It's always comforting to know that I'm smarter than the richest man in the world
I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was founded by two dudes who absolutely drank wolf milk
Okay, but here me out. What if all the soldiers of Thebes (the kinda coolish Greek one, not the hella coolish Egyptian one) were just the teeth of dragons, and they fought one another until only the strongest survived, and then those survivors became a middling city state that still got Spartans to STFU about being based at long last?
were just the teeth of dragons, and they fought one another until only the strongest survived,
then the dragon wakes up to find it's been grinding its teeth again
Nah, founding can only be done by one person unless you have paper to do it with (like the Founding Fathers), so chances are they fought to the death first
ngl that would be a funny bit if Musk started a whole ass Twitter thread rephrasing the entirety of the Aeneid in his usual raving manner, screeching about weapons and some dude from Troy
Dido
this brings back memories of the time i had to read a few paragraphs of the aeneid aloud in 7th grade but my friend changed Dido to Dildo with a pencil while i was reading and i got in trouble for laughing.
I would agree, but the aeneid was blatant propaganda, so the reversal works on the meta level
Thanks for reminding me of the long buried memory of my Latin teacher explaining this is the first description of pizza in literature.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat. That’s true prophecy. A roman writing about a food that won’t be invented for 1000 years
Guess he answered the "how often do you think about Ancient Rome" question.
Only good response to this was Amber Rollo tweeting that her boyfriend thinks about way more empires than your boyfriend
Only thinking about Rome is the history eqvivalent of only listening to Imagine Dragons.
This is a hill I will die on.
Competent soldiers (almost no women) is definitely in his browser history.
I love the casual homophobia. Like when libs Photoshop Putin kissing other men as some kind of sick burn
Rome is on an incredibly good spot for a settlement, and has probably been occupied constantly ever since there have been people in the area. It was almost certainly not "founded" by anyone. This is your brain on Great Man ideology.
Very few cities have an explicit founder unless they're relatively modern. The vast majority of settlements throughout human history just built up in good locations on their own. You're completely right, the conservative/liberal mind seems to be incapable of comprehending groups of people doing something on their own. They have to have a brilliant leader who told them to build a city.
They have to have a brilliant leader
(almost no women)
I think it comes from north america brain/settler brain, where settlers roll in, kill/replace the original inhabitants who were living there for millennia, and "found" a "new" settlement that you can assign a founder to. Then you export that way of thought to places where it has no basis in reality and you end up with roman statue avatar twitter guys (and musk apparently) actually believing that cities that have existed since cities began could have singular founding figures and didn't organically emerge because it's a good place to settle down
Iirc, we even have evidence of wars fought between the inhabitants of the different hills of rome, implying that it is such a good place for a settlement that multiple groups settled there before growing too large to be supported by the resources available on their hill alone.
One of the funniest things here is that unlike heavily mythologized figures like Gilgamesh or various biblical leaders Rome's legendary founder isn't even believed to have existed at all. Like they didn't just make up stories about some old king, he was just invented and named after the city relatively late in its existence. It'd be like if America's civic cult developed to the point that "Uncle Sam" was written into the historical record as a literal demigod who built Jamestown by himself and led a bloody crusade across the continent before writing the constitution himself.
With my vast Civilization experience I can confidently inform you that Beijing was founded by Mao Zedong in 4000 BC.
I am under the impression the "founded by children raised by wolves" just referred to whatever dynasty people liked back then having started by a nomadic army just taking over and declaring themselves the kings. Which was super common historically.
One could simply enter a walled city by concealing soldiers in a gigantic, hollow wooden horse! I wonder if this was ever attempted by the ancient Greeks?
maybe the Persians where conquered by a Macedonian Army . They had the Phalanx at that time it could have been very effective against the Persians.. Archemidic Perisa did go under in 330 , maybe theres a conection..
Only to face the merciless clan that was the strike through
He definitely has a folder on his computer labeled "NOT VIDEOS OF ME DRINKING WOLF MILK"
Wondering if this is because that meme that went around about how some (white) men think about Rome at least once a day. Probably felt he was missing out so vomited up this nonsense.
Wondering if this is because that meme that went around about how some (white) men think about Rome
you are a Visigoth auxiliary in the Roman Gaul. the year is 452AD, you have received grim news about the bleeding on the Catalaunian plains . As you are on your daily patrol, the ground starts to tremble,
you are going to die
There is some evidence of sub-mycenean/Luwian settlements in Apulia, which may be the core of the myth. But thinking something invented by Virgil 1500 years later is literally true is bizarre
To think you're the first person to think of it is even weirder lol.
What do you mean? Jumping to spurious conclusions based on gut feelings and vague word associations is definitely a valid methodology that certainly doesn't rehash word for word the exact same random theories by anglo aristocrat failsons in the 19th century when they took time off their phrenology blogging to go look at a collection of looted artifacts/contemporary forgeries.
well they are the idiots inventing "worse version of a bus system" and calling it a startup.
This pdf (requires a login, alas) was my first introduction to the subject. There's also a few scholars that think the Etruscan language has a Luwian substrate but they're considered a bit fringe, especially those who say Etruscan is an Anatolian Indo-European language.
Really makes you think what a couple of feral kids raised by wolves could bring to democracy today.
CEO saying to a board: "we need an innovative idea, because we need something new." moment
