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History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
- Thread starter Plotinus
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By that point, there's not a lot of danger of being confused with paganism, though, because there haven't been any pagans for centuries. Even then, it wasn't anywhere near as popular as 'Romans' until independence.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
It should be noted that Latin (and presumably Greek) was an extremely homogeneous language throughout much of the Imperial period owing to the relatively high level of education, and in particular standardized education that was practiced throughout the Empire. A luxury English didn't really have until the 18th or 19th centuries at the earliest, and English has changed very little substantially during that time.
Also the difference between Old Latin and Classical Latin is prooobably more or less comparable with Modern English and Middle English. Middle English is pretty doable if you know your Germanic roots/are familiar with another Germanic language and have a bit of imagination.
Do you know anything about spoken Latin? After all, most people actually speaking Latin didn't have much in the way of education.
Actually, they did. People speaking vulgar Latin didn't have much in the way of education. So I'm not sure how anyone can claim there was a
throughout the empire. Or anywhere else for that matter. After all, why would peasants need education? They just need to pay taxes.
throughout the empire. Or anywhere else for that matter. After all, why would peasants need education? They just need to pay taxes.
Lexicus
Deity
The word "relatively" would probably give some clue as to how someone could say such a thing.
Hm. This I do know a little bit about. Education definitely wasn't free, and in pretty much every pre-industrial society most people don't really have one - even if you can afford the fee, it's too expensive to not have the children working. There are certainly plenty of legal documents and the like surviving that begin with one name and end with somebody else's signature, with a note that the second person signed it on behalf of the first, who was illiterate. On the other hand, there are a couple of cases like the poet Horace, who grew up a relatively poor farmer's son, was sent to Rome for an education and ended up mixing with the very top of society. That might be a little bit of a self-made-man myth, but we do know that you had to be literate in order to be a centurion, which means that at least a couple of percentage points (allowing for a few premature departures from service, and the desire not to promote the totally incompetent) of the lower social ranks could read and write, even if that came through a rather basic barrack-room education. There's also a surprising amount of handwriting - whether scratched into the walls of Pompeii, on religious dedications or 'curse tablets', or on wax tablets, which have been found at Hadrian's Wall and recently in London. Now, this isn't all particularly good Latin, and it's the sort of thing that's used as a source for spoken Latin, on the grounds that their 'mistakes' probably reflected how they thought the written language 'ought' to look. Nor should we assume that the ability to scratch 'Marcus had sex here' into a tavern wall implied the ability to read the Aeneid. But there's certainly more reading and writing being done than you might think.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Yeah, this. The distinction I'm making here is that Latin (as far as I know even at the vulgar level) was very homogeneous from a linguistic standpoint, which is a stark difference from European languages post 5th/6thish century until the advent of standardized language education in the 19th century, and more particularly with the recent proliferation of tv and radio.
In Imperial Roman times it was conceivable for a Latin speaker to go from Eburacum to Alexandria and still be essentially speaking the same form of Latin, whereas in, say, 14th Century Europe you could take someone from Köln and someone from Strasbourg or München and get 3 things that we'd almost certainly call distinct languages today. Same with Paris to Lyons to Bordeaux or Milan to Naples to Messina.
At the local level hard language divides, or even hard language family divides essentially didn't exist in pre-modern times.
None of which makes for any standardized or empire wide education. It only shows that those educated could (and did) travel empire wide. Which is quite something else. It would be very different indeed if we found empire wide inscriptions in the country, that is, outside of cities (the centres of civilization), villae, and camp or fort locations. That indeed would point to an empire wide education. It still wouldn't be indicative of any standardized education, however.
When you say 'standardised', we do know that educated people were broadly reading the same things and doing the same sort of exercises. The whole idea of 'canonical' literature goes back to Classical times: from Britain to Mesopotamia, those receiving a 'proper' education were reading poets like Homer, Virgil and Ovid, orators like Cicero, historians like Caesar and Livy, and so on - and we know this because they quote them in their own literature and letters, and imitate their style. It was pervasive enough that some medallions made by a British usurper in the 3rd century had an abbreviation quoting Virgil. This is why I'm uncomfortable using the general 'standardisation' (ignoring for a minute that most of our literary texts have been consciously edited and standardised down the centuries) written, literary Latin as evidence for the general unity of spoken Latin. We know that there were forces acting to make educated Latin sound like that, which were not acting on the way ordinary people spoke. What I was asking Owen earlier was whether we have any evidence for the level of 'diglossia' going on - whether learning 'proper' Latin for an ordinary Roman was like somebody with a regional accent learning RP, or whether it was more like going from Scots to English, or even from demotic Greek to katharevousa.
I would agree that for the limited few (because we are talking about the top, say, 5 % of the general population) there might have been something of a canonical (in the sense of setting a standard) education. (In the same sense that in the 19th century there was democracy - just that the people didn't enjoy it.) So you might say there was a standard grammar, rhetoric and literature enjoyed by the happy few. But it's not exactly what 'standardized and empire wide education' suggests. So I would just like to see some nuance added.
Fwiw, standardising Greek was happening already in the time of Socrates, if one goes by the various dialogues exactly dealing with grammar, syntax and etymology/orthoepeia. Protagoras was foremostly a grammarian, it seems, and he also was arguing in favour of using the correct term for each instance (what orthoepeia means anyway, and the term is also found in Plato).
Moreover the awareness of more and less refined use of Greek was a known subject a couple of centuries prior to that. Even Solon the legislator is sometimes said to have coined the term "solicism', which means 'rural/uneducated use of terms', and supposedly was coined after the far-away south coastal asian minor Athenian colony of Soloi
Iirc the aetolians were also said to be using quite rough version of Greek, and the slight differences in dialect as known (usually 'a' replaces most of 'e' in Dorian dialect, and the opposite in Ionian)
Moreover the awareness of more and less refined use of Greek was a known subject a couple of centuries prior to that. Even Solon the legislator is sometimes said to have coined the term "solicism', which means 'rural/uneducated use of terms', and supposedly was coined after the far-away south coastal asian minor Athenian colony of Soloi
Iirc the aetolians were also said to be using quite rough version of Greek, and the slight differences in dialect as known (usually 'a' replaces most of 'e' in Dorian dialect, and the opposite in Ionian)
I'm not sure how any of this points in the direction of a 'standardized Greek'. Greek was spoken from the Black Sea to Eastern Iberia. Some sort of 'standardization' only took place after Alexander's conquests - in the area of hellenization.
^I didn't know that Alexander was concurrent with Thales. I suppose all those people between Thales and the first Athenian Empire read the works of previous Greeks through translators 
And there is a fair bit of distance between Miletus, Cyrene (north Africa) and Italy as well.
And there is a fair bit of distance between Miletus, Cyrene (north Africa) and Italy as well.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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There are inscriptions to be found in the country. Namely, at rural shrines to native gods, you can't get more down to the "popular" level of society than that, except also in the army as Flying Pit pointed out. I've found and held pieces of such inscriptions. We can't know who carved them, but we do know that latin was used among the rural people and was valued enough for them to go through the expense to have those dedications made. And it is reasonable to assume that most were written in perishable materials and are gone.
Just because we can't find plenty of evidence now about something 2000 years ago, doesn't mean it didn't happen. It means we have to use indirect clues to be able to speculate on how society may have been.
trader/warrior
Deity
I read some pretty in depth discussions on this a long time ago that I hardly remember any more, but just curious if anyone here has any knowlege on it; did archers generally use the typical "volley fire" we know from movies and such (talking about large-scale battle warfare ofc)? I remember hearing some quite good arguments that they in fact did not, but for all my google-fu I can't find any good info on this. Just reading random stuff it seems the concept of volley fire becomes much more prominent with the dawn of the gunpowder age, think this may have to do with the speed of fire in particular, gunfire volley is a devestating blow at once but takes a long time to repeat, a trained archer can keep firing quickly whittling down the enemy over a longer timespan with a higher rate of fire.
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
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I don't know about bows, but there is evidence that the Chinese used volley shooting with crossbows from at least the eighth or ninth century AD. Lots of evidence here. It's simple and useful enough that I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese had it during the Qin Dynasty, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet.
r16
not deity
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any discussions of old Turkish use of bows invariably mention the volley fire , especially on distant targets . Which must be quite impossible to hit by aimed shots . There's also a mention of a fight of "Indians" with American cavalry where a wagon and its escort was destroyed . They collected or at least counted 40 000 arrows expended in angled fire , with bowmen behind cover that protected them from rifle/carbine/pistol fire but slowly yet inevitably took out the troopers .
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