Moderation Questions

probably fair but i think given most people have no idea and assume there's a fluid and seamless transmisson over the course of history then stuff like that warrants being brought up and given special attention

ie take anything written by homer - the oldest extant and intact copies are from the 10th century, nearly 2,000 years after it'd been originally written
nevermind that we don't even know if homer was a group of authors or a single person or even when he wrote his works
but the amount of typos, editorial decisions to cut or expand upon, mistranslations, etc over the history of the works means what we read today is very far from the original text

i know this because when i entered college i wanted to study ancient greek so i could read the classics in their orginal translation (i'm very good with languages, am fluent in chinese despite only studying it for 1 year study abroad in high school where it typically takes people several years of dedicated study) and then was heartbroken to discover that no such copy existed, i could of course learn medieval greek and read that but alas it's the old cleopatra was born closer to the age of the iphone than the pyramids dilemma

yes i know, again, i'm not saying they are necessarily forgeries, just that there are without a doubt many pieces in museums today that were renaissance era forgeries much like much of the great works studied as part of a classical education in the victorian era were later shown to medieval and renaissance forgeries as well

i say this as someone with a deep love of history to the point where i even went to live in egypt for over a year simply because the nature of my income means i can live anywhere so i figured why not go see ancient ruins every day and so i did just that for over a year (helped that i was with a gf who also loved that stuff as well had similar flexibility in her life) - no way single rick could have lasted that long in an arab world

this is probably my favorite of all time - like it even more than egyptian caracalla

you can tell by the horrible lighting that i took that myself 😀

I don't know about the poems and the plays, but most of Plato and Aristotle can be traced to manuscripts from 100-200 AD. That's still several hundred years after their time, and the manuscripts obviously are copies of copies of the originals. But there is a good chance that they are relatively faithful copies because Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. were all very famous intellectuals in their lifetimes.

My comment was unrelated to whether they are forgeries. I was just noting one reason why the eyes look creepy.

There is a fair bit of forged art from all eras in museums across the world. For obvious reasons, after a work has been deemed authentic by the art community, a museum doesn't have much incentive to go back and revisit that judgment.

too late for me, i already discovered alcohol and porn - they draw my attention far more than learning ancient greek these days

You are both missing the forest for the trees. I have no issue with the Islamic golden age and the importance of its scholars in regards to Greek knowledge or European culture.

What I have issue with is THIS statement:

Because this statement completely omits the existence and influence of the Byzantine empire / eastern Roman empire. This is literally the continuation of the Roman empire where Greek language and culture became dominant, and one of the most significant cultures in European history.

The Crusades brought classic Greek texts to the West in the 1200s, and a lot more came with the flight from Constantinople after the Islamic conquest in the 1450s. So it wasn't all about Averroes, or about the Islamic empire generally. The Arabs translated the Greeks into Arabic, but that was unintelligible to Western scholars. Of course even Greek was difficult, because, while it was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe relied on Latin. Averroes, 1126-1198, was only influential once he was translated from Arabic into Latin.

btw homer probably never existed and/or never wrote anything

In 10k years people will be speculating if Luciom ever existed

Will be hard to dispute if he wrote anything though. Assuming everyone's writing decays/becomes lost to time at the same rate, there will come a time when his is the only left from our decade.

Nah, the memes might exaggerate it a little, but there is a lot of truth to it.

I am fascinated by how modern Europe is the descendant of fractured medieval kingdoms and fiefdoms that were so haphazard they don't even quality as nations let alone countries, built on the ruins of enormous fallen empires vastly more advanced. That doesn't mean the middle ages were backwater times filled with dumb people, but it is post-apocalyptic: Craftsmanship, ingenuity and isolated advances are the norm. They were using ancient roads they could no longer build, taking masonry from buildings they could no longer make and the world was so dangerous that overland travel became one of the most dangerous things you could do.

We might borrow a lot of terminology, law and structure from Antiquity, but our ("western") culture is definitely more from that later period. Therefore Antiquity has that alluring shine of massive, mysterious and strange Empires that are very distant to us. I think anyone can be drawn to that, but it is perhaps culturally something that has been more of a "man"-thing.

Of course culture is overlayed on it; but because of sex hormone differences during development "boys" brains are just wired differently than yours; and fascination with empires of yore is a manifestation of this. If you are interested, Jordan Peterson spends a lot of time musing on how evolutionary psychology can be used as a tool to examine such sex-linked psychological dichotomies.

I, for one, am absolutely shocked that you're a Jordan Peterson fan.

I was also shocked to discover that he's a real person. I always thought it was just Billy Bob Thornton doing some sort of performance art.

On the "right wing" X inter webs, there is actually this whole sub community that discusses group and individual psychology, mainly focusing on the history of western civlization, in the context of Nietzsche. I haven't read any Nietzsche myself, but some of the discussion is very interesting.

Generally, Nietzsche argued that the Roman Empire (and the Muslims during their conquests FWIW) had a master morality; as opposed to Christianity which was a slave morality. I think it is pretty easy to guess which morality right wing X edge lords think is superior.

You know ev psych will get you banned around here but maybe you're just genetically predetermined to like playing with fire.

as someone who took 6 years of Latin, the genocidal rapacious nature of the West can draw a distinct line to the Roman Empire and late Republic.

Do they like to listen to Wagner as they discuss Nietzsche by any chance?

Truly amazing that you got all that from studying a language. Was it the imperialistic declension and the colonial conjugation that gave the game away?

Not as bad as Rickroll, but I think it is fair to say I am generally disagreeable in nature, which manifests in "playing with fire." FWIW disagreeableness is also identified as skewing generally male, obviously with a lot of individual variation.

Well, that is certainly a bunch of absolute nonsense if Jordan Peterson is telling you that, he should probably sign up for Pscych101 again.

I had lunch next to an expert on the history of Assyria not long ago, and she delivered a 10 minute monologue about Assyrian bureaucracy. Apart from being one of the best lunches this year, it also nicely shows how this post of yours is drivel.

maybe to a typically incurious person

You are right. Clearly all group differences, no matter how well studied and reproducibly documented, are negated if one can find a single anecdote that is an exception. Check mate. You got me.