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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3132 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 23, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Absolutely fascinating.

I took Latin in high school; we watched “I Claudius” on Fridays in class which gave us a flavor to the language we were learning. I really hadn’t kept up with such entertainment, such as HBO’s Rome, until recently reading Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy. What stunned me the most about those books was not just his scholarship on the cultic nature of life in ancient Rome, the historicity of the plot to turn the republic into the empire, or the focus on the daily lives of high and low class slaves. What, impressed me was his ability to weave everything together into a coherent reality, as real as my own daily life.

In that context, I see a Rome which treated its relationship with the gods as transactional and just part of the business of a city. It also now makes sense to me why the early Christians were called atheists by the Romans: they had no rituals other than feasts and sharing, no sacrifices, no negotiations with the gods. They treated other gods as simply not existing, unlike the usual civil courtesy of treating other peoples gods as their business and a relationship that was not to be impinged upon.

I’m going to go read more from that website; linking here for my convenience. It appears the Roman religion pages are all sub-pages of this page on The Enigmas of Tiberius.

By the way:

One and one half millennia later, Sir Thomas Browne noticed those questions in his essay Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, remarking that they, "though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture." It is notable that he did not mention the first of the questions, confining his reference to the latter two, and resisted himself the urge to answer any of them, if only by conjecture. Herewith. we attempt what he would not.

Check this out too: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/02/09/urne-buriall-in-tlon/

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