https://kottke.org/25/11/mary-beard-hollywood-lied-to-you-ab...
Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."
Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.
Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.
Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.
He said both had their rise to power rooted in a (for-the-time) unique meritocratic element, where people would join you compared to the alternative options due to the ability to advance.
On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony.
Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
> Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.
Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.
> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.
From what I've read I wouldn't call games at the Colloseum formal, other than the senators (seated in the front) apparently having to wear togas. There were more (class-based) levels of seating, and restictions on women, but the Circus Maximus also reserved the best seating for the equestrians.
I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
SOme history here too https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019/tag/silence/
Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago.
The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.
Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.
(Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)
I got something too, something that nobody wants to depict:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia...
(Science? Science is a craft for creating stories closely coupled to reality. It's a special case and not as popular as you might think.)
To get popular a story needs to be simple, satisfying, logically consistent with the other stories... I think that covers it.
Reality? LOL. We are bronze-age mud-worshippers.