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Meet the Romans had a bit in there I did not understand: child exposure. I was aware it was carried out, but the show implied that exposure was a last ditch form of family planning (in the same way an orphanage might be considered that today), but then goes on for a bit about how it was a literary trope that formerly abandoned children would find their parents by the protective talisman they were given. So there must have been someone collecting the fortunate trash children and preventing them from starving to death. What I don't understand is why a parent would leave their child in the garbage above say, selling them into slavery? They're both pretty horrific but one maybe murders your child. I can assume the mothers who are forced to abandon their children would not be in a financial position to turn down that kind of money.
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Sep 1, 2014 14:29
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Troubadour posted:I found an interesting article on child exposure in various places and times in the empire, maybe some other people will enjoy it: First paragraph answers my question completely, thank you! quote:Disapproval of exposure seems slowly to have gained ground. Then, after the sale of infants was authorized by Constantine in A.D. 3I3, the need for child-exposure somewhat diminished, and at last probably in 374 - it was subjected to legal prohibition. But of course it did not cease. So mothers didn't sell their children because it wasn't legal. Simple enough!
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Sep 1, 2014 18:35
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Don Gato posted:Just go back a few pages and see that map of the world where Korea either directly owned or indirectly influenced loving everything, to me that is the craziest conspiracy I've seen because I thing GF mentioned it's main source was a book of fairy tales. Korea=Corea sea people=c-people???!?
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Oct 6, 2014 09:21
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And obviously Japan hid it by tricking the west into using Korea to cover up the historical superiority of the Corean people. Do those ultra-nationalist museums hire non-Korean citizens/speakers? 
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Oct 6, 2014 12:34
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Ynglaur posted:Tell me more about Nazis in Canada in 1952. Well, 59 years. Weather Station Kurt, which actually was not landed in Canada, as the Dominion of Newfoundland (and Labrador) wouldn't join Canada for another six years.
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Jan 4, 2015 00:34
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Deteriorata posted:I've been amused in researching the history of American football. There are numerous articles crowing about the size of the linemen back in the 1890s. Yale, for example, dominated the league at that time by having a bunch of giants who were all of 5'10" tall and weighed as much as 175 pounds. While the average has only slightly increased, the extremes, particularly in athletic endeavor, have dramatically shifted. People with far right on the bell curve bodies would once typically have little to no opportunity to apply them; people like Micheal Phelps might have been stuck farming for most of history but even more recently might not have been able to have access to swimming pools to discover their extreme specializations. Now more then any other time in history, if you have a very tall body you have the most opportunity to apply it to basketball, for example.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:58
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FAUXTON posted:I think we're overlooking the fact that they hosed crocodiles. "If you can think of an easier way of making lil Sobeks I am all ears!"
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Jul 14, 2016 00:27
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Grand Fromage posted:The least tyrannical demagogue I can think of offhand is Andrew Jackson and he committed literal genocide so He also personally murdered up to a hundred people he disagreed with. Really the only untyrannical part was that he chose to do it himself.
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Nov 9, 2016 16:46
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If you drink booze all the time as one of your primary sources of calories/refreshment/entertainment, how would you tell that stopping that caused a physical reaction instead of associating that with just, being hungry/thirsty/bored? You'd think lots of people would have a sort of low level dependence that they'd never notice because it's so completely socially accepted, and you're much less likely to see the long term effects because there were so many things you couldn't explain vying to kill you. Slight tangent, but there are also plenty of more modern post Industrial Revolution examples of eg whiskey shipments getting spilled and then hundred of people die of alcohol poisoning, demonstrating (at least in part) the factor preventing people drinking themselves to death was access, not will (see also: England and cheap gin). Getting access to enough alcohol to really give yourself a rip roaring addiction must have been expensive. Lots of people couldn't afford it.
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Dec 6, 2016 13:57
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Ras Het posted:What Sorry, that came put garbled. If you're drinking constantly to satisfy another need (for example, hunger) would you associate cessation with alcohol withdrawal or with failing to satisfy that need (i.e. starvation).
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Dec 6, 2016 16:20
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I would also question what "bloodthirsty" could possibly mean in context. As already stated you're asking a relatively specific question about an incredibly broad swath of history (I suspect "yes absolutely" is true, as is "absolutely not" as are countless shades in-between) but "bloodthirsty" adds another level of vague on top. Even if you take a specific period, say the end of the republic (which I'm more familiar with thanks to pop culture) breaking formation as a legionnaire and brawling was a punishable offence, which suggest "bloodthirsty" was something discouraged, while sometimes "ordering your troops to murder your political rivals/people who's property you desire and also their families" was more or less totally acceptable. To go even broader: wars are unpleasant things, and unpleasant things happen during them. Modern "quiet professional" armies do bloodthirsty poo poo all the time, even moreso depending on how you define "modern".
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Jan 8, 2017 00:01
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I've never seen I, Clavdivs, does Brian Blessed shout "Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!" at any point? Even better! https://youtu.be/f-ohKuKy4_s
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Jan 22, 2017 01:42
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Ainsley McTree posted:So wait, how are you supposed to pronounce Caesar? This is of course very deliberate; the Legion is supposed to be the kind of people who go "well it's pronounced animè".
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Jan 25, 2017 17:33
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Ras Het posted:Modern westerns are pathetic slaves of their machinery, like babies glued to their iPad by its colours and noises. The industrial revolution destroyed what little hope we might have had as a species for a dignified future. ah, the quiet dignity of making GBS threads yourself to death
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Mar 31, 2017 12:17
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Do we have an idea of how garum tasted? "similar to south east asian fish sauce"? The two things I remember is that they used an amount of salt that we would find repulsive (as the cuisine of most seafaring, salt as a preservative societies would taste to us now) and that only barbarians would have their wine undiluted. I think some recipes even survive? efb
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Apr 14, 2017 14:55
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Kanine posted:is there any evidence that people in heterogeneous societies in the past recognized that discrimination/bigotry was wrong at all? As mentioned, it's really challenging to determine people's motivations after so much time and with so few sources, very, very few of which are primary. There were certainly Romans who took actions that seemed to promote a kind of tolerance, or acted against discrimination - Claudius wrote the letter to the Alexandrians which attempted to reduce religious conflict and in doing so would have somewhat protected the Jewish population from persecution (while limiting immigration) or, how he was known to promote freedmen to positions of power - we know this was both atypical and that freedmen must have faced some form of discrimination because people complained about it. It would be easy to project our modern ideals on these actions - but they didn't exist at the time. Maybe he took these actions for purely selfish reasons to prevent conflict in Roman territory and promote people loyal to him, maybe he did it because he thought it was a good thing to do for entirely different motivations- we don't know, and we can't know.
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Aug 24, 2017 09:23
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i love it when someone comes into this thread asking if they should get a history degree and all the regulars go all bronze-age-collapse
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Sep 1, 2017 08:52
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There's a lot of granularity in what "literacy" encompasses, too. I can't really picture how you'd find much evidence of a population that has an understanding of the alphabet to the point they can decipher simple text phonetically - developing a limited vocabulary of things they encounter a lot (eg signs). It's an enormously useful skill after all, and people would have plenty of time.
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Jan 13, 2018 05:21
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e: oh jesus wrong thread this was for the milhist thread about civilian casualties in war gently caress CoolCab fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Mar 3, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 01:17
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LingcodKilla posted:Maybe the most desirable loot was humans the deaths are all "worthless" people (too old or young). You'd think if they were taking a bunch of slaves they'd also take all the slave's nice stuff. Maybe something caused mass delirium for some reason? Spoiled food or water supply maybe, or some particular disease. Everyone goes insane and murders each other and the survivors or survivor holes up with all the weapons somewhere out of paranoia.
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Apr 26, 2018 21:24
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“What things will kill you if you eat them” is such a civilisation prerequisite I can’t imagine anyone not discovering some poison.
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Apr 26, 2018 23:05
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it belongs to the people who loving own it and while we can weep at the loss of historical context if it’s destroyed or left to degrade it is their poo poo. I can’t waltz in to the Tower of London and nick the Crown Jewels even if my display case is nicer then theirs - perhaps more relevantly, I couldn’t take the cenotaph even though London air quality isn’t optimal for its longevity.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:
 do you think i think it would be...good if someone took the cenotaph
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Jun 7, 2018 17:54
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i don't think anyone can attend the british museum and not leave with the unshakable impression "boy these people took everything that wasn't nailed down. and then came back a crowbar." i actually found the contrast with the imperial war museum - a museum with imperial in the loving title - actually quite shocking. the IWM doesn't try on the same "we're a Compendium of the Human Condition" horseshit. the war museum was more "yeah we shot them and we took it. here's the gun we shot them with!" CoolCab fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 21:50
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Koramei posted:
it feels like a thin veneer of respectability that’s trying to justify an outrageously exploitative imperial legacy. you can build a monument to the human experience or you can display all the spoils of colonialism and your empire- it feels very disingenuous to try and do both, particularly since the empire itself was such a stain on said human experience.
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Jun 8, 2018 00:02
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putting aside boring stuff like spices are there many things today that are very inexpensive compared to in roman times? if i had a time machine and a tight budget and wanted to pass myself off as a rich foreigner what would i encrust myself with?
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Jun 20, 2018 19:37
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Halloween Jack posted:Salt and pepper, maybe a little saffron. quote:Seriously though: I see it repeated as a truism that salt was practically money in ancient times, but I've read other sources indicating that the plenitude of salt was wildly variable based on region. I read something in a book I can't remember that a proverb in one coastal French region, in medieval times, was "Salt and advice are free for the taking." Any comment on that? that comes from the salary myth, i think? salt generation is mostly about managing seaside real estate and sunlight iirc
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Jun 20, 2018 20:04
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Tunicate posted:of course if we're talking precious gems, the easy answer is buying modern synthetic ruby and sapphire, which you can get for less than a hundred dollars a pound. what holy poo poo really? are they all really small and lovely or something, can i get a big fuckoff fake ring for my time travel goddammit
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Jun 20, 2018 22:46
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sullat posted:I heard the same story except with a type of glass that didn't break. I think its apocryphal. Especially since you need electricity to smelt bauxite. also like - wouldn't you get the secret of this amazing new technology? even if you were being all Tiberius about it, just torture the secret out of him. if you control the only source of the amazing new material it doesn't matter if your precious metals are worth less - you have a monopoly on the thing that's worth more!
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Jun 21, 2018 17:59
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i mean they had opium and it doesn't seem like a ton of people were that into it, or at least there doesn't seem to be much historical record of abuse or addiction to opiates afaik. dream big - dope tiberius to the guts with enough molly to send his rear end to mars and make sure he's locked away somewhere for the blue monday. now there's a counterfactual
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Jun 22, 2018 19:28
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Grand Fromage posted:Single-cause events exist but they're never grand historical narratives, just individual instances. Even then it's not that common, everything gets more complicated the more you learn. Which is counter-intuitive to a lot of people I think. it's sort of like the coastline paradox - every piece of history represents a simplification of a intractably complex series of events. this means you can increase the resolution indefinitely and only discover how little you know.
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Aug 31, 2018 13:01
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Mr Enderby posted:Stuff off twitter recently: i playtested this! 
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Oct 8, 2018 19:26
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also the act of generating a successor also grants a ton of power and legitimacy to someone who isn't you. that's a danger, and it's a danger that makes you paranoid which is danger compounded. rome is also littered with would be successors - dudes who were groomed for power only to do something to piss off their patron.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:42
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Eh, just a ploy to protect the profits of licensed castrators I mean it’s not exactly a growth industry.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:38
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the only primary source i read entirely uncritically is the graffiti found in pompeii. everything else was written by an elite and as such has an agenda of some kind - the guy who made bread just wanted us to know he made some bread. i looked it up while typing this post and what a coincidence: II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8792: On April 19th, I made bread - happy day that guy made bread!
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Apr 19, 2019 19:22
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here's a good video about roman elections, it helped me visualize it a lot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw
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Sep 18, 2019 21:34
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watching the new historia civilis video about the assassination of julius caesar, i had no idea that the overwhelming majority of the stabbings were post mortem, and the others were largely superficial. the one senator who actually fatally shanked caesar was the dude trying to protect his brother which is the kind of adorable sub plot you don't often get in violent assassinations.
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Oct 19, 2019 17:40
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freeze distillation is super loving harsh to drink though, i understood it was more niche for that reason. you're just removing water from the solution which means you're concentrating everything, not just the alcohol. unpleasant to drink and very, very dirty hangoverwise.
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Oct 30, 2019 19:24
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chitoryu12 posted:Red wine is especially notorious for the hangovers it gives, as it's filled with congeners (all the stuff other than ethanol in your drink). Nobody is quite sure of the exact science behind what causes a hangover, only that it probably has some correlation to the amount of congeners present. It might also be that the amount of alcohol you need to suffer a hangover is roughly the same regardless of what you drink but you need far more beer or wine than hard liquor to achieve it, which means putting even more of those impurities in your body. i always sort of figured that what we call "hangover" is a bunch of different conditions caused in the aftermath of drinking heavily - part of it is consuming impurities, part of it is consuming a shitton of calories (and likely terrible food) in one evening, part of it is the disrupted sleep, part of it is the GABA parts of your brain rebounding etc etc. dehydration plays a major role too, so while you may need to drink a ton more beer than liquor to achieve a hangover at least you're consuming a lot more water in the process. i always figured that masked the effect somewhat.
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Oct 31, 2019 18:16
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Squalid posted:How is that justified first baby in last baby out
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Dec 2, 2019 19:31
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