Amused to Death posted:Theodora She was clearly an extraordinary woman, but unfortunately a lot of the information about her background comes from Procopius' Secret History and there's no telling how reliable it is and how far it may have been motivated by jealousy or disapproval of powerful women (Procopius' "day job" was as Justinian's official historian and he was a leading courtier). Of course, the same is true of most stuff written about Roman emperors at the time. Various people posted:Roman "racism." There is some evidence for Roman anti-Semitism. Cicero said of the Jews:- quote:Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors. But now it is even more so, when that nation by its armed resistance has shown what it thinks of our rule. How dear it was to the immortal gods is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for taxes, made a slave. Tacitus called the customs of the Jews "preposterous and mean."
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Aug 28, 2012 20:08
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Amused to Death posted:In regards to the equites and merchant class, wasn't one of the problems there in terms of Senate membership the fact that technically under law Senators weren't allowed to engage in trade? So nominating a man with 20 vessels sailing to India every year might be a bit of a political problem. Another way around this was by using your freed slaves, who continued to be under patronage obligations to you even after they were freed, to trade on your behalf. The prejudice against trade is common in every society dominated by a landowning aristocracy, which is essentially what Rome was (at least, in the beginning). Even in Britain, for example, there was a feeling right down into the twentieth century that industry was not really for a gentleman. There was less prejudice against banking or finance, and there are theories that blame the decline of British industrial power and the power of the financial sector on these attitudes.
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Aug 29, 2012 19:04
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WoodrowSkillson posted:The quote was closer to "Come then, Aquila, take back the republic from me, you tribune." Its one of the most badass taunts I have ever read, and also one of Caesar's most petty moments. I can just imagine the cocky smirk on his face as he rode off on his chariot in a 2000 year old version of "come at me bro!" And, for once, everyone was literally standing up and applauding. Caesar is one of the handful of people in history whose life was basically a series of shitthatdidnthappen.txt stories, but they actually happened. "Oh, yeah, did I tell you about the time I got kidnapped by pirates but I ended up crucifying them? Well, it happened this way..." euphronius posted:Caligula hated the Senate and it was a giant gently caress You to the Senate to make his horse Consul. And, well, he was insane.
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Aug 31, 2012 20:48
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cheerfullydrab posted:If you take the historical sensibilities of Washington Irving and merge them with the sensationalism of British tabloids, you get Suetonius. This is why so many books, TV shows, etc. use the guy as their primary or sole reference with no mention of the dubious nature of a lot of the poo poo the guy wrote down. He's the source of many myths, just like Washington Irving was. Suetonius is fun but he's just not someone whose accounts you should ever take as gospel truth. A lot of the Roman historians have similar problems. Livy, for example, is full of "ROME, gently caress YEAH!" and hardly objective about Hannibal or Scipio. Ancient historians generally just weren't as worried about objectivity or sources as modern ones would be - they primarily wanted to tell a good story. However, they are what we have to go on.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:51
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achillesforever6 posted:Weren't a lot of the Emperor's top aides usually were his former slaves? Yes, this was often the case. Probably the most well-known of them were Narcissus, Pallas and Callistas, who were Claudius' secretaries. Pallas and Callistas were in charge of finance and petitions to the Emperor respectively, and Narcissus was more or less his prime minister. The tradtional aristocracy centered on the Senate really hated these kind of upstarts, but they had to put up with them. Eventually, Hadrian gave into their pressure and reserved the very top jobs for members of the order of Equites. However, a lot of the slightly more junior posts were still occupied by freedmen even after that.
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Sep 3, 2012 19:36
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Dr Scoofles posted:I've also been reading a selection of letters by Cicero and it's extremely funny how they are chock full of back handed compliments and demands for more praise. I remember Robert Harris presenting the guy as a cheeky chappie but really he sounds more like a total big head to me. Years ago, someone I knew at university who was studying classics told me that the Romans didn't have the same attitude to boasting/modesty we do - they thought that if what you were saying about yourself was true, it was fair enough to tell the world about it. I've never found a formal source for that, but it makes sense. Cicero, and other writers like Pliny the Younger, are always blowing their own trumpet, without the least self-consciousness. I think the idea of modesty as a virtue may be a Judeo-Christian one.
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Sep 5, 2012 19:27
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Mans posted:Were Roman soldiers given lands after they retired? How much did they receive? Did they get the right to use slaves? Did they get leaves or vacations? The Romans set up lots of "colonies" in the lands they conquered which were essentially new settlements made up largely of ex-soldiers and their families, so the short answer is that, yes, they often were, although we're not talking huge estates. Could they use slaves? If they could afford them, yes, like any free person. The idea of the colonies was that they were a way of bringing Roman civilisation to the provinces and they also had a security function - the settlers were expected to turn out and fight if any of the local tribes revolted. I don't know about military leave, I'm afraid.
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Nov 6, 2012 19:34
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Besesoth posted:Tangentially, I may have asked this before but I can't remember the answer: when I was studying in college, one of the texts my professor (who was a generally very learned but also very idiosyncratic man) used was Jérôme Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome". It seemed like a good text, but it's been close to a decade since I studied it in any sort of detail. Have any of the rest of you run across it? What are your thoughts on its quality and veracity? I read it fairly recently. It's a decent general introduction to its subject, but old as hell now. The copy I read didn't have a date of publication but I don't think it can be more recent than the 1950s. So you're not exactly getting the latest research. Also, it's translated from the French, and every book I've ever read that was translated from French has a slightly weird quality to it, in terms of style. I think it may be that the French aren't embarrassed about writing in a slightly grandiose way and if you translate that straight into English, it sounds odd.
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Nov 9, 2012 20:34
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