Also,

Someone needs to get to the bottom of the reactionary obsession with using apostrophes wrong! It's weird! They seem to know how to pluralize and how to use possessives in other contexts!

I don't have time to respond at length to rickroll, but a good chunk of what he wrote above is an exaggeration, and some of it is just wrong.

Funniest part of the chain email is how obv wrong all the stats are. Like it even got the amount of states wrong.

I wonder if that is intentional as it will have more appeal to the target audience kinda like how Nigerian scam emails have misspelling and grammar errors to select for easier targets.

i said i'd leave it because it's obviously going to go down in that direction but it's pretty baseless to just leave it at that

you may notice the typos, just something i blasted out but quickly so I may be guilty of not properly couching something or it could just be that exaggeration is subjective - but I do not think it's valid to just say something I wrote is outright incorrect without actually saying what is incorrect

you can easily find many counter arguments that will disagree strongly with everything i wrote, but nothing I have written is objectively false and that is indisputable. I don't think it's fair to toss out a blanket statement dismissing what I wrote.

i will sum it up it one paragraph and you tell me where I am full of it.

dunno about ancient Greek, but its pretty easy to translate and interpret Latin.

for the record rococo, i think you're probably one of the smarter and more erudite people on this forum

most of what you post i find very impressive

i just think you're being unfair here, I am not surprised that a lot of this stuff is very close to home for you and there are millions of very viable arguments to reduce the implications of my argument to make it meaningless, but nowhere have i written anything here that is false and I think that's wrong for you to just toss out a blanket statement dismissing what i wrote without actually bothering to say which part you believe is a lie

you are free to disagree with my interpretation entirely, in fact, most would

but to ridicule it as false as a shortcut to say you disagree is wrong and I know you are better than that

i'll not detract this any further, no more responses from me, I've said my piece

you can still address what i wrote and point out where I lied though if you so wish

First they ignore, then they laugh

Can you pm me some links or something? This sort of deeper falsification of history intrigues me but I wouldn't know where to start looking.

There is serious questions whether a lot of very big historical figures even existed, much less whether they did what they said they did.

This includes Moses, Jesus and Mohamed.

I don’t know if falsification of history is the right way to think about it. I think it is more a byproduct of human psychology and the tenuous relationship to reality for most.

You originally presented your ideas as mostly undisputed facts. As you now admit (see the bolded), that is not the case. Let's start with the basics.

I'm not sure what you are implying here, but there is no serious debate about whether major figures like Pericles, Pythagoras, Alcibiades, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, etc. were real people.

There is no serious debate about whether the major events like the Peloponnesian War, the plague, etc., actually happened. (I of course am not defending the historical accuracy of events described in epic poems, etc.)

I am unaware of any serious debate about whether the works commonly attributed to Plato and Aristotle in fact reflect the thought of Plato and Aristotle. There is of course considerable debate about the extent to which Plato's writings accurately reflect the though of Socrates.

In sum, you are conflating more dubious academic claims (Troy was a real place that existed in X location) with less dubious claims (what we know today as the main works of Aristotle were authored by Aristotle and reflect his actual thought).

Some material surely was lost. Misinterpretation surely happened to some degree, but there is no evidence that the original texts were significantly altered to suit the taste of non-Greek audience.

This is just false. Very few discrepancies in the widely available translations of works from ancient Greece are attributable to a translator favoring one source material over another. The overwhelming majority of discrepancies reflect debate about how to translate the source material.

This is very wrong. You would be a damn fool to try and sell a modern forgery of a Vermeer, Leonardo, etc. You would be much better off aiming lower on the food chain.

Forgery was common in certain areas, but this is a gross exaggeration.

Not all Renaissance artists were sculptors. In fact, most were painters. And we can date paintings.

This is a huge exaggeration. Michelangelo almost certainly forged a few things in his very early years. Over the last decade, a few academics, one in particular, have pushed the idea that Michelangelo forged a ton of stuff, including the Laocoon. (I assume your reference to discovering something in a backyard is a reference to the discovery of the Laocoon in a vineyard in 1506.)

The person who suggested that the Laocoon is a forgery by Michelangelo has never held a tenure track job at a college or university. And she never will, in part because of dubious claims like this.

I agree with you in general, although I am not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to comment. I definitely am not interested in getting bogged down in a discussion how real our history is, and am inclined to be on your side all else being equal regardless.

I just thought it interesting a concept of whether democracy (such as it is) is most likely a transitionary state. From a natural history and mechanical perspective I think it very possible human societies are not capable of maintaining a true democracy for very long, if at all.

I don't think it an accident the most democratic natural animal societies have a completely different genetic structure. That is how deep our hierarchal structures go IMO.

Rickroll,

If we were talking about the Bible, I would be more sympathetic to what you are saying.

This one is really, really wrong. I just checked my memory. Michelangelo completed the Pieta and the David by age 29. His reputation from that point on was enormous and he worked steadily until he died almost sixty years later.

The idea that he was working mainly as a forger after he completed those two works is ludicrous.

not necessarily falsification but just not the verbatim understanding we believe we have

basically if you google "historicity x" you'll likely find a good starting point, if there's nothing on wiki/google search then go to google scholar and you should be fine.

Otherwise for this particular stuff, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Aristotle and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transm...Greek_Classics are good wiki beginnings.

but i think something you may be interested in is the eastern origins of western civilization but that book definitely comes with some criticism, it's still interesting nonetheless

some less controversial, far more entertaining books (the book above is probably the most boring book I've ever read in my life and that's saying a lot) that also broach on similar topics are the Gunpowder Age and The Silk Roads

guns, germs and steel also pretty interesting in reshaping modern viewpoints (also a film version of that too) as well as it's counter argument book why nations fail

Rococo:

I think the issue is that you seem to have felt i was saying Aristotle was fake and the history was made up. I specifically pointed out that wasn't the case and this wasn't fomenko theory or anything of that nature. It's best explained by this article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism

I just want to say that we're dealing with the umpteenth iteration of anything ancient by the time we have the oldest intact document and even if everything is on the up and up, there's surely been massive alteration over time.

And as to your claim that they are uniform in version, I direct you to page 90 here, where the author discusses the problems with the multiple versions of source material when it comes to translation of Homer.

Interestingly, homer was the easiest one to provide source material on this, multiform of ancient texts is so common they often don't bother mentioning it, so coincidentally since most versions of Homer are so surprisingly uniform that there have actually been academic papers written in trying to figure out how that was possible because the notion that most of Homeric texts are similar is just such an incredible outlier - it was literally easier to find a paper trying to explain why Homer didn't have so many wildly different versions than to show a paper explaining that most stuff did have wildly different versions.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.ed...a997398e33d480


A lot of what I've written I honestly think is open to debate and I'm likely too far on my side of the spectrum to be 100% accurate in my interpretation. But I think much of this you're being overly sensitive to and misinterpreted as me saying Aristotle was fake or we have no idea what he said when I just want to say it's very fuzzy and not the verbatim treatise we hold it to be. I assure you, what I've written here isn't on a whim or from an afternoon of internet searching, it's from a lifetime of traveling the world, visiting the sites and reading academic papers. Name a historical site and I can probably post a selfie of me there, this is my passion.

I also think you're being a little silly saying that because most artists were painters that forgery of sculpture didn't exist. I find it humourous you chose Vermeer as someone they didn't forge as that's literally the most infamous case of art forgery. Honestly man... if it were anyone else I'd have sworn you were trolling me by choosing Vermeer as the non https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren

Anyway, my point is I'm not lying nor making things up. We can interpret things diffrently and most scholars will be on your side given this isn't really a debate about right or wrong but how far on the spectrum of authenticity these documents are. I'm in the "sure it was probably based upon something but let's treat it more as high brow entertainment rather than an accurate documetation.

ok i promise i'll stop the derail now, i was ok until I saw vermeer as an example of something not to forge... that triggered me for sure

I wasn't aware of that specific Vermeer forgery, but in any case, I don't think a modern forgery would survive the scrutiny than a newly discovered Vermeer would have to endure. The science has advanced considerably in the last 50 years, and it would be put to its full use before someone shelled out tens of millions for a newly discovered Vermeer. Still, it was an interesting article.

Less valuable forgeries are subjected to much less scrutiny and are much easier to move. That's one reason why there are a zillion fake coins, autographs, Civil War firearms, etc., for every fake of a painting by an artist of Vermeer's stature.

All that said, art forgery is definitely a thing. But among artists of the Renaissance, modern misattribution (often for pecuniary reasons) is a much bigger issue than modern forgery.

The proliferation of pseudo-Aristotelian works doesn't call the attribution of all the works of Aristotle into question.

I don't know what this means. If we knew that some of these works had been altered to some degree by medieval scribes, would that make them less worthy of study?

no, as i've stated for the umpteenth time, it's just that simply nothing is verbatim and what we have is possibly never actually written by the guy or a gross misunderstanding due to the inevitable changes over time

my point is that reading the classics should be treated as historical fiction - entertainment value only

also, my mother used to restore renaissance era paintings before she retired, you're severely underestimating the forgery market - this book may be of interest to you - dude was awful, didn't even bother to use the correct paints but just locked down the provenance and once people bought it, they wouldn't dare reveal it was a forgery even after they found out because then their valuable artwork lost all it's value https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002IPZG4A...ng=UTF8&btkr=1

but my main point is that I spent my youth reading constant references to guys like Plutarch so I'm thinking wow that guy was awesome, I should just read the ancient texts directly - this blew my mind

guys like plutarch regularly mix in actual ancient figures of history and have them regularly interacting with gods and mythical creatures

Plutarch is a primary source for much of what we know about many romans and greeks, he's also a primary source for the minotaur

for example, in Arrian's Campaigns of Alexander, he starts off with a lengthy introduction where he states why he's writing this book. It's essentially that he is Greek himself and wants to glorify Greece and believes Alexander to be a god of sorts. He is fed up with all the lies and conflicting versions of him and thus wants to write this book to both glorify Greece and unify the narrative. He even states his methodology is to sort out through all the lies written about Alexander and then he chooses the lie he believes to be the most plausible. He wrote this 300 years after Alexander died.

Even 300 years after the death of Alexander, nobody knew much of anything about him and there were so many competing storylines that Arrian felt the need to step in and create a single storyline. He also straight up treats Hercules and the god Dionysus as real people who also conquered their way through India. Alexander wasn't a pioneer, he was just the most recent iteration of a great greek conquering the East.

Yet today, we still have scholars quoting ancient greek conversations verbatim despite that surely they are reading a paraphrased dialogue at best. We can't even figure out where the battle of Gaugamela took place, and yet we still believe we actually know the exact words spoken between Alexander and his generals the evening before the fighting took place? That's absurd.

Looking at Plutarch and Arrian now, it's easy to dimiss the Hercules and Dionysus conquering India because they are gods and gods are not plausible. We can also dismiss the minotaur passages of Plutarch because minotaurs are not plausible. I'm not saying that means what they wrote about Alexander is wrong, but it certainly means we should be heavily skeptical about it. I'm sure there's a whole lot of stuff that's also more myth and legend that we treat as reality in their works because it wasn't ridiculous enough to easily dismiss.

that's all i'm trying to say... that anything before the renaissance is just sketchy, that's all, the rococo or baroque periods were certainly much less sketchy

Democracy May Not Exist - But We'll Miss It When It's Gone

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Exi.../dp/125017984X

I haven't read it, but it sounds good. I heard the author (Astra Taylor) on Mitch Jeserich's Show - Letters and Politics (which I very highly recommend)

I wasn't really familiar with the author. Crazy bio. She was unschooled until she was 13, went to school 13-16, dropped out and into college for 2 years before dropping out again and then taught at two different universities.

You should start a thread or AMA or whatever in History rickroll.

I'm sure more than a few would be down to read and post in there, argue with you, etc.

I have no idea what it would mean to read Aristotle, Plato, Aristophanes, etc., as historical fiction.

As for the ancient historians, no one is arguing that that they are 100% accurate. It's pretty obvious that the speeches in Thucydides are not 100% accurate, as Thucydides wasn't present for the overwhelming majority of them. And Herodotus, Plutarch, etc., pretty obviously mix history and myth.

I probably don't need to buy the book. I'm married to a Renaissance art historian. I think we are talking past each other on this point. I never disputed that art forgery was real. I said that modern forgery of paintings of super well-known artists would be dumb because they would be subjected to so much scrutiny. I said that it would be much easier to pass off forgeries of lesser known artists, and I said misattribution was a bigger problem than forgery. I stand by both those statements. On the latter point, I was thinking of the higher end of the market, but I made not have made that clear.

*thumbs up emoji*

does she have a sister?

She does not.

do you

cringe

Less cringey than the alternative joke to go with there