Some questions about the Roman Empire... (1 Viewer)

[Hunter P]

The only unspoken language is the language of love.

 

[Holadem]

I believe the german word "Kaiser" and russian "Tsar" (sp?) are both derived from "Ceasar".

--
H

 

[Grant B]

So do you have enough facts young man?
(I always wanted to say that at least once)

Between the History Channel specials this week and all the other documenteries out there, it shouldn't be hard to pull together.

One of my favorite books was 'The 12 Caesars' by Seutonis.
Goes through each one and the 1st part tells all the good he did.....the 2nd part all the bad disgusting things he did.
It's nice to know that in most cases they make our sick perverts look like altar boys in comparison.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Right. The other transliteration from the Russian/Cyrilic is "Czar" (both are considered correct.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

We usually associate the revival of classical literature and knowledge with Italy and the late 14th and early 15th centuries, but in fact the seeds were planted centuries earlier than that, in Spain, thanks to a rare confluence of Muslim, Christian and Jewish cultures and scholarship:

"We think of Italy as the birthplace of the Renaissance. But the conception was in Spain in the twelfth century, and it is symbolised and expressed by the famous school of translators at Toledo, where the ancient texts were turned from Greek (which Europe had forgotten) through Arabic and Hebrew into Latin..." -- Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

In 1085, Toledo, Spain was taken from the Muslims by Alfonso VI of Leon. It soon became the capital of Castile and a community of scholars. There, the transmission of ancient knowledge reached it peak through the School of Toledo where translations were made from Arabic to Latin and later to Spanish, and helped the scientific and technological development for the European Renaissance. Toledo took the place of Baghdad as the new great translation center of the world.

Under the leadership of French Archbishop Raymond, who reigned from 1126 until his death in 1152, the Toledo School's Bureau of Translation attracted first rate scholars from all over Europe. Raymond knew the wealth of knowledge and scientific expertise, which the Muslim world possessed, and desired that Christendom gain access to its riches. Archdeacon Dominic Gundisalvi undertook many translations and directed the Bureau of Translation that Raymond had founded. Among the school's great scholars were Gherard of Cremona, John of Seville, Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester, Rudolf of Bruges, Hermann of Carinthia, and Michael Scot. The twelfth century came to be known as the Age of Translation.

By the middle of the thirteenth century, scholars such as these had translated the bulk of ancient science into Latin, including the writings of such greats as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid and Hippocrates, which had been preserved in Arabic for hundreds of years. These writings were either Arabic translations from Greek, Persian and Indian books or they were written by Muslim scientists themselves as new works.


From The History of Translation, Copyright © 2000-2005 Complete Translation Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Regards,

Joe

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I would quibble, but it's not often enough that someone mentions Gerard of Cremona. Also, I'm too busy fondling my anonymous schyphate trachea of the Latin rulers of Constantinople.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

And far be it from me to interupt a man when he's so engaged.

Joe

 

[todd s]

I have been watching the Rome specials on the History channel. That is why I am curious about this. Another question....How is it that they now so much about ancient Rome? Dates, people, and even lifestyles seem pretty well documented. I would have assumed that after the sacking of Rome and the subsequent dark ages. Most Roman writings would have been destroyed or lost.

 

[Holadem]

To ask that question is to not fully appreciate what a massive civilization Rome was. There was a time when the empire spanned from the Atlantic to the Middle East and included everything around the Mediterranean. Anything as massive, as advanced and as recent is bound to be well documented.

--
H - kinda of non answer eh?

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Well, it isn't like the only place that Roman writings were kept was Rome itself. And much older written material has passed down to us - many ancient Chinese works, complete epics from Sumer and Bronze Age Greece, the Old Testament. All of these documents give us a sense of what daily life was like in long-vanished cultures.

Printing didn't exist in Caesar's time, but publishing certainly did. Cicero's speeches were copied out by scribes and sold very well. So did Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, originally his summary dispatches of each year's campaign to the Roman Senate.

People routinely wrote letters twice, a rough composition copy and a finished "fair copy" that woule be sent to the recipient. They often cross-referenced their replies with the letters they were answering (sometimes they would write the draft of a reply on the back of the letter they were replying to.) So two complete sets of the correspondence between Cicero and his friend Atticus may have existed, doubling the chance of any given letter surviving.

Rome had its own historians who collected and wrote down popular traditions and who summarized earlier accounts of events before their own time. So we often know something of the contents even of works that have not survived, because of histories and epitomes written by those who read the works and whose own writings have survived. (Tradition says that the Emperor Clauidus wrote his own history of the Julian-Claudian line, and that he continued it during his own reign. The literary conceit of Robert Graves' novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God is that they are excerpted from Claudius's own first hand account. Claudius's actual book is lost, but references to it and summaries of it survive.)

Many Romans kept journals or diaries, and sent letters all over the empire that survived. (There are some quite charming letters that were discovered not long ago in the forts that dotted Hardian's wall - an invitation to a birthday party from a woman stationed with her husband at one fort to her sister stationed with her husband at another, a letter from a soldier to relatives in Rome asking for some warm woolen socks to fight the damp chill of northern England.)

The Church preserved much material from the ancient world, often in remote monastaries that escaped the clutches of the barbarian hordes, ready to re-educate the world when European civilization was reborn.

Heaven knows much was lost. But the Romans wrote a lot and therefore even the fraction of their work that has survived gives us a huge legacy of Roman writings. So, for instance, the period of Roman rule in Britain has left us much more detailed records than anything we have for the period between the Roman retreat to the continent and - well probably until the Norman conquest.

The nature of the intervening cultures were not such that they left a great deal of written material behind, nor did they depend on written orders to maintain their societies the way Rome did. One of the reasons why we know so much about Rome's economy, population, overseas trade and what-not is that they kept good business records and these also survived - household records as well as tax and business records. If there is a question about whether or not a famous Roman had a son in a given year, gossip in letters among his friends may or may not give you reliable information. But if a notation in the household expense book by the slave in charge says, "Bought a rattle and a crib for my master's new son" you can be pretty sure the kid was real. That's the sort of thing that has come down to us, luckily enough. Doesn't make up for all that was lost, though. I'd certainly like to read Claudius's actual history....

Regards,

Joe

 

[Grant B]

Joe
Can I sign up for your class?

You certainly have a way with words, thanks for taking the time with us hooligans.
Sincerely
Grant

 

[Yee-Ming]

Sounds like Colleen McCullough's conclusion in her Masters of Rome series of books, in particular probably "Caesar", the 5th book IIRC.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Yes, quite. I'd seen some discussion of alternate versions of Caesar's words, but I had seen none that offered a reason to prefer one over the other until I read McCullough's notes, and I found her theory persuasive. Probably should have mentioned that. (And add that Tom Holland, in his well-received non-fiction narrative Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, accepts the traditional wording, although stating that Caesar would have quoted Menander in Greek rather than Latin. Holland has some interesting things to say about which records have survived and which vanished and why, which I'll probably redact a bit and quote in a post when I have some time. I've only just started the book (which arrived in a nice trade paperback edition from Amazon.com on Friday), but so far it is living up to the hype. An excellent resource for anyone made curious about the period by the HBO series.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Yee-Ming]

I didn't say it in my earlier post, but to anyone interested in Roman shenanigans, in particular the life and times of Julius Caesar, McCullough's books are quite entertaining and I'd recommend them to anyone wanting to learn more, especially with the Rome HBO series on now.

A point of dispute: McCullough strongly disavows any suggestion that Caesar was bisexual, although in the Making of Rome they state that he was. Obviously a point of disagreement amongst scholars?

As an aside, the now-defunct Avalon Hill produced a game called Republic of Rome, which IMHO was a very good simulation of Roman politics during the Republican era. The design notes there are also quite illuminating, e.g. in game terms a Dictator may only be elected if Rome faces three "active wars", in effect an extreme crisis, which is when in reality a Dictator might have been resorted to.

 

[todd s]

Thanks for the info Joe. When you mention what was lost. It reminds me of how cool it would be to have had access to the Library of Alexandria before it was destroyed. Can you imagine how much was lost there? :frowning:

On a similar note regarding Alexandria. Did anyone see the Seaquest episode where they find a wing of the library that wasn't destroyed? And it was filled with artwork and writings never seen before. I always wished they would find something like that for real.

 

[Grant B]

Check out the I Claudius series from the BBC which covers that period in time too

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I think McCullough has the right of it vis a vis Caesar's sexuality. There was exactly one, and only one, allegation ever made of homosexual activity on Caesar's part during his lifetime: when he secured the fleet from the King of Bithynia, supposedly by sleeping with him. That was the slur against him then (despite what some documentaries may suggest avowed homosexuality was not a matter of indifference during the Republic, it could end a man's political life) and it was still the slur against him many years later when he was dictator. If he'd been having affairs with men all along, surely they would have come up with something a bit more recent than a nearly forty-year old rumor about a king who'd been dead so long that most living Romans would hardly have heard of him or his reputation.

We know Sulla was gossiped about by his contemporaries, that Tiberius's crimes on Capri made him notorious at Rome, and that Caligula and Nero barely concealed their excesses. Even Scipio Africanus was rumored to be too fond of some of the young men under his command. If there'd been similar notions about Caesar, they'd have come down to us from many sources - but apart from a jestingly obscene song by his own troops there is only the rumor about the poor old King, and there's no particular reason to believe that since it was first spread and then kept alive by his political enemies.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Actually McCullough's series stops before the point where Robert Graves's two novels and the series derived from them begin, and covers much of an earlier period that Graves omits. McCullough's interest was in the collapse of the Republic, not the birth of the Empire. She begins her story with the rise of Gaius Marius, a generation before Gaius Julius Caesar the Dictator, and manages to include much information about the Brothers Gracchi, who in many ways inaugurated the century of chaos that destroyed the Republic a generation before that. She brings the narrative down only as far as the death of Brutus early in Octavian's Civil War, long before the youth has become the Augustus of the Graves piece.

I'd recommend both the Graves novels (I, Claudius and Claudius the God in addition to McCullough and the BBC mini-series.

Regards,

Joe

 

[David Williams]

Discovery Science has been running a cool, hands-on program on the technical sophistication of the Roman Empire (in a series along with the Egyptians & the Chinese). It's called What the Ancients Knew: The Roman Empire and it re-airs this Saturday (9/10) at 4pm E/3pm C.

 

[MichaelBA]

Julius Caesar upon being stabbed by Brutus is reported to have said in Greek: "kai su, teknon," which means, "you too, [my] child." Some speculated that Caesar, who had had longstanding romantic affairs with Brutus' mother, Servilia, was in fact Brutus' father.

The Roman aristocracy could typically speek Greek in personal matters. Latin, professionally.