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Giodo! posted:It was too big for one person to rule effectively, especially as the overall vitality of the empire waned over time; from the third century on (and maybe even earlier) emperors tried various schemes to make the administration function, including splitting the empire into eastern and western halves. Partly this, but also because the 3rd century was the century of "how many asses can we put in the emperor's chair?". The Roman Empire just barely survived the 3rd century, but the result was that it was an incredibly decentralized states. Provincial governors/cities basically ruled almost completely independent of Rome/Ravenna, and this decentralization helped to contribute to the fall of the Roman Empire - the central government simply couldn't exercise the kind of control it could earlier on.
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Jun 15, 2013 23:55
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karl fungus posted:What did people in antiquity think the future would be like? Did they even have some sort of conception that things would change, or was the rate of technological progress too slow? Did they realize that they came from earlier peoples that they themselves would consider barbarians? I can't necessarily answer all the questions, but I will address a few. Technology actually progressed at a somewhat rapid speed. The Romans utilized Hellenic architecture and engineering and actually made and utilized incredibly advanced machines for their time period - working sewers, city planning, water pressure, pipes, central heating, structured mining. The reality is that had the Roman Empire continued uninterrupted, I think we may have actually been well ahead of where we currently are. The fall of the Roman Empire set Europe and the world back at least three centuries - the exchange of information and technology that the vast Roman Empire (and the Silk Road) had allowed disappeared with it, and so humanity lost a lot of the information that would only be partly recovered later on by the Islamic world. As for the what they thought of the future, I can't really answer that question. As for what they thought of the past, well. The Japanese of the Sengoku Period made a point of calling upon history - indeed, many post-Sengoku authors talked about the Samurai of old (ie, the Gempei war) as the true samurai, and the samurai of that period as sad facsimilies. It's really kind of interesting. As for the what the Romans thought of their past is a somewhat different question. I know this has nothing to do with Rome/Greece, but peoples of the past were as interested in the past as we are.
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Jun 16, 2013 01:27
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Chopstix posted:The history nerd part in me is in conflict with the fantasy nerd part in me when orcs and humans are getting one hit slashed KO’d by swords in full plate. I’ll give Aragorn and Gimli a pass since he has a super sword and big axes to the crouch Considering Tolkien has more than a few instances of a Elf facing down a Balrog and killing them in The Silmarillion, I'm just gonna go with the idea that being thousands of years old gives you some time to get swole as a motherfucker.
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Oct 3, 2020 17:16
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Blame Roman Catholicism for the incorrect Latin. Priests were railing at their congregations in trash tier Latin from Constantine's reign to Vatican II, so like 1500ish years of people saying words wrong, making the corpse of Roman grammarians rattle their urns in ghostly anger.
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Apr 22, 2021 01:10
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I've been reading The Fate of Rome and I have to say, hearing the Fall of Rome narrative from the point of view of climate and disease is quite interesting, even if the author I think does kinda make some weird leaps of logic at times. I do particularly like the Fall of the Western Roman Empire framed more in the context of "The Romans could not have stemmed the tide of humanity fleeing the megadrought on the Eurasian steppe, and also sincerely hosed everything up at the Battle of Adrianople" than the more common context of a Roman system that was completely unresponsive and teetering at the end of the 4th century. EDIT: Also, if you'd be so kind, can somebody link me the effort post wherein the Athenians managed to totally gently caress up a war? A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 14, 2021 |
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May 14, 2021 04:20
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Roman ideas of sanitation were novel but thr execution wasn't. There were public latrines...because poo poo is a valuable farming product. These were still gross as hell, and doubtless there were not nearly enough latrines per person to satisfy demand in virtually any city of Antiquity. I don't put a lot of credence in the 'shared butt wiping sea sponge' idea. I think it is nothing short of a wild idea taken from basically no evidence for it. It's such a wild exaggeration that it would be like finding the thousands of disabled placards in US bathrooms and deciding that Americans must of had a god of the bathroom. Aqueducts didn't flow all the time or all year (because summer water supply is dependent on spring rains in the Mediterranean). Roman bathes were downright ghastly in comparison to a modern public swimming pool and were better spreaders of disease than actual places to not be gross. A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 20:59
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Enlighten me, thread: Why was it necessary to mix ancient wine with water? I could see you doing this if it was a high ABV distilled beverage, but why would you do it with quite a bit lower ABV wine?
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Dec 6, 2021 17:43
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Grand Fromage posted:If you ever actually figure out an answer to this that isn't speculation you can write a whole book and go on every history podcast in the world. Kinda like the sea sponges I mentioned on the last pages. It's actually kind of a bizarre thought (to me, anyway) that a society existed, used sea sponges, and used toilets but were so loving different from us that we're not entirely sure what they used the sponges for. though I'm fairly sure it's something banal like cleaning the toilet off. Dried sea sponge would be like wiping your rear end with a Brillo pad, I imagine.
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Dec 6, 2021 21:34
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My image of the first Portuguese encounter with the Japanese has the Japanese being absolutely amazed how at how loving filthy, smelly, and hairy they are. I'm actually kind of curious as to how China and Japan stacked up versus Europe in terms of cleanliness, both of the personal variety and the city variety.
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Dec 22, 2021 02:58
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