Ancient Greece vs Ancient Rome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKDzVXSAP6w&feature=related

wau

i mean, jesus christ.

why hasn't this woman been fired

apparently we think that it doesn't matter if ppl who watch daytime television are served ignorance of this level, just a bunch of housewives amirite? look i'm sure joy behar would fail a 9th grade exam if you handed it to her but this shit is ridiculous and maddening to me.

I am really actually choking on my club sandwich, unholy fuck.

good god

that was like six months ago or something wasn't it

ha yeah

She's an actress, right? Not a history teacher? So why is this a big deal?

anyone who does not know the world is round or that things occurred 'before jesus' need to be mercilessly hounded from any position in the public eye

You want everybody ignorant removed from the public eye you're gonna have a pretty thin TV schedule.

that's cool with me. let's reduce all TV broadcasting to 2 hours a day.

anyway I prefer Rome to Greece for the underrated silver-age Latin writers, bitchin' foundation myths, its mystery cults, Petronius, Apuleius, Suetonius, oratory, and its much cooler pantheon - the Greek Gods are the big heavy metal badasses no doubt but in Rome it's considered disrespectful not to honor anybody's God so you get all these urbs-dwellers bringin' their own thing, Lares Familiares and all, and it's kinda rad

both Greece and Rome had cool mystery cults but again I give the nod to Rome

I'm reading this at the moment and one of the things Lane Fox says is that the Greeks had a far wider pantheon of local and private gods than the Clash of the Titans dudes we know and love, so their pantheism was of a kind with the Romans. Greece vs Rome might be the only situation in history where I prefer the snobby effete team.

I dunno which one I *like* more but Rome is certainly more interesting to me

The Greeks invented awesomeness, there's no contest.

Whereas the Mesopotamians invented grid-based cities and water rights bills. Those things are kind of awesome, maybe.

I thought I should really learn about the Hittites once, but then when I tried, my god was I wrong. They are DULL motherfuckers.

The Hittites carried the big stick, back in the day. Beyond that, not so much.

Does anybody know that much about the Hittites other than the trail of kicked asses they left in their wake?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Colosseum_in_Rome-April_2007-1-_copie_2B.jpg/800px-Colosseum_in_Rome-April_2007-1-_copie_2B.jpg

I'm really more of a Minoan kind of girl.

seriously. they had flushing toilets. pwn!

I think I like the Meso-American ancient civilizations the best. Way gnarlier mythology and architecture.

Would the Romans be anything close to what they become without the Greeks? It's as if it was a dependent and borrowed civilization (that built upon past ideas...) And to those above saying the Roman pantheon was cooler, surely you jest: the Roman deities were faint echoes of their Indo-European/Hellenistic counterparts, THEY GOT SO MANY DETAILS WRONG, and the religious pilfering from everywhere != coolness, but rather pantheistic confusion. Example A: Mithras (would be blasphemous to orig. Indo-Aryan worshippers of Mitra!)

Politically speaking, and as far as city-states go Rome blows away Athens and Sparta...but culturally, by Jove - no! Zeus! - the Hellenes are still superior (sayeth the mythology snob)

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/snakegoddess/images/minoansnakegoddess2a.jpg

I'm really more of a Minoan kind of girl.

-- Laurel, Tuesday, April 8, 2008 10:11 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

The concept of the theriomorphic god and especially of the bull god, however, may all too easily efface the very important distinctions between a god named, described, represented, and worshipped in animal form, a real animal worshipped as a god, animal symbols and animal maskes used in the cult, and finally the consecrated animal destined for sacrifice.

i'm starting to warm up to the 'byzantines' but do they count as greek or roman?

Would the Romans be anything close to what they become without the Greeks? It's as if it was a dependent and borrowed civilization (that built upon past ideas...) And to those above saying the Roman pantheon was cooler, surely you jest: the Roman deities were faint echoes of their Indo-European/Hellenistic counterparts, THEY GOT SO MANY DETAILS WRONG, and the religious pilfering from everywhere != coolness, but rather pantheistic confusion. Example A: Mithras (would be blasphemous to orig. Indo-Aryan worshippers of Mitra!)

Well, yeah, if your deal is "the original model is best," then OK. But I don't care who came up with shit first; I care about whose take was more interesting. The Roman deities are "faint echoes" - they're syncretistic, and more heavily informed by inflowing African influence (vide Apuleius especially for this - once shit gets post-imperial it's really, really interesting). "Getting details wrong" = what I prefer to THE ORIGINAL 'CORRECT' MODEL which is boring literalist rockist nonsense.

aren't "faint echoes" I mean: they're third and fourth drafts

Apuleius - The Golden Ass is really something impressive. It's as if the ancient world developed their own post-modernism.

Ancient Greek literature approached something similar with Lucian's A True Story, but Apuleius man ... genre parody, pop culture, the self-aware narrator, toying with the narrative structure as it existed in the ancient world, etc. Good stuff.

bronze age greece is best

I miss school. Real life surprisingly cares very little about dead language literature

Apuleius - The Golden Ass is really something impressive. It's as if the ancient world developed their own post-modernism.

That's because the ancient world really did develop all the ideas that post-modernism likes to think it dreamed up, cf. also Petronius, Propertius, Euripides, etc etc

also Hesiod, fuck yeah

Oh I'd be the first to proudly admit a total rockist when it comes to mythology :) - since I'm of those kooks who believe these are/were "real accounts" about "real figures" that shouldn't be tampered/fucked with or hybridized. But I can understand the argument that the cosmopolitan influences upon Rome would make them "more interesting" in some academic way

"It's as if the ancient world developed their own post-modernism."

hi Aristophanes

The "Hellenistic period" post Peloponnese war up to Rome gaining an emperor is so fscinating. Athenian ideals, Greek philosophy, science and city-state political concepts being disseminated all around the med, eastern europe, west asia and africa, a little globalisation going on before roman corrupton and christian fanaticism. This great enlightened cosmopolitan world opening up.

i'm starting to warm up to the 'byzantines' but do they count as greek or roman?

I'd count them as Greek -- there was not only more ethnic overlap, but Greek culture remained relevant in Byzantium long after it decayed to virtually nothing in the West. The Renaissance was kickstarted in Italy by Byzantine scholars.

but they called themselves 'romei'! anyway, they probably aren't even 'ancient'

The Byzizzes were too goody-goody Christians *comparatively,* to really count as belonging to either classical culture. Nice work on those icons though. And I heard Empress Theo used to be a stripper

The Byzantine period was a weird parallel to the post-Roman and Medieval period in the West. Definitely interesting; it's impossible to appreciate the development in the West without taking the Byzantine period into account.

I'd take any ancient "real accounts" with plenty grains of salt man, it's not like ancient historians had any less of an axe to grind than modern ones!

To J0hn D: "Real accounts" since I think myths were true part of my harhar bizarro religious beliefs that are culturally prohibited on aetheistic ilx. We shouldn't discount traditions that had primarily oral histories, even if that's against the rules of modern scholarship. Honestly I'm interested in origins of myth with the factor of cross-cultural sharing being an exciting one (as it is to you), but the "similarities" in comparative myth make for really interesting puzzle games in which many of the pieces are missing...

For example, Latin Jupiter is clearly related to Vedic "Dyaus" who was derived from Indo-European "Dyeus Pitar" = "shining father," - who in Greek became Zeus from Dyeus... but speaking in terms of personalities, Jupiter/Zeus have nothing in common with the abstract, fatherly Dyaus Pitar ...they are much more similar to his randy, young, hot warrior-ruler son Indra..

Similarly, Uranus might be cognate with Varuna, but latter-day Varuna, Lord of the Seas / God of Ocean is loosely congruent with Poseidon/Neptune, and dissimilar to Father Sky Uranos (who suffers a terrible fate with his testicles in Greek myth that thankfully Varuna bypassed)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_%28mythology%29

Ouranos and Váruṇa

Georges Dumézil made a cautious case for the identity of Ouranos and Vedic Váruṇa at the earliest Indo-European cultural level.[5] Dumézil's identification of mythic elements shared by the two figures, relying to a great extent on linguistic interpretation, but not positing a common origin was taken up by Robert Graves and others. The identification of the name Ouranos with the Hindu Varuna, based in part on a posited PIE root *-ŭer with a sense of "binding"— ancient king god Varuna binds the wicked, ancient king god Uranus binds the Cyclopes— is widely rejected by those who find the most probable etymology is from Proto-Greek *worsanos, from a PIE root *wers- "to moisten, to drip" (referring to the rain).

It's also interesting that Roman deities (a word that itself derives from "dyaus") that have no Greek counterparts...do not have much mythology, such as Janus

And I wonder how much of those "Roman mysteries" were derived from Greek ones, such as at Eleusis

mmmmmm.... PIE! (Proto-Indo_European)

yeah I should say that even though I get really excited to say "Rome is totally as interesting as Greece for so many reasons, people need to not sell Rome short because Rome is badass and Catullus & Propertius are so heartbreakingly wonderful that you gotta recognize!" etc., the ancient works that always hit me hardest are Works & Days & the Greek tragedians

xpost yes! yes. the Lares Familiares, the native/local Roman/Italian gods, those are kind of what makes Roman cosmologies cool - the grafting, the accomodation. Lots of that in Greece too but it's less clear to me than Rome, which is kinda like a religious agora, everything goin' on at once.

I did a whole class on the mystery cults. A fair number of them have roots in Greek cults though there are one or two that seem wholly Roman - IIRC the Mithras cult? i.e. proto-Christianity) but I may not RC, it's been a long time.

I think a lot of those "native" Roman religious aspects and mysticism are borrowed or adapted from erstwhile Etruscan traditions, and other localized Italian pagan pantheons...but by the time we reach the height of the Roman republica and the empire to follow, the Greek influences are undeniable and so thoroughly blended in, they're almost indivisible from what came before. Yet you are correct: the wholesale pilfering and blending and compositing of countless cosmological realities is fascinating on some level...but for one always concerned with the *origin* of legend as I am, Roman religious intermixing can also seem heathen and profane!

A good example is this very Mithras himself, who is radically different from his Indo-Aryan roots. The Iranians adopted him as a figure quite greater in stature than he ever was to the Indians, and like a limitless tall tale, his cult only grew from there - and for whatever reason (compared to what? Why do the earlier myths seems more "organic" ? Because we don't have clear trajectories of their developments, lost as we are in PIE-recreation? I don't know)...it all seems inauthentic or illegitimate, "invented," if you will (to me!). It would be like if the Japanese adopted the Virgin Mary nowadays and made her the patron Shinto goddess of gardening, and we'd be reading about it in the 25th cent. - it might seem artificial and almost arbitrary. That's what the Roman and Near Eastern cult of Mithraism seems to me as of now, once removed from his Persian popularity, twice removed from his Zoroastrian function, and thrice removed from his Vedic origins.

Mitra was originally belonging to the celestial classification of "asura" -before they were the antithesis of the divine "devas" - associate god/best friend of our above-discussed cosmic Varuna's - and the lord of associates, contracts, and friendship itself ('mitra" as an improper noun means "friend" in Sanskrit). The Iranians, for whatever reason, adopted the "asuras" as benign and cast off the "devas" as demonic, the polar opposite of the Vedic Aryans' weltanschauung, and proceeded to make Mithra (adding the H) more important: he now presided over ALL human interactions. And his closest associate Varuna? There have been a number of arguments made that suggest that he's none other than Zarathustra's "Ahura Mazda," himself - or Asura (the Persians frequesntly lost or replaced he Sanskrit "s" with an "h") the Great.

As Ahura Mazda was the all-encompassing force of goodness, an almost attribute-less entity that cannot and *should* not be personified in Zoroastrianism (indicative of his roots as corresponding to Varuna's secret divine law "rta," - a concept very similar to Tao)...the more mundane, human, grand-heroic attributes could therefore by applied to Mithra, the more accessible form of the dyad. From there, almost like a ridiculously generic superhero, we see him accommodating all sorts of traits and characteristics that had nothing to do with whatever his original functions were, almost like all the minor deities of the civilizations the Parthians were conquering, were being swallowed up in his newfound formless persona. Formless since it was becoming all-encompassing!

It wasn't long before he'd get to Rome and become extremely trendy, as Rome was unique in often being culturally conquered by whoever they'd militarily subdue. But it still seems like the Roman Mithras, by that point, really had become a surrogate god to replace former Greco-Roman figures in worship, and serve as a more vibrantly pagan alternate to Xianity, a sort of "all things to all people," divine figure. It's interesting, but also somewhat confusing and depraved. Or maybe I just feel uncomfortable with mythological compositing and would prefer my divine hierarchies to remain clean, distinct and separate, thank you. :)

I'd really like to hear about what you learned in your class on mystery cults though!! Would you have to initiate me? I'm really fascinated by Eleusis in particular, I don't know why - something about Demeter and the earth worship gets to me. If you'd like I can start a separate "rolling mythological matters" thread, or possibly just email you

I feel like I'm a little out of my league with you because you sound more current than I - I did a lot of studying about this stuff in the mid-nineties, but that was a long time ago and I don't entirely trust my memory. That said, however: I think we come at stuff from entirely opposite perspectives: I'm always less interested in the origin/original and most interested in the syncretistic traditions that arise around imported/pilfered/borrowed myths, legends, gods, etc. Partly this is because I think the whole idea of an original is fallacious: "original" only means "as far back as we can trace it": it's almost beyond doubt that any of our original figures stem from the mother goddess in her many forms, and that she herself is rooted in something else that doesn't survive. Which! Is why I'm pretty into Demeter worship myself - there's something so basic about Demeter and her cult, so potentially-original-and-complete: the earth feels like as basic as you can take it, right? Except for maybe the ocean, and that's maybe a modern way of thinking about the ocean - certainly ocean gods in ancient myth aren't loving fecund gods but destructive fork-wielding ones like Poseidon.

In the Mystery Cults class we did Demeter, and Mithras, and Cybele/Attis (the big one of course because of the castration), and Isis in late Rome which is where I get really excited - bring Isis into Rome and have her devotees claim a sort of Krishna-in-the-Gita-per-the-bhakti-cult status for her ("all gods are actually me") and wow, you have this awesome interaction of local traditions and new things from the outside world = the way I'd like the world to work culturally, really: all traditions fluid and available to everyone in a limitless field of play.

OK I get pretty romantic about this stuff

also yeah you're right I should say "Italian" rather than "Roman" to refer to native traditions, like ancient Rome itself I tend to say "Rome" to mean "a huge region with lots of different people & traditions"

not gonna choose, but i gotta say, the iliad and the odyssey both kick the crap out of the bloody aeneid.

"the greeks are" not "the greeks were"

dunno if this is what you're going for, but modern greeks aren't really descended from the ancient greeks for the most part ... this stuff is pretty misty at this point, but I remember learning that nearly the entire population of Greece died off during the Greek dark age and the Greek peninsula was repopulated by various Slavic tribes who adopted Greek culture from Byzantium. so modern Greeks are more related to modern Russians, Bulgarians, and Turks than to the ancient Greeks.

that's true for the cities, but not the islands. and there are lots of greeks in the hinterlands and in the mountains of arcadia who've mixed with the bulgars etc. but still trace their ancestry back millenia

Village life is prettty durable in terms of cultural stasis. The chances are that the only hueg change in Greek village cultural life since the Periclean Age was the advent of the Orthodox Church; apart from that it's just painfully slow accretions.

2,000-year-old ruins of a Roman military chief's luxury villa with 14 rooms, marble floors and ornate mosaics are unearthed by subway construction workers in Rome