One of the fun bits about genealogy as a hobby is that you end up delving into places and areas you’ve never remotely understood. And I always pooh-poohed any possibility of being able to trace ancestry back into the Roman Empire, but research got me into some really, really interesting characters, during the Really Dark Ages, when the Roman Empire was coming apart and the most loyal Romans were often provincials who’d never seen Rome at all. I’ll give you a list of really interesting characters to chase through Wikipedia: I know, not a gilt-edge source, but pretty good on general detail. Here goes.
Stilicho, his wife Serena;Â Justina, wife of Valentinian I; Galla Placidia, Alaric the Visigoth, Ataulf; Theoderic; Brunhilda (Merovingian); Clotaire, Chlodevech, Clovis, Bertha of Kent, Childebert, Chilperic, and Gundicar, and follow the related links. If you can piece together that jigsaw puzzle, in an age in which Northern France and Belgium were called Austrasia; middle France was Neustria, Burgundy (central France) was a separate and very noisy kingdom, and the Suevi, the Visigoths (mostly Spain) and Ostrogoths and Lombards were quite often serving in the Roman army, what time they weren’t raiding…talk about a batch of characters. Brunhilda is particularly interesting.Â
They should do a computer game on this period.
“They should do a computer game on this period.”
That would be Europa Universalis or one of its relatives. EU III is quite good, though slow moving as conquer the world games go. A historian friend plays it uncounted hours.
Hmmmn. Sounds like fun.
Uh-oh. For a few reasons.
I’m not certain I have the right time period. EU3: Complete runs, I think, 1399-1821. Outside that you need the EU2-engine “prequel” Crusader Kings (1066-1452; EU3 standard starts in 1453) or the sequels Victoria and Hearts of Iron.
EU3 requires a very specific hardware graphics set up! It will *not* run without it since it downloads the user interface of the game to the GPU while the CPU is devoted to actually running the hundreds of countries in the game. I believe this is true for the whole EU3 series, including the EU3: Rome titles. To emphasize, this is not a case of running poorly or slowly, it’s running at all.
The last caution is that EU3 can be a major time sink. 🙂
🙂 This lot dates from around 500 AD.
Sheesh, interesting…sounds like a monster program.
I’ve gotten pretty good at locating things inside Austrasia and Neustria, and figuring out which cities in the record are real, and which are misspellings…I’ve figured out English Wessex, etc, and can even tell you which shires don’t have -shire on their end. But somebody threw in Cumbria, just to confuse me (an organization of territory that used to be borderlands.)
I love learning new things. My field was the transition between the Roman Republic and the Empire in terms of constitutional (they did have sort of one) law, ie, what were the legalities and institutions involved, and I can faithfully report that, legally speaking, there was no such thing as a Roman emperor. 😉
The dark ages are a whole new sandbox. And they’re fascinating. The first thing you need is a map and a slow Saturday afternoon. Just understanding Valentinian I and the rise of Galla Placidia is a good start, but also understanding Stilicho and Ataulf is a good addition; not to mention the Merovingians, starting with Clovis. Wiki is about the right amount of exposure for a first dip into that territory, and the stuff leading up to Charlemagne is just amazing. You’re watching the remaining institutions of the Roman Empire still functioning long after there ceased to be an authority in Rome, and slowly transiting into a new model, involving one set of persons empowered because they held Roman office, and another set of persons who were the leadership of the tribes, who intermarry and create something halfway between.
You might want to look at EU3: Rome. IIRC, 280 BC to the fall of the Republic–or it might be like fingernails on a chalkboard depending on its accuracy. I suppose from the developer’s perspective, the game becomes uninteresting once you can’t play minor powers with a chance of winning. You’d think they’d push back the start date of EU3, but I see no sign of development in that direction. Paradox Interactive is a great one for expansions, though.
I think if you can run the demo, you can run the program; but I’m not positive.
I always remember my history professor describing Galla Placidia as “the most inappropriately named women in history”
Sorry
That should be “most inappropriately named woman in history”. (Wetware spellcheck not up to scratch)
😆 She (or they: she seems to have been Aelian clan, and the Romans repeated names: there was her mother, then her, and possibly a third) seems to have been a dedicated survivor, and one wonders what her relationship was with her cousin Serena, while she was living in Stilicho’s household. She approved Serena’s execution…and in the light of other actions she took, I kind of doubt she was a cowering flower being shoved by more powerful interests. She survived and got more and more power, and seems to have had the luck of a cat for landing on her feet. She gets appropriated into Stilicho’s household: Stilicho and his family die; she gets captured by Alaric in his invasion; he dies and she ends up with Ataulf, who has more brains than Alaric, and while the Empire goes down, Galla Placidia is helping rule the Visigothic slice of Europe…interesting woman.
Actually early medieval Europe is a very interesting and not really dark time at all. It gives as lot of clues to why some ideas complexes and so on got precedence in western civilisation. I recently read an anthology (or really – a compilation of papers) called Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West 300-900, edited by Leslie Brubaker, that was very interesting, not least for putting some previously held truths in another light.
“…the Really Dark Ages, when the Roman Empire was coming apart and the most loyal Romans were often provincials who’d never seen Rome at all.”
Yes, Hollywood today likes to present Rome as a tyrannical conqueror, but the reality was very different. Rome was as successful as it was for so many centuries because it was very inclusive. People bought into Roman ideals, wanted to be Roman, and indeed became Roman, whatever their ethnic background. It’s interesting to compare Rome with America in this respect.
It’s worth quoting the following passage from Tacitus. (I hope it’s not too long for this blog.) He relates how Gauls from areas conquered by Caesar were allowed to become Roman senators in 48 AD. There was initially some opposition from senators against allowing into the Senate men whose fathers and grandfathers had fought against Julius Caesar.
The Emperor Claudius addressed the Senate as follows: “My ancestors, the most ancient of whom was made at the same time a citizen and a senator of Rome, remind me to govern by the policy of transferring to Rome all conspicuous merit, wherever found. And indeed I know as a fact, that the Julii came from Alba, the Coruncanii from Camerium, the Porcii from Tusculum, and not to inquire too minutely into the past, that new members have been brought into the Senate from Etruria and Lucania and the whole of Italy, that Italy itself was at last extended to the Alps, so that not only single persons but entire countries and tribes might be united under our name. We had unshaken peace at home and prospered in all our foreign relations, in the days when Italy beyond the Po was admitted to share our citizenship, and when, enrolling in the ranks of our legions the most vigorous of the provincials, we rejuvenated our exhausted empire. Are we sorry that the Balbi came to us from Spain, and other men not less illustrious from Cisalpine Gaul? Their descendants are still among us, and they do not yield to us in patriotism.
“What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens? Only this, that mighty as they were in war, they disdained as foreigners those whom they had conquered. Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought cities as enemies and then hailed them as fellow-citizens on the very same day. Strangers have always reigned over us. That freedmen’s sons should be entrusted with public offices is not, as many wrongly think, a modern innovation. It was a common practice in the old Republic. But, it will be said, we have fought with the Senones. I suppose then that the Volsci and Aequi never stood in line of battle against us? Our city was captured by the Gauls. Well, we also gave hostages to the Etruscans, and passed under the yoke of the Samnites. In general, if you review all our wars, never has one been finished in a shorter time than that with the Gauls. From then on they have preserved an unbroken and loyal peace. United as they now are with us by manners, education, and intermarriage, let them bring in what they have of value rather than enjoy it in isolation.
Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity, was once new. Plebeian magistrates came after patrician; Latin magistrates after plebeian; magistrates of other Italian peoples after Latins. This practice too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
“The emperor’s speech was followed by a decree of the Senate, and the Aedui were the first to obtain the right of becoming senators at Rome. This compliment was paid to their ancient alliance, and to the fact that they alone of the Gauls held the title of Brothers of the Roman people.” – Tacitus, Annals 11.23-25
Roman history amply shows that the speech of Claudius was not just fine words, but really expressed the long-term inclusive approach of Roman rule.
Thank you for quoting that. It’s very true. It went to the very core of what Rome was: they began as an amalgam of outcasts from other cities, their women claimed certain rights and stuck by it, they had a framework within which they could unite families (adoption of adults) and tribes (inclusion in the voting body), and they practiced religious and legal tolerance, according equal precedence to a foreign citizen’s native law when in a lawsuit in a Roman court.
Well, the religious tolerance thing could be discussed, but what I think interesting is how the romanisation of western mainland Europe continued even after the empire broke down and how the antagonism with moorish Spain (for a lack of better words) worked to amalgamate and polarise an otherwise rather diverse western christianity mainly consisting of converted, romanised, “tribes”. Most people speculate in what the western civilisation had looked like if the moors had won the struggle for hegemony but I think it more interesting to speculate in were we would had been had there been no moorish presence at all… It gives an interesting lesson in how cultures influence and counter-influence each other.
…Well, religious tolerance for everyone except for a certain fanatical, martyrdom-loving sect I could name – who even went so far as to deny that the Gods even existed and who claimed that everyone except them would burn in hell forever. 😉
And even in that case, persecutions are generally somewhat exaggerated, and were mostly driven by ordinary uneducated people blaming them for crop-failures, earthquakes, etc. rather than by Roman officialdom.
And of course, that sect also later became the Official Region of ancient Rome for 150 years before Rome fell, and it was then the non-believers who were violently suppressed and persecuted.
Actually (let me speak as a Roman lawyer for a moment) what fried the Christians and got them suspected of everything but Deucalion’s Flood was *their* perceived intolerance of other religions, and their hostility toward the Romans’ own beliefs in particular. That was number 1. They roused considerable suspicion for clandestine (even underground) meetings, and rumors of cannibalism. The general belief was that they were subversives of dark and dangerous habits, out of the Middle East, origin of several other cults at the time, and practiced human sacrifice, which was the one thing Roman religious tolerance did not extend to.
Well, let’s just say they were right to be suspicious, eh? 😉 I wasn’t just thinking about that particular sect, though. Belief systems are generally an important part of the justification for a certain ruler/dynasty and in general most people through history have tended to acquire the belief of their current rulers. Wise people did, and often managed to stay on top even after they got ‘conquered’. Of course parts of the ‘old’ belief was retained, in local rites and so on, partly informing the way the new belief was interpreted.
I’m not sure that’s the same thing as ‘religious tolerance’.
Also I’m not one to rely wholly on the existing sources and the popular interpretations thereof. Current research and theory has had reason to question analysis only a decade old and let’s face it – most of the perceived facts regarding this part of our history is a good deal older than that and subject to a historical and political bias.
Also, written sources are one thing – we cannot know to what extent the practise went. Humans are political animals and the romans were not less so.
For a long time the early middle ages has been designated the dark ages, mainly because that intolerant sect who gained hegemony viewed the period prior to their getting almost total dominance in that way. Or so I have come to think, rightly or wrongly.
(aw, what a sentence, yuk, but that’s me with a fever, lol)
That the intolerant ideas have a way to succeed is worrying. We humans don’t seem to enjoy opposing someone who threatens us.
Wise people did, and often managed to stay on top even after they got ‘conquered’. Of course parts of the ‘old’ belief was retained, in local rites and so on, partly informing the way the new belief was interpreted. I’m not sure that’s the same thing as ‘religious tolerance’.
In the Roman world, religious practice, festivals, deities, etc. always varied widely even from city to city.
Julius Caesar says of the Germans that their chief deity is Mercury, and the Germans regard him as having such-and-such attributes. That is to say, he had no problem with identifying Woden = Mercury, even though many details were different. This was a general Roman attitude.
I’m only aware of 3 cases of religions being suppressed by Rome in over 1000 years before Christianity became the official religion of Rome.
1) The Cult of Bacchus in early Republican Rome – suppressed as being a fraudulent front for prostitution and sexual abuse, and not a religion at all.
2) The Druids in Gaul and Britain – who had a habit of human sacrifice. According to Roman writers the general population lived in fear of the Druids, who also extracted large amounts of tribute from them. This may be borne out by the fact that when they were once they were suppressed, their religion was never revived.
3) Christians – whom we’ve already discussed briefly.
Also I’m not one to rely wholly on the existing sources and the popular interpretations thereof. Current research and theory has had reason to question analysis only a decade old and let’s face it – most of the perceived facts regarding this part of our history is a good deal older than that and subject to a historical and political bias. Also, written sources are one thing – we cannot know to what extent the practise went. Humans are political animals and the romans were not less so.
You’re certainly right. I think that today any historian worthy of the name takes into account who was writing, why they were writing, how biased they might be, and to what extent we can believe what they say. By putting together as many sources as possible and evaluating them carefully in the light of common sense, and combining this with archeological evidence, we can build up a reasonably good picture of a society.
We can take for granted that many Roman authors had strong political beliefs, but in some ways there was a *lot* less spin than in modern times, simply because there was no sense of ‘political correctness’.
Roman historians also tend to go on at great length about the details of Roman military defeats, and to devote very little time to Roman victories, which tend to be taken for granted. They almost always spend a lot of time criticizing the failings of Rome rather than glorifying Rome.
For a long time the early middle ages has been designated the dark ages, mainly because that intolerant sect who gained hegemony viewed the period prior to their getting almost total dominance in that way.
… but Christians gained dominance in the Roman world long before the ‘Dark Ages’. The first Christian emperor of Rome was Constantine. Even tribes like the Vandals were Christians of some kind or other.
Agreed on the last note, at least. But on the other hand christianity was a lot more diverse back then than it is even now, or at least that’s how I read the evidence – lots of different ‘sects’ vying with each other for hegemony. And it was certainly not the only religion, either, at least not if we are talking late antiquity/early medieval times.
As to the particulars of the roman empire while it still was ONE empire you know more than I do – it’s a part of history we had to learn by rote back in school and it follows that I have had no curiosity about it later in life. Dates and lists of emperors never did trigger my imagination. My interest is in what we in Sweden call ‘history of ideas’, which is a field of study dedicated to understand how different ideas have evolved, particularly the ideas that can be viewed as foundational for the western civilisation. And in that I have had much more reason to look at the times when the roman empire was no more.
Still I don’t know exactly who did what at what exact date. What ideas prevailed and got formed in what competition, and how that lead to the complex of ideas that guides us in our world… well, there is no truth out there but it certainly is more of my arena.
I’ve always been curious about the time difference between when an idea is written down and when the information has enough common knowledge that it affects other ideas and behaviors. Do historians calculate this for the speed of change.
That depends on the culture. Where there is a religious imperative (the Jews, for instance have a rule about writing down the Torah, that you can’t make a mistake, and you have to copy exactly)—you get pretty good transmission. Ditto the middle ages, when copying manuscripts, even if you couldn’t read the language, was counted good for the soul. Occasionally they would mistake a reader’s marginal note for an original correction, but not too often.
Oral tradition can be highly accurate, particularly in ballads or chanted verse. Homer’s Iliad was oral tradition long before Homer (or whoever) wrote it down: it describes, for an instance, a helmet and a cup that had not been seen in Homer’s age—not for the last 500 years. We found them among grave goods in a modern excavation. (Google: boar’s tooth helmet and Nestor’s cup). Those were chanted.
You can also tell shift of authors, by counting the number of times they use words. This, for a writer, is a lot like a fingerprint. We all have our favorite vocabulary and sentence structure. You can tell, for instance, that the Aeneid was written by one man, that the Iliad shows some diverse regional characteristics, and that the early books of the Bible had several authors.
Now, as to the transmission of information, bards were important in Bronze Age Greece and in the Celtic culture; wandering from village to village, they were a unifying factor, like bees carrying a pollen of information. In the case of books and written records, in a culture of general literacy, like Rome, there was a daily ‘newspaper’ posted in the Forum, where you could go and read (and discuss) the news.
Literacy is a biggie: literate populace means rapid, facile dissemination of ideas and rapid progress of invention and social change.
It is interesting to see how a person’s beliefs color their perceptions. For example, men studying wild horses were quick to realize that you have a herd of mares and one dominant stallion. And that the stallions fight off rivals to control the breeding rights in the herd. Perfectly simple… the strongest wiliest stallion defeats the lesser ones, and sires the foals. Later on, a young female biologist was watching wild horse behavior, and she noticed that mares would “go missing” for a while and then come back to the herd. And she figured out that those mares were off having trysts with stallions that were apparently more attractive to that particular mare, but not strong enough to challenge the dominant stallion for control of the herd. And, when they did genetic testing, they found out that something like 30% of the offspring in the herd were the result of this type of clandestine tryst.
Now, mares did not suddenly start having them just because a female researcher was watching them. But the male researchers knew that it made good genetic sense, and fit their idea of what was “obviously right”, that the strongest male was the only one that got to mate, that they had just ignored the disappearing mares and put their absences down to reasons that had nothing to do with sex.
The same issue came up on Meerkat Manor (a really interesting “reality” show about meerkats). We are told in all seriousness that the alpha male and alpha female “reserve all breeding rights” in the group for themselves. And yet, we are shown that the young males go roving when they reach sexual maturity, where they go hang out by rival meerkat gangs and seduce the junior females. And the junior females in the group that the show followed were always getting pregnant. Now, what the alpha female could and did do was control whether those pups had a good chance of surviving, by either chasing pregnant females out of the group, killing the pups after they were born, or just moving the gang to a new burrow, leaving a new mother to either follow them or stay with her pups. (A lone female meerkat has a very low chance of surviving, and her pups have almost no chance.) But if the food was plentiful, the alpha might allow another female’s pups to be born and raised by the gang.
So you have to be very careful when describing what you see that you are accurately depicting the facts, and not what you think is happening. And even then, you are going to filter things through your own preconceived ideas. Which has always made me wonder what is more important… what happened, or what you think happened? For example, if we put up cameras at a wedding reception so that they could record everything, and then a year later asked people what happened at the reception, how close would their memory of the event be to what really happened? And if one side of the family was firmly convinced that the other side had been highly disrespectful at some point, would having the tape to show them the reality affect that any, or would they say that the tape was wrong? It’s something to think about.
yes, and there is the subjective context of ‘what happened?’ and the objective text of ‘what happened’. Ie,against what context was it playing out, in whose mind.
This (I’ve quoted it before) is the poem that, when I read it at about 8 or 9, taught me about other viewpoints.
Title: Hadramauti
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Who knows the heart of the Christian? How does he reason?
What are his measures and balances? Which is his season
For laughter, forbearance or bloodshed, and what devils move him
When he arises to smite us? _I_ do not love him.
He invites the derision of strangers–he enters all places.
Booted, bareheaded he enters. With shouts and embraces
He asks of us news of the household whom we reckon nameless.
Certainly Allah created him forty-fold shameless.
So it is not in the Desert. One came to me weeping–
The Avenger of Blood on his track–I took him in keeping.
Demanding not whom he had slain, I refreshed him, I fed him
As he were even a brother. But Eblis had bred him.
He was the son of an ape, ill at ease in his clothing,
He talked with his head, hands and feet. I endured him with loathing.
Whatever his spirit conceived his countenance showed it
As a frog shows in a mud-puddle. Yet I abode it!
I fingered my beard and was dumb, in silence confronting him.
_His_ soul was too shallow for silence, e’en with Death hunting him.
I said: ‘Tis his weariness speaks,’ but, when he had rested,
He chirped in my face like some sparrow, and, presently, jested!
Wherefore slew I that stranger? He brought me dishonour.
I saddled my mare, Bijli, I set him upon her.
I gave him rice and goat’s flesh. He bared me to laughter.
When he was gone from my tent, swift I followed after,
Taking my sword in my hand. The hot wine had filled him.
Under the stars he mocked me–therefore I killed him!
In this context I want to tell you, CJ, that one of the reasons that I love your books is because I think you are very good at showing the reader different ways to perceive the same ideas or events.
I also agree with Philosopher77. And I think us being so certain that we are unbiased and erudite in our analysis and observations, as opposed to prior generations, are one big bias in itself.
I beg pardon for my lack of grammatical perfection. I honestly do not know what the english language plural version of analysis /curious greek word!/ might be. English, any version, is not very kindred to Swedish and some ideas need surgical perfection on the choice of words to be discussed with any success.
This is, by the way, another reason for me loving your books. Language is central to understanding but it also carries culturally coloured concepts, ideas and biases that are not easily translated without extensive understanding of said culture. It gets so much more tangible when it’s different species portrayed interacting with each other but it’s just as valid on Earth. Even between humans who THINK they speak almost the same language.
Lol—It’s the actual Greek plural: analyses, I think. Most English speakers dodge having to write that plural, never being sure either. Your English is immaculate and your idiom is that of a native speaker. Which is way ahead of my Swedish. I was totally blown away, when visiting Oslo,to find that Scandinavia is so very bilingual. I expected to have difficulty communicating, and even one lad who had come in from the far north and rarely used English used it very, very well indeed.
I believe it was George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion/aka My Fair Lady) who said that England and America are two nations divided by a common language.
Well, people who like me grow up with languages not many other understands have to learn a bigger language to be able to get around in the world. Most Swedish people that I know speak swedish, english and at least one more language – often german, french or spanish. I have no fluency whatsoever in any of those three but can get around where those are spoken.
Influenced by my SF readings I wanted to become an engineer so I chose a technical track instead (despite a total lack of gift for it but I put the blame on Heinlein and Asimow and Clarke) and technical tracks didn’t require language studies (at least not in the 70’s/early 80’s).
It’s interesting to note that until the mid-40’s German language studies were compulsory in swedish schools (think high school/college level) but after WWII it got switched for English. Now, how could that be?!?!?! 😉
On the plural of analysis: Since you are already online, it’s quicker to look it up than to write about how you don’t know what it is. 🙂
Try http://www.thefreedictionary.com or http://dictionary.com/ or http://www.merriam-webster.com/ or some other online dictionary.
Or simply type ‘analysis plural’ into Google.
These days it’s very easy to find out simple facts.
For a good dictionary+thesaurus you can download to your computer, I recommend the free version of WordWeb from http://wordweb.info/
You know, I did a dictionary search (I have several handy, online, not to mention the paper ones – having grown up with a father who edited an wrote articles encyclopaedias for a living I have a thing for reference books) but no one turned out anything that I managed to interpret in an unambiguous way. My references told more about how the root was “anal” and about other words connected to that, lol.
BTW, I had two other reasons for taking up the language aspect so no need to be a besserwisser 😉 (which I am myself noted for being)