71–80 of 146 posts
I live in Northern Greece/Macedonia and I can confirm that we were never taught history with this level of detail. It seems so fascinating to me that if you focus hard enough to a simple sentence of a modern history book you can uncover battles and kings and strategies and winters and politics.
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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 ge…
The course of the book is to focus on whatever team was winning at any given time, and how the actions of that winning team set up the game for the next winning team. As such, though... before the New World, northern/western Europe didn't have any winning teams, except for the Vikings (whose slave trade with Persia and the Arab world led to the formation of Russia as a nation and a power), and the brief victory of th…
True, but very informative, as China's borders have grown and shrunk and grown again quite a bit over the centuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zdHkY3XYHKA
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…
Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system. That happens everywhere it's not an American thing ( btw, the article is from an Irish newspaper), there's too much to cover in so little time. But learning shouldn't stop when we graduate, I can't blame school for my adult-life shortcomings, I got the basics and that should be enough IMHO On the subject of th…
Then again, you look back at what students and school boys from earlier eras were able to learn and accomplish by the time they were considered men (which by the way was like 16-17 in antiquity), you wonder what the hell our modern education system is doing sometimes.
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> It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery One old saying around these parts of the world (Romania) can be translated roughly like this: "The bowed head doesn't get cut by the sword", which explains like at least half of our history, seeing as we've never been a major regional power while being surrounded by 3 empires for at least a couple of centur…
> The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three. This is very simplistic way to describe reasons behind partitioning of Poland, which was by then standards very large multiethnic country with borders from Baltic to Black Sea and ability to raise considerable military power to defend its borders in times of need. Commonwealth's dissolution came from the inside…
Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)
Similar statements (which I am not historian enough to judge the accuracy of) regarding the Chinese and the Mongols. The Mongols won militarily, and were turned into a culturally Chinese empire, in the east at least. Again, I am not historian enough to say if this is accurate, but it is a common assertion.
Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)
Similar statements (which I am not historian enough to judge the accuracy of) regarding the Chinese and the Mongols. The Mongols won militarily, and were turned into a culturally Chinese empire, in the east at least. Again, I am not historian enough to say if this is accurate, but it is a common assertion.
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Franz Ferdinand was a fall guy.
Germany had good reason to be paranoid. They were surrounded by a powerful alliance between Britain, Russia, and France, all of whom were scapegoating German ambition to help with their own political problems. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was just a crystal falling into a supersaturated solution. When Russia demanded action from its allies in support of their ally, war was inevitable. At that point, Germany dec…
An Anglo-French alliance was not inevitable; as late as 1894 it was possible to publish a novel in which England, invaded by France and Russia, was rescued by Germany [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_18...
Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)
Similar statements (which I am not historian enough to judge the accuracy of) regarding the Chinese and the Mongols. The Mongols won militarily, and were turned into a culturally Chinese empire, in the east at least. Again, I am not historian enough to say if this is accurate, but it is a common assertion.
I've always been curious why they have stagnated so much since and been so... mediocre.
I guess you could say the same about Macedonia and maybe some middle eastern areas if we're looking purely at past greatness, but those two seem to be easier to explain. Greece's impact was more wider, longer, and stronger.
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> Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor) A better translation would be "captured Greece has conquered its savage captor", since that better captures (pun intended) the intended parallel between capta and cepit --both are forms of the same verb. (Also cepit is perfect tense, hence "has conquered".)
> Also cepit is perfect tense, hence "has conquered". The Latin perfect is the equivalent of the English perfect. It's also the equivalent of the English simple past; whether "Greece captured her conquerors" or "Greece has captured her conquerors" is the right translation depends on whether Horace was writing about the past or the present (that is, his past or his present), not on the form of the Latin verb.
Yes, you're right. I still prefer the "has conquered" translation, though, because I think Horace was talking about a condition that was still there in his present, not just what had happened in his past.