But Pompeii and Rome were quite different in architecture and development. Rome was an ancient, grown metropolis while Pompeii was a middle-sized Roman provincial city.
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Basileios I said:
Not really. The working class districts of Pompeii & Ostia have pretty much the same layout as those in Rome, insulae were built with same technology and architecture, etc. They are just better preserved.
EDIT: Here's a pic of a one Ostia insula. Roman insulae wouldn't have been very different.
Abdul Goatherd said:
AFAIK there weren't that many insulae in Pompeii.
Pompeii was a neatly constructed Roman city while Rome "grew" historically.
Pompeii
Rome
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Basileios I said:
Take it up with Storey. He's the specialist on this, not me.
EDIT: Mental exercise: You live in Singapore. At its densest urban districts, it reaches a height of 20,000 people per square km (city average is 6,500). Now, go to the densest point, multiply the people by four and limit buildings to six stories (note: average Singaporean insulae are 20 stories). Plausible?
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Basileios I said:
Uh, what now? Pompeii is an very old city, probably as old as Rome. Look at the old city core, it was constructed before Rome took over, and doesn't have the same grid pattern as the roman. Iirc they dug beneath the roman layer of the city and found even older parts of the city not too long ago.
Zohrath said:
The point is that Chandler seems to have used the orderly Roman layer in Pompeii as a reference for the city of Rome.
Basileios I said:
Not Chandler. Storey. But he reached the same figure as Chandler. Chandler used a whole bunch of other stuff to compute his.
Abdul Goatherd said:
That is the roman history numbers sickness asserting itself once again. It is somewhat interesting to read, for example, Goldsworthy's account of the Punic wars and see him spend exactly one line pondering whether the battle of Ecnomus really was the largest naval battle in history, based on one single source, and conclude that there is no reason to distrust the assessment on no other grounds than that Polybius "must be trustworthy" (not necessarily a direct quote
). Vast articles have been written on such details when writing about hellenic, medieval or early modern warfare, but somehow, historians of roman warfare seems immune to such doubts. It's all a bit odd.
In that case I'll have to disagree with their choice. If you don't know, it is better to say so...motiv-8 said:
Endre Fodstad said:
Not wishing to spoil schoolboy fantasies, I guess.
I guess a lot of people learn about Rome this and Rome that when quite young, so are reluctant to soil their youthful impressions about it being the absolute bestest & most uniquest thing around. Very annoying.
And the popular press is even worse. Just today in the New York Times, there was a strange assertion that since the Roman republic died, there was never another republic until 1776. :wacko:
An unhinged Romanophilia when young causes a lot of sloppiness when old.
motiv-8 said:
There is always the citizen lists, estimations of population, and so on. There is always something to work on - far better than just saying that because X says so, it must be so - not even an attempt at source criticism.
reasons
1- Byz withstood several assaults by the Arabs, some lasting years. If Byz had fallen it would have opened the balkans up to a much earlier islamization.
2- Byz preserved all the ancient texts from Greece, all those would probably have been lost.
3- Byz was the last continuous link with a tradition stretching back over 1500 years.
1- Byz withstood several assaults by the Arabs, some lasting years. If Byz had fallen it would have opened the balkans up to a much earlier islamization.
2- Byz preserved all the ancient texts from Greece, all those would probably have been lost.
3- Byz was the last continuous link with a tradition stretching back over 1500 years.
A large part of ancient texts (particularly those of Aristotle and Platon) were tradited long before Constantinople fell, most of them by Arab scholars. The rest (such as Aristotle's Magna Moralia) was, deliberately or accidentially, destroyed by Eastern Roman monks.scaevola said:
During the Umayyid Caliphate and the early part of the Abbassid, many works were actually translated by Syriac Clergy.
Tambourmajor said:
Where did the Arabs get the texts from?
Anyway, ancient knowledge was mainained in Byzantium. Plato was the most famous of the ancient philosophers in the empire.
