Romans
Article
Romans is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 15, 2021 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Historians can hunt down some things Romans said that sounded vaguely PTSD-like”; “the Romans conquered hundreds of barbarian tribes”. It most often appears alongside China, 1902, 1903.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 15, 2021
- Last seen: January 10, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- 1902 (1 shared issues)
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- 1903 (1 shared issues)
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- 1906 Japanese neurology journal (1 shared issues)
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- 1970s feminists (1 shared issues)
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- Abkhazia (1 shared issues)
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- Afghan War (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander the Great (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Americans (1 shared issues)
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- Amorites (1 shared issues)
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- Anshan (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
As before, the part I found most enlightening was the history of trauma. Although cultures throughout history have included some people with bad reactions to traumatic events, it’s controversial whether this has happened at anywhere near the levels of today. Historians can hunt down some things Romans said that sounded vaguely PTSD-like, but the fact is that a very large segment of their society was going into a bunch of pitched sword battles and/or crucifying people for fun and profit, and mostly pretty blase about it. We don’t have great records for historical traumatized populations, but it would surprise me if eg antebellum slaves had classic PTSD symptoms at the same rate as Afghan War veterans.
Xenophon’s view of Persia - they were great because they were hard men who resisted decadence - is what historian-blogger Bret Devereaux calls “The Fremen Mirage”. Devereaux is against this. He has a long, very interesting series on how this trope gets called up to serve various unsavory agendas, but in real life settled “decadent” states usually beat hard “manly” barbarians. Sure, some barbarians eventually conquered the Western Roman Empire. But before that happened, the Romans conquered hundreds of barbarian tribes in the process of taking the entire Mediterranean region and holding it for hundreds of years. The score is still settled states 100, barbarians 1. And this is a typical record - look at China, the Middle East, etc, and you will find a similar pattern.