Reading some more on the Romans this morning. Those guys never fail to crack me up. One general, not wanting to look less heroic than another one, took tens of thousands of prisoners and crucified them along the public highway -- the carnage went on for over a hundred miles. You can imagine having to travel that road, listening to all those men suffer. It was a great PR move. Another Roman senator had his son killed -- he was afraid the son was taking up with the wrong crowd and could bring dishonor on the family. Meanwhile Cicero was making speeches about how low Rome had fallen. Do you know what kind of depravity many Romans were engaged in? Dancing! Dancing -- sometimes to all hours of the night. You want to know what the downfall of Greece was? They let dancing get out of control. In addition, there was a worrying trend among the aristocrats to prepare nice food for themselves. Why, I never! Back in the day, the cook was the least valuable slave. Some of these folks have even taken to sleeping in beds, instead of sleeping on the ground like the real Romans did. And dont even get me started on the hobby of fish farming.... So I took a break from the book at went to my Twitter account. Geesh. Once again, there was some kind of picture meme about Christopher Columbus. For the last decade or so, not a Columbus Day can go by without my social feed being filled up with folks angry at Columbus. They seem to feel like hes gotten too much positive press or something. Or perhaps simply because he was praised in the 1930s that we now have to trash him. That somehow they are making a moral contribution to public discourse, weighing in against Columbus. Speaking truth to power! Balancing the story. I never hear from pro-Columbus people, though. Aside from his fame as discovering the New World, most folks dont know anything about him. And thats probably just fine. He is a footnote in history. He was a very bad person by modern standards. Which gets me to my rant. I understand that right is right, and wrong is wrong. But when dealing with people from history? Theyre not around anymore. There is a lot that we do not know about how folks lived. Its very difficult to try to understand their lives in their own way while at the same time sit back and pass moral judgment. This is called Presentism -- the application of modern morals and standards to people who lived long ago. The odd thing is, if you showed these people an image of somebody making severe moral judgments against somebody living in the present day, many of them would be offended! How dare somebody tell somebody else that theyre living their life immorally! Remember granddad? Seemed like a nice guy, huh? Would it make him less of a nice guy if you knew he was a typical misogynist, favored segregation, and wanted to sterilize the mentally ill? Sure. You might hate him. But youd probably want to learn more about how such a nice guy could do and say the things he did. And thats what history is all about -- people living their lives in their own terms. Not us viewing the entire past as just a set of props to make current political points. When we try to stick our modern lives into somebody who lived in the past, we take away the only thing they have left -- their story. We make everybody who lived in various times just a slave to whatever point were trying to make. We also make assumptions about how they might act today -- and those assumptions are probably not true. I can assure you that Columbus, if he lived today, would not be a child rapist. Hed probably own a delicatessen in Soho. Who knows? Im done ranting now. I hear the next chapter has one of the most vicious scandals to rock Rome in the century before Christ. A man sneaked into one of the female-only rituals to the Good Goddess! With all this depravity, its a wonder Rome ever survived several more centuries :)
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 11:07:38 +0000
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