I hope whoever penned this quote was proud of themselves, it still carries a provocative punch after 2000 years:
‘Would you in your refusal to revoke this law’, the question was put to the Senate, ‘allow the trappings of your own horse to be more splendid than the dress of your wife?’
Animals sans humans are honest about fooling you, too.
Yes, I appreciate that that sounded very hypocritical but I implore you to give it deeper thought. I hate dealing with humans because 99.999% of them are two-faced or more to varying degrees, animals sans humans are one-faced and thus honest to a fault including being honest about lying.
Animals don't intend nor even attempt to deceive, unlike humans. They have a goal in mind, and they just do whatever presumably achieves that goal sooner. They are honest even if they seem like they are lying.
Another way to look at it is a computer throwing out wrong information. The computer doesn't care about deception, it's just honestly doing what it was told with what it knows.
Sometimes I wonder if the norm is the world doesn't lie and humans are the major exception. Humans are fucking assholes.
> Animals don't intend nor even attempt to deceive, unlike humans.
I mean, that's just factually wrong.
Animals aren't different at all from humans in that regard. Since you don't seem to have much experience with animals, perhaps you might be interested in one tiny example:
The reproductive strategy of cuckoos is based on deceit, quite fundamentally.
And humans generally lie to achieve some goal -- humans don't generally tell major lies for no reason at all. And their minor lies often have an emotional reason behind them -- e.g. to avoid offense or avoid conflict or preserve their ego.
All that being said, I'm sorry that you've had such terrible experience with other people. If you haven't already, I would definitely suggest exploring talk therapy. It can help you both to figure out how to deal with people, as well as how to identify and find other people who are emotional supportive and beneficial, rather than people who drain and harm you.
>The reproductive strategy of cuckoos is based on deceit, quite fundamentally.
Is that deception, though? Lying? It might look like deception as far as humans are concerned, but the cuckoos just want other birds to raise their chicks.
>I'm sorry that you've had such terrible experience with other people.
It's not so much that as it is all humans are two-faced to some degree of non-zero value. Human society is also structured in a way that honest, one-faced people finish dead last. It's tiresome, downright exhausting even when there are no negatives involved.
I never so much as have to care about that if I deal with animals, they are honest to a fault including when they "lie". What you see is what you get; animals are a breath of fresh air compared to humans.
Clearly you’ve never stood behind or near a barn sour (or just plain cranky) horse.
They will crush your feet, or even kick you in the head.
I was in the mountains and had a mare roll over and try to pin me to a boulder when I was on her - it was 5am and cold + icy, and she clearly didn’t like that.
Unfortunately for her, I grew up around a barn sour horse and saw it coming. Several
times he tried to scrape me off against trees at full gallop.
People are more dangerous just because they can manipulate others to kill/destroy you, and due to opposable thumbs can use weapons and construct machines/traps to kill you.
Physically they’re far weaker and less capable than a horse. A horse can consistently kill a full grown man with a single well aimed kick to the head.
I’ve also been threatened with knives 3 times, and shot at once, by humans - but near as I can tell, they weren’t serious about it. They just wanted the reaction. Unlike those horses.
If horses (or cats for that matter) had opposable thumbs or speech, the sky would be the limit.
> The lex Oppia was implemented to severely curb female expenditure on adornment and finery.
This explains that other laws had been repealed following the conclusion of war 20 years prior. Women took to the streets in protest and filled the senate. As a result the lex Oppia was revoked.
Interesting event. Let's not engage in presentism while we consider the implications of it today.
I'd never encountered the term "presentist" before, and at first blush it sounded like some kind of hipster slang.
Turns out it's been a word for at least a century, and I have to admit the definition encapsulates a worthwhile concept. Not to be confused with "presenteeism".
The commenter could also have said: "Let's remember we're viewing this through the looking glass of today's values."
Why do you consider simpler the use of the incomprehensible expression “through the looking glass”, as a looking glass is something you cannot see (view) through.
Lewis Carroll’s use of “Through the Looking-Glass” in the title of one of his books is an explicit joke in this regard. I don’t think you meant that same joke.
Of course you can see "through" a looking glass (mirror) - you will see yourself. That's what they are for - direct reflection.
"Through the looking glass" involves physical movement via a mirror and that is science fiction or fantasy or both (pick your genre or hit the drugs!) When I want to verify I have shaved fully, I look through a mirror, which is not a sight for the nervous ... first thing in the morning!
There are half silvered mirrors and you can get a similar effect with a window, where you can see yourself and what lies beyond at the same time.
We see in a mirror, not through one. Yes, a half silvered mirror can be seen in and through, but that’s hardly true of the mirrors of the time when the archaic term “glass” meant what we call a “mirror”.
Sorry to be a pain but put a ruler on the end of your nose (for accuracy, stick it in your eye) and touch the other end to a mirror. You may have to adjust yourself a bit but you will see two rulers, end to end, from you to you'. One of them is in your hand and the other one is an image (and also has your "hand" holding it) but it still has the property of measurement.
The image of yourself that you see "in" the mirror isn't actually "in" the mirror. The rulers are showing you that the mirror is doing something that causes an image of you to appear exactly twice the distance from you to the mirror.
The mirror image of yourself is actually on your own retina, which is exactly the distance from you to the mirror and from the mirror to you.
We can debate semantics and to be fair, most people will use your terminology. It's bloody hard to ignore the "evidence" of your own eyes!
Since you were talking about choice of language I thought I’d seize the opportunity to make a jocular comment on your own choice of words. Hope you saw it in the spirit intended.
Sure. And people 50 years ago were seeing history through the looking glass of their values 50 years ago. And whoever contemporary is writing about those events is biased by his own social class, economic interests, emotionality, gender, age and what not. Just like people today actually have quite diverse opinions, even if they live within one society.
The root of the "presentism" complaint is just weak attempt to prevent actual engagement with history whereas you try to look at situation from more then one point of view.
Indeed! I most often see it used in the context of apologists defending an organization's history by hiding people for looking at history with their current values. These apologists tend to miss the cases where their defended org was also seen as abysmal by people concurrent to their own time.
As a modern example, almost everyone sees Epstein as a purveyor unmitigated corruption. Imagine in 200 years people defended him because in 200 years sex trafficking is also horrible.
Half the time it amounts of defending past equivalents if Heydrich Himmler, arguing they were big leaders who achieved great territorial expansion and well matching ideological opinions of his peers. While radically rejecting anything a Jew, socialist, French, Czech, German who did not voted nazi, homosexual thought at the time.
As someone who spent years studying classical and medieval philosophy, and a few more years studying medieval history, this really pisses me off.
I guess astrophysicists have to deal with people who read Steven Hawking and think they’re brilliant physicists.
But Hawking is generally right.
It’s so insane how serious scholars are allowed to treat this area like it’s crap, ignoring the work done by serious philosophers and historians.
I guess I’m a bit sore because one of the most respected faculties of medieval history in America replaced their “Medieval History” courses with “Modern Conceptions of the Middle Ages” - which is the Middle Ages according to Shakespeare , Chaucer, and Tolkien.
There’s still good work being done here, but the stupidity is alive and well and being passed off as reality.
Wait, how does Christianity makes sense if women have no souls?
> Christianity swung between the Augustinian view that women had souls only to have Aquinas take up Aristotle’s position that women were incapable of reason and therefore had no souls
> The question of women having Souls was only resolved for the Church in 1950 with the promulgation of “The Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven” and the Papal Bull (De munificentissimus Deus 1950) which accompanied the creation of a special feast to commemorate this event
This isn't even remotely accurate to Christian belief in either the Catholic or Orthodox churches. There isn't a single church father who believed women didn't have souls, that's facially ludicrous if you know anything about church teaching which means the person writing this did not.
Here's a simple example out of many I could draw on: if women didn't have souls they wouldn't be able to receive the sacraments. That means no baptism, no chrismation, no Eucharist, no marriage, no reconciliation, and no extreme unction. It would be metaphysically impossible to be sacramentally married to a woman. C'mon. There would be no need to distinguish between sacramental and natural marriages if women were soulless because they'd be unable to confect the sacrament with their espoused.
The misreading of St. Augustine here has to do with a distinction he was making regarding Imago Dei. He pretty clearly believes women and men are spiritually/metaphysically equal, including as it relates to their spiritual dignity deriving from being made in the image and likeness of God. The passage that gets misread has to do with physical nature and its derivation from Imago Dei. I don't think it was a particularly important point and it's not something I've seen repeated elsewhere.
You know, for a place as respectable as HN when it comes to internet discourse, it is odd how any commitment to the truth gets thrown off the window when it comes to religions and Christianity specifically...
Neither of those sentences cite a source. The papal bull notes, "our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the loving Mother of God's Immaculate Conception."
Pope Pius IX died in 1878. Did he proclaim that Mary was born without sin but she still didn't have a soul?
So, how many errors do we have to find in the paper before we just dismiss the paper as nonsense?
This turns e.g. hard won fights for civil liberties and other very-nice-to-have things (parental leave, say, for countries developed enough to have it) into even more of a never-ending battle than they already are.
It seems like that would not necessarily be the case, since not all laws would be temporary. But there would certainly be a push to make controversial things a temporary law.
I have contemplated whether every law should be explicitly time limited. There are some theoretical arguments for it - all uncontroversial laws (e.g. no murdering) should be renewed, and other laws can be re—evaluated (e.g. a number of US states enacted laws in the 90s preventing under—18s having pagers, which are at best irrelevant today, ignoring all other facts)
The trouble is that perhaps our societies are now so polarised we’d never be able to agree to pass uncontroversial legislation without partisan horse trading.
Laws that are uncontroversial in one year can become very controversial in another. Is it murder to kill your slave? Is it murder to kill the man breaking into your home at 3AM? Is it murder for the government to kill the man convicted of murder?
I think it's a good idea for all laws to have sunsets, though some could be longer than others.
In the US, I see federal laws renewed every few years with little public debate, sometimes released to the legislature with little opportunity for them to debate, let alone read and verify changes.
> The trouble is that perhaps our societies are now so polarised we’d never be able to agree to pass uncontroversial legislation without partisan horse trading.
Again, some things may be more controversial than they appear.
When things are uncontroversial, I think there's usually broad agreement to pass it without horse trading. More often, I see something (very) controversial is packaged with the uncontroversial, and the reporting of the situation is biased.
Laws past are often changes to legal code, they often soon have other code intertwined with them. How do you expire code automatically, do all dependent changed also have to expire? How do you track the dependency tree?
Horse trading is an aspect of compromise: you want A, I would rather not; I want B, you would rather not; so we agree on A & B.
The trouble for me comes where you want A, I also want A, but I claim to want A*, so that I can ‘compromise’ with you to agree A and another policy I want, B.
If people want some specific changes, such as real, well-provided single-payer healthcare without the involvement of for-profit insurance companies, and universal prescription coverage, then they need to follow the examples of Roman women: mass, nonviolent action that targets the pocketbooks of the billionaires and the gold-bar-taking crooked politicians in a sustained manner.
Medicare is incomplete, complex, confusing, expensive to the patient, and outsources much of itself to for-profit insurance companies. And Medicaid is terrible, offering only sometimes temporary and limited coverage for very poor people during emergencies and minimal care because few doctors accept it.
Back when that meme of "how often do men think about the roman empire" was going around, I was talking to my girlfriend about it and I noticed how I couldn't name any Roman women other than [Agrippina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippina_the_Younger).
I mostly just watch [toldinstone](https://toldinstone.com/) and [Historia Civilis](https://www.historiacivilis.com/) on Youtube. I'm not really that interested in roman history, it's just nice infotainment to put on in the background, so it's not like I am going out of my way to learn about roman history, so it may also be that the presenters are glossing over the role of women in roman society. But I also watch a lot of ancient roman cooking videos, and again, the role of women is often absent in the historical texts that these videos quote from.
I find it odd that I can only name a single roman woman, when I can name at least a few dozen women in other historical time periods that were very patriarchal. medeival, renaissance, and colonial era European history has many famous women, and Chinese and Japanese history has many named women, many in the courts of nobles, but they were still written about. I also don't read into these eras of history deeply, I just consume infotainment about them.
It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them. Or is it that pop-history about ancient rome tends to be more male-oriented than history about other historical eras, and so women are just not talked about?
Don't need to get farther than 3 paragraphs in and a Roman woman is politicking in high Roman politics:
Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction. For so firmly had she riveted her chains upon the aged Augustus that he banished to the isle of Planasia
Was there a name? It wasn't mentioned in the quote. Was it revealed later? If not, I suspect the OP's point stands. The only woman I could think of was Helena, mother of Constantine, of course that's the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantine, not the seven hills people often think of when they say Rome.
And I could add Anna Komneme, who was definitely Roman, but not in the Classical period nor the city of Rome. Boudicca and Zenobia were more famous for disagreeing about being Roman, and leading revolts.
Oddly the most famous women of the Roman Empire were commoners in Roman Judea: Mary, Anne, and Mary Magdalene.
Well Irene managed to usurp the throne in a similar way to most male emperors (by scheming and murdering her opponents, even if one of them happened to be her own son…) and even managed to rule on her own right for a while. Which was extremely unique historically, even by modern standards (how many female dictators are there?).
Livia. She's named in the phrase just before that. The full quote is:
"When Agrippa gave up the ghost, untimely fate, or the treachery of their stepmother Livia, cut off both Lucius and Caiusº Caesar, Lucius on his road to the Spanish armies, Caiusº — wounded and sick — on his return from Armenia. Drusus had long been dead, and of the stepsons Nero survived alone. On him all centred. Adopted as son, as colleague in the empire, as consort of the tribunician power, he was paraded through all the armies, not as before by the secret diplomacy of his mother, but openly at her injunction"
That's Livia Drusilla, also Iulia Augusta, wife of Emperor Augustus and mother of Emperor Tiberius.
Thanks for the clarification. I remember reading Mary Beard's Women and Power, and her lament regarding Greek literature was related to this point. She used examples from the Iliad, Odyssey and other works to illustrate how in the history of humanity, soft power that women frequently exert (politics) has minimized in favour of hard power (violence) that men tend to norm towards.
The point that I'm replying to and that I quoted is 'Romans didn't write about women'. I don't see how it stands when you can open a Roman chronicler and right away he's writing about women.
The only woman I could think of
I mean, you have 'suspect' and 'think of', I've got a link to a big pile of Roman writing. It's not hard to check if women are in fact represented in Roman writing.
> It makes me wonder how much worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently didn't even bother to write down anything about them.
One thing to note is that freeborn women in Ancient Rome were citizens but could not vote and could not hold public office, severely limiting their public role and hence reference by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Rome
Probably mainly because it’s relatively underdeveloped Wikipedia article and we have very few surviving sources from the Roman period compared to the middle ages (and I’m pretty sure the list of Greek women or any place pre ~1000 AD would be even shorter).
There's a self-fulfilling cycle that happens here in both history and anthropology where the assumption when looking at old cultures has been that they were a patriarchy, because that's all we've ever seen, because every time we look at an old culture we're assuming it's a patriarchy, so when we see things that look like a matriarchy we assume we're mistaken because everything else we've seen has been a patriarchy, so this must be one, too.
For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy, the assumption has been that these were gods being portrayed, and not rulers, because rulers are men and these were women, so they couldn't have been rulers.
You see similar where we'll find grave sites where the skeleton seems female, but they're buried with the trappings and in the fashion of a ruler, and a shocking amount of effort is spent trying to reconcile that contradiction.
(This is not to argue that Rome was actually a matriarchy or anything silly like that, rather that the blindness of history to the role of women reaches almost comical levels in other places, so it's not surprising to find a blank spot in Roman history in pop culture, at least.)
>For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy
Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."
Yes, and the reason it's taken more than 40 years to go from conjecture to broadly if grudgingly acknowledged theory is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries. Looking at the evidence on its own without the notion that a matriarchy would be outlandish and weird, there'd be no doubt what you were looking at, but instead we spent a long time talking about how strange it was they kept painting fancy women on the walls and we couldn't figure out who their kings were.
>is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries
Given 100% of present societies and all examples from recorded history can you blame them for this baseline? That's literally what a baseline is supposed to be!
Like, you're adding say USA (350M), China (1.4B), France (80M), etc with say, some Amazonian tribe of 5K people (which you don't count as part of the 99.999% patriarchical Brazil)?
I guess in that way it's enough that 200 tribal villages (more than the UN nations iirc) to be matriarchical for the world to be "predominantly matriarchical" or at least 50%-50%.
Agree op is wrong as worded. Sort of depends how you count though. If you count like an anthropologist, tons of non patriarchal examples.
But they don't seem to have scaled in the same way for one reason or another.
If you count by membership the number of people who live in patriarchal societies vs not, I think you would come up with an answer very very close to 100% patriarchal.
There's a little bit of an interesting facet of this, which is that it depends on how you're defining patriarchal societies - if you're looking at what is explicitly encoded into the legal systems, it's hard to argue that, as of today, the US or really most of modern world qualifies, and similarly if you're looking at who holds power, while the gender skew is still towards males, a disinterested observer from the future would not observe a society in which power is either exclusively or as a rule held by men. I'm not sure the legal structures around gender in China or India (if we're talking about percentages of the global population), though, although at least for India one could argue Indira Gandhi might have been the most powerful person in India since the empire.
Semi-related, I was doing some reading about different cottage industries from antiquity and the feudal era and was wondering if a feudal-era simulator existed that included cottage industries as part of its core mechanics. I ended up finding that Manor Lords game later on which features this exact mechanic!
It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.
Last thing, there is a anecdote by Richard Feynman I think where he is in a room with his friend's wife who is crocheting. He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?". It's interesting how much knowledge humans were about to collect about the world before the scientific method.
There is a book "1000 Years of Women's work" that is on my reading list now but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
> It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.
There is a very rich strain of feminist literature on this very point!
> He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?".
If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.
That's a similar but different anecdote. The one I am thinking of he specifically is talking to someone's wife while she is crocheting. It may not have been Feynman though, I CTRL+F'ed "Surely You're Joking" and wasn't able to find it or I would have cited my sources in the parent comment.
I was thinking something very similar to this. For all the thinking about the Roman empire, we (well the vast majority of we) need to be very thankful we live now rather than then. Tom Holland's dominion gives a very interesting run down of the horrors of those times.
> worse roman civilization must have been for women that they apparently
When it comes to women rights the Romans were relatively progressive (possibly unintentionally) by historical standards. I think certainly an improvement over the Taliban style treatment of women in classical Athens..
By the mid/late Republican period they switched to a form of marriage which allowed women in practice to retain their legal personhood and wealth to some extent after marriage (legally she remained under the protection of her father/family while living in her husband’s household, meaning that he had very limited authority over her or her personal property).
In the Imperial period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum while far from universal (but from what I understand it was possible to get it without having 3 children in some cases) granted women comparable rights to those they possessed in pre-1800s Europe.
In later European monarchies you could have a queen or a woman acting as a powerful regent. There's no way a woman could be elected consul in the republic though, and it seems like child emperors were not much of a thing. I think the same is true for lower levels on the political ladder: they were all elected instead of truly hereditary, so women were legally barred.
Yeah, but that was the case in the western world until the 1900s. I doubt someone would describe France in the late 1800s in the same way though (and they didn’t get the right to vote until 1944).
Until well into the Imperial period women didn’t even technically have their own names. They based all called Julia, Claudia, Cornelia etc. which was just the female version of their father gens. If you had 3 sisters sisters you’d just be Claudia IV..
So basically it’s pretty easy to come up with an unlimited number of Roman women if you just know a few Roman family names. Of course for boys it was only marginally better since each family just reused 3-4 first names (and eventually just started using numbers instead of names as well..)
Also their mythology was full of powerful women, why would an oppressive and patriarcal society would tolerate having a woman as the goddess of knowledge or hunting?
Probably women were happy in their housewife role, so were my grandmothers.
> These restrictions prevented what these women saw as their right to be elegant in appearance.
...
> The events that it set in motion on the streets of Rome created a precedent which saw Roman women stand up for their rights and make their voices heard.
Recognizing that yes, women and men should have the same legal rights, I find it hilarious that the tipping point that year was that women had to limit their wardrobe in public.
"Cato argued that the law removed the shame of poverty because it made all women dress in an equal fashion. Cato insisted that if women could engage in a clothes-contest, they would either feel shame in the presence of other women, or on the contrary, they would delight in a rather base victory as a result of extending themselves beyond their means."
Again, men and women should be equal under the law, but it isn't an antiquated notion that women would engage in a "clothes-contest", particularly among economic classes.
(Men, to be clear, are socially permitted far less peacocking with clothing, so there isn't anywhere near the same contest.)
> I find it hilarious that the tipping point that year was that women had to limit their wardrobe in public.
Im not an expert in that time period, but my guess would be that was the one thing women had of their own and it was being taken away.
Men did their peacocking with their more tangible possessions. With both women and men equally wanting to participate in the timeless human condition of wanting to show off and one-up their peers. Take that away from either men or women and I would guess it causes a tipping point of rebellion.
Even at our point in history, there is at least one watch brand which advertises with the message that this particular toy[0] is one you are merely the custodian of until you bequeath it to your successor[1].
[0] the difference between men and boys is how many people are on the payroll for taking care of their toys.
[1] for patina, rings beat timepieces, but those families aren't exactly a growth market, now are they?
‘Would you in your refusal to revoke this law’, the question was put to the Senate, ‘allow the trappings of your own horse to be more splendid than the dress of your wife?’