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The Road from Rome
- satya71 6y agoLooks like they are talking only about the Roman Empire in the west. The Empire in the east, which was bigger and wealthier, continued for another 1000 years or so [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire
- uniqueid 6y agoAlso, Constantine the Great created the Catholic Church. That an institution from Ancient Rome is still going strong today boggles my mind. If humanity is around ten or twenty thousand years from now, perhaps historians will just lump us together with the Ancient Romans, and consider it all part of the same era.
- yongjik 6y agoWell, we already do something similar with terms like "Antiquity", even though Julius Caesar lived closer to us than construction of the Pyramid of Giza.
- jackcosgrove 6y agoWhen the Romans conquered Egypt, their take on it was something like, "Wow, this place is old."
- jbay808 6y ago"We thought we were ancient, but this is even older than us!" It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the ancients also had scholars and studying ancient-to-them history. They considered themselves modern...
- pixl97 6y agoIf you're writing this statement, you're modern. If you're reading this statement I may no longer be modern.
- kibwen 6y agoThe opening line of the 4,000 year-old Sumerian poem "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the nether world": "In those days, in those distant days, in those nights, in those remote nights, in those years, in those distant years; in days of yore, when the necessary things had been brought into manifest existence, in days of yore, when the necessary things had been for the first time properly cared for, when bread had been tasted for the first time in the shrines of the Land, when the ovens of the Land had been made to work, when the heavens had been separated from the earth, when the earth had been delimited from the heavens, when the fame of mankind had been established, [...]" Even the people of 4,000 years ago were romanticizing the ancient past!
- pjmlp 6y agoIt is somehow fun to be able to read > 2000 years old letters from rich people complaining how their sons were wasting their money at the Athens university, by spending it all in parties and playing rich instead of attending classes. Or how Greek medicine students would do "erasmus" in Egypt, considered more advanced in medicine practices.
- mncharity 6y ago> They considered themselves modern... Last week I was surfing google books. Was skimming The History of Modern Europe. Noticed it was from 1871. At least for me, there's something about human artifacts, that can change what feels old. View a museum exhibit, a clay tablet, prescribing interval training for horses, from 3 kya. Something that was held in hands, and could be held in yours. Then, medieval objects, feel like they're from just yesterday, not old at all. I wonder if you could structure an stepped experience, where users repeatedly experience an "oh my, that's old", a baseline shift, and then get hit again with something older, and again. And then walk back through, feeling it all compressed into a stretched now. I don't get the same effect from critters, or geology. Perhaps I'm not familiar enough with them, or thinking in genealogy. Lunch-time's inquisitive squirrel feels peer, but not "just yesterday" cousin. Enjoying the sea breeze, glad Boston is recently coastal, and that there's an ocean there to be coastal with. Despite flowering trees and chirping birds for context. On Gondwanan crust. I wonder if you could cultivate that feeling, and use it when teaching deep time? [fwiw, those are vaguely: 80 Mya, 12 kya, ~150 Mya, ~200 Mya, ~300 Mya, and ~~1 Gya] I've lately been thinking about transformatively improved science education content. For AR, in part. Current content, classrooms, practices, apps, even education research... they've been starting to feel to me... distant? Clustered with inkwells in wooden desks, student arithmetic on Roman wax diptych and drawn on Sumerian sand. The modern of the present, become the patinaed old, the before. The "oh my, people lived like that? How curiously odd."
- nerdponx 6y agoWhat Roman and/or Eyptian source material do we have from this time? I'd love to read this stuff, it's really a trip.
- B1FF_PSUVM 6y agoMaybe they'll figure out that the USA republic is Rome 2.0, "the good bits, now with science added". (A remarkable feat, I might add, perhaps surpassing the first version in overcoming the "you're not in Asia" geopolitical handicap.)
- regus 6y agoAlthough Constantine legalized Christianity the claim that he created the Catholic Church is misleading. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/constantine-has-been-beaten-to-death https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/constantine...
- cwyers 6y agoThree paragraphs in: > It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.)
- billfruit 6y agoNot to mention the Holy Roman Empire which lasted for about a 1000 years till 1806.
- joe_the_user 6y agoThe "Holy Roman Empire" was feudal alliance in no way comparable to the Roman Empire - not that it was insignificant but basically entirely different.
- billfruit 6y agoHRE did claims legitimacy, and had the weight of the Catholic church behind it. Tension brewed for centuries between HRE and the Eastern Empire as to who was the legitimate emperor.
- edgyquant 6y agoWasn’t it Voltaire that said it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoIf you read the article, you would have noted that they mention it at the very beginning: > (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.)
- rektide 6y agoI think a lot of the opportunity cost of there being one & only one interesting city. It took generations, but Rome's fall lead to other places being able to find their own identity & value. Civilizations value became decentralized. This is also a fine example of the classic Trimurti, the cycle of creation, maintaining, & collapse that defines existence. Rome flourished & became, but the world had been "stuck" with Rome for so long, had maintained it for so long, & it's presence was not leaving room for other acts of creation. This article largely asserts that destruction was necessary: Rome was facing a millennia+ old version of "The End of History" hypothesis. Which, to double back to the Trimurti, is against the cycle of creation & existence.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- edgyquant 6y agoBy the time Rome fell it wasn’t even the most interesting city in its empire, let alone “world.”
- fidesomnes 6y agohow do I downvote this?
- science4sail 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Why don't I see down arrows? > There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.
- mtmail 6y agoOut of your 12 comments to far 4 have been flagged. That's a very high ratio and flags is a stronger 'this doesn't belong on this platform' than any downvote. If you believe downvotes send the author of a comment a message, check your own messages, too.
- rektide 6y ago
- jackcosgrove 6y agoAs a fan of pluralism, it's sometimes hard to keep the faith when confronting empires and monopolies. Pluralism is so messy and slow, sometimes it seems like it can't compete. This essay does a good job reminding me that not only is pluralism desirable, it is also competitive.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CryptoPunk 6y agoIt really is hard to make the case for pluralism, and ideas related to it, like the free market and natural selection, over centralization/homogeneity and its corollaries, like planned economies and intelligent design. The latter are more compelling in a shallow analysis. The former are based on a lot of extrapolation, so I think the immediate impression many have is that they're based on wishful thinking / ideological fundamentalism.
- billfruit 6y agoDid the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1450 have a greater impact than the end of the empire in the west on the modern world?
- joe_the_user 6y agoI don't think so. Islamic societies had already appeared and the Ottoman Empire was in the process of expand. I think Byzantium primarily controlled areas in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The development that happened there came later, from elsewhere.
- billfruit 6y agoHistorians think middle ages ended at the fall of Constantinople. From then on progress towards the modern world was swift.
- joe_the_user 6y agoBut I haven't heard a single analysis claiming the fall of Constantinople actually caused this and the parent article gives a pretty standard analysis why the fall of the Western Roman Empire eventually gave rise to the modern world. The fall of Constantinople was more a matter that a variety of more advanced societies (Venice, the Turks, etc) were rising and the Byzantines were there, so why not loot them, as far as I understand the situation.
- didericis 6y agoI listened to a podcast called “12 Byzantine Rulers” a while back. I believe they said a number of people fleeing after Constantinople fell made it into Venice and transplanted a lot of old knowledge that had been locked up and stagnant within the city. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were both heavily influenced by a resurgence of interest in classical work that seems to have started around the exact same time Constantinople fell. I don’t know enough history to know all the reasons in favor or against that argument, but it makes a lot of sense to me that it was a contributing factor.
- fidesomnes 6y agoNōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. Nōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. Per ātrium, ex ōstiō, ex vīllā, in templum, Tūsculō Rōmam, per agrōs et silvās. Cantat Mēdus apud ōstium amīcae suae Lȳdiae. Nōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. Nōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. Per ātrium, ex ōstiō, ex vīllā, in templum, Tūsculō Rōmam, per agrōs et silvās, Viā Latīnā, per Portam Capēnam, cum rosīs et liliīs, cum nummīs sine dominō. Cantat Mēdus apud ōstium amīcae suae Lȳdiae. Nōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. Nōn longa via est Rōmam, ubi habitat amīca mea pulchra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmMauT_GejA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmMauT_GejA