# Classical Civilisation



## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Are you interested in ancient Rome and Greece? And could you recommend me an introductory history book to the period?

So far, my historical and literary explorations have been very heavily based in the medieval European period, but I'd like to branch out and don't quite know where to start.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Gibbons. You are a classicist - so where else?


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Hilltroll72 said:


> Gibbons. You are a classicist - so where else?


Is Gibbons a writer or are you talking about monkeys? I'm not a classicist.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Have ever tried reading the Philosophical writings of Aristotle, Socrates or Plato? Those are interesting.


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## Fsharpmajor (Dec 14, 2008)

Polednice said:


> Is Gibbons a writer or are you talking about monkeys? I'm not a classicist.


This is what Hilltroll means:

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire*

I don't claim to know anything about the subject myself.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

violadude said:


> Have ever tried reading the Philosophical writings of Aristotle, Socrates or Plato? Those are interesting.


I've dipped into those, but at the moment I'm looking for a modern introductory history to the period.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

If you want to get a feel for the ancient historians and their styles/area of focus, there's the well known Michael Grant book, The Ancient Historians.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Polednice said:


> I've dipped into those, but at the moment I'm looking for a modern introductory history to the period.


Science-wise, those guys were mostly wrong - and the Europeans bought it anyway for a l-o-o-n-g time.


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## Rasa (Apr 23, 2009)

E non vero...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I wouldn't read Gibbon because we've learned so much since the 18th century, unless you're just interesting in finding out what 18th century people thought about Rome and the Byzantine Empire. 

A great short book is "Ancient Greece" by Martin. If you want the long version, Fine's "The Ancient Greeks." 

I haven't read it yet, but I believe Starr's "A History of the Ancient World" will be good.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

science said:


> I wouldn't read Gibbon because we've learned so much since the 18th century, unless you're just interesting in finding out what 18th century people thought about Rome and the Byzantine Empire.
> [...]


Certainly Gibbon's historical storyline can be improved upon regarding factual data. He had to do considerable guessing from the data he was able to find. It's really the _'beside-notes'_, so easy for the reader to connect to the main subject, that make the work a fascinating read. One of my older brothers, long ago, possessed a printing of the work that had been edited to change the 'beside-words' to afterwords; readability was effectively destroyed.

Since _Poley_ appears to be doing a Sgt. Joe Friday, your suggestions (and those of others) are much more sensible. But I can't resist pointing out that Sgt. Friday was a pretty dull guy.

:tiphat:

[I forgot to add: DUM de DUM DUM]


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Hilltroll72 said:


> Certainly Gibbon's historical storyline can be improved upon regarding factual data. He had to do considerable guessing from the data he was able to find. It's really the _'beside-notes'_, so easy for the reader to connect to the main subject, that make the work a fascinating read. One of my older brothers, long ago, possessed a printing of the work that had been edited to change the 'beside-words' to afterwords; readability was effectively destroyed.
> 
> Since _Poley_ appears to be doing a Sgt. Joe Friday, your suggestions (and those of others) are much more sensible. But I can't resist pointing out that Sgt. Friday was a pretty dull guy.
> 
> :tiphat:


Well, after a couple of sour apple martinis he was a real hoot. So I hear.

The classic work of nonfiction is an odd beast: it is almost doomed to be surpassed by later research. A thing I'd appreciate is if some company such as Norton perhaps would make annotated "Critical Editions" of works like _Decline and Fall_, _Wealth of Nations_, _Origin of Species_, and so on, in which scholars would inform readers about advances in the field that the authors didn't know about, what issues in the work are still debated by contemporary scholars, and so on.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

science said:


> Well, after a couple of sour apple martinis he was a real hoot. So I hear.
> 
> The classic work of nonfiction is an odd beast: it is almost doomed to be surpassed by later research. A thing I'd appreciate is if some company such as Norton perhaps would make annotated "Critical Editions" of works like _Decline and Fall_, _Wealth of Nations_, _Origin of Species_, and so on, in which scholars would inform readers about advances in the field that the authors didn't know about, what issues in the work are still debated by contemporary scholars, and so on.


Good idea I think, except that the (side-words would be nice) comments would likely be more 'readable' if done by a 'popularizer'. I think of those guys as a kind of collator. The scholars/researchers provide the data, but I wouldn't have to contend with what is often a constipated writing style derived from that required in a doctorate thesis.

But maybe that procedure wouldn't do for the edification of professionals - of which class I am not.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Hilltroll72 said:


> Science-wise, those guys were mostly wrong - and the Europeans bought it anyway for a l-o-o-n-g time.


Yes, but who wouldn't without certain key discoveries being made? Anyway, Frederick J. Copleston's A History Of Philosophy series is a monumental achievement of erudition chronicling the development of western thinking. Volume one covering the classical period. http://www.amazon.com/Frederick-Coplestons-History-Philosophy/lm/1616OC9WOFRMJ


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

starthrower said:


> Yes, but who wouldn't without certain key discoveries being made?
> [...]


I ain't disagreeing. My point (besides the one on my head) is that, through no fault of the ancients, their Faulty Findings were accepted as a kind of Holy Writ for way too long. Shucks, if not for that stagnation we'd have Men on the Moon.

No matter, I guess. If the plutocrats saw a profit in it, we'd have Dyson Spheres in the trailing and leading stable orbits by now.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Why does Greece and Rome get all the limelight. Phoenicia! Now there's a civilization! They had a modern alphabet when everyone else was still drawing damn pictures of everything.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Couchie said:


> Why does Greece and Rome get all the limelight. Phoenicia! Now there's a civilization! They had a modern alphabet when everyone else was still drawing damn pictures of everything.


 East of there the original pictographs had become too highly stylized to be considered 'pictures'. Don't know that the symbols represented sounds rather than syllables, but is there a valid value judgement between those attacks on the problem? I suspect that the alphabetical approach was more valuable as a pointer toward numeral arithmetic. Maybe.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

A problem I've pondered is I feel in many cases we have the most war-like groups of people writing history. In reading about their cultures I've come to the realization the ancient Greeks and Romans were for the most part fairly sick people. I would speculate a lot of the artistic and spiritual treasures found in these cultures were simply plundered from earlier civilizations many of which have likely been erased from the history books. 

I did manage to get an A+ in a Roman civilization course in college simply by studying the notes I took in class (I didn't buy the required texts). I'm pretty sure I have forgotten about 90% of the information I learned. Ahhh the wonders of the modern educational system!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

tdc said:


> In reading about their cultures I've come to the realization the ancient Greeks and Romans were for the most part fairly sick people.


In living in my own culture, I've come to the realization that us modern folk are for the most part fairly sick people. The question is which kinds of sickness you're more willing to tolerate, and I think the many ways in which the ancient civilisations flourished appears preferable to me than the uninformed ignorance that so often wields or desires power in our times.

Of course, if I were born then, I would be dead by now because of my health condition, so I'm glad I find myself in this century in this country, but, though I admit I am speaking from an uninformed position (hence my starting of this thread) I can't help but think we still haven't recovered in some respects from the destruction of those cultures.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Here's an interesting piece that argues against the idea of the Romans as sick, sadistic people.
http://janusquirinus.org/essays/Arena.html


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

starthrower said:


> Here's an interesting piece that argues against the idea of the Romans as sick, sadistic people.
> http://janusquirinus.org/essays/Arena.html


Doesn't do much to argue against the idea that they were... (this is a test) derriere-anuses though.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

My feeling, even taking the justifications into account, is that they were a cruel, sadistic, ruthless lot. Of course plenty of other civilizations were just as ruthless.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

starthrower said:


> My feeling, even taking the justifications into account, is that they were a cruel, sadistic, ruthless lot. Of course plenty of other civilizations were just as ruthless.


Are you talking "foreign policy", or right down to the last woman and child as they brutally set about torturing grapes into wine?


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

No, I don't mean they terrorized their own citizens in some type of systematic, brutal order. But they did do horrible things to the unfortunates in society. There was also massive corruption among the leadership throughout the empire. Kind of like in America today. The top 1 percent living in obscene luxury while inflicting burdensome taxes on the working poor, and adopting an attitude of indifference to their suffering. I read about this in the book Crossing The Rubicon, The Last Years Of The Roman Republic. It's not surprising another author chose the same title for his book on the American empire.


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## Guest (Jan 30, 2012)

For a more provocative look at Greek and Roman history, try Charles Freeman's "The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason". In it, he maps out how religious pluralism in the Roman empire was stamped out once Christianity got its turn to be the state religion. There was a tradition for all emperors to adopt a religion, sort of on a rotating basis, but Christianity was notoriously intolerant of other religions. Once the Christians took power, they pretty much plundered everyone else's temples. And then the Christian church morphed (once again) to take on many of the traditions of imperial Rome.

If people read more, I think this would be a highly contention book. In general, the earliest years of any religion is when it typically looks most banal and cult-like. Efforts to reconstruct the first 300 or so years of Christianity are particularly illuminating.

Charles Freeman has many other books, including "Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean", which is used for undergraduate survey courses. He's certainly no dummy.

To give you a sense of Freeman's argument, here's a quip about another one of his books "A.D. 381":

_In AD 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This edict defined Christian orthodoxy and brought to an end a lively and wide-ranging debate about the nature of God; all other interpretations were now declared heretical. It was the first time in a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization free thought was unambiguously suppressed. Yet surprisingly, the popular histories claim that the Christian Church reached a consensus on the Trinity at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381. Why has Theodosius's revolution been airbrushed from the historical record?

In this groundbreaking new book, acclaimed historian Charles Freeman shows that the council was in fact a sham, only taking place after Theodosius's decree had become law. The Church was acquiescing in the overwhelming power of the emperor. Freeman argues that Theodosius's edict and the subsequent suppression of paganism not only brought an end to the diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs throughout the empire, but created numerous theological problems for the Church, which have remained unsolved. The year AD 381, as Freeman puts it, was "a turning point which time forgot."
_


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

The concept of The Trinity was a borrowing - most recently for them from Zoroastrianism - that is what has been forgotten. Also apparently forgotten by Freeman is Mithraism, which survived the edict by centuries. "Groundbreaking' has among its contexts that of burial, or in Freeman's case sloughing off inconvenient data?

:tiphat:


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Hilltroll72 said:


> East of there the original pictographs had become too highly stylized to be considered 'pictures'. Don't know that the symbols represented sounds rather than syllables, but is there a valid value judgement between those attacks on the problem? I suspect that the alphabetical approach was more valuable as a pointer toward numeral arithmetic. Maybe.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Couchie said:


>


You jumped too far east, _Couchie_. Maybe Mesopotamia?


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Truly, Persia is a great, neglected and too often maligned society. I didn't know that the idea of a trinity came from them, but many (or even most) of the ideas we think of as "Judeo-Christian" started with them. The Romans learned a lot from them as well. And their influence stretched eastward to China: it was probably Persian Buddhists who invented the Boddhisattva, for instance.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

Hilltroll72 said:


> You jumped too far east, _Couchie_. Maybe Mesopotamia?


Sumeria? Better than the Egyptians, but nothing on Phoenicia.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

The Greeks are great... brilliant sculpture, architecture, and literature. The Romans have some great literature and are brilliant engineers. The Egyptians have the most sensuous art... but I go for the Persian/Sumerian/Babylonian/Akkadian Empire... 'Mesopotamia' or Iran/Iraq, myself. Babylonia/Sumeria/Akkadia/etc... or present-day Iraq was absorbed into the Persian Empire in the 6th century BC and remained so-aligned until the fall of the Persians to the backwater Arabs after making the mistake and openly confronting the Byzantines when they were not properly prepared. The Persian Empire had already outlasted both Greece and Rome. After the Arabs came the Mongols and the Turks... and then Persian came into a second glorious "classical era" around the same time as the Renaissance:


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

tdc
A problem I've pondered is I feel in many cases we have the most war-like groups of people writing history. In reading about their cultures I've come to the realization the ancient Greeks and Romans were for the most part fairly sick people. I would speculate a lot of the artistic and spiritual treasures found in these cultures were simply plundered from earlier civilizations many of which have likely been erased from the history books.

You never watched _The Third Man_, did you?






Art has always followed wealth and power for the simple reasons that wealth and power are largely supportive of art. It might also be noted that the the great centers of wealth and power are also centers of trade and the influx of trade includes ideas and skilled artisans and intellectuals.

Art is not Egalitarian. It never has been... and quite likely never will.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Gibbons. You are a classicist - so where else?

Polednice... you're majoring in literature. You should read Gibbon's if only because he was one of the greatest writers of English prose. As for his accuracy... I suspect most of the revisionists of today will be revised several more times in another century. Personally, I'd get a simple overview of the culture in question (Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc...) and then focus upon primary sources: Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer, Aeschylus, Sappho, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, etc...


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## anshuman (Jul 6, 2010)

Try BRIEF HISTORY OF
ANCIENT GREECE
Politics, Society, and Culture By Sarah B. Pomeroy et al (OUP:2004) Also Some parts of the great Cambridge Ancient History might be useful. Of course this has to be supplemented by a close reading of the primary sources- Thucydides,Xenophon,Plutarch,Tacitus etc


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

science said:


> Truly, Persia is a great, neglected and too often maligned society. I didn't know that the idea of a trinity came from them, but many (or even most) of the ideas we think of as "Judeo-Christian" started with them. The Romans learned a lot from them as well. And their influence stretched eastward to China: it was probably Persian Buddhists who invented the Boddhisattva, for instance.


I did a little googling and there's quite a bit of debate about the trinity origin. I'll have to read into this further and see who has their facts straight.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> tdc
> A problem I've pondered is I feel in many cases we have the most war-like groups of people writing history. In reading about their cultures I've come to the realization the ancient Greeks and Romans were for the most part fairly sick people. I would speculate a lot of the artistic and spiritual treasures found in these cultures were simply plundered from earlier civilizations many of which have likely been erased from the history books.
> 
> You never watched _The Third Man_, did you?
> ...


This is an interesting clip, thanks for posting. You do have a bit of a point to tell you the truth, I think there is a purpose to negativity in the universe, that is why I don't have a problem believing in a divine force and plan for our spiritual evolution despite the dark seemingly chaotic times we are in. There is a reason they call Lucifer ' Light-bringer', though Lucifer is not the light.

I would suggest art is neither egalitarian or non-egalitarian but more about a distilled form of expression.

Stiff catalyst can bring out the best (and worst) in the human spirit, but so can love. Perhaps nothing much happened in Switzerland during its times of peace, but I don't think this can be used as an excuse to justify atrocious behavior.

I would love to see what kind of renaissance would occur if the U.S. military industrial complex is shut down, and the thousands of suppressed patents regarding free energy technologies are released, freeing up people's time and resources. At this stage such an event can lead to a golden age on earth for everyone - including the sun-god worshipers.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Polednice said:


> Are you interested in ancient Rome and Greece? And could you recommend me an introductory history book to the period?
> 
> So far, my historical and literary explorations have been very heavily based in the medieval European period, but I'd like to branch out and don't quite know where to start.


What's your interest: Historical annals, or period literature like philosophy and art?


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Lukecash12 said:


> What's your interest: Historical annals, or period literature like philosophy and art?


I'm interested in finding out about general culture, daily life, belief systems.


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## Chrythes (Oct 13, 2011)

I've been following this thread and it partially revived my interest in history. 
Aside from the suggested books (some I'd probably get in the future) maybe do you know any good documentaries about Greece, Rome and especially Mesopotamia?
I know history channel must have some, but knowing that they aired Ancient Aliens I don't really know what to expect.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Gibbons. You are a classicist - so where else?
> 
> Polednice... you're majoring in literature. You should read Gibbon's if only because he was one of the greatest writers of English prose. As for his accuracy... I suspect most of the revisionists of today will be revised several more times in another century. Personally, I'd get a simple overview of the culture in question (Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc...) and then focus upon primary sources: Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer, Aeschylus, Sappho, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, etc...


It's nice to see primary sources being championed. In classical history, especially when it comes to having to rebut the dubious works of writers like Pervo and Doherty, you have to sift through so many footnote references just to get down to the original source.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Polednice said:


> I'm interested in finding out about general culture, daily life, belief systems.


Then you'd be interested in the original sources that Stlukesguild referenced you, period sociologists, and the anthropologists of many disciplines who study the regions you are interested in. If you'd like to discuss classical civilization a little bit with little ole me, you may enjoy that as well, because I've been obsessed with the first century for a long time.


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