From goya@uvic.ca Sun May 21 05:41:24 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id FAA47562 for ; Sun, 21 May 2000 05:41:24 -0700 Received: from front2m.grolier.fr (front2m.grolier.fr [195.36.216.52]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id FAA03516 for ; Sun, 21 May 2000 05:41:23 -0700 Received: from [195.36.213.125] (nas1-213-225.kdel.club-internet.fr [195.36.213.225]) by front2m.grolier.fr (8.9.3/No_Relay+No_Spam_MGC990224) with ESMTP id OAA08051 for ; Sun, 21 May 2000 14:30:55 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 14:39:04 +0200 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Michael Chase Subject: Re: Triump(h)us At 2:09 AM +0200 on 5/21/00, James M. Pfundstein wrote: > At 6:56 AM -0400 5/20/2000, Daniel P. Tompkins wrote: > >At the same time, we have two cultures that had ideological > >commitments to brutality--if William Harris' work on Rome is to believed; > >compare Hitler's orders to lexicographers to find positive meanings for > >"brutal" and "hart" (reported by Walter Mueri years ago--not as if > >lexicography were the only evidence). > > > >So a question perhaps worth pursuing is not, how were these cultures > >"similar" but how did they differ? How did they use this imperative to be > >cruel? > > This seems a little reductive. What evidence is there that Rome had a > particular and defining "imperative to be cruel" that would justify a > comparison to the Nazi police state, or even (less inflammatorily) the > relatively short-lived empires of (neo-)Assyria and (neo-)Babylonia? There > was cruelty in Rome, as indeed there is in every human culture (human > beings being what they are). M.C.: Does "every human culture" tie prisoners to wheels and roll them into arenas where thousands of spectators could cheer as they watched them be disembowelled by wild animals? No, I didn't think so. Ah, but Greece was a cruel society too, it will be answered. Maybe, but name me one Greek practice which compares with the barbarism of the Colisseum practices. There were other features as well. > > For what evidence lexicography can provide on this issue: "crudelis" and > its by-forms remain words of harsh condemnation throughout classical Latin > (and afterwards). M.C.: What Roman practices actually were, and the way the Romans themselves spoke about such practices, are two rather different things, I should think. To be sure, comparisons between ome and the Nazis are abusive inasmuch as the Romans had no ideologically-based program to exterminate one particular race. But no society of which I'm aware can match the Romans of the first two centuries as far as sheer, gratiuitous blood-lust is concerned. The Aztecs carried out human sacrifice because of their religious beliefs; those few Islamic nations which condone public executions also believe such practices are in accord with the Qu'ran. The Romans had men and women publicly killed and tortured for fun. There's a considerable difference. > Cheers, Mike. Michael Chase (goya@vjf.cnrs.fr) C.N.R.S. Paris .