sylla
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Posts posted by sylla
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no reason to apologise, and also thanks on both; now feel free to discuss the philosophical aproach on methodology and evidence in the Arena, and continue about Valerianus right here
cheers
viggen
Not much more to add besides what I've already posted.
Valerian's atypical (for the III century) noble family background is attested not only by the unreliable Historia Augusta ("Trebellius Pollio") but also by Aurelius Victor (presumably the best source for this period) and even by the hostile Zosymus.
In fact, I'm not aware of any relevant source that contends this fact.
I don't think any reliable genealogy can be designed for Valerian beyond his own father.
Being the contemporary naming practices so irregular, the presence (or absence) of Valerian's cognomina is hardly useful for our purpose.
I think there's no way to know if there were any connections of the Valerian dynasty with the Republican plebeian noble Licinia Gens, even less its nature.
The poor condition of the available records for the III century makes the absence of such evidence essentially meaningless.
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...is this thread still about Valerianus, or about something else, i mean no one will join the discussion if this is going to continue in this way, and thats what we want, a lively discussion from as many bright heads as possible on a given topic, right?
cheers
viggen
My apologies; there's a point where we must simply agree that we have the right to disagree.
The disagreement so far has been not about Valerianus' genealogy per se, but the logical methodology involved.
My only point: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...s_Carnuntum.jpg
the inscription basically says (if i am not mistaken) he died with 58 after serving 34 years in the Legion (from simple horseman to Optio eventually becoming Centurio)
34 years are a pretty long time, right? anyone knows of archaelogical evidence of longer serving soldiers?
So Pannonia is leading with 34 years....
No, I don't; but then, we need to check on more military funerary inscriptions.
This epitaph is CIL III, 11213:
The Latin original :
T(itus) Calidius / P(ublii filius) Cam(ilia tribu) Sever(us)/ eq(ues) item optio/ decur(io) coh(ortis) I Alpin(orum) / item (centurio) leg(ionis) XV Apoll(inaris) / annnor(um) LVIII stip(endorium) XXXIIII / h(ic) s(itus) e(est) / Q(uintus) Calidius fratri / posuit
The English restoration:
"Titus Calidius Severus, son of Publius, of the Camilia (voting) Tribe , an eques (then) optio and decurion of the Cohors 1 Alpinorum, and then centurion of the Legion XV Apollinaris, Aged 58 years, served 34 years died. He lies here. Quintus Calidius his brother put this up".
This inscription came from the late I or early II century; its terminus ante quem is 117 AD, when XV Apollinaris was deployed to Syria. The terminus post quem might be circa 80 AD, as it is then when the Cohors 1 Alpinorum (Equitata) is first attested in Pannonia.
Calidius' secret was that he served two times; first as a peregrinum in an auxiliary unit, presumably for the 25 years required for acquiring Roman citizenship; and then the remaining nine years as a regular centurion for XV Apollinaris. He was most likely from a local Pannonian family.
In principle, it seems perfectly feasible that other Roman auxilia upgraded to legionaries might have served for even longer periods, because:
-Calidius first recruitment was relatively late (24 years old).
-At least some of them may have survived beyond their sixth decade.
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From the List of Logical Fallacies, this is the entry for Argumentum ex Silentio.
However, it's easy to see that such fallacy doesn't apply here; this thread has an example of argumentum ad ignorantiam. Click on it.
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You know, when one makes an argument, one must bring a source .
As a last remark, just check this thread; I never made any agument.
You made the argument that Valerian can't be a true Licinius, but you didn't bring any source.
You actually try to base your argument in the absence of sources!!! (ie, as no source proves it, it's impossible)
You know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I just pointed the faulty logic, and indeed it is; but that's also not my business.
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...and how that's helps us ?
At least, by pointing you a faulty assumption that would bias your prosographical analysis.
BTW, it seems the less than 0.0001% was just an alternative way of expressing full impossibility (0% chance). And that's one impossibility that you can't sustain.
Any family anywhere has the potential of leaving descendants; you may consider unlikely that Valerian came from bona fide Licinii, and you may be right; but from the content of this thread or the primary sources on this Emperor you simply can't reach such conclusion.
So, in your logic, the descendants of Hamurabi are with us today but are not ATTESTED...Is that impossible in your logic? Really?
I'm absolutely sure that my ascendants, your ascendants and Valerian ascendants were all alive by the time of Hammurabi, and there's a priori no reason why this king couldn't have been one of them (in fact, his polygamy would have made it particularly feasible).
After all, about 1 in every 200 men in the World comes from a genetic lineage related to Gengis Khan.
And of course, all known life came from a common ancestor that lived in the Paleoarchean, some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.
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Why not simply one of the true Licinii?
By the mid second century BCE there were only two Licinian branches, the Luculli and the Crassi . The last Luculli was lucius Licinius Lucullus who died in 42 BCE . The last biological Crassi was Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives cos. 30 BCE, he adopted a son and named him M. L. C. D. (cos. 14 BCE) . The son of the last one was M.L.C. Frugi (cos. 27 CE), he had a son with the same name - executed by Nero . This Frugi (II) had two sons (cos. 87 and cos. suff. 88) . They are the last true Licinnii, by adoption . The chanse that Valerianus was their descendant is no more than 0.0001 % . Take for example Marcus Licinius Sura cos. 93/97, 102 and 107 . He was a contemporary of the last two and did not had any familial connections with them . He was a descendant of some Hispanic who got his Roman citizenship sometime in the first century CE .
You're quoting last ATTESTED descendants. Even if your sources are reliable, I don't think you can be absolutely sure that there were not UNATTESTED descendants from these or even other branches. In any case, I don't understand your Maths or how did you get the 0.0001%.
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There is no information about republican/early empire families in mid third century .
That depends on your definition criteria; if you consider ANY Republican nobile nomen from this period as freedmen or clients' offspring, your argument is circular.
There is a source about Valerianus' coming from old senatorial family (not HA) ?Both Aurelius Victor and Zosimus.
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Scipio's triumph over Hannibal was one of a great general over a great general.
That's an interesting comparison because, contrary to the isolated panegyric accounts for any of the three quoted Roman battles, we have plenty of information available on Waterloo from almost any angle. In fact, we can attest the Rashomon play; it's no surprise that the battle analysis is defined essentially by the nationality of the analyst. Both the British and the Germans attributed their victory to their respective commander, while the French (and the Emperor himself) attributed their defeat to the mistakes of one of their own (Ney).
There are of course countless factors that contribute to any battle's outcome; an endless discussion on the case of Waterloo is clearly out of the scope of this thread. However, the outcome of Waterloo was hardly unexpected after a quick arithmetic assesment: some 118,000 veteran allies crushed some 72,000 young conscripts from the demographically depleted France.
Even if Waterloo was less than two centuries ago, there is always some debate regarding casualties; even so, the average figures are far more reliable (and credible) than the typical balance from either Zama or Pharsalus; a good estimation would be some 32,000 French (44%) and 22,000 allies (19%).
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Salvete !
I really find it hard to believe that you had so much trouble learning to read and write, Kosmo.
Did they have to torture you or what ?
By the way, you don't need any paper to learn to read and write. I didn't need any. I learned it on a little blackboard with a piece of chalk. Or with just about anything on anything else really, as you do when you are five years old. And books ? How many books you think I had read at the time ? Or how many I needed to scribble away on my little blackboard ? Yes, I'll let you in on a little secret : I could already read and write a bit before I entered first grade. Alright, I was a little ahead of average but I was far from an exception : there were at least a couple of other kids in my kindergarten class who could. And all the rest learned it within a few months in the first grade.
Why do you suppose that to learn anything at all you of necessity need years and years of formal training or schooling ? The evidence to the contrary is just everywhere. If that was the case I wouldn't be talking to you here. Where did I learn English ? I sure didn't learn it at school. Or to use a computer, at least well enough to get most things I want done ? In school ? I am sure there are loads and loads of things you have learned by yourself that are far more difficult than memorizing 22 symbols and the sounds they represent.
The Romans would really have been complete morons if they hadn't seen the enormous advantages of a relatively literate population and, not least, soldiers. Why try to run an enterprise like the Empire almost entirely just by word-of-mouth (if it was even possible) while you have something as simple and advantageous as the written word around ?
Formosus
That's a gross underestimation of the immense ongoing effort developed at almost any level for the education of the peoples all over the world.
Even if it might seem as natural as breathing to us, social alphabetization has never been spontaneous, and it has been considered a regular public issue just for the last two centuries at most.
As virtually any state previous to the European Enlightenment, the ancient Rome never had anything remotely similar to an alphabetization policy for its civil population.
Even if we lack any kind of statistics, there is some useful indirect information available; we have abundant evidence on the administrative and military literacy, and also of a relatively high educational level for the elite and even some urban popular sectors; but that is orders of magnitude away from the status of any modern developed country.
Just think that the vast majority of peasants were most likely unable to read, not to mention most slaves and most women from any social level.
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It is hard for me to believe that roman soldiers were often in a place where the centurion could not shout at them so he needed to write them letters.
One example among many: the document RMR 9 from the Legio III Cyrenaica (Egypt) from about 90
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At some point, the Roman Army included more than four hundred thousand legionaries and auxilia.
The required documentation was immense, not only because of the magnitude of financial and administrative issues, but also because the status of each soldier was recorded in an archive; each one was identified by name, filiation, tribe, origin and date of enlist.
As pointed out by Phang, records going back 16 years in the Praetorian Guard, 20 to 25 years in the legions and auxilia, and 28 in the fleet were a minimum necessity.
Even if only a tiny fraction of these documents have survived, they are quite enlightening.
Most of these records were probably used by relatively few professional clerks (like financial accounts, recruitment, personnel management, mission reports).
However, there were many documents that clearly implied their lecture and filling by regular soldiers, like the giving and confirmation of orders, daily tasks, general duty and guard duty rosters, daily and pridiana (yearly) reports and so on.
Literacy was hardly considered a luxury for the regular Roman soldiers, even the auxilia.
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....The ideas from Pollard and Fagan are indeed interesting, but Lamb's writings (at least as quoted here by Mr McKenzie) are simply too farfetched; for example (sic):
- "1690-1728 - Reports of Inuit appearing in Scotland";
- "Between 1693 to 1700... two-thirds of the population died through cold and starvation" (In Scotland).
This can't be serious.
I can't swear to the population decline figures not having folowed it up so far but depending upon the context it may simply have been referring to a part of the highlands severely affected by bad weather. However the inuit story has been around for years and seems to be based on established facts - even if the full story is unlikely to ever be discovered. The British Association for American Studies has an item on
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- Previous to Thapsus, Caesar "made friendly overtures to the latter's (Scipio's) soldiers, and distributed among them pamphlets, in which he promised... the Roman that he would grant him pardon and the same prizes that he had offered to his followers. In this way he gained over a goodly number" (Dio 43,5).
- When facing Anthony at Brundisium, "the men whom Octavian had sent to tamper with the soldiers distributed the greatest possible number of handbills throughout the camp, reflecting on Antony's stinginess and cruelty, recalling the memory of the elder Caesar and urging them to share the service of the younger and his liberal gifts"...
Even more, "Antony tried to find these emissaries by means of rewards to informers and threats against those who abetted them, but as he caught no one he became angry, believing that the soldiers concealed them" (Appian, BC 3, 44).
- Previous to Philippi (II), Anthony and Octavius "managed in some way to cast pamphlets into his camp (Brutus'), urging his soldiers either to embrace their cause (and they made them certain promises) or to come to blows if they had the least particle of strength" (Dio 47,48).
All these references seem to imply that by the late Civil Wars period most of the regular Roman legionaries were expected to be literate.
Or expected the literate to read them to everyone else. You may be right of course, but taking into account the literacy of the entire population, I find it unlikely that the vast majority of civil war era soldiers were literate.
[EDIT] Granted, of course, that the literacy level of the Roman world citizenry is disputed in this conversation.
I find it hard to believe Scipio, Anthony, Brutus or anyone else would have let their enemies' pamphlets be read aloud among their ranks while waiting for an imminent battle. Besides, if the pamphlet editors ought to rely on scanty potentially hostile readers to transmit their message, such expensive measure might have been useless or even counterproductive.
On the other hand, both Appian and Dio wrote in the late principate, so it may be reasonably inferred that the literacy levels of the Roman soldiers of their time was enough to allow individual political propaganda.
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Hasn't someone mentioned this before in another thread? Or maybe I'm imagining things...
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- Previous to Thapsus, Caesar "made friendly overtures to the latter's (Scipio's) soldiers, and distributed among them pamphlets, in which he promised... the Roman that he would grant him pardon and the same prizes that he had offered to his followers. In this way he gained over a goodly number" (Dio 43,5).
- When facing Anthony at Brundisium, "the men whom Octavian had sent to tamper with the soldiers distributed the greatest possible number of handbills throughout the camp, reflecting on Antony's stinginess and cruelty, recalling the memory of the elder Caesar and urging them to share the service of the younger and his liberal gifts"...
Even more, "Antony tried to find these emissaries by means of rewards to informers and threats against those who abetted them, but as he caught no one he became angry, believing that the soldiers concealed them" (Appian, BC 3, 44).
- Previous to Philippi (II), Anthony and Octavius "managed in some way to cast pamphlets into his camp (Brutus'), urging his soldiers either to embrace their cause (and they made them certain promises) or to come to blows if they had the least particle of strength" (Dio 47,48).
All these references seem to imply that by the late Civil Wars period most of the regular Roman legionaries were expected to be literate.
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In his book 'Collapse' ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/15/society ) Jared Diamond suggests that the Little Ice Age starts somewhat earlier, round about 1350. His account of the extinction of the Greenland Vikings due to climatic factors is a harrowing and dramatic read.
Mr Diamond is evidently talking about not the "Maunder Minimum", but a more conventionally defined "Little Ice Age"; this is an example of why the use of the latter label might be misleading.
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I have a different way on looking on the subject, unlike the western provinces (Hispania, Gaul, etc.) who didn't have a common culture and were ready to absorb the Latin and Roman one the eastern provinces were radically different - they had the common culture of the Greek Hellenism, which was consider equal if not superior to the Roman Latin culture (even by the Roman themselves), hence the east never receive the Latin Roman culture and instead view itself as Roman but this was a different kind of Romans than the west. so in fact there were two Roman nations: The Latin Romans in the west and the Greco-Hellenistic in the east.
As the empire was split and the western empire eventually collapse, the eastern empire (while still viewed itself as "Romans") began to be more and more Greek.
As your description is exact, I really find amazing that you still justify the use of the quotation marks; unsurprisingly, Romans from anywhere always viewed themselves as Romans.
- The Romans profited from their Hellenic cultural heritage both in the West and in the East; you simply can't imagine a Seneca or a Cicero without their Greek background. The Roman culture was as Greco-Hellenistic in west as in the east; just think about the divinization of the Imperial family.
- Most of the cultural production of the Roman Empire came always from the Eastern side; even more, most of the scholars of the principate that wrote in Greek (Strabo, Ptolemy, Plutarch, Josephus, Galen, Cassius Dio, Appian, even the Church fathers) has always been considered Roman and Greek at the same time; even by Gibbon.
- The Romans wrote in Greek long before writing in Latin. And a lot of what the bona fide Italian Imperial ruling elite left us was in Greek. Maybe Fabius Pictor and Marcus Aurelius should be considered "Byzantines".
- But the most important fact is that, by your own description, essentially nothing changed. The Eastern side was Greek before the Romans came, was Greek up to the Fall of the Western Empire, and was Greek for centuries afterwards. How could they have become even more "Greek"?
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It must be said that Belisarius (under Justinian) was the last general who made significant territorial gains in the name of the Empire, even though they were reconquests. The brief reconquests by the Comnene dynasty in the 10th cenury were paltry in comparison. Therefore I hold with Sonic's view that he is probably the last general who can be equated with figures from the Principate.
If military conquests are the Roman-defining criterion, the eunuch Narses was as Roman as Belisarius, while most Emperors between Trajan and Justinian would have been "Byzantines". In any case, the military deeds of the Macedonian dynasty were equiparable with any general of the Principate.
That the Byzantine Empire was the same state as the one set up by Augustus is beyond doubt, and even the Franks of the Crusader period acknowledged this. However, they noted also that it was now run by Greeks. Furthermore, Constantinople - especially under Justinian - had a policy of distancing itself from its pagan, classical heritage. It is generally considered that by the end of the sixth century there had been a big enough cutural and linguistic shift to regard the Roman Empire of Constantinople as a different entity to the classical Empire of Ancient Rome.The Empire has been run by Spaniards since Trajan, Africans since Severus and Greeks at least since Diocletian; the "Greeks" that ruled the Empire after the VI century came from any province: Armenia, Phrygia, Syria or Africa. The distancing from the pagan, classical heritage was inherent to the Christian rule from the very first moment.
No one ever called "Byzantine" the Roman Empire; unsurprisingly, the Romans were identified as Romans by all of their neighbors, from China to the Franks themselves. Only occasionally some western chroniclers had any objection, when they futilely tried to support the incredibly absurd idea that the Pope was able to select not just the new "Roman Emperor", but even the new "Roman Empire".
The bizarre schizophrenic idea of a "Byzantine Empire", not only different from but supposedly opposed to the Classical Roman Empire, was simply a cheap invention from XVIII and XIX centuries' historians; revisionism of the worst kind. In the context of the preceding post, "it is generally considered" means by those that considered that the I Reich, the so-called "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" had anything remotely Roman within its nature.
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We know that in some periods and places illiteracy was widespread while, Formosius, you did not give any reason why romans were different.
We still had modern populations where what we say it's equally truth (and had more advantages) with 90% illiteracy.
My answer it's because the vast and silent majority was rural population.
More accurately they were peasants and their mothers did not know how to write. Probably they did not know anybody who could write and a book was more expensive then themselves and their family.
Illiteracy is (surprise!) the lack of literacy, currently defined by the UNESCO as "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use... written materials ... to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals... and to participate fully in the wider society"; under such definition (age 15 and over) the literacy rate for the World as a whole was 82% by 2007, and the worst score was for Burkina Faso (23,6 %).
Even if the rural population was the vast majority, it wasn't always so silent. Written records are not restricted to the books; the thousands of amphorae recovered from all over the Empire (multiple rural areas included) have almost always at least some short inscription regarding its contents, producers and shippers.
If no one was able to read, why were so many inscriptions required?
Unsurprisingly, one of the most constant archaeological evidence of the barbarian conquest across the V and VI centuries was the abrupt decline on the written record.
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The implicit premise of the Imperial characters and population suddenly and almost magically becoming non-Romans after Justinian and Belisarius is simply unhistorical and plainly absurd.
I agree - to a point. I call him the last of the Roman generals because he is probably the last general that earlier generations, especially in the Principate, would acknowledge as being their descendant, and was probably the last natural Latin speaker that rose to high rank. After him, and especially with Narses, there is a distinct switch to a more Eastern culture, despite the fact that they thought of themselves as 'Romans'. I can't really believe that, for instance, Augustus, Caesar or Trajan would have been impressed with the idea of an eunuch at the head of the Imperial armies.
They would probably have been as impressed as Scipio Africanus with Septimius Severus, Cicero with Maximinus Thrax, Cato Maior with Philip the Arab, even the pious Augustus with the fanatic Theodosius or Justinian himself ... or George Washington with Colin Powell. All societies and nations evolve; so?
The main reason why the Roman population of the Roman state of any time considered themselves as Romans (without quotation marks) was that they were so: the same state, population and culture in constant evolution, from Romulus to Constatine XI.
The weight of the proof rests on anyone who pretends that, at any arbitrary point, the Romans stopped being Romans just to support Montesquieu and Gibbon.
If I'm not mistaken, we have here two main criteria of unromanliness:
I'll leave aside the extraordinary idea of that Eastern trait (Parthian? Athenian? Armenian? Chinese?) of the (Roman) soldiers
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Astronomers have reported that the Sun is at its dimmest for almost a century. Some scientists believe a similar "quiet spell" is connected to a cooling of temperatures in a period of time called the Maunder Minimum. Also known as the Little Ice Age, it lasted 70 years from 1645 to 1715 and featured The Great Frost which froze the River Thames in London for days.
Interestingly, this period coincided with some of the most dramatic events in Scotland's history. A king was forced into exile, there was rebellion, famine, an ill-fated Scottish bid to establish a colony in Central America and a sandstorm buried a coastal estate. The span of 70 years also saw the signing of the Act of Union in 1707 and the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715...
...full article at the BBC
"Little Ice Age" is a misnomer for the "Maunder Minimum", because the former term has been used to describe quite different periods and phenomena.
1645-1715 was an extremely dramatic and complex period not only for Scotland but for all Europe, the European colonies and the whole world (the reign of Louis XIV, to begin with); it's unclear how much of such complexity is attributed by the authors to the climate change.
The ideas from Pollard and Fagan are indeed interesting, but Lamb's writings (at least as quoted here by Mr McKenzie) are simply too farfetched; for example (sic):
- "1690-1728 - Reports of Inuit appearing in Scotland";
- "Between 1693 to 1700... two-thirds of the population died through cold and starvation" (In Scotland).
This can't be serious.
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The implicit premise of the Imperial characters and population suddenly and almost magically becoming non-Romans after Justinian and Belisarius is simply unhistorical and plainly absurd.
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Era is also extremely important... early to mid Republic legionaries consisted of landed citizenry and were likely to have better access to education than military counterparts in the later Republic and imperial eras or in armies of other "states".
The Vindolanda tablets were written by and for legionaries from the middle and late Imperial eras; I'm not aware of any archeological evidence that might imply an even higher literacy level for the Roman soldiers of any previous period.
Valerianus as an example
in Nomina et Gentes
Posted · Edited by sylla
And if there were any trace of any one of such families, how would we indentify them?
As stated here, the argument is circular; P. Licinius Valerius can't be from the original Licinia gens just because he lived too late; then, his name is no trace of the old republican families; then, such families didn't survive.
(Just for the sake of clarity, what we have here is an example of argumentum ad ignorantiam, not of argumentum ex silentio; the latter means that you can't infer you're right simply because your oppponent didn't answer).