History Summarized: The Roots of Rome
Added 2023-08-18 15:05:03 +0000 UTCThe Roots of Greece is olive trees, the Roots of Rome is... well, whatever Livy and Virgil tell us they are.
-B
Comments
Remarkable, that’d be interesting! I have a founding story for America, and it’s based on a true story (no, really): The history of New York City is practically real, genuine, certified organic American…. The Dutch set up New Amsterdam (for reference, see Blue’s vid on Colonial American cities) and welcomed and encouraged settlers to do trade and commerce (but let’s not get into why Wall St is allegedly named WALL St, or it’s humble beginnings as a slave market 🙂). It had a gravitational pull and it shows when you look at records and documents and see Portuguese, Afro-Caribbean, German, Jewish, English, , Italian, Hispanic, African, etc names spread across the pages. It was an entry point from the beginning, and there was religious tolerance and any amount of languages you can guess were spoken. There was representation-ish in government, not like VA’s House of Burgesses,, but Virginia had slaves, and New Amsterdam had free African men, so it started okay
Paul Adam
2023-08-25 12:09:53 +0000 UTCA lot of social creatures have some way of recognizing who's part of their group: bees can recognize who's genetically related to them, and of course a lot of animals have pack sizes that are just ... small enough that you recognize everyone who's in your pack. But humans have the ability to make cities, nations, movements, among people who have no prior relationship and in numbers much too big to recognize everyone. So how do you tell that someone's part of "your people", when you've never seen them before and you have nothing in common? In _Sapiens_, Yuval Noah Harari argues that it's because of our ability to share a common story: you know that someone is Roman because they speak Latin and they act like someone who understands the story of Romulus and Remus. OK, so they look nothing like you, but Rome has always been a mongrel empire -- just look at who Romulus admitted to the city! Although the story is definitely not real, the belief in the story has very real impacts on the material world. And I feel like this -- the ways in which beliefs in stories has a measurable impact on history, regardless of the accuracy of the stories (from founding myths to propaganda) -- is (a) a thing that society could really benefit from us talking about more, and (b) could be done better by OSP than by maybe anyone else on the internet. It's the perfect intersection of Miscellaneous Myths and History Makers, and I'd love to see more of it, if you guys felt inspired to do so.
Kraken Artificer
2023-08-23 17:05:18 +0000 UTCIn Futurama’s opposite coin flip dimension, the people of the old Remean Empire are probably learning from the Buble!
Jason Veevaert
2023-08-18 22:50:55 +0000 UTCAh, no wonder werewolves seemed to have their origin story in the Greco-Roman period?
Violet Sterling
2023-08-18 22:18:04 +0000 UTC
