Tunicate posted:

Library of congress is a fairly safe bet.

fishmech posted:

Alexandria wasn't massively replicated across a continent.

Marxist-Jezzinist posted:

An Egyptian peasant who pissed off pharaoh was likely to die of sickle sword anemia.

hailthefish posted:

The 'made by a woman from a first-person perspective' theory as I recall doesn't involve them being intended as sculptures of ideal female forms, but rather that they were more along the lines of 'what to expect when you're expecting: cavewoman edition', the idea being that the sculptures were intended to be looked at as though from a first person perspective and then compared to what the viewer's own body looks like.

Catch-22 posted:

"[…] it's better to die on one's feet than live on one's knee," Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. "I guess you've heard that saying before."

"Yes, I certainly have," mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. "But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes."

Ras Het posted:

Cats are like #1 most destructive invasive species in the world

Guildencrantz posted:

People being afraid of starting a fire brigade because they'll turn into a gang or launch a coup is yet another example of something we take for granted in the modern world but didn't really exist in the ancient world: continuous, peacefully transferred and politically neutral public institutions. In a lot of ancient history books whenever some ruler starts a new institution to safeguard something or accomplish a specialized task, the author then goes "keep these guys in mind because the institution turns out to be effective, so obviously they're going to make a power grab later". Professionalized bureaucracy, watchmen, postal services etc. only really seem to appear in the 16th century at the earliest, and not without growing pains.

It must have been absolutely hectic to govern anything if whenever you start even the most banal organizational project you can't just think of management but always, always keep a paranoid eye on how it affects the balance of power.

Arglebargle III posted:

What the gently caress who would pay to gently caress a gorilla?!

skasion posted:

Squalid posted:

America’s most smartest boy everybody.

skasion posted:

Yes and yes

skasion posted:

Yeah absolutely. Bad in terms of history: the fatal weakness of the Roman state led to turmoil and disorder and general shift in standards of education that had the side effect of preventing us now from knowing a poo poo ton of things about antiquity that we might otherwise know. Bad in terms of common good: the weakness and in the West, collapse of Roman government was clearly not fun for many of the people who had to live through it; it brought about further warring among all the successor states, some of it (Justinian’s Italian war comes to mind) immensely brutal and more devastating than the actual collapse of imperial government. While morally speaking it’s easy (and valid) to complain about how violent and corrupt Roman society was: it made possible constant civil wars, terrible plagues, graft and intrigue on a level that make the USSR look good; and we know these things because people complained about them even at the time. But collapse of Roman government didn’t fix this, it just meant that the same kind of violence and corruption took place on smaller scales for smaller stakes.

Grand Fromage posted:

Well, humanity.txt

They do seem to have been ruthless enough about unwanted infants that there are references to trash pits as being a good place to pick up free slaves.

Grand Fromage posted:

The context is important. Infanticide was quite normal among all the classical world cultures, there was nothing especially Roman about it. The Romans are more progressive and what we would consider moral than many of their neighbors. Slavery was very much a flexible position, not a life sentence. Women, as mistreated as they were, had a lot more freedom and rights than they did in a place like Athens. There's a robust philosophical tradition questioning everything, which we don't see in a lot of places (though this could entirely be the difference in documentation). Roman society is significantly more open, social mobility is hard but exists, the Romans were highly multiethnic and don't seem to have had any problem with who you were once you crossed the line into being a Roman citizen. They were the first civilization to introduce any kind of social welfare systems, even before the massive expansion of that during the Christian era. Their system of rule of law at least made an attempt at fairness, which again, for the time was remarkable.

I'm not saying they were great people, this is a civilization that holds up war as the highest possible virtue. But if you judge them exclusively against the other civilizations of the time, they are no worse and often much more decent. I honestly can't think of anything where the Romans were known to be significantly more immoral/brutal/whatever than the way other contemporary cultures behaved.

Benagain posted:

I just read an offhand reference to the apparently not common but not unheard of practice of citizens of a region suing the governor for corruption once he was out of office. Any truth to that?

Kassad posted:

Also you mentioned China but values weren't that calcified over there, it's just that most records only tell you what the upper class thought.

Cyrano4747 posted:

The breakup itself would be intensely violent and kill millions as people fought over everything from state assets to the final borders.

Grand Fromage posted:

Ah. I suppose it could've gone that way, but Roman values did evolve a lot with time.

sullat posted:

Sumerians used carved cylinders to "sign" official tablets.

Grumio posted:

Reminds me of the joke about Greeks inventing sex, and then the Romans teaching it to women

SlothfulCobra posted:

The more I learn about later Rome, the less remarkable it is to me that it lasted so long. It seems like it doesn't matter what happens with the internal politics of the empire. No matter how power shifts, it still counts as "Rome" and the old institutions manage to limp onward into the future in one way or another, regardless of how decayed or corrupt they get. If it hadn't been for a series of mass migrations where entirely new and unrelated people came in to physically replace the Romans as rulers of territory, then the dumb ol' empire would've never given up the ghost.

Last time I read up on the Ostrogoths, it turned out even their rule wasn't exactly a clear end point for the west, because apparently Theodoric was brought in by the Byzantines and despite basically ruling on his own, he was nominally under the eastern emperor, and it wasn't until he was dead and his successors deposed that it became an issue. Then there was Jusinian's last hurrah, and it takes the Lombards for the empire to be dead in the west. Except when the Lombards were gone, the pope got the bright idea to revive the imperial name for the nice man who kicked them out, and we get a thousand more years of the name going on, just like how the Ottomans kept the imperial name when they kicked in the gate of Kostantiniyye.

Grand Fromage posted:

I'm not sure what you mean by momentum, they'd eliminated all their real opponents and so the empire was simply the way things worked for quite a while. It's pretty common for political situations like that to seem strong and eternal until one day they aren't anymore, and then everyone gets to argue what changed. After Carthage was eliminated the Romans didn't have a serious external threat until the assorted hordes of late antiquity. The Parthians/Persians were strong opponents in the east but never posed any real danger of conquering the eastern empire or anything.

skasion posted:

Goldsworthy’s book on the fall of Rome spends the entire first third on the crisis and is very accessible.