[bhritchie]

> Rome’s Asian contemporaries completely dwarfed Rome in almost every respect: heritage, population, cultural diversity, technology, architecture, medicine, philosophy, poetry…

> it’s always made me sad to think of the Romans being largely cut off from the main action on the world stage.

This is incorrect because the Romans knew about Greece - in fact they ran the place.

The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece. They didn't do anything that could compare to the Greeks in math or philosophy, for example. And by, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, India had far more interesting philosophy (sadly little known because not very accessible) than Rome, so sure, "Asia" had better philosophy than Rome (really India specifically). But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either). Rome wasn't cut off from the best of philosophy - they were just too practical to care much about it - and they knew it and said as much.

Philosophy I know something about - I dropped out of the PhD program at Harvard after studying quite a bit of it. But some of the other parts seem dubious or of questionable importance. Architecture? The Romans look pretty good to me there, and I mean they even used concrete. Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo. Population? So what?

[duaneb]

> The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece.

This is definitely the case. Barbarian was a greek term centered around greece; while romans managed to avoid the label most of the time, they definitely fell into the category at points, e.g. in their worship of the Lares during the Republic.

> But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either).

Definitely. I will say that the philosophies in the original vedic texts are possibly the oldest things we can call "philosophy", even though the more popular hindu/buddhist derived philosophies were heavily hellenized by the fall of the roman empire. I also think that development of a koan, the "simultaneous truths", would have been vehemently rejected by the greek philosophers of which I am aware. Though they still had "middle road" type thoughts, it was not based around the acceptance of two contrary truths, even though you can form such a dialectic that way. Does this match up with your understanding? Do you know of anything framing vedic-derived philosophy in greek-derived terms? I often get swamped in the details when attempting to read through the material directly; doubly so for the ridiculously archaic older texts.

> Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo.

Not quite true; Galen was an excellent surgeon, covered basic sanitation (e.g wash the wound and then bathe it in vinegar), and was THE reference until our knowledge of anatomy improved starting around the renaissance. But in this respect, the Romans certainly dominated the greeks, and their ability to treat soldiers on the field with the "state of the art technology" was absolutely crucial for the maintenance of a standing army, especially during periods of expansion (e.g. the tail end of the republic).

However, they had lost their edge by the fall of the empire to neighboring powers. That goes for nearly everything but IIRC engineering secrets, which were simply lost.

[whack]

"And by, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, India had far more interesting philosophy ... But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy"

That sounds very interesting. Are there any sources that discuss this in more detail? All the results on google seem to suggest that if at all a correlation exists, that Indian philosophy might have inspired Greek Philosophy.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/did-ancient-greece-borrow-...

http://www.josephwaligore.com/greek-philosophy/indian-influe...

https://francoisgautier.me/tag/influence-of-india-on-greek-p...

https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-ancient-Indians-influence...

[bhritchie]

The book I mentioned, The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley, is an amazing one. That's the place to start. My now vague recollection is that the influence went first from India to Greece (via various other places) not as what I would call philosophy but maybe "speculative theology" or "speculative religion" (think Vedas, Upanishads) Then more fully formed Greek philosophy influenced Indian thought via the Hellenistic world following the Alexandrine conquests (so e.g. you wind up with Buddhist philosophy like Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī that deploys some arguments familiar from sceptical schools of Hellenistic philosophy.

[vacri]

> The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece. They didn't do anything that could compare to the Greeks in math or philosophy, for example.

The Greeks never had a lasting widespread empire, and warred amongst themselves a lot in their golden period. Yes, Alexander conquered all the way to the Indus, but as soon as he died, his empire splintered. The Romans, on the other hand, built an empire that lasted for centuries, and their culture as we see it is not defined by a mere handful of names.

Maybe the Romans didn't exceed the Greeks at philosophy, but they certainly and uncontestably exceeded them at statecraft, which is why it's odd to hear them called 'barbarians' in comparison.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The Greeks never had a lasting widespread empire

I am Greek so you can take the following with a big fat pinch of salt but, yes, yes we did have a "lasting widespread empire". We have it still: it's called the Western Civilisation. The Greeks conquered, not with swords and shields, but with philosophy, art and science.

The Romans carried Greek culture along with them wherever they conquered. In the East, Greek philosophy reached India [1]. Arab scholars transcribed Greek philosphers' works and carried them over to the Middle Ages where they were picked up by Christian monks, themselves followers of a religion built on holy scriptures written in Greek (the Evangels, or, Gospels [2]). Most of early Western science either confirmed or refuted the ideas of the Greek philosphers [3]. Greek mathematics still form the basis of mathematical knowledge today [4]. And who knows what else was lost to war, or natural disasters [5].

I am very well aware of the fact that I would have been equally proud of my history were I to be British, or a descendant of the Mongols, or even a modern citizen of the USA. However, I'm not- I'm Greek and I'm proud to be a distant relative of a people that has gone down in history not for having the vastest empire, or the most fierce warriors, or the most brutal war machine, but for having kickstarted civilisation.

Even today, you go to the capitals of the world and you see "Grecko-Roman" architecture built when people want to show the world that they dont' just have power, but brains also.

You can bet yer keister we damn well conquered an empire. We conquered several of the things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yavanajataka

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almagest

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_mathematics

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

[fsloth]

If we are discussing actual history now I think it's a bit of a hyperbole to claim all of western civilization as greek inheritance as this view trivializes the intellectual and cultural developments before and after the greek golden age. Yes, it offered great seeds for many things but those seeds were grown to fruitition by other people. It is very hard for me to see much living intellectual continuity from the ancient to the modern greece. The area was reduced to a backwater serfdom for centuries. Even the ancient texts had to be refound through islamic sources in the early renaissance. You can't just take Aristotle and Euclid and claim that they offer all of the keys to our modern civilization. Some - definetly.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> You can't just take Aristotle and Euclid and claim that they offer all of the keys to our modern civilization. Some - definetly.

I won't really contest this. Yes, Greece is today and has been for the last few hundreds of years an intellectual backwater. That's the course of history, right? We've had our five thousand ish years of dominance. Who can ask for more?

I also agree that many other cultures laid the ground for the Greek civilisation- the ancient Greeks themselves liked to say their civilisation came from Egypt.

I say in another post that we should be really speaking of a human civilisation (and thank whatever deities, or blind luck, that we have it). Civilisation does not stop at national borders, fortunately.

Also: big pinch of salt; I did say that at the very beginning.

Still, I'd like it to be remembered that one particular people was very influential and went down in history not because they slaughtered thousands or millions, but because they produced a lot of knowledge.

I'm proud of this as a Greek but we should all be, it's our shared heritage and we must remember that we are at our best when we build, not when we destroy.

[vacri]

You're wearing some extremely hefty rose-coloured nationalistic glasses. For example, the golden period was very early in the story, isn't yet 3000 years old, yet you're claiming 5000 years of dominance?

But ultimately, it's silly to have this kind of nationalistic association, because the Greeks of the golden period had a very different society to modern Greeks. Where is your Athenian direct democracy? Where is your Spartan warrior cult? Where are your slaves? Where is the widespread demand for Greek-educated workers? Where are your city-states, each having their own international relations and cultural aspects?

And, ultimately, where is the modern Greek's love of learning and knowledge, for which we lionise ancient Greece? As far as I can tell, the modern Greek is no more interested in education than any other typical modern European. I live in the biggest Greek-population city outside of Greece itself, in the Greek-est suburb, and my experiences are that modern Greeks love life and family most, and aren't so interested in higher learning, art, and music (no more than any other demographic). Yes, ex-pat Greeks are a little different culturally to native Greeks, but not that much. It's not like modern Greeks have a particularly notable reputation for education, like Jewish people do.

Ancient and modern Greece are two different places, as were the Greeces in-between, just like modern Italy is not Rome, even though they use the same alphabet.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> You're wearing some extremely hefty rose-coloured nationalistic glasses. For example, the golden period was very early in the story, isn't yet 3000 years old, yet you're claiming 5000 years of dominance?

Let's not have a fight over this. I take the start of the Minoan civ to be the beginning, some 3.5 kya, and the fall of Constantinople to be the end of the Good Old Days, followed by a few hundred years of decline. That makes very nearly 5k years.

I resent the accusation of nationalism. I can wear my rose-tinted glasses all I like (and you're free to laugh at me all you wish) but I'm pretty sure my right to be proud of my heritage does not deny others' right to be proud of theirs [1]. As far as I am concerned a patriot is someone who loves their country, a nationalist is someone who hates everyone else's. I am very confident I'm not the latter.

>> Ancient and modern Greece are two different places

Totally no objection about this. You can't have 5k ish years of history and remain the same people throughout.

>> It's not like modern Greeks have a particularly notable reputation for education, like Jewish people do.

That's alright. Another part of my definition of "patriot" is someone who loves their country regardless of its history, or current condition. It's nationalists who long for the Good Old Days (of Empire, usually). Although for the kind of Good Old Days I'm talking about, of brilliant intellectual achievements, I would make an exception and say that I do wish we hadn't declined as far as we have.

So, happy now? You broke my heart and rubbed my face in my own dirt. Can't an ancient people be left to decline in peace?

___________

[1] If the descendants of the Mongols or the Brits feel robbed of their right to be proud of being the biggest butchers in history, I consider that to be their problem.

[ianamartin]

Thank you for saying this. I'm not Greek. I'm a typical U.S. mutt with somewhat unknown origins.

I'd like to add that the distinction we use now to indicate differences between Eastern and Western culture/art/and music are largely artifacts of how things evolved after a key point in time.

I know the most about Music, so I'll speak to that. What we speak of now as "Western Music" is largely tonal or functional harmony, and it has its origins in ancient Greece around the time of Pythagoras. But it was a mixture of the Eastern chant tradition with the applied Mathematical and logical rigor of Hellenistic Greeks that provided the foundation for what would eventually evolve to what we now know it as.

For about 1000 years, the early Christians mostly followed in the tradition of Eastern chant traditions with some additional codification and structure in what we now call Gregorian Chant. A guy named Boethius described texts by Pythagoras, Aristoxenus, and Plato, and was reprinted in Renaissance Italy and got some attention there.

And--just as that several generations tried to do by superimposing Greek Philosophy onto the Church doctrine of the time--misinterpreted/mistranslated those pieces of information onto what was at the time a developing, but still fairly primitive version of polyphony.

What happened from there happened pretty quickly and is well known. [1]Zarlino, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, etc. Pop music took over the mantle of tonal music right about the time that "classical" composers were getting funky and atonal in the mid-20th century, and has largely stuck with it.

Everything you hear on the radio that is popular is directly traceable to Bach (and unfortunately much less interesting). The work of Bach himself was the almost-inevitable evolution of what happened when Greek thought met Eastern chant.

[1] Before the Boethius reprint in Italy in the late 15th century, the chant style that originated in the Church was, in fact, evolving to certain types of polyphony . . . some of it quite beautiful, and instrumental music was also becoming its own separate thing rather than just an accompaniment to a singer. There was a weird time when a lot of mathematics were applied to the generation of music in the 14th century, and you can find examples of music from this period that are so odd, you could mistake them for mid-20th century art music. But this is a) mostly happening in France and the Netherlands, and b) well before Greek philosophical thought really took fire and spread across a more modern Europe.

Also, this is really broad, and I'm leaving a lot out. Bottom line is that we call it Western Music Theory or Wester Music because the mixture of central Asian and Greek traditions evolved in the way that it did and continues to be separate from purely Eastern musical traditions where Greek philosophy did not take a strong hold.

It's a label of convenience to describe the result of a long process; it's not intended to reflect some kind of a pure origin.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The West - largely because of Greek influence - invented two ideas that were never invented elsewhere: abstraction, and universality.

Abstraction meant that instead of learning ad hoc practical recipes for art, science, culture, etc, the West has always had an interest in developing symbolic systems of representation that allow formal modelling, manipulation, and prediction.

Universality meant that truth was external to society, and independent of social status. It's the theoretical basis of much Western politics ("All people are equal") but it's also the foundation of much science, which combines abstraction with universality to find reliable invariants.

Asian cultures were very inventive in specifics - sometimes more so than Western culture. But they never aimed for abstraction and universality in the same way. The tendency was more to group knowledge into hierarchies of virtue, and to privilege subjective experiences over objective invariants.

In your example, Western music is what you get when you get both abstraction and universality applied to sound. There's abstraction in that the music is written before it's played, which makes it possible to create complex abstract structures on paper that can be built slowly and expertly for maximum effect.

And there's universality - less successfully, perhaps - in the sense that there's a belief in a primary set of invariant relationships between the elements of sound.

Eastern musics have some different attempts at universality, but so far as I know there was never an interest in abstraction in the same way. E.g. Indian classical music has systems, but they're more like rules for improvisation, not rules for building structures out of notes without actually playing any sounds at all.

The critical thing about abstraction is that it can be a huge amplifier of creativity, because you can prototype ideas, systems and experiences symbolically without having to build/generate/perform them in the real world first.

And the interesting thing is that we're only just getting started with it. Science has mostly been a success, but there's a lot mileage in other areas. Computers are one step along the way, but there's a lot more about abstraction still to be discovered and enjoyed.

[vacri]

> It's the theoretical basis of much Western politics ("All people are equal")

From the 18th century "enlightenment" period, you mean? Before the 18th century, this idea was pretty much absent from actual western politics. The 18th century is parted from the ancient Greek golden period by more than two thousand years.

Yes, ancient Greek philosophy was influential, but as fsloth says above, you can't just ignore the in-between time and its thinkers. Don't forget either that many of the advances in the Enlightenment came from breaking with the teachings of classical Greece.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thanks for this- I'm not very well aware of the history of music. I was aware of the work of the Pythagoreans on music, but didn't realise it actually influenced anything.

Also, it's funny because what we consider "Greek" music nowadays is in the Eastern canon, influenced by the music of the Ottomans and the Near East in general (For example, see [1], a traditional Turkish song given Greek verse and performed in Greece since the 1930s at least). I myself play the Ney [2] and the toubeleki (darbuka [3]), and consider them both "traditional" or "folk", like most of my friends.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDzXPLX8JdQ

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ney

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_drum

[bhritchie]

I don't really think they were barbarians in any very interesting sense, just that if there's some contemporary perspective from which you could have seen them that way it would be from a Greek cultural perspective. My point was more just that anything Rome might have lacked culturally was basically right next door in Greece and even familiar to educated Romans - it's silly to skip over Greece and denigrate the Romans from some "Asian" perspective when a substantial amount of that asian stuff derived from Greece in the first place.

And I think the Romans knew they had the strengths you describe and the weaknesses I describe - and in the case of some Romans explicitly preferred it that way. Again that's not well described as a society that is "cut off" from anything.

[mcv]

The Romans were great at politics, engineering and warfare. The Greeks were great at all the stuff that doesn't help you keep an empire together.

[Ericson2314]

Also arguably the Punic wars or something is their societal peak, and late republic their cultural. In the empire period the locus shifted east pretty quick.

Which is to say the Romans assimilated into their conquered cultural betters.

[jomamaxx]

The Greeks call Romans 'barbarians' because they are culturally bereft.

It's the same reason Liberals might call Conservatives 'barbarians' or France might call Germany 'barbarians'.

I.E. The Greeks saw themselves as superior, culturally.

But the Romans were not actually barbarians.

The Germans were actually barbarians.

[pazimzadeh]

> Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo

Is this a joke?

The First Recorded Case of Inflammatory Mastisitis - Queen Atossa of Persia and the Physicial Democedes https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034507/

I can't find the source now, but it's known that antibiotics derived from molds such as penicillin have been in use for a very long time.

[Spooky23]

Traditional medicine was a thing, but the problem was that without the scientific method and isolation of active ingredients, you had no way to know if the treatment was helpful or not.

So one healer may provide you with an effective concoction of antibiotic compounds, but the next may treat with with leeches and give you some herbal tea.

[soufron]

Let's say medicine was essentially accessible to rich people who could employ the rare people who could perform a bit of surgery, make a difference between drugs and placebo, etc.

[Spooky23]

The problem was that they didn't know what was effective or not.

Capitalist societies are relatively new. The nobility might have access to a healer, but that healer may be practicing some religious mumbo jumbo. Middle age kings would get a bleeding from a leech and a dose of Jesus.

In China, you'd get traditional medicine that has some legit use cases, but lots of bullshit as well.

[jomamaxx]

There are hardly any medical procedures performed more than 100 years ago that are actually medical.

Amputations.

What else?

Later on bladder stone removals ... child birth ... setting broken bones.

Even today, if you have something wrong the doctor gives you the 'wonder cure' penicillin.

[Spooky23]

You pretty much made the point. The historical maternal death rate during childbirth was >1%, and even higher in adverse conditions.

[Chathamization]

Well, the Greeks became Romans. Romans stopped meaning citizens of Rome as the polity expanded, and you got emperors from all over the empire. Eventually the empire became Greek speaking and was centered mainly on Greece and Anatolia. My understanding is that there are still Greeks in Turkey that refer to themselves as Romans.

There's a story about Greek children running up to look at Greek soldiers landing on Lemnos during the First Balkan War in 1912 (Hellenes refers to Greeks)[1]:

Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked.

"At Hellenes," the children replied.

"Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier retorted.

"No, we are Romans."

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=iWs0Lh57NvwC&pg=PA42&lpg=P...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I'm Greek and your information is correct :)

We have at least three words to refer to ourselves as a nation:

"Hellenes" is the one most commonly used in modern parlance. I'm not sure where it comes from but you could google it.

"Graikoi" I believe is from the same root as "Greek". You find it in literature from the 19th century and earlier.

"Romioi" is a rendition of "Romans" and you find it very often in accounts from the Epanastasis, the uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. It's used by mainland Greeks and also by the Albanian people who had moved into Greece under the Ottomans, and then fought to expel the Ottomans alongside the Greeks, and finally are today considered Greeks (primarily because it would be madness to try to untangle one's heritage, after a few hundreds of years of intermarriage).

"Romioi" is not in common usage today, except in literature or generally as a colourful turn of phrase. I believe it was bequeathed to us from the Byzantine Empire, a.k.a. the Eastern Roman Empire, as others have noted.

[HillaryBriss]

Ancient Roman medicine included surgery and some surgical instruments close to instruments in use today. More here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/info/medicine/ancient-roman-...

As for ancient Egyptian medicine: While the bulk of Egyptian remedies can now be recognized as incapable of providing a cure, and in many circumstances even alleviation of symptoms, owing to their lack of active ingredients, it would be inappropriate to label all of these treatments as placebos. Of the 260 prescriptions in the Hearst Papyrus, 28 percent contain an ingredient which can be perceived to have had activity towards the condition being treated. More here: http://www.ucalgary.ca/uofc/Others/HOM/Dayspapers2001.pdf#pa...

[FlyingSnake]

> But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy

I'm sorry but I've to call bullshit on this. The accepted term is that the Greeks and the Indians influenced each other. If you read the account of Pyrrho, who traveled with Alexander, he was clearly influenced by the naked gymnosophists. Take a look at this SO answer[1] discussing how Indian thought influenced Greek thoughts. On the other hand Graeco-Buddhism is an apt example of how Greeks influenced Indians. So I would rather call it a meeting of two equals, instead of this eurocentric approach of one way influence.

[1] http://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/2801/is-there-ev...

[bhritchie]

I didn't say it was one way, so I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on.

Indian philosophy may eventually have equalled Greek philosophy in many respects. But in the Hellenistic period? What would you stack up against Aristotle? Plato?