Plato's Final Hours Recounted In Scroll Found In Vesuvius Ash (theguardian.com) 153
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:
Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy. In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl. Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato — who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC — retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests....
In a presentation of the research findings at the National Library of Naples, Prof Graziano Ranocchia, of the University of Pisa, who spearheaded the team responsible for unearthing the carbonised scroll, described the discovery as an "extraordinary outcome that enriches our understanding of ancient history". He said: "Thanks to the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques, we are finally able to read and decipher new sections of texts that previously seemed inaccessible... For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries, through an unrolling process using a mechanical technique that disrupted whole fragments of text."
In a presentation of the research findings at the National Library of Naples, Prof Graziano Ranocchia, of the University of Pisa, who spearheaded the team responsible for unearthing the carbonised scroll, described the discovery as an "extraordinary outcome that enriches our understanding of ancient history". He said: "Thanks to the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques, we are finally able to read and decipher new sections of texts that previously seemed inaccessible... For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries, through an unrolling process using a mechanical technique that disrupted whole fragments of text."
How far to trust this story (Score:4, Interesting)
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The question scholars sometimes pose in these instances is if you're going to relate such an anecdote why would this be it, i.e. the less flattering the anecdote for a famous person, the more likely it is to be true.
One his last acts was to criticize a slave (Score:2)
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You do realize that there are lots of Biblical (New Testament) texts between those years, right? Mostly fragmentary, but not differing substantially from later complete texts.
The technology involved - amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
While most of the commentary has centered on applying today's standards of morality to a culture from 2000 years ago, how about we take on for a moment the technological advances and skills needed to recover writing from a scroll over two millennia old and buried by a volcanic eruption?
There is no morality about it, no "woke" aspect of it...it's just plain amazing that we have the skills and technology today to do this. We can get insights into our past from ancient relics that should otherwise have been destroyed and lost to time thousands of years ago, but by a remarkable set of events we are recovering their contents today.
Try wrapping your head around THAT for a minute.
X-Ray vision! Impossible! (Score:2)
Guess what kids, revel in the luxury of knowing that Plato was an asshole. Your comic book back-page purchase has finally arrived.
In charge of ethics (Score:2)
Plato — who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle,
Heh. Anytime I hear discussions of these guys I can't help but think about Chidi's Ethics Lesson [youtube.com] in S1E3 of The Good Place [wikipedia.org]:
Chidi: So Aristotle was Plato's student. And Aristotle believes that your character is voluntary, because it's just the result of your actions, which are under your control. For example, right now, you have made the insane choice to ignore the person who is literally trying to save you from eternal damnation.
Eleanor: No, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm listening. Uh, I just... are we sure we should be paying attention to these guys? It's like, who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?
Chidi: [points to blackboard] Plato!
Socrates last minutes (Score:2)
And Plato in turn was Socrates pupil.
A scroll of Socrates' last minutes might reveal his last words to have been, "Say, just what kind of tea did you say this was?" :)
hawk
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And Plato in turn was Socrates pupil. :)
A scroll of Socrates' last minutes might reveal his last words to have been, "Say, just what kind of tea did you say this was?"
From the movie Real Genius [wikipedia.org]:
Chris Knight: I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"
Clearly fiction (Score:2, Insightful)
Thracian slave girl? Thrace is in Greece, ergo she was probably white.
Black Lives Matter insists that America invented and perfected slavery AND that only blacks have ever been slaves, therefore this must be a fictional account.
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Black Lives Matter insists that America invented and perfected slavery
No they don't. They just insist that Americans invented and perfected black slavery in America. Why do they not acknowledge European slavery? To answer that ask yourself why would BLM give a flying fuck about what happened in Greece 2000 years ago which is completely and utterly irrelevant to slavery in America?
Misread, thought it would be something like: (Score:2)
My last hour I listened to some music in the the Castle of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh!
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At that time in human history, slavery was a necessity. Cities could not exist, at all, without them (and neither could the benefits of a city, such as education, scientific investigation, high art, defensive walls, etc.). In the modern day, it is easy for us to say that the ends do not justify the means and that slavery was always wrong, though in that day its raw necessity was used to make it seem morally acceptable. The only alternative, after all, was barbarism (and even the barbarians kept slaves).
O
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No, slavery was always morally wrong. Where do you get this crap? There was no "need." Maybe life would have been harder for half the population, but cities would have existed, maybe even more so if half the population wasn't slacking off!
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they teach that then most people will realize they are much closer to the Helot class of slaves in Athens than to free Citizens.
The extant reality is a cleverly-designed rouse fed by selected ignorance.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, slavery has differed over time and place. But there were constant slave rebellions in Roman times, at the cost of all their lives, and the Spartans were so afraid of their slaves they sought to make their children stronger to fight the inevitable rebellion. Slavery was nearly always awful enough for the slaves to constantly be trying to kill their masters.
And the way people got them was virtually always through force, or birth, or leaders sold their own people into it, by force. Even those few who temporarily entered into an arrangement did to by coercion, and further back in time, even inherited it.
I can't imagine a time when some rich city builders were like, "gosh, I need to build this wall, I can't possibly accomplish this if I pay those guys, but I'm sure they'll do it for free!"
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
'Slavery was nearly always awful enough for the slaves to constantly be trying to kill their masters.'
In ancient Rome, there was a legal practice wherein slaves of a household would be subjected to torture to investigate their involvement or knowledge concerning the death of their master or another member of the household. This practice was based on Roman legal principles that did not consider slaves fully credible without coercion due to their status as property, not persons.
The rationale behind this practice was the belief that slaves were more likely to tell the truth under duress or pain, especially in cases involving serious crimes like murder. The practice also reflects the broader societal views and legal structures that governed the lives of slaves in Rome, who had very few rights and were often at the mercy of their owners and the broader legal system.
This legal practice is a stark illustration of the harsh and often brutal reality of life for slaves in ancient Rome, highlighting the extreme disparities in rights and the value placed on human life based on social status.
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Yeah, dude. You miss the point. I realize there were varieties of slaves. I mention some, too.
But they were all in horrific conditions, and didn't want to be there. None of this ever made the practice a "necessity" to build the earliest cities.
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Plato was in Greece, which was not at the time part of the Roman empire. Do you know what conditions were like for slaves in Greece? (I do not, so this is an honest question.)
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Here's what ChatGPT told be:
Slaves played a significant role in ancient Greek society. They were often acquired through warfare, piracy, or by being born into slavery. Conditions for slaves varied depending on their roles and the preferences of their masters.
In general, slaves had no personal freedoms and were considered property. They were subject to the will of their owners, who had the authority to buy, sell, or even kill them. Slaves could be employed in various capacities, such as household servants, l
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But slaves aren't free. You need to provide them with shelter, sanitation and food. And you wouldn't really use a lot of army/soldiers to keep them there as that costs money. Basically, you'd let slaves leave if they don't want "free" food, shelter and sanitation - demoralized worker is useless anyway.
So in the end it's not much of a difference between slaves in ancient world and blue collar workers now.
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Nuclear eye roll, comrade.
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I mean, peer pressure doesn't count as "necessary," either. I am sure the powerful leaders at the time could have tried something else, if they'd seen the injustice of it (though most didn't).
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They were already living in a city. They could have let them continue there, maybe replacing their king.
The key is that you don't have to do it, and it wasn't necessary to create cities, it was just what they did at the time, and that doesn't remove the moral judgement.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, it's simply not true that ancient wars had only two options, "genocide or slavery". Far more wars were ended with treaties, with the loser having to give up lands, possessions, pay tribute, or the like. Slaves were not some sort of inconvenience, "Oh, gee, I guess we have to do this". They were part of the war booty, incredibly valuable "possessions" to be claimed. Many times wars were launched with the specific purpose of capturing slaves.
Snyder argues that the fear of enslavement, such an ubiquitous part of the ancient era, was so profound as to be core to the creation of the state itself. An early state being an entity to which you give up some control of your life in order to gain the protection against outsiders taking more extreme control over your life. For example, a key aspect to the spread of Christianity in Europe was that Christians were forbidden to take other Christians as slaves, but they could still take pagans as slaves. States commonly converted to Christianity, not by firm belief of their leaders, but to stop being the victim of - and instead often be the perpetrator of - slave raids.
First slaving focused on the east, primarily pagan Slavic peoples. With the conversion of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, some slaving continued even further east into Asia, but a lot of it spread to the south - first into the Middle East and North Africa, but ultimately (first though intermediaries, and later, directly) into Central Africa. Soon in many countries "slaves" became synonymous with "Africans". Yet let's not forget where the very word "slave" itself comes from: the word "Slav".
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Interesting +15
Re: Really? (Score:2)
We know from their idea of slavery from texts and it was pretty much people as property of state and individuals.
Massacres and genocides too.
The point is though that the slave had no say in the matter of playing the flute and got told that they succ, but that of course could be narrative of whoever wrote the text either to make him sound like an ahole or as we would say now being hyper based.
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I think the Nationalist-autocorrection was ON. You really meant North America, specifically what would became USA.
False. North America is a continent and what the GP was talking about was first the "American Colonies" of Great Britain and then it was the "United States of America". In neither case is one talking about the land which would become known as Canada and The United States of America. The nation is relevant because it was the laws of the nations involved which permitted the particular arrangement of slavery which we are discussing.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
America is the common phrase used for the USA and people from the USA because there is no other word. Unitedstatian, anyone?
There exists a word in Spanish, which is why Spanish speakers often make this point. But they are wrong, there is no other word in English that works other than "American." The United States of Mexico can be shortened to "Mexico," ours can't. Also, our name came first!
In point of fact, Americans mainly called themselves by their state of origin early on ("Virginian," "Pennsylvanian," "New Yorker"), and it was Europeans who started called us "American." It took a Revolutionary War, a Civil War and a few World Wars before we completely adopted it.
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There exists a word in Spanish
Yanqui.
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Yeah. But then New Yorkers would object to everyone using their word! :D
I heard another word years ago that was nicer.
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You should learn about Columbus's colonies.
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You should learn about Columbus's colonies.
Exactly. He was a fine, upstanding individual who adhered to God's words [imgur.com] to beneift the people.
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You should learn about English's colonies XD
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
My friend, there is no need for such acrimony. I get "this crap" from interesting books written by professional historians. In this case, the book Sapiens [wikipedia.org] by Yuval Noah Harari. He made a convincing case that the rise of technology was the definitive factor in eliminating slavery.
Of course, the rise of technology was not the only thing that eliminated slavery. There were many contributing causes, including violent uprisings and religious influences and politicians spending state money to buy freedom for all slaves and all kinds of key historical events. But his argument was that the rise in technology was foundational, as that was the only thing that made civilized life without slavery even physically possible.
You and I never experienced stone age technology. Quite a lot that we take for granted didn't even exist back then. What was easy to do, what was hard to do, how much food a farmer could produce, how one assembled a wall, how one managed a water supply, how money worked and how the economy operated, and on and on, it was all completely different and required a whole heaping lot more human effort than it does today. What we think of as a simple model of paying workers a livable wage to convince them to do this backbreaking labor in the amounts necessary to build and maintain a city was outright impossible back then, because the needed effort level was too high and the payment capacity didn't exist.
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Correction: I think it would have been more "iron age" technology for Plato's time. But still quite a long time pre industrial revolution.
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In the book does the author lay out a timeframe or a sort of technology tipping point, the time period where the technology line which is sloping up and the slavery line which is sloping down intersect? Just curious as one thing I have always heard is that the USA in particular hung onto slavery longer than it had to from an economic and technological sense.
Also I would have to surmise that along with the technology was the lack of foundational knowledge and philosophy, like I know there were "abolitionist"
Re: Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting, where did you learn such history as England and the US were amongst the first nations to start abolishing slavery. Slavery is still legal in large swathes of Africa and the Middle East (Islam outright requires slavery) as well as China and North Korea. Belgium had slaves in the 1960s (Belgian Congo), the French Revolution reinstated slavery also up to the 20th century, Germany up to the end of WW2 employed slaves and East Germany and the Soviets even longer, Dutch didnâ(TM)t do much better nor did the Spanish.
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Slavery is still legal in the USA, 13th amendment allowed it as punishment for crimes. It's one of the reasons for America having so many prisoners, free labour.
BTW, Amer
Re: Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slavery is...one of the reasons for America having so many prisoners, free labour.
Nonsense. The economic output of prisoners in no way exceeds or even equals the cost of their imprisonment. So imprisoning an additional person is economically negative, not positive.
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Don't forget that the government pays for the upkeep while private industry profits from the cheap labour.
Originally it was also to keep certain classes of people enslaved, there were lots of bullshit laws that were selectively enforced.
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So ancient societies without slaves didn't and couldn't exist? Say, the Incas? The Harappan civilization? None at all? *eyeroll*
Incan society is IMHO really interesting. It's sort of "What if the Soviet Union had existed in the feudal era", this sort of imperial amalgam of communism and feudalism. There was still a heirarchy of feudal lords and resources tended to flow up the chain, but it was also highly structured as a welfare state. People would be allocated plots of land in their area of specific s
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righteous application of democratic values
Damn straight!
Slavery has brought death into our own households already in its wicked rebellion. There is but one way [to win the war] and that is emancipation! I want to sing ‘John Brown’ in the streets of Charleston, and ram red-hot abolitionism down their unwilling throats at the point of the bayonet.- Captain John Ames
Re: If society was cooperative rather than competi (Score:5, Insightful)
If society were cooperative rather than competitive, then one of two things would be true:
1. Brutal repression would need to be employed to keep down anyone with even an inkling of competitiveness from amassing more stuff than anyone else.
Or, alternatively,
2. A small number of high-achievers would run roughshod over the lazy and complacent, and amass all the goodies for themselves. And if you don't like it, you disappear.
Functionally equivalent for the average man, I should think.
You see, under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. But under communism, it's the other way around.
Re: Your username gives the game away (Score:2)
Humanity for *hundreds* of millenia, and perhaps even before in pre-human times, consisted of small clans that warred for resources against their neighboring clans. And within the clans, the cooperation was enforced at the tip of a club or a spear.
Only through further competition could we graduate first to enforcing the cooperation at the point of a gun, and with mass production and industrialization, even that became less tenable when the pleb on the receiving end might just have a gun of his own.
You live
Re: If society was cooperative rather than competi (Score:2)
Technically dictatorship could be argued as slavery and that extended to french revolution and beyond.
The systems how you got your lot varied of course but throughout most of it large concentrations of people tended to have pretty strict hierarchies.
Iike it would be wrong to say that the whip was the only way you got people to do back breaking labor as well. A lot of really crappy jobs in antiquity and even to victorian england weren't structured as ownership of persons.
Arguably in victorian england the ex
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Really? (Score:3)
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But they were saaaving them but not killing them after they razed their cities! But the peer pressure was too great!
The rationalizations never change. At least, not until the academics get involved: "it was neceeeessary to build ciiiitieesss! It's not so baaadd!" LOL
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Forget the future, the majority of us turn a blind eye to the moral standards of today as long as we can get a benefit from exporting our morals to another country where there are none. /Disclaimer: This post brought to you by a computer, manufactured by people earning way below my standards for minimum wage, work way longer than my standards for safe working hours, in factory conditions more resembling chicken batteries than any job I would comfortably recommend someone in my own country from doing.
I bet y
Re: Really? (Score:2)
By your own logic you're also an irredeemably horrible person for not adhering to some future moral standards that don't even exist yet, but some future person will insist are universally true and have existed for all time.
What do you mean irredeemable, we'll be dead. It will be a little too late to persuade us, and that doesn't make us right. Every asshole that beat his wife might have said your words. They're not right now, they weren't right then. It's too late for them, it's not too late for you.
There are things we do in our own lifetime that we live to regret. Living a life without regrets doesn't mean die a sociopath incapable of introspection. I might disagree with future me, but I'll be dead. Right now, the golden rul
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How did slavery enable those things to exist in a way that voluntary labor could not have? Voluntary labor can do anything slavery can, although perhaps with slightly lower levels of inequality.
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How did slavery enable those things to exist in a way that voluntary labor could not have? Voluntary labor can do anything slavery can, although perhaps with slightly lower levels of inequality.
Voluntary labor means paying the people more than it would cost to keep a slave. Also, if a slave got uppity there was no prohibition on punishing them. Couldn't do that with voluntary labor who would walk away from the job. Also also, if you had the right mix of slaves they'd produce children for free which gave you more slaves without having to buy them.
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Yeah, and thousands of years later, YOU can detect that fine line between slavery and cheap labor and distinguish it from hot air enough to declare the first cities impossible without slavery.
That's it, if slavery was a "necessity" then for cities for form, let's resort to it again after the apocalypse!
No cities without slaves? (Score:2)
At that time in human history, slavery was a necessity. Cities could not exist, at all, without them
No cities without slaves? How does high density living require slavery in any time period?
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That's an absurdly inappropriate use of the word "necessity". "Inevitably" would be a much more appropriate term. And given human nature, I think "inevitably" is reasonably defensible, but the implication of "necessity" is unjustifiable.
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I guess this is the crux of my original comment, for which I have been modded "Troll" by several people. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.
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At that time in human history, slavery was a necessity. Cities could not exist, at all, without them (and neither could the benefits of a city, such as education, scientific investigation, high art, defensive walls, etc.).
That feels dubious, slaves were common, but not ubiquitous, and the degrees to which slavery was used varied significantly.
Our technological ascendancy is what eliminated the necessity of slavery. The victory of persuasion over force came when we had the tools necessary to build and maintain a city entirely on paid labor (of workers free to quit and choose other jobs if they please).
Maybe in the special case of Europeans using African slaves, but the real decline would have been political and economic, not technological.
Remember, you still need to "pay" slaves in order to keep them alive so they're not any cheaper at a society wide level. But as property they're a bit easier to track and if you're a rich person you're able to collect the excess production of your s
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One of the big technological advancements was the horse collar. Before a slave and a horse were close to equal in work output, after a horse was better
Re: Really? (Score:2)
At that time in human history, slavery was a necessity.
No, it was not, you're dead wrong and confusing prevalence with necessity. You should feel ashamed of yourself.
What changed? Take a hypothetical Mars colony for example. It will be a challenging time for sure, a closed system isolated from everything on Earth, and everyone will have to carry their weight. Will slavery be a necessity? What scenario will EVER justify forcing labor under a whip?
There is no one point in time in human history that we can never see again, history always repeats. Slavery is alway
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I could see an interesting SciFi story coming out of your Mars colony scenario. Leave out the whip, since that's not a necessary part of slavery. But what recourse would a Martian colonist have if they didn't want to work for the system? And how does this differ from slavery? Entered into voluntarily in the first generation, I suppose, but with no option of exit, and no choice for succeeding generations until the population grows much bigger.
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What absolute bullshit! You know all those magnificent churches and palaces in England and Europe? Care to guess how many of them were built by slaves?
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Citation: The book Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari. [wikipedia.org]
Poking around online, most writing about the end of slavery focuses on specific historical events surrounding the industrial revolution. Who said what, who killed who, and so on. It is seen as primarily a victory of newly-emerging moral values over entrenched greed. And, certainly that was an element. But Yuval argues that the only reason these ideas got any traction is because new tech made it possible for city life to happen at all without slavery, whe
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I read that book. I don't recall any justification for slavery in it, much less a claim that cities couldn't have happened without it, just that they did.
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Yeah, most important historical works have criticisms like that. History must be pieced together from shaky evidence, so there is always room for scholarly debate. And there are always rival theories to debate about.
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You're assuming that critiquing someone's performance is being a "prick." I guess you've never had a school teacher mark up your papers?
Re:Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
drinkypoo, I never defended slavery. I was careful to use phrases such as "make it seem morally acceptable", and again : "any (however flimsy) moral justification". See the semantics there? I never said it was acceptable, just that it seemed acceptable at the time (for the reasons given). Something can seem acceptable while not being acceptable.
And my conclusion was that this justification no longer exists (even though it was flimsy) so it is clearly not morally justifiable now.
Seriously, I think you are trying to misinterpret my post.
I was never defending slavery and never will.
Why do people like you insist on making it so difficult to have a simple discussion about history? All I did was point out an important way in which things were different, and here you are making false moral accusations against me.
Re:That is some stupid shit. (Score:4, Informative)
To put this properly in context, Plato himself was a slave.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
Yet in all likelyhood that slave had it better than most of the "free people". For.their work they were guaranteed housing, food, healthcare. Many had families.
If they died, the damage was their owner's.
Today, we sell away most of our waking time just to survive, and in many instances (in the USA) are guaranteed none of that. If we die, or are crippled by a preventable medical condition, the damage is our own.
Yet nobody winches at callng this "normal".
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For.their work they were guaranteed housing, food, healthcare. Many had families.
If they were "guaranteed" anything they would not be slaved. What they were is allowed to have those things by their owners and it was norm and custom to provide those things, for obvious reasons, none of which have to be altruistic in nature. If you pull the short straw and get the owner who doesn't treat you nice what's your recourse? Go to the cops? Am I allowed to take a vacation? Can I quit my job and go find another one? Am I allowed to learn how to read? These people are slaves.
Yet nobody winches at callng this "normal".
What do you mean? T
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That particular slave? Possibly. Slaves in general? ... No way. Ask one of the thousands of child slaves that died in the Athenian silver mines.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
You mean like these Athenian boys [huffpost.com]?
The data processing is awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
All I got from that is Plato was such a prick that he needed a slave to play him music. Then denigrated the manner in which she played it.
In a historical context, were I the slave girl, I would have punch the guy right in the face.
The data processing techniques used to decipher the text on the scrolls is downright awesome. You can check out the Vesuvius project [scrollprize.org] for more detail.
There's a hefty prize award [scrollprize.org] for anyone who wants to take a crack at it. Really fascinating stuff if you happen to be interested in that sort of thing.
Also, it uses AI.
were I the slave girl, I would have punch the guy right in the face.
And your genes would not be propagated to future generations.
Look, I get it, virtue signaling is a thing and gets you in good with your friends, but down in the real world you do what you have to to survive. Specifically in this case, if you *don't* punch the guy in the face and instead take a different path, you can live longer and maybe get out of slavery another way.
The Romans had ways for slaves to get out of slavery. A couple of the emperors (or kings) were sons of freed slaves. The phrase "you have to play the game by the rules you are given" comes to mind.
Also if you live and make it out of slavery you can turn your efforts towards ending slavery, which is probably a more effective strategy if, for example, ending slavery is your intent.
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"Berated" is your interpretation. Did you go and read the transcribed scrolls in their original Greek? Plato's critique may well have been the same sort of thing your high school music teacher would have done for your playing of a musical instrument.
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In a historical context, were I the slave girl, I would have punch the guy right in the face.
No you wouldn't have. You also would have owned slaves of your own back then were you wealthy enough and would have thought nothing of it.
For all you or I know that girl might have been quite grateful to have been the slave of someone well regarded by society who could provide her with a fairly comfortable lifestyle and give her the opportunity to learn to play music. I can think of plenty of more dreadful circumstances that would certainly make me glad to be in her position given the alternatives.
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Which would explain the Servile Wars?
No slave is grateful. Show me a historical citation of a slave being grateful? One written by a slave?
I'll wait.
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You are failing to distinguish between "this particular slave" and "slaves in general". Slaves in general lead miserable lives. A few particular slaves lived quite well.
Slavery is unfair and immoral, but also widespread. It even exists among ants. This is because in many circumstances it is to the advantage of those who are powerful. And decisions are never made with the consideration of the goals of the slave as a primary desideratum. But this doesn't mean that it is never to the advantage of the sla
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Indeed! To have been critiqued by Plato might well have been an honor, sort of like having one's math critiqued by Euler.
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>"All I got from that is Plato was such a prick that he needed a slave to play him music."
Then you missed the point, completely. I came to look at comments only just to validate what I was *sure* to be the case- that the first comments would be about slavery. So predictable.
Slavery was common across essentially all cultures and all areas. Most probably every one of us had many members being slaves in our family trees.
>"In a historical context, were I the slave girl, I would have punch the guy right
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I'm guessing Plato didn't have a Soundcloud subscription. It sounds like his final request before execution was to hear some music. Understandable.
Reading a translated thirdhand account, we aren't going to be able to pick up exactly how their interaction went. Maybe she was playing poorly and the man thought to give some constructive criticism.
I just spent the last few hours practicing fingerstyle guitar, I know I need to work on keeping a consistent rhythm. I wouldn't slap someone if they told me that.
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Different times.
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Has anyone read the actual article? A couple of paragraphs:
He died "around 348BC", I have no idea when he ceased being a slave but at appears that b
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You are overgeneralizing from one exceptional example. For many being a slave was a slow death sentence...and not that slow. Most never escaped from slavery. A few did. A very few did, and were later successful.
OTOH, it was less uniform than later "S of the Mason-Dixon line" (and even that was more varied that stories suppose).
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All I got from that is Plato was such a prick that he needed a slave to play him music. Then denigrated the manner in which she played it.
Today we call this system "Spotify."
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Since communism is, by definition, classless, you cannot both be classist and communist.
Racism is, again by definition, incompatible with abstraction.
My conclusion is that you're pretty shaky on definitions.
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Five letters... starts with "T" and ends with "orah". I'll let you figure this one out?
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Given the complete lack of documentation by the Romans and the fact that the only historical accounts come long after his reported death... I tend to believe it's because Jesus was probably a completely unremarkable street preacher during his lifetime and it was the apostles creating works of fiction drawn from existing regional myths to build their religious cred who wrote what little exists.
Nobody bothered to write about him during his lifetime any more than you're documenting the life of the nearest guy
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The same apostles who ran away and hid when Jesus was arrested? The same apostles who (as far as we know) paid with their lives for their beliefs?
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Some believe Jesus was an Essene, and they were into studying books, so if he existed and he was an essene then it's conceivable that he learned to read in the decades of his life where nothing was written about him.
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The elders in the Temple did not seem to think so.
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Jesus objectively existed, virtually all historians agree on this. More likely was that he wasn't some high class scholar who could read and write. What is a work of fiction is the things he did, except for his crucifixion, there's multiple sources to indicate that actually happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ha, Jesus was the original woke.
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Imagine he had lived to see the West turn into the Woke TOILET that Silicon Valley built for us.
He would have been pleased people were following what he said, because by "woke" (whatever that is) you meant treating people like you want to be treated, caring for your fellow man, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, taking in strangers and treating them like your brother.
I mean really, it's all written down in a little book accessible to anyone. It's probably the most "woke" book you've ever read and hundreds of millions of people (supposedly) follow it.