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Bryaxis Hecatee

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Posts posted by Bryaxis Hecatee

  1. About Greece, I'd first say : there is no single united entity in Greece before the Roman Empire came and invaded it ! Thus one should not speak of Greece but of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, etc.

     

    On statehood, most cities were probably low : administration was much less developped than in the roman empire (although not that far away from what did exist during the roman republican period).

     

    On accountability, Athens should probably get a rather good rating, at least from the time of Pericles to the time of Philipp II of Macedonia. Every elected/nominated official had to give official accounts of his actions when he came out of office and could be prosecuted for those actions. In Sparta, the rating would probably be medium since the Kings were always controled by the Ephors, but the Ephors were close to immune.

     

    On rule of law, I'd say that Athens would rate medium for while justice was easy to access (even for non-citizens), we have many cases of political abuse of the tribunals and justice worked also mainly for citizens and non-citizens of subject from the athenian empire's other cities had more difficulties to be heard. In Sparta I'd probably rate the rule of law as rather medium too.

     

    Thus :

     

    Athens : low - high - medium

    Sparta : low - medium - medium

  2. Let your hat rest then, for it is indeed the site of Heraklea Lynkestis, with it's two roman basilicas, it's hadrianic theater, it's thermae and it's episcopal palace, visibles in the modern macedonian city of Bitola, a place to visit when you go along the Via Egnatia.

  3. I'm not really surprised by what we see in the UK, which is still much less than what has happened in France in the past but seems more shocking because it's done in "normal looking" streets instead of HLM. I remember that every time I went to the UK and came a bit late to my hotel, be it in Southampton, Oxford or London, I saw lots of youths completely drunk lying in the streets as early as 6PM : a country that let's it's children go so low is a country in which parents don't educate anymore. And uneducated children are worse than anything one may expect, and unoccupied children (schools are currently closed, holliday time...) means bigger crowd of firebrands availlables for trouble and even bigger crowd of followers...

     

    Allow me to finish this by a citation of French S-F writter Bernard Lenteric, whose "Nuit des enfants rois" was recently adapted betrayed into a very bad movie called "prodigies".

     

    Je crois profond
  4. Maybe sell reconstruction bricks with the name of the benefactor : there is a roman tradition (I remember some aqueduc in northern africa had every stone/brick stamped...) and modern exemples like Saddam's printing his name on every new brick for his rebuilding of Babylone's walls...

     

    It would be one of those "eternity" actions that seems so popular, like sending one's name into deep space, and could make people feel part of both past and future...

  5. Well the fact is that the link with the "false religion" of Akhenaton, the first recorded form of monotheism, has often been touted as a possible explaination for the rise of the hebraic faith : exiled practitionners of the forbidden cult intermixing with the peoples of a land on the border of the empire, mixing their beliefs with those of the locals (cult of a thunder god and his wife) and leading to what would become the basis of the hebraic faith, a faith that would be simplified and radicalized during the Exode in Babylon, the place where the sacred book(s) would be written.

  6. For special exhibits I must confess I hate the practice but can still live with it for it is a way to keep things "exclusive" and thus generate much needed revenues. For permanent collections on the other hand I think open access is to be fully granted and photography permited WHITOUT FLASH in any museums (although I hate taking pictures in painting museums). If they want to restrict photography they must then offer full, high resolution, multi-aspects pictures of each and every artifact in the collection for free use. They often live thanks to tax money and have a mission of both conservation and public education that they must fulfill, including granting to each the possibility to access the pieces from wherever they are, if possible with as much open metadata about them, in order to allow date re-utilization (for exemple : if all museums in the world put in common their roman imperial portraits we could create a fine database that would speed up research and allow faster pre-identification of roman portraits by facial recognition software)

  7. I've almost no clue on how the sport is played so I'd be far from giving you comments on who may win :P For me it's just a bunch of guys punching a ball far from them then running after it with the ultimate goal of putting the ball between two (or well three) bars, with a lot of mostly drunk and often prone to riot peoples watching them, with obscenes salaries paid to the so called "athlets"... I was just surprised to see only european (taken large...) countries in the list for a world cup :)

  8. I just came back from Berlin where indeed war did huges damages too : at the end of the Altes Museum (Old Museum, one of the three antiquity museum on Museuminsel, Museum Island, the museum district in the center of the town) they list some of the damage that museum alone did suffer : 500+ destroyed ancient potery, 250+ marble and bronze statues, hundreds of other objects... Same was true in the Neue Museum (New Museum) which held amongst other Schlieman's trojan artifacts : an allied bomb blew of in the middle of 300 crates of ancient artifacts... And I don't speak of what the Russian took and still exhibit in Moscow !

  9. good idea. I'm currently in Berlin on a small Eeepc so if someone else could set up things that could be best. I'd suggest that we either give a meeting hour in Tongeren or start from Brussels and take a group transport from there (either car sharing or train or renting a bus if we're truly numerous). We could also see who in Belgium has room for one or two peoples too...

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