|
Phobophilia posted:Okay now I'm surprised I've never heard that used as Conclusive Evidence for the Existence of Judeo-Christian God. Asimov's Left Hand of the Election contains an interesting essay on this angle of the story.
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2013 23:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 17:17 |
|
|
Ras Het posted:Suetonius, Plutarch, the Historia Augusta... Isn't the Historia Augusta considered far less reliable than even Plutarch and Suetonius? The list of the Thirty Tyrants contains people who probably never even existed, for example.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2013 05:46
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:One reason, anyway, was a sense of finally out-doing the Romans. Europe had spent close to a millennium living with reminders of how great things had been in the distant past, which made their current misery all the worse. Up through the Middle Ages, Rome had represented the epitome of all that was civilized - in art, science, technology, engineering, law, and everything else. Is that really the case? Wasn't the Renaissance more about re-creating Rome than surpassing it? I always assumed that no one believed in "progress" in an ideological sense until the Enlightenment.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2013 01:49
|
|
|
the jizz taxi posted:IIRC it was actually illegal to rape slaves. Not that I imagine it didn't happen, of course, as sexual abuse goes hand in hand with economic exploitation. I get the impression that slave-rape was actually pretty institutionalized. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Puer_delicatus and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Rape_and_the_law: quote:The rape of a slave could be prosecuted only as damage to her owner's property, under the Lex Aquilia. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Nov 2, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2013 23:16
|
|
|
Alhazred posted:The Romans didn't like the Kymeans and so they were often the butts of the jokes: The Romans had pretty dark sense of humor.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2013 05:42
|
|
|
cheerfullydrab posted:An oriental mystery cult... "When Constantine legalized Christianity, the Roman Empire was irreversibly tainted by oriental decadence!" -- Edward Gibbon (OK, not really)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2014 06:59
|
|
|
Kaal posted:Honestly this element of dissimilarity is unappreciated in popular understanding of antiquity. We have a tendency to look at historic people as being pretty much the same as modern people, just in a different situation. As if Romans were just a bunch of Americans in chainmail and togas. And while there is some truth to this, it conceals the greater truth that in many ways there are fundamental differences between a Roman and a modern American that go far beyond iPhones and democratic capitalism. There's differences in how they understand the world and society, and there's differences in how they were motivated and norms of behavior. And those differences are often difficult to bridge. One thing that tends to get glossed over (particularly when this thread talks about slavery in the ancient world) is the extent to which Roman society tolerated many forms of sexual violence. To some extent this is true of most slave societies, but the Romans are unique, as far as I know, in castrating their prepubescent male slaves just to preserve their youthful beauty. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2014 18:54
|
|
|
Obliterati posted:Eunuchs as a whole are pretty popular in this timeframe: Persians even obtained them for the specific purpose of administration, the theory being that they'd have no sons to try and pass their status on to. I referred specifically to the reason involved; I wasn't saying the Romans were the only people to practice castration.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2014 22:05
|
|
|
sebzilla posted:What about castrating boys to preserve their singing voices? Still gross, but not really comparable to literally castrating boys to enjoy raping them more.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2014 22:36
|
|
|
BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's a toss-up between him and Commodus. I'd say that he was the worst human being to bear the title, but history shows no evidence that he was a human being. Tiberius raping babies was pretty inhuman... I know this thread often assumes Suetonius was making that up, but given recent events in the UK I'm having trouble finding it implausible.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2015 23:49
|
|
|
On the other hand, non-Byzantines didn't always call it the Roman Empire even at the time.
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 30, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2015 00:04
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:I think Chomsky had (when I was doing my MA, so going on 8 years ago now) narrowed language down to an outgrowth of our brain's ability for recursion. So being able to understand that 1+1=2 and then 2+1=3, etc. lead, after however long, to our capacity to start combining ideas and meaningful sounds into infinite combinations from a finite base of linguistic concepts. There was then that whole kerfuffle over the Piraha tribe supposedly lacking the ability to think recursively so it couldn't be an inherent cognitive function. There are lots of people that say that research is bullshit though too. Of course maybe they're all schizophrenic like the ancient Greeks. I will have to read The Bicameral Mind some time, because the idea seems so obviously full of holes and lacking in solid evidence that I'm interested in why it's apparently taken seriously by some psychologists and anthropologists.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2015 17:42
|
|
|
Re: the origin of gods and myths, I don't think all gods got started the same way. Someone like Aphrodite might have started as a poetic metaphor and gradually became literalized into an actual being to appease and ask for help. Others may have been real people who gradually became seen as more than human; we know for sure that people like Julius Caesar were real people before they were proclaimed gods, so it's not so absurd to think that there are cases where it was forgotten that the person was human to begin with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism The third possible category, as I see it, is explanations for dramatic natural phenomena. Such gods might start as vague forces that people sought to appease, but gradually became seen more anthropomorphically, perhaps due to association with the other two types of gods. Edit: A fourth possible type: Gods invented as fictional characters and intended to be read as such, later misunderstood as real. Distinct from the first category because they don't start as a one-word concept; the personality and myths are there from the start. Something like this happens in the modern day in certain subcultures... Edit: A fifth category: Crazy but charismatic people convince others that the voices in their heads are real. Edit: Sixth category: Same as the fifth, but the originators of the cult are charlatans instead of madmen. The snake-god Glycon is an actual recorded example of this. Edit 2: Seventhly, gods could be created to explain rituals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_and_ritual#Myth_from_ritual_.28primacy_of_ritual.29 Of all the possibilities, this is the one I'm most skeptical of; I can't think of any obvious examples. (Smith's Adonis explanation seems strained.) Two gods with differing origins might be syncretized into one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyeus suggests that Zeus's king-of-the-gods traits (rule over the sky, etc.) come from a different previous god than his lightning-god traits. Of course, this is just unscholarly speculation on my part. It would be interesting to read an overview of current scholarship on the matter; the wiki article on Euhemerism, for example, is focused on views held by people in the 19th century and earlier. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Sep 13, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2015 06:56
|
|
|
sullat posted:I thought Aphrodite was imported from the Phoencians and inserted into the Greek pantheon? Weirdly enough, wiki suggests that she may have derived from an Indo-European goddess of dawn, which actually does go against my idea that she originated as a personification of love. As I said, that whole post was unscholarly speculation. Saying that she was originally a Phoenician goddess doesn't explain why the Phoenicians started believing in her in the first place, though.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2015 15:29
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:it was a religion of the urban middle classes, and urban poor, basically, and it took a long time for it to diffuse out into the countryside This is actually the origin of the word pagan. Paganus originally meant a rural person.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2015 13:40
|
|
|
Star Man posted:The medical procedure that I was given birth with is named after a guy that got stabbed by thirteen people. Sounds about right. Not exactly. It's possible that he got his cognomen from one of his ancestors being delivered by C-section, but even that is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarean_section#Etymology Incidentally, Caesar himself apparently preferred to interpret his name as deriving from an ancestor who killed an elephant. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 8, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 21:21
|
|
|
Doctor Malaver posted:Were there any progressive thinkers during ancient Rome/Greece? The kind that would advocate against slavery or for women rights? Or maybe against people killing each other in arena for spectators' amusement? Seneca disapproved of gladiator fights. And even in Athens you can find some acknowledgement that their society's treatment of women was messed up in plays as well as philosophical texts. Surprisingly, there were even some people in Athens who seem to have been anti-slavery, like Alcidamas.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2016 16:58
|
|
|
sullat posted:reorganizing the byzantine patchwork of colonies and client states that represented the eastern half of the empire Nice pun.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2016 04:11
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:On how they lived their own lives they knew much more and there are for sure lost oral historical traditions and lost writings of all sorts of kinds but it's abundantly clear that understanding of distant history quickly becomes mythological. We have no very clear idea of how much Greeks believed their own myths but for sure in gener they believed there was a Trojan War and a real Agamemmnon and Priam but our archaeological records, which they could not access, show that pretty much everything Greeks believed about the Trojan war, including that it happened at all, was untrue. I believe the consensus is to that there probably was an actual Trojan War, but the details are mostly unknowable.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2017 03:14
|
|
|
skasion posted:There was almost certainly military conflict between Mycenaean Greeks and their contemporaries in Anatolia. The Tawagalawa Letter, written from a Hittite king to an Ahhiyawan king in the 13th century BC, refers to their previously having gone to war over Wilusa. Current scholarly consensus is that Ahhiyawa = Achaea, Wilusa = Ilios, and thus that Greeks at one point fought Hittites over Troy. Additionally archaeological work on the site of Troy does suggest that the city was destroyed in the early 12th century, probably violently. Hence "the details are mostly unknowable."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2017 05:42
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:CoolCab is right in that assigning motivation to ancient people is exceptionally difficult and almost always speculative. Marcus Aurelius is the only ancient figure I can think of off-hand who left extensive documentation giving insights into his own motivations. What about St. Augustine?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2017 15:08
|
|
|
The Belgian posted:Oh I didn't notice that it's by NJ Wildberger, 4chan's favorite mathematician. (Ultra)finitism is an extremely fringe position in mathematics. These are the people who believe things like pi or the square root of two do not exist. To get back to the thread topic, that sounds like the Pythagoreans. Apparently they were very upset about the discovery of irrational numbers (though the exact details of how they reacted are unclear): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus
|
|
#
¿
Aug 26, 2017 23:37
|
|
|
Some other interesting stuff on that site. Apparently there's a controversy over a statue of everyone's favorite philosopher-bum, Diogenes the Cynic, in his hometown of Sinop(e). https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/08/turkish-islamists-demand-removal-of.html#2OXjICdpXVJz8ETM.97 "The study's authors are now trying to determine whether the wine was red or white." https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/08/worlds-oldest-italian-wine-just.html#X9QJUOAmAQ3mEwj1.97 "The advent of farming, especially dairy products, had a small but significant effect on the shape of human skulls, according to a recently published study from anthropologists at UC Davis." https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/08/farming-cheese-chewing-changed-human.html#v8CwzAwiDwBM40JZ.99
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2017 04:31
|
|
|
fishmech posted:My great grandma died just short of reaching her 100th birthday back in 2010,and she was still able to handle things like cell phones, computers, even smartphones (though she never owned one herself, she'd use relatives smartphones plenty). Your great-grandma was experiencing all that change gradually, though. If she had been transported through time from 1920 or so straight to 2010, she'd get some serious culture shock.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2017 07:00
|
|
|
Grevling posted:Interesting, thanks. Could our picture of what people actually believed be a bit flawed though? I've read some stuff about Norse mythology and it seems that if you examine some subtle clues in sagas and the like you can get a sense of there being many imagined afterlives apart from only those Snorri wrote about. Maybe the average Greek could hope for something a little better than Hades? There were Greek philosophers who believed in reincarnation, such as Pythagoras (and possibly Plato; his Myth of Er deals with reincarnation, but it not clear how literally it should be taken). Vergil even incorporated reincarnation into Homer's version of Greek mythology in the Aeneid. Epicureans didn't believe in any afterlife at all. Stoic views on the afterlife seem to have been vague. I don't know how much any of these views ever caught on among the general population.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2017 20:29
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:To stretch and be fair to the mythology: the Shang were also considered fake until the discovery of the Oracle Bones and the records written on them. It is not impossible there is something waiting to be found from the Xia, but I find it unlikely. The stories about them are all so obviously mythological with god-kings ruling for like 200 years and teaching humanity about fire and poo poo. The fact that the PRC officially considers figures like the Yellow Emperor to be 100% historically real is hilarious and pathetic. The god-kings who invented fire and so forth you're thinking of are the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. They supposedly reigned before the Xia Dynasty.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2017 07:01
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:My go to example of Trump isn't the worst leader in history is the French king during (part of) the hundred years war who suffered a head injury and alternated every few months between being lucid and taking direct control of the government and being very very insane and needing ministers to manage everything They specified elected leader. Depending on your definition of elected, I'd say Hitler.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2017 00:41
|
|
|
homullus posted:"This I will assert with no evidence" was the motto of ancient historiography. Yeah, by ancient history standards Eusebius was very good about showing his sources. Not so good at interpreting his sources, though.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2017 19:31
|
|
|
Guildencrantz posted:They also had a bunch of ideas that are surprisingly close to modern sensibilities, probably owing to their general prosperity and food security. Like thinking that infanticide is horrible or that women are people. Too bad they were too isolationist to really influence other civilizations. Re: "thinking that women are people," it's worth noting that the ancient Egyptians practiced FGM at least sometimes. Also worth noting that in addition to practicing sibling marriage between royalty more or less from the beginning, by the Roman period about 20% of all Egyptian marriages were between siblings. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 21, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2017 18:24
|
|
|
sullat posted:Would that have been amongst the Greek nobility, or the Egyptian peasants as well? From what I understand, by Roman times, the two were well separated and nobody (except Cleopatra, occasionally) really paid attention to the peasants. https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...627041607DBDBF0 quote:According to official census returns from Roman Egypt (first to third centuries CE) preserved on papyrus, 23·5% of all documented marriages in the Arsinoites district in the Fayum (n=102) were between brothers and sisters. In the second century CE, the rates were 37% in the city of Arsinoe and 18·9% in the surrounding villages. So more common in urban areas, but still common elsewhere. A source I can't find right now suggests that one of the Ptolemies legalized sibling marriages among his Greek and Egyptian subjects to create a shared national myth about both groups being semi-divine.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2017 19:14
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:I don't see how this is an inaccurate statement. Kelly is saner than Trump, but he also enables Trump a lot. But that's not really related to ancient history.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2018 19:21
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:His last episode about Julius Caesar was got me really confused, since there's all that junk about him angling to become king, the Roman people loving him, but hating the idea of a king (whatever that entails) despite the prophecy, and the senate killing him to prevent a king, but didn't do anything to prevent there being clear heirs, which seems to be the only differentiating characteristic of a king versus dictator for life, other than all the trappings of regalia. Some historians believe that the aversion to kings was mostly confined to the senatorial class anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:Tyranny was very much a transitional government form I was tempted to call this a borderline tautology (what's the difference between a long-lasting tyranny and a monarchy?), but come to think of it, the Roman Empire could be considered a long-term tyranny (in the non-pejorative sense).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2018 19:41
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Roman commanders were, at least during the Republic, expected to be leading from the front. How many of them actually did so is questionable, but there are enough reports of commanders dying in combat that I feel comfortable saying it happened at least some of the time. There are two reliable instances of the spolia optima being taken, so that's at bare minimum two generals fighting on the front line. Things like the mural crown are motivations for the soldiers but you would also need to be able to verify that guy was indeed first over the walls. It's spolia opima (rich spoils), not spolia optima (best spoils). You're far from the first person to make the mistake, though (I used to misread it as optima myself, and it's written as optima in several published books, sometimes on the same page where it's written as opima), and it's even been suggested that the term spolia opima originated as a corruption of spolia optima. Moreover, there are more than two reliable instances of spolia opima being taken: once by Marcus Claudius Marcellus, multiple times by Drusus Germanicus, and once by Marcus Licinius Crassus (although Crassus was apparently prevented from claiming the honor by Augustus). Edit: Actually, it looks like Germanicus only tried multiple times to win spolia opima (according to Suetonius); the claim that he actually succeeded appears to be a misunderstanding. My bad. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jan 8, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2018 05:11
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:I've not had a single Latin class so wouldn't know the difference. You're probably still familiar with enough etymologically related English words (like optimal) to have a strong intuition that it should be optima, though.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2018 05:28
|
|
|
Looks like I was wrong about Drusus, by the way; this article makes it clear that Suetonius only says that he aspired to take spolia opima (to the point of recklessly pursuing enemy commanders), not that he actually did so. I should probably change the Wikipedia article.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2018 05:41
|
|
|
Benagain posted:I was reading a book about early church history and it asserted that we know that early Christianity was popular among the downtrodden because early Christians used Greek, the language of the lower classes in AD 50-250 Rome. I was under the impression that Greek was like an educated language? Not the version of Greek the New Testament used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2018 18:28
|
|
|
mycomancy posted:There seems to be some modern sense of superiority over ancient peoples in that moderns think that they were nearly retarded monsters who died at the age of 30. The Flat Earth myth is one of them; any dumbass on a boat could see the Earth has a curve to it. Eh. Many of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers believed in a flat Earth, and in China belief in a flat Earth seems to have the dominant paradigm as late as 1600 or so. So clearly intelligent people have believed in a flat Earth, just not so much in medieval Europe. (And even in medieval Europe, where belief in a spherical Earth was essentially universal among educated people, it's been argued based on medieval romances that many uneducated people still believed in a flat Earth.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jun 25, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2018 00:20
|
|
|
fantastic in plastic posted:Which ones? Leucippus, Democritus, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and possibly Thales.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2018 15:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 17:17 |
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:this isn't new but i hadn't seen it before: Wow, that's dark. The comments have some bad takes from random people, but also some interesting clarifications from the author of the article.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2018 22:27
|
|