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Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

irishtimes.com

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Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#21

Post by mbrookes »

jake-low wrote: post #5

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured…

> > We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man

Consider yourself fortunate that they were covered at all. In some schools those are taboo subjects, as they conflict with the religious ethos.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#22

Post by staunch »

It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history. There were many Greek colonies in Italy but the whole peninsular might have become dominated by Greeks.

By the time Rome got around to taking over Greece it wasn't even a contest. It's actually lucky that the Greek states weren't unified into a force powerful enough to be an existential threat to Rome. It would have likely suffered the same fate as Carthage. Instead it essentially got colonized and incorporated into the Roman empire in a way that could be called a co-equal merger. Rome kind of became Greece v2.

History is full of civilizations that fought bravely against invaders and were destroyed. It's also full of examples of civilizations that surrendered and thrived. It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery. One of the big facts of history that blew me away.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#23

Post by emodendroket »

Spooky23 wrote: post #12
emodendroket wrote: post #2

I don't know about little-known.

Schools vary, but usually this conflict isn't really presented much in survey classes. The highlights of education on Greece usually focus on Alexander the Great for a day or two, phalanx, the various figures of Athens, Athens vs. Sparta. Rome usually is some chat about the origin myth, "they were a republic", the Punic Wars, specifically Hannibal, Ceasar, transition to empire, random facts.

Surely most people know that the Romans conquered the Greeks and adapted large part of their culture. For goodness' sake, the eastern half of the Empire they all spoke Greek!

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#24

Post by mwaitjmp »

existencebox wrote: post #8
jake-low wrote: post #5

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured…

I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoni…

Of course, history is amazing, and I too have devoted much of my time to studying various periods the older I have got. Studying is perhaps too strong a word, it's more of a form of entertainment and as a way of understanding how we got to where we are now.

I think it started with an obsession with the news, and to understand the news, you need background, history.

I think though, it's difficult to covey all this to a child, or even perhaps a teen, and I doubt there is much interest, outside of the gory details. Looking back I found parts of history interesting, but I never felt like a had a holistic view of the past. As time has gone on, you piece it all together, bit by bit, place by place and see how it's relevant to today's world. There is a lot to take in, it takes time.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#25

Post by jandrese »

afarrell wrote: post #9
jake-low wrote: post #5

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured…

As an immigrant from the US to the UK, this isn't unique to the US. The reality is that there is so much history out there that it is very hard to get a solid overview of it which weaves together into a coherent narrative. There's just not enough time. Its why independent resources like youtube and video games which actually care about history are so important. (Its still reasonable to be annoyed by the way. My perso…

IMHO the biggest problem with the way history is taught in school is the need to test on it. This means making kids memorize names and dates and individual events so that they tend to lose the forest for the trees. It's hard to get a holistic view of the situation when you're focused on the smallest details.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#27

Post by AnimalMuppet »

existencebox wrote: post #8
jake-low wrote: post #5

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured…

I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoni…

Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#28

Post by Balero »

beat wrote: post #18

For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/We…

I think the idea of a single "centre of civilisation" is less than helpful. There were certainly a number of centre's of different civilisations, but if you try to plot the centre of these, there's a good chance you would end up in the middle of nowhere, or open ocean.

I think it's much more useful to think of a net with connections, with different levels of "zoom out".

For example, you could look at 0CE Rome, and get a good understanding of how the city ran. Zoom out to Italy, and have a good understanding of the 'Centre' of their empire. Zoom out to the entire empire, noticing a second clustering towards Egypt, and how trade flowed to the Parthian empire, into Germania and how there was even a trickle through the Sahara.

Then zoom out again to get an idea of how these all interacted with the other great empires in India and China. And how these were disconnected from the American empires at the time.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#29

Post by existencebox »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #27
existencebox wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoni…

Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.

That's the sad part for me, there was 0 "Framework" learning. It was 100% rote memorization, usually for a standardized test. (As I've said in other threads, it wasn't until college that I really "Learned how to learn.")

A bare-bones framework, to my older eyes, would teach you to ask about incentives, to look at the zeitgeist of the times, to ask "what's the precedent," and might establish a motivation for this in showing the predictive power of history, or its utility in comprehending current situations. Unfortunately, all of those were long-post-primary-schooling revelations. While I may not have had the context or appreciation I do now, my schooling did almost nothing to move me in that direction.

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