and now to Rome...
May. 13th, 2010 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiI thought I'd try doing this as a list.
Things Methos likes about Rome.
Things Methos doesn't like about Rome.
There's a bit of scholarly debate about Rome was really more militaristic than other Mediterranean societies, or just a lot more successful; it's certainly true that Rome isn't the only city in, say, the 4th century BCE where military service dictates civil and social status and where annual military campaigns are normal. But by the third century or so the Romans get very good at building on their successes in a way that city-states often aren't, and I think that for Methos things like Roman inclusiveness can never seem wholly positive, since he'd always have in the back of his mind the origins of the practice as a way of increasing Rome's own power.
Anyway, places Methos liked which are absorbed by Rome: first of all, Etruria and the Greek cities in Southern Italy. The Etruscans don't do too badly out of the result, really, so it will be centuries before Methos sits up one morning and realizes that although there are still people who know how to pray in Etruscan, he's the only one left who knows how to joke in it. Then of course, after the first Punic war, Sicily, which gets hit again during the second round; I think it took him a long time to get over the sack of Syracuse in 212. Carthage itself doesn't go into 146, the same year as Corinth; I can see that being a bad year for Methos, as the Romans are particularly thorough about leveling both cities. Possibly time for him to get out of the Mediterranean altogether and head for India for a while. Meanwhile, the Romans are slowly but surely taking over the rest of the Mediterranean world. I can imagine Methos heading east in 146 and then coming back eighty or ninety years later and wondering what the hell had happened. And things don't really improve over the next decades, since the civil wars are fought all over the empire.
It's not like he hasn't seen this kind of thing before (if anything, the Assyrians were worse) but something about Rome gets under Methos' skin; maybe it does come down the way the Romans incorporate what they conquer, so that he's always coming face to face with echoes of things he's known. Maybe, he thinks much later, it was the world they eventually created, vibrant and urbane and more peaceful than anything he'd known before, the world that came out of all that wreckage: did it make the violence worth something?
Things Methos likes about Rome.
- Hot baths and underfloor heating
- Virgil
- The women. But that's not saying much; I doubt there are many places Methos doesn't like the women. Maybe Athens, and the problem there isn't that he doesn't like the women, but that it's so hard to meet them. But certainly, Roman women are a good thing, even though Methos would probably add that most of what's good about Roman women comes from the Etruscans anyway. Which is a nice lead-in to...
Things Methos doesn't like about Rome.
- The Roman habit of destroying placed he rather liked the way they were before the Romans killed almost everybody and leveled all the buildings and took everything that wasn't nailed down and everyone who wasn't dead back to Rome as loot.
There's a bit of scholarly debate about Rome was really more militaristic than other Mediterranean societies, or just a lot more successful; it's certainly true that Rome isn't the only city in, say, the 4th century BCE where military service dictates civil and social status and where annual military campaigns are normal. But by the third century or so the Romans get very good at building on their successes in a way that city-states often aren't, and I think that for Methos things like Roman inclusiveness can never seem wholly positive, since he'd always have in the back of his mind the origins of the practice as a way of increasing Rome's own power.
Anyway, places Methos liked which are absorbed by Rome: first of all, Etruria and the Greek cities in Southern Italy. The Etruscans don't do too badly out of the result, really, so it will be centuries before Methos sits up one morning and realizes that although there are still people who know how to pray in Etruscan, he's the only one left who knows how to joke in it. Then of course, after the first Punic war, Sicily, which gets hit again during the second round; I think it took him a long time to get over the sack of Syracuse in 212. Carthage itself doesn't go into 146, the same year as Corinth; I can see that being a bad year for Methos, as the Romans are particularly thorough about leveling both cities. Possibly time for him to get out of the Mediterranean altogether and head for India for a while. Meanwhile, the Romans are slowly but surely taking over the rest of the Mediterranean world. I can imagine Methos heading east in 146 and then coming back eighty or ninety years later and wondering what the hell had happened. And things don't really improve over the next decades, since the civil wars are fought all over the empire.
It's not like he hasn't seen this kind of thing before (if anything, the Assyrians were worse) but something about Rome gets under Methos' skin; maybe it does come down the way the Romans incorporate what they conquer, so that he's always coming face to face with echoes of things he's known. Maybe, he thinks much later, it was the world they eventually created, vibrant and urbane and more peaceful than anything he'd known before, the world that came out of all that wreckage: did it make the violence worth something?
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 02:41 am (UTC)2) Totally serious question (because my Highlander chronology is totally off): could Methos have wandered into the Middle East a millennium later on? I can totally see him being a part of, say, the Umayyad governance and, perhaps especially, the early Abbasid empire. These were the caliphates that prized intellect over faith, the Islamic golden age before the rise of the religious schools, who'd have gladly taken a man of a different faith (or no faith) if he were clever and wise, and were the crossroads and partial caretakers of ancient Western knowledge during what 'dark' ages there were. I can see him sitting there translating the Greek texts and bitching at Ibn Sina's and Ibn Rushd's (Avicenna and Averroes) interpretations and the endless third-rate redactions that are all in vogue... Or am I geeking out and this is too late for you to have any firm opinion?
3) Comments on Dreamwidth or LJ if we have the capacity for both?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 08:42 am (UTC)2) Although it is too late for me to have any official opinion, I agree completely on this -- I think he probably spent a lot of time in the early Islamic Near East and probably in Spain and Central Asia as well. Intellectually and culturally it just seems like a perfect place for him. I love the idea of him bitching at Averroes and Avicenna because that's not what Aristotle meant, and don't even ask how he knows that...
3) I don't really care where people comment -- it seems to me that when people cross-post, sometimes conversations develop further in one place, sometimes in the other.