Today, for some reason, YouGov retweeted a survey they did a few months ago about the Roman Empire. It turns out that 76% of Americans say they know at least a little about the Roman Empire and 49% have a favorable view of it.
But why? YouGov asked the 76% of Rome-knowers what they admired about it:
Roads, art, buildings, literature, etc. Fine. Military conquests? Sure, I guess. But slaveholding? Only 68% were firmly against it and 5% thought it was great. Where does this stuff come from?
Anyway, you all know where I'm going with this:
I blame HBO Max
Maybe most Americans realize that judging people from 2000 years ago by modern standards is STUPID.
If we actually do that, then all of our ancestors were evil monsters. They virtually all practiced slavery. They tortured and murdered prisoners of war. They exterminated inconvenient people to get rid of them, to demonstrate their ruthlessness, or to make a point. They raped female prisoners. They married 12 year old girls and consummated those marriages. They tortured alleged criminals and killed them in messy and painful ways after patently unfair trials for trivial offenses like stealing food.
However, those ancestors also created our (and every other) civilization. They created the foundations of math, science, and philosophy. They created the major religions that more than half our planet still follows. They invented many of the basic tools of civilizaiton on which everything else we have still depends. If you cannot see these things as admirable despite their other rather unenlightend behaviors then you are an idiot.
I have been told that only American Slavery is problematic.
Well, American Slavery was a lot worse in some concrete ways than Roman slavery. Though I do not reckon Roman slavery a good thing.
1. Only the slave was a slave. Any children of a slave were free - born free. Slaves were created by conquest and capture, not by a breeding program. In consequence,
2. Nobody had a going business of growing slaves and selling them, to never be seen again by their families.
+1
You should add that pretty much all of the Roman slaves would have happily made the romans slaves if they could (and had actually tried to do so), so there was clear reciprocity.
Like that makes a big difference to someone who is in bondage. It might make a difference to the children, but we don't actually know what kind of life most of the children of Roman slavery had.
That is definitely not the case. The children of an enslaved mother were always slaves, full stop, regardless of who the father was.
Sorry, I can’t believe that 76% of Americans know something about the Roman Empire…I stopped reading right there.
You might blame PBS for that. They've had some terrific shows on the subject.
I can’t believe 76% of Americans know something about PBS.
Hey, that looks just like a Maine Coon we once had. The same “who are you?” expression. Until dinner time, that is…
The Romans made really good cement, and their water and sewage infrastructure was pretty amazing for the time (even if the pipes gave everyone lead poisoning).
But you'd think moder conservatives would absolutely hate Rome as a built environment. Everyone lived in apartment buildings. The whole thing was a "15 minute" city. The individual buildings housed a variety of social classes under one roof (some floors were more desirable than others). They were also known for randomly collapsing due to poor building standards. Not sure if conservatives would love or hate that last one. On the one hand, no regulation! On the other hand, some of those crushed to death are rich!
It's my understanding that it was the wine (and the mining) that gave Romans lead poisoning more than the plumbing. I'm sure our host could correct us.
There's an old canard that lead poisoning led (ha!) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Yeah, no. Did they use lead in a lot of stuff that probably poisoned some people? Sure. Did it turn the entire population into drooling dullards that allowed their civilization to collapse? No. If that were true, it would have happened a lot earlier. And to virtually every other culture that also used lead for everything from plumbing (which comes from plumbum, or lead in Latin) to makeup and paint.
Those 5% are probably the conservative Christian types who interpret the Bible literally with all its apology for slavery in both the Old and New Testaments.
Kevin, oh Kevin, after the last eight years, you are surprised that 38% might be OK with slavery from a couple of thousand years ago?
Come on! About 20% of the population is fine with slavery now. Talk to me a decade or more ago and I would have said "eh, maybe 5% would be OK with slavery now." I believe I have been proven wrong on that one.
Being a slave is never a good thing (kind of right there in the word), but the positive responses are likely due to how Roman slaveholding compared to other cultures of the day. Slavery was endemic across societies then. Roman slavery stood out in that even slaves had some level of rights and the ability to buy their freedom and become a full citizen.
No, it's not flat-out "positive" by any semblance of modern standards, but taken in historical context it was at least better than most other cultures, which looked on slavery as a way to disperse and utterly destroy a conquered race. So yeah, some people will answer that question with the context in mind and say "could have been worse".
Historical context is important.
Nero gave slaves standing in court. They could sue their owners and others.
Unlike, say, Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision.
Yeah, but if I had to guess I'd say roughly 0% of Americans know that.
Exactly. A chunk of slaves lived much better lives than freemen.
Possibly they think they'll be the slaveowners.
The Roman adage went "You have as many enemies as you have slaves."
HBO's "Rome" was an interesting look at that society from the bottom up as well as top down. A soldier is paid off after a campaign with a cart load of slaves, who soon sicken and die and he's left with a boy that the kids in his family want to keep, like a puppy.
the crazification factor comes up more than you'd expect.
I was once in a discussion of ancient Rome and someone said that the Romans were surprisingly like us except that they had no concept of charity or mercy. The book Pax Romana on the late Roman era plagues points out that Christianity was big on charity and mercy. Christians considered it a duty to feed the poor, nurse the ill and bury the dead. A lot of people nowadays are a lot like ancient Romans in that they have no place for charity or mercy. Many of them call themselves Christian but they are CINO.
The Trump cult is the revival of some kind of twisted pagan ethic that worships nothing but greed, lust, lying, and power.
A third of Americans have zero morals beyond Money/Fame/Power Is Good.
I think students are taught -- and History Channel documentaries reinforce -- the idea that Roman slavery was 1. not race-based (which makes it somehow less bad?) and 2. there was a possibility of manumission (so also, not so bad?). I guess people are left with the impression that it was a fairly innocuous institution because of that.
That of course is not true. Roman slavery, particularly during the Republican period, was horrible and brutal. One law prescribed that if any slave killed their master, every slave in the entire household was to be summarily crucified. We know of at least one occasion (Tacitus, Annals, XIV.45) where this was carried out, including on children.
Surely the most interesting statistic in your fanatically Christian nation is that only 38% definitely thought Rome's conversion to Christianity was a good thing! And by Jupiter, how many felt positively about Rome's pagan religion (29%)!
For years I've heard people using biblical slavery to say that American slavery was no big deal. That could be influencing their views on ancient slavery.
Recall the incredible efforts Lincoln had to go through to get the Emancipation Proclamation passed- AFTER the civil war.
Lincoln was assassinated just days after the war ended (and was still ongoing in some parts of the South). The EP was an executive order, not a piece of legislation, so there was nothing to "pass" per se. You may be thinking of how the so-called Radical Republicans in Congress tried to impose a much more onerous set of terms on the former Confederacy, but were thwarted by Andrew Johnson, a stone-cold racist and fairly incompetent man in general.
How did they feel about the Pagan's nasty habit of feeding Christians to the lions?
Of course the current MAGA nutbags (aka, the rank and file GOP today) probably wouldn't object to have Trump feed Nancy, the NYT, CBS News, Kamala, ABC News, Sleepy Joe, General John Kelly, Adam Schiff, Michael Cohen, Stormy, the NYC and Georgia prosecutors, Jack Smith and few hundred others fed to lions.
Um, Rome didn't have a political structure, at least after the fall of the Republic. It had a bureaucratic structure but that isn't the same thing. As long as the only way to find out who the next emperor would be was civil war, you can't really say there's a structure.
Oh, and more to the point, 12% aren't sure about slavery? I can see some percentage of assholes loving it (like the current Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina), but how can you not have an opinion one way or the other?
And it baffles me why Robinson thinks he would be the slave OWNER.
This was a harbinger of something (writing this on November 7)