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Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about. I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisat

Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about. I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now. I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been. Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.

krysp 1y ago
At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been. I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).
- wkrsz 1y ago
  > At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been. Debatable. Proponents of "original affluent society" argue that agricultural civilization was a major step back in terms of quality of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
KolibriFly 1y ago
Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress because people can only measure against what they know
- jalk 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jalk 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - jalk 1y ago
        Thanks, I see your point. Was not trying to be snarky/funny, but rather come with counter example to parent. I was thinking about the (recent) "Era of globalization" - but perhaps that is too short of a time span to be called an era
        potato3732842 1y ago
        Just tossing out more examples than just MAGA would likely have sufficed IMO. Current Russian expansionism, 1930s Italian ambition in Africa, etc, etc. There's a fair bit to to make interesting comparison to even if you restrict yourself to "modern" (i.e. industrial revolution and beyond) societies.
- saispas 1y ago
  I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or cultural evidence that previous generations could do things that they couldn't. E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle. Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Those petty kingdoms did have the technology to build that - they just were too small to have enough people.
    - saispas 1y ago
      Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to preserve surviving classic manuscripts. It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed). Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
- f1shy 1y ago
  I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that currently there are more people that think the past is better than the present. There is even a statement "every past time was better": is a subjective perception influenced by cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties. Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
- bazoom42 1y ago
  No, most ancient people believed in a steady decline from a golden age in the past.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  > Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that there was a society before them that had the capacity to do things they could not.
bonoboTP 1y ago
I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common. Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > The progress Progress towards what, exactly?
  - willis936 1y ago
    Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
    - getpokedagain 1y ago
      Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.
      - falcor84 1y ago
        Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death. I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
plomme 1y ago
IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- username332211 1y ago
  Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters. On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
  - mr_toad 1y ago
    Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.
    - KineticLensman 1y ago
      Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
    - username332211 1y ago
      That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders. This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.
close04 1y ago
> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now. I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today. But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had. Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.
- graemep 1y ago
  > For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had. I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there. 1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy. 2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people. 3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/ https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
  - saispas 1y ago
    I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them. E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology. And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
verzali 1y ago
Is the headline actually wrong? Its literally about how they saw themselves.
probably_wrong 1y ago
Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields. As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life, > the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan. [1] https://acoup.blog https://acoup.blog [2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only tangentially related. Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc. How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in. Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.
cjs_ac 1y ago
Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar to many Americans' current fascination with the British class system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)
compyman 1y ago
This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations. The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization. For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights. I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

krysp 1y ago

At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been. I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).

wkrsz 1y ago
> At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been. Debatable. Proponents of "original affluent society" argue that agricultural civilization was a major step back in terms of quality of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

KolibriFly 1y ago

Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress because people can only measure against what they know

jalk 1y ago
[flagged]
- jalk 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - jalk 1y ago
      Thanks, I see your point. Was not trying to be snarky/funny, but rather come with counter example to parent. I was thinking about the (recent) "Era of globalization" - but perhaps that is too short of a time span to be called an era
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Just tossing out more examples than just MAGA would likely have sufficed IMO. Current Russian expansionism, 1930s Italian ambition in Africa, etc, etc. There's a fair bit to to make interesting comparison to even if you restrict yourself to "modern" (i.e. industrial revolution and beyond) societies.
saispas 1y ago
I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or cultural evidence that previous generations could do things that they couldn't. E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle. Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
- bluGill 1y ago
  Those petty kingdoms did have the technology to build that - they just were too small to have enough people.
  - saispas 1y ago
    Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to preserve surviving classic manuscripts. It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed). Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
f1shy 1y ago
I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that currently there are more people that think the past is better than the present. There is even a statement "every past time was better": is a subjective perception influenced by cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties. Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
bazoom42 1y ago
No, most ancient people believed in a steady decline from a golden age in the past.
potato3732842 1y ago
> Every era probably feels like the apex of human progress Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that there was a society before them that had the capacity to do things they could not.

bonoboTP 1y ago

I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common. Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> The progress Progress towards what, exactly?
- willis936 1y ago
  Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
  - getpokedagain 1y ago
    Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death. I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.

plomme 1y ago

IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
username332211 1y ago
Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters. On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
- mr_toad 1y ago
  Slavery was quite common in classical Greece too, especially in Sparta.
  - KineticLensman 1y ago
    Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
  - username332211 1y ago
    That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders. This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.

close04 1y ago

> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now. I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today. But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had. Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.

graemep 1y ago
> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had. I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there. 1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy. 2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people. 3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/ https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- saispas 1y ago
  I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them. E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology. And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?

verzali 1y ago

Is the headline actually wrong? Its literally about how they saw themselves.

probably_wrong 1y ago

Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields. As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life, > the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan. [1] https://acoup.blog https://acoup.blog [2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...

potato3732842 1y ago
I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only tangentially related. Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc. How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in. Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.

cjs_ac 1y ago

Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar to many Americans' current fascination with the British class system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)

compyman 1y ago

This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations. The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization. For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights. I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]