Tag: Classics

Sandro asks:

Hello. I am working on a story right now and I need to study a historical background for it. Could you recommend me good books (in English, preferably, and yes, I am willing to actually buy them, and yes, I am willing to spend a lot of my free time studying this.) about Rome and the life of common citizen of the city of Rome? The time frame is around the year AD 20. I need information about culture and customs. What were the ways common families worshipped gods? What were the naming conventions? How strict were Romans in following traditions? Was it common for “middle class” Roman family to have a slave? There is a lot I need to know before I can write my story. I obviously started with reading Wikipedia, but while I consider that useful, I still do think that I should get a more detailed and more trustworthy source of information. Thanks for help.

Let me see… for a basic introduction you could do worse than The Romans: An Introduction by Antony Kamm and Abigail Graham, which is the textbook we use for our introductory Roman Civilisation class in my department. Everyday Life in Ancient Rome by Lionel Casson is a similar level; I haven’t read it myself, but it’s quite well thought of, and possibly better tailored to your particular needs. Themes in Roman Society and Culture by Matt Gibbs, Milorad Nikolic and Pauline Ripat is a bit pricey but covers similar sorts of things in more detail. Continue reading “Sandro asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

This doesn’t have anything to do with pokemon, but I was wondering if you might have any thoughts with your Archaeology background: In a lot of stuff written about Greco-Roman mythology I’ve read, Hectate is called a goddess of witchcraft and Circe a witch, and there’s probably other examples I don’t know of. However, I’m not really sure what being a witch would mean outside of the context of Christianity or modern pop-culture. Was this just something that was added in by much later writers?

Well, what is a witch, exactly?  Ugly old woman, warty nose, pointy hat, flies around on broomsticks, brews potions in cauldrons, turns people into newts, weighs the same as a duck, that sort of thing?  Circe, Hecate and Medea aren’t witches in that sense, no; they predate that stereotype of what a “witch” is by a good couple of millennia.  Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

Something that’s been on my mind for a bit that your professional word may be able to help with. Would you happen to know how ethnically diverse the Greek and Roman empires were?

very

next question please

…

…what, you want more?  Oh, fine, but for the record this is not the sort of thing people just “happen to know.”

Okay so I’m assuming by “Greek empire” (remember, kids: there was never a politically autonomous and unified state called “Greece” or “Hellas” until 1822) you mean Alexander’s empire (320s BC) and the Hellenistic successor kingdoms (323 BC – 31 BC), and by “Roman empire” you mean Rome starting from the time it becomes a major interregional power (say, following the second Punic War, which ended in 201 BC) rather than just Rome in the time of the Emperors.  You could spend like most of a book on each of these just corralling the data that might let us answer this question, but whatevs. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

What can you tell us about the Batrachomyomachia, and how hilarious/awesome/hilariously awesome is it?

To be honest, not a whole lot.  The Batrachomyomachia is one of those texts that tends not to be taught or studied very much, because it’s quite short and is not traditionally regarded as a piece of high literature, and honestly there is more interesting ancient comedy/satire out there (the Frogs, the Apocolocyntosis, the Satyricon…).  You can read it in English here if you’re interested.  But I’ll see what I can do.

Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

How reliable was Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian Wars, especially considering that he was Greek?

well I mean it’s not like he isn’t not unreliable

Okay, so disclaimer number 1: people have literally spent their entire careers writing whole books that fail to give a definitive answer to this question.  It is impossible for any answer I give here to be anything but a ludicrous oversimplification.

Disclaimer number 2: reliable or not, he is the best we’ve got.  There just aren’t any surviving contemporary Persian sources that talk about the war in the kind of detail that Herodotus does, and Herodotus was literally the only person in the world writing something we would think of as “history” in his time. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

In the course of research for a story I’m writing, I found that the Roman god Janus is a perfect allusion for my main character. Could you perhaps spare a little of your time to tell us a bit about Janus? What his place and role in the Roman pantheon was, what things made him happy/sad/angry, general personality traits he favoured, that sort of thing. Thanks in advance, Doctor-to-be!

Janus is the god of doorways, keys, beginnings and endings, change, and the New Year.  He is always depicted with two faces, on the front and back of his head, so he can look through a door in both directions at once, and images of his faces could be set above either side of a doorway to invoke his protection.  The month of January, the beginning of the year, is named after him, and his name is related to the Latin word for door, ianua.  It’s not clear where he comes from, or whether he represents a standard Indo-European mythological archetype, but he seems to have been a very ancient Italian god whose role in the pantheon may once have been extremely important, though most of his functions are vestigial by the time of the late Republic.  Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

I’ve been reading about monism and ancient monistic philosophers (particularly Thales), and I find it absolutely fascinating! Could you please explain the topic a little more in-depth, in your usual easy-to-read style? 🙂 I’m also wondering if our current scientific knowledge points to a neo-monistic view of the universe (in that everything is made up of atoms)? (although I understand that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons) (matter and energy are the same thing, aren’t they?)

Well, pre-Socratic philosophy is not exactly my “thing” but here goes

So Thales was a Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus (modern Milet, western Turkey), probably around the early 6th century BC, who was famous for predicting eclipses, and discovering that any angle in a semicircle is always a right angle, good stuff like that.  We don’t have anything written by Thales himself, but we know a fair bit about his thinking and his achievements in engineering and mathematics because he gets quoted a lot by later Greek philosophers.  Apparently, one of the things that Thales believed was that everything is water. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Random Access asks:

No concept of heresy? Wasn’t Socrates put to death for being an atheist though?

It’s not quite the same thing.  Denying the existence of the gods altogether is a problem for them, although in Socrates’ case that was probably just a pretext to get rid of him (as far as we can tell, he wasn’t an atheist at all, at least not in the sense that we understand it).  The late antique and mediaeval notion of heresy, though, presupposes that there are wrong and unholy things to believe about God(s), or wrong and unholy ways to worship God(s), even if no one disputes that he/they exist(s).  For instance, for a 4th century Christian to say that God the Son is inferior to God the Father, when the central authorities of the church believe that they are equal, is heresy (specifically, the Arian heresy) and can get you excommunicated.  There isn’t really any equivalent in the polytheistic religions of the classical period, because they have no dogma and more or less take it for granted that different communities have different ideas about what the gods are, how they act, and how they should be worshipped.

EDIT: An illustrative example.  Hesiod’s Theogony says that Aphrodite was born from the blood of Ouranos, the primordial sky god, when it mixed with the foam of the sea.  Homer’s Iliad says that Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and a minor goddess named Dione.  These are two fundamentally incompatible origin stories for one of the most popular goddesses in the Greek world, and they come from the two most respected and authoritative Greek poets.  You can believe either.  Or neither.  Or even both, if you can wrap your head around it (that was Plato’s answer).  No one particularly cares.