[akiselev]

Have you read many ancient Roman manuscripts? Human nature may not have changed but I found the vast majority of texts completely unrelatable - both due to content and prose. Seneca and a few other philosophers/authors are the exception.

[close04]

I haven't really. But keep in mind that a manuscript is just the world as seen through the author's eyes and mind, not the world. So I'm not saying that the writing style hasn't changed in 2 millennia, rather that the people themselves are the same once you drill beneath the thin layer of change from education and society.

I find texts written by my conationals a century or 2 ago already hard to relate to, also modern ones written by people from cultures very different from mine.

[akiselev]

> So I'm not saying that the writing style hasn't changed in 2 millennia, rather that the people themselves are the same once you drill beneath the thin layer of change from education and society.

We've been debating the nature versus nurture question since philosophy was a concrete concept with no visible light at the end of the tunnel. Many people, myself included, would strongly disagree with the latter half of that statement.

[close04]

> myself included, would strongly disagree with the latter half of that statement

In your earlier comment you seemed to be in perfect agreement:

> Human nature may not have changed

This echoes my sentiment that nurture may change from one generation to the next but nature stays the same. Our traits that stubbornly stay the same probably come from our nature, while the ones that change easier over generations or centuries come from nurture. This isn't about which one is more important in defining you. Fresh out of the womb humans have probably been the same for many, many millennia. Like x86 CPUs running newer and newer software.