Ancient Literature Discussion (History, Myth, Philosophy &c.)

[hayate]

Been reading Malleus Maleficarum.

I've heard of deliverance rites performed by my parents, and they're undergoing fasting whenever they do so. But this one, yep...

They never even realized the power of the Word at that time.

That one command in the name of Jesus is sufficient enough to drive out malevolent spirits. Surely they only read the Scriptures from an intellectual standpoint and not by faith.

[Sesto]

Richard I is so goddamn cool

[2Bad]

He's a huge idiot

[Sesto]

Sounds like someone is envious of how cool he was tbh

[2Bad]

He basically destroyed his family empire because he danced off to harass a higher tier civilization on the other side of the known world.

Not to mention getting himself jailed hilariously

[Sesto]

You mean he left his kingdom for the sake of the greater good, risking his life in the process, unlike other cowardly kings like Phillip II

I haven't gotten to his capture yet pls don't spoil

[2Bad]

No I mean he abandoned his kingdom and fatally destabilized it on a pointless, unsuccessful military venture

[Five_X]

Not everyone can be an absolute madman like Alexander the Great.

[Sesto]

Who cares about that; managing a nation is boring and for losers. Even if it ended in failure, he still looked cool af doing it

King Richard pursued the Turks with singular ferocity, fell upon them and scattered them [and] wherever he went his brandished sword cleared a wide path on all sides...He cut down that unspeakable race as if he were reaping the harvest with a sickle, so that the corpses of the Turks he had killed covered the ground everywhere for the space of half a mile

I mean ignoring the racism for a sec, how cool does that sound. I would have been proud to call such a man my King

[2Bad]

Pursuing Turks is for generals, managing a nation is for kings

Ritchie was a bad king

[asterism42]

He was an idiot. And yet somehow still better suited to rule than his idiot brothers. Should've just made Eleanor queen.

Despite what Robin Hood'd have you believe, she basically ran the country while Richard was gallivanting off hither and thither anyway.

[2Bad]

A war leader who can't actually win the war and causes his territory to collapse

[Sesto]

In early November 1192, a routine foraging expedition went awry when a group of Templars were attacked and outnumbered. When the news reached [Richard], the king rode to their aid without hesitation, accompanied by Andrew of Chauvigny and Robert, earl of Leicester. The Lionheart arrived 'roaring' with bloodlust, striking like a 'thunderbolt', and soon forced the Muslims to retreat.

Latin eyewitnesses suggest that some of the king's companions actually questioned the wisdom of his actions that day. Chiding him for risking his life so readily, they protested that 'if harm comes to you Christianity will be killed'. Richard was said to have been enraged: "The king's colour changed. Then he said: 'I sent [these soldiers] here and asked them to go [and] if they die there without me then would [that] I never again bear the title of king'"

A worthy king

[Sesto]

Finished reading Thomas Asbridges's history of the Crusades. It was pretty great.

Saladin seems a bit overrated honestly, I was a bit disappointed with him. Nur ad-Din was far cooler.
Richard, Frederick I, and Frederick II were also cool af

[Five_X]

Last week I got the chance to attend a lecture/talk by Tom Holland (no not Spider-Man), historian and author of a bunch of fairly popular books like Rubicon, Persian Fire, and his latest, Dynasty. It was that last book he was talking about, dealing with the subject of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of the Roman Empire, from Augustus to Nero. What he focused on mainly wasn't completely unique, but it was very interesting: he talked exclusively about how these five figures are viewed versus how they most likely actually were, and how we can take our understanding of Roman society and morals and use that to separate fact from fiction. One of the main claims he made was that, chiefly, none of the Julio-Claudian emperors were really all that mad, not even Caligula or Nero.

He talked about how Tiberius, on his retirement to the island of Capri, is "believed" to have done all sorts of terribly naughty things, but this wasn't something derived from evidence but from Roman satire and mudslinging, just like in modern tabloids. In Rome, especially a Rome still within living memory of the Republic, a person having a private rather than a public life was in itself quite shocking and unusual. The Roman Emperors were autocrats, but they were never truly absolute rulers; they were, as living figures, ultimately just men, conspicuously powerful politicians leading the country. They and their families were scrutinized, and when they did things that didn't entirely mesh with accepted Roman morals, they were heckled for it in all sorts of ways. The Romans were a very moralistic people, and hedonism and extramarital sex were as looked down upon then as they were in 1940s America, for example - natural cultural exceptions aside, of course. Augustus pledged to end the civil wars wracking Rome by tightening sexual morals, blaming moral decay for the strife within the late Republic.

When it comes to sex especially, most of the targets during the Julio-Claudian dynasty were, unfortunately, women; for some reason it's the debauched sex that we like to fixate on when it comes to Rome, just like the Romans themselves did. That's why we have stories of Claudius' wife Messalina having served as a prostitute while her husband was asleep, and that she had randy sex competitions with famous local prostitutes. Even Augustus' immensely moral and uptight wife Livia was at least accused of being a poisoner. For the Romans, not only was having a private life an automatic cause of suspicion, so was being a woman and having power - as Holland put it, a woman being in charge was both suspicious and opposed to their traditional morals, but also kind of exciting in the way that forbidden, unusual things are.

Holland gave a picture of Caligula not as a completely insane sex-monger, but as a rather astute politician with a hatred for Rome's senators, loving to oppose and also troll them whenever he felt like it. However, with the way that slander and satire worked in ancient Rome, it was easy for people to paint pictures of the Emperors and their family as being up to all sorts of things behind closed doors - not that people believed that to be the honest truth, but because it was funny and, owing to distaste for the figures involved for various reasons, were, if not believed outright, at least believable.

It was really interesting to hear, and I'd have been very happy if it had been longer than just one short hour. I probably mangled his words and ideas, but it was a great lecture and he was an engaging and funny speaker, which made it perfect.

[aldeayeah]

So, many of our historical sources on public Roman figures are roughly equivalent to The Onion.

[Five_X]

More like the Daily Mail, really.

[asterism42]

That actually explains a lot.

[aldeayeah]

More like the Daily Mail, really.

Let's settle on Type-Moon wiki.

[You]

Magical eye powers in mythology?

Like Balor, Medusa, Basilisk, Shiva's third eye etc etc