No, the Roman republic was much more peaceful and prosperous than this, internally, during its good times. What we're seeing now tends to mark the decline.
I'm so ready for ancient Greece that I'm prepared to start studying classical Greek declensions right now. Prepare the Time Machine!
People go on about how the Greeks were barbarians who had slavery and fought endless internecine wars, with the implication that we are civilizationally superior to them. I ask these people: who do you think made your Nikes? Santa's elves? Do you think pixies assembled your cell phones and other electronic devices, not to mention mining the minerals used to make them? Who made the cheap synthetic clothes most of us are wearing these days? And as for warfare: was the Peloponnesian war more brutal than what's happening in Mariupol right now, to say nothing of what's happened in Iraq, Yemen or Syria over the past 20 years or so?
The substantive advantages over western antiquity that we enjoy are basically things like bicycles and washing machines; especially washing machines. But the real difference between us and them is that they had an incomparably more civilized attitude toward human sexuality.
No, the Roman republic was much more peaceful and prosperous than this, internally, during its good times. What we're seeing now tends to mark the decline.
ReplyDeleteZ
Send me back to Ancient Greece. Or if not that into some indigenous tribal area.
ReplyDeletehttp://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XqDS-NW2P3Y/Tgrkn0QXzXI/AAAAAAAA05U/EHRGkZhMaTQ/s1600/86.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DaZ2KcIhO9c/SZmv1VOsWOI/AAAAAAAAFgQ/EaYXzhPduXk/s400/omo01.jpg
I'm so ready for ancient Greece that I'm prepared to start studying classical Greek declensions right now. Prepare the Time Machine!
ReplyDeletePeople go on about how the Greeks were barbarians who had slavery and fought endless internecine wars, with the implication that we are civilizationally superior to them. I ask these people: who do you think made your Nikes? Santa's elves? Do you think pixies assembled your cell phones and other electronic devices, not to mention mining the minerals used to make them? Who made the cheap synthetic clothes most of us are wearing these days? And as for warfare: was the Peloponnesian war more brutal than what's happening in Mariupol right now, to say nothing of what's happened in Iraq, Yemen or Syria over the past 20 years or so?
The substantive advantages over western antiquity that we enjoy are basically things like bicycles and washing machines; especially washing machines. But the real difference between us and them is that they had an incomparably more civilized attitude toward human sexuality.
Z
"Love has reason, reason none"
Delete-William Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle"
Precisely!
DeleteZ