I didn't having time to watch the entirety of the clips, but for what I saw and based solely on reading novels from the eras (not about, but from) yes, that more or less accurate.

Upper middle class men had clubs like the second clip and they had their own jargon (Brits always have and still do lol). And yes, bored second sons with wealth and time would get into great mischief... Not always so innocently either.

In the first clip, the first outlandish character would have been refered to as a Dandy. In some instances, a dandy is just a man who focused a lot on their appearance, but in most instances it was insinuating the man was a feminine gay- not something widely accepted in most cultures in history, no matter your status. Some circles of historical England (can't attest to America at the time) would tolerate a gay man if he kept it hidden and/or (probably more importantly) had connection to power families.

If any more versed historians (and most of you are lol) disagree, please be kind and share sources/suggestions as I'm always trying to read more!

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I agree with you! But where are the pictures? These bs wrong angled ones are a joke.

I’m pretty sure that was Morgan Freeman. He got his stuff confiscated by medieval Scottish TSA and then transferred to the Nottingham Penitentiary where he met Robinhood.

Mystery solved by early 90’s Hollywood.

Thank you!

What are some good books about ancient Italy? (Other than Rome.)

>a young child and an adult woman who could have been his cousin and grandmother.

I would interpret this as the young child is cousin, adult woman is grandmother

This comment is inline with everything i learned in college 20 years ago. Huzzah!

Yes, read here. https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2019/08/the-5-great-last-battles-of-the-western-roman-empire/

This is where I start to get sad…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(410)

At that point yeah. The Greeks definitely began to view themselves as Greeks and not Romans as the centuries went on.

It doesn’t outright discuss migration of Western Romans to the East, but it does touch on most of what u/AJ_Lounes mentions above in regards to how the fall of the western empire didn’t trigger a mass migration of citizens to the Eastern Empire.

I love seeing the pictures of these finds. I imagine it must be moving to see in person. To think you’re one of the first people to see this in thousands of years, that people stood right where you’re standing so long ago, chiseling their art into stone. A completely different civilization, a completely different world, speaking to us through the ages.

> If we look outside the Roman elite, which makes up a very small percentage of the overall population, I would bet money that the vast majority of people hunkered down and stayed put.

The main form of wealth in ancient Rome was land, so even much of the elite was stuck.

If you think about it, the landlord is also unlikely to leave.

very good book, but this issue was not discussed.

I always think of the symbolic end of Rome as 660. Constans II comes over from Constantinople. He visits Rome which after all is still part of his empire. He walks around marveling at the glories done centuries ago. Rome has only about 50k people at this point, just the Papal bureaucracy really. It isn’t even the capital of Byzantine Italy. That’s Ravenna.

He orders his men to strip all the remaining precious metal gilding from the monuments. He even takes all the copper.

Then no Roman Emperor returns until the 15th century, unless you count Charlemagne and tue HRE.

They didn’t so much let taxation slip as they inherited a system of taxes in kind. The money economy was going away. It becomes much harder to rebuild a needed aqueduct for a city 500 miles away when you can’t pay the workers from the surplus you’ve got elsewhere. All you can do are smaller projects using your local surpluses.

... the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Langobards, the Burgundians...

This was what I was going to posit as well. The late Roman Imperial term for this practice is coloni (quick Wikipedia article on it). Peasants from the late Empire through the Dark Ages were essentially serfs; beginning with contracting away rights for food and a part of land, and then just legally being owned by the local lord. Fascinating stuff.

I always remember that, yes Rome itself was outside the empire for 60 years after 476, but then it was back in and stayed in until about 750. Then in 800 the Pope looked around and said, “yep it’s back again” and crowned Charlemagne “Emperor.”

So the idea took forever to die.

That's an interesting point. One could argue the Trojans weren't actually Greeks, but then other says there are Trojan names in the Illiad that translate to Greek ( leading some to speculate that the citizens of Troy were a mix of Trojans and Greeks when the siege was happening ).

Others dispute the story altogether.

But there is that "Etruscan" linguistic angle ( that Etruscan doesn't fit with other local languages back then, lending weight to the idea they came from Troy ).

I once wondered where the word Etruscan came from and if it was some kind of form of "ex-trojan"? (e-troyscan ? I dunno). We'll never know for sure, but all that bronze-age stuff (like, 1000-1600BCE or so? ) is just great fun to speculate on :D

Nice! Is that Horace?

(zomg, and down the rabbit-hole I go :P

It depends on what these key words mean - "operate" on what level? and "fall" as in 476? A number of cities continued to provide public services, pay to keep up their existing infrastructure and construct new buildings. It depends on how you define the specific romanitas of a city! In Ostrogothic Italy, some aqueducts were repaired or built anew in Ravenna, Rome, Naples, for instance. Vandal North Africa also remained pretty urban. Overall, cities definitely get less important for a few hundred years, for sure.

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