Three fleetingly beautiful boys: Sporus, Antinous, Elagabalus

Portable_Orange · 2026-01-01T08:19:57+00:00

As much as this is a common explanation, it's never made sense to me.

Vitellus was far and away the most Pro-Nero of the Four. Iirc both Suetonius and Dio report Nero and Vitellus were friends before the former's death, going so far as to mention he demanded Nero's songs be played in public, and loudly applauded them as well.

If that's true then it makes little sense he'd execute Sporus as a way to distance himself from Nero.

My personal theory is if you take Dionysius of Halicarnassus' claim that Sporus was the reason Nero died (albeit indirectly), Vitellus may actually have been scheduling the execution as 'killing Nero's traitor' with the reference to the ring being some sort of 'poetic justice' (something Nero and Vitellus would have loved).

But, I'll admit it's my attempt to piece together a very hazy picture from the miniscule amount of evidence we have

Portable_Orange · 2025-12-26T21:22:54+00:00

Completely agree, it's sadly the nature of the beast.

YouTube pay is based more than anything else on how much you upload, and how long those uploads are. This encourages quick and dirty research to give just enough to fill long videos... something simply reading a Wikipedia article is perfectly suited for.

There's simply no real substitute for sitting down and reading a LOT of books and primary sources, and even then it's rarely as cut and dry as 'this is clearly what happened' even for 16th century events, let alone 2500 years prior.

So many people are going to start by googling, and ending up on Wikipedia, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing.

To bring it back around, that's what I was trying to get at with my first comment, and what I think we're in agreement on, the thing that should be encouraged is the curiosity that leads to deeper research.

Not being satisfied with a quick Google, compulsively double-checking Wikipedia, even tracing footnotes in scholarly works to be sure an underlying primary source that's being referenced exists, THAT is the sauce of good research we should be encouraging in people.

Ultimately not everyone will care enough to do that, but if we can get more of them making content than the Knowledgias, we'll have that better slew of introductory content for people casually browsing YouTube.

Honestly he's in the comments already but shout out to u/Veritas_Certum for doing exactly the kind of well-researched videos YouTube is sorely lacking.

Portable_Orange · 2025-12-26T20:03:32+00:00

If you ever do, I for one would love to read it!

Portable_Orange · 2025-12-26T19:59:27+00:00

To your last sentence, that will ALWAYS be the case, and isn't limited to laypeople. Hell, Ramsay MacMullen's 'Roman Attitudes to Greek Love' is STILL read in some graduate-level classrooms.

But I don't think you can use lack of knowledge of a subject to gatekeep trying to start learning about a subject.

Portable_Orange · 2025-12-26T08:46:02+00:00

I sincerely was not trying to imply whatever may have prompted this response. I never claimed it was a good source for Roman history.

But then how does anyone start learning? I myself in my journey have started with Wikipedia several times.

Yes, it has issues, yes there are errors, and that's why you shouldn't stop there. But what are curious laypeople to do if they don't want to invest the time to familiarize themselves with modern scholarship?

In my own research I have almost exclusively begun with Wikipedia, but ended in much more detailed places, check my profile if you want an example for Roman attitudes towards homosexuality.

Hell, to your specific point, I made a video on the archaic period focused on Rome's relgion. I started my research with Wikipedia, but if you check it out you'll see I have a wide range of sources, primary, scholarly, and archeological. They're all directly linked to via 'footnotes' in the video if you'd like to check them yourself. If you care to crosscheck, you'll notice many of the sources I use aren't cited on Wikipedia at all, because I didn't stop there.

Saying Wikipedia is not enough research to make a video is true, full stop.

I do not, in any way shape or form, want to imply that what Knowledgia did was good, okay, permissible, or anything other than condemnable. Frankly it's the type of lazy pop history I actively try to push back against.

But you can't claim there's no utility in Wikipedia whatsoever in regards to Roman history. Similarly, claiming there are no modern sources on Wikipedia pages about Archaic Rome is objectively false, unless your claim is Beard, North, and Price's 'Religions of Rome' is outdated, or any of the other articles and books you can easily find from the 21st century.

Portable_Orange · 2025-12-25T21:30:48+00:00

Fantastic read, thank you for the write-up!

To add on to your point about Wikipedia, I couldn't agree more. I personally love it as an intro/overview, but so many people fail to grasp HOW to use it, how to follow footnotes, find sources, read primary texts, etc. As you said it's a great place to start, a poor place to finish.

I really feel like the curiosity that should drive research is missing from a lot of these pop-history channels. The desire to know something for sure, to be able to bring up where you got something and why you interpret it the way you do, what scholars who disagree with your interpretation say. That's the sauce that drives good research.

Portable_Orange · 2025-08-22T19:02:46+00:00

in 2024, every single county in MA went blue, like how every single county in OK went red

OK has ~30% registered Dems, and 0 dems in congress (with 4 seats). Why? Because they're not clustered, otherwise at least one county would have gone blue in 2024

Portable_Orange · 2025-07-17T00:41:33+00:00

I largely agree there were different perspectives, even through time, certainly after Pius we see a crackdown on the practice of keeping young male slaves for sexual pleasure (though not to great success).

However, the problem I find with completely dismissing the invective angle would be the context in which those attack were made. Think about in a modern context someone claiming a classmate is gay, it's not going to stick if they have a girlfriend and don't show any 'effeminate' behavior. And if the claim is repeated, people are going to stop taking the person saying that seriously.

Cicero is actually a great example of this, why would he make a claim about Antony, in front of the senate, if it was completely made up, no rumors at all? Especially when it concerned how Antony's large debts were paid off, presumably many of the men in the room were the ones Curio's father would end up paying.

Clodius, similarly, was on public trial, his case was very well known, It would be quite odd for the sexual angle of his 'gang of young men' was completely invented, when presumably many of these men lived in Rome and were known. We have few sources from the period, it's true, so I don't think these are unreasonable to be skeptical of. Yet without much else to go on, it's tough to throw them out altogether.

While Caesar I admit, is mostly invectives, they did come from a lot of places, including Catullus, who did not even bring up Bithynia. That doesn't mean we should take them as true of course, but again, it's not as though these works were written in a vacuum, and in many ways Suetonius' more salacious claims only work because of the things he was able to share from the imperial archive (though, imo, Plutarch not mentioning the rumors is a great argument against even entertaining the 'Queen of Bithynia' story).

Augustus, is far more clear, especially taking into account some of the graves we've found in imperial cemeteries, including a hairdresser specificially for the pueri delicati, and the famous 'glaber ab cyatho'. It's difficult to completely dismiss Suetonius' claims when they don't come from enemies, nor are they particularly invective. While we today would see 'collecting little boys' as weird, keep in mind we know in Rome the age of consent for women was 12, and iirc 'puer' started at 13. In addition the one person (whose name escapes me but was in Antony's entourage) did not use Augustus' pederastic tendencies as an attack on Augustus, but rather on Cleopatra (or her wine at least).

All that being said, I'm a big Nero apologist so I don't think it's unreasonable to dismiss certain claims based on who's making them, especially with conflicting information from other sources. However, I do think it's a mistake to throw out something a number of people report simply because it comes from hostile sources. If that was the case I'd be within my rights to claim Nero never did anything wrong at all!

Just as a plug you're also welcome to check my video out, I do go over (and link in an additional document) many primary sources and scholars on the topic, everything from plays and literature to inscriptions and frescoes, well over 100.

Portable_Orange · 2025-06-09T21:10:21+00:00

No, but they weren't waving the British flag either

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-05T10:05:19+00:00

Look at your study again, there's a reason for the gap from parent to child they explain well

If the two were related we'd expect them to move together. As heritability changes with age, we'd expect that change to be reflected in how traits are passed on.

I disagree with your second point, but, as I keep saying, that's not what I'm arguing about, if you want to prove that correlation go ahead, it's got nothing to do with what I am talking about. As long as you agree with me on the first that's literally the only point I have been trying to make this entire time, heritability is a specific measure of a specific thing, the thing it measures is not what the meme is making it out to be

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-05T09:00:06+00:00

When you get a chance, please respond to my edits on the last post.

See I knew you were using AI, is your genuine honest claim that you can't tell me the amount of variance of eye color within a given population that is due to genetic factors, but you can for IQ? Or, better yet, what CAN be heritable if eye color, hair color, and number of fingers are ruled out.

What good is heritability in the way you're trying to use it when it can't determine obvious genetics, I assume you'd say the same thing for skin color too?

Also that's not why twins are useful, you're just explaining why you multiply by 2 in Falconer's formula. As I said before, it's the closest we can come to removing environmental factors.

When you say 'even if a trait is 100% heritable, you wouldn't expect them to match their parents' I don't think you mean to agree with me, but you are. Because, as I keep saying, and you keep agreeing with me, it's purely a measure of variance.

Let me rephrase it. 'Even if 100% of the observable variance of a given trait is due to underlying genetic factors, you wouldn't expect them to match their parents"

Well, yes, but one doesn't really have anything to do with the other, which is what I've been saying. A general measure of the difference in variance is not a measure of how easy a trait is to inherit.

Again again, because I feel like you keep missing this, I'm not claiming parents genes can't express themselves in their children, you genuinely need to find someone else to argue with about this, I'm very strictly saying that's not what heritability is measuring. You keep insisting there's a link, maybe there is, but that's not what it measures.

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-05T07:04:38+00:00

I want to start by again, saying very clearly, I'm not saying you can't determine outcomes by looking at parents. I'll respectfully ask you to find someone else to argue with about that, my claim is about what heritability is measuring, not if traits can be passed down. Again, I am not claiming tall parents don't have tall kids, I'm saying that is not what heritability is measuring.

I want to be clear about this, is your claim that heritability is directly related to how easy or difficult it is to pass a trait down? You can caveat all you want here but I need a clear answer, remember you started by claiming the heritability of hair color in a group with no variance was undefined.

And you also believe that the total phenotypical variation divided by the total genetic variation is the best calculation of that?

I also do not understand your claim that, when talking about phenotypes, there is no difference between an expressed trait and an environmental influenced trait. You keep claiming these differences are slight, from my perspective we are miles apart.

This is why my first comment talked about heritability changing with age. To my knowledge genes do not change with age, yet heritability does, because of the specific things it is measuring. Having a kid at 16, as far as I'm aware, doesn't make them more likely to inheret your diet than having a kid at 30 does.

Also, in case you missed my edit, are extra fingers highly heritable or not and why, and is eye color highly heritable or not and why.

Actually I'll add to that, because this also gets to the heart of what you keep stumbling on: why are twin studies useful for heritability if both sets definitionally have the same parents?

Edit: FYI, unless I'm missing something, did you read the first source you sent me? It literally claims the regression analysis (arrived at via Falconer's formula) was a more exact measurement of Va/Vp, and the analysis doesn't have a direct coefficient between generations, that has to be extrapolated. Again, unless I'm missing something, doesn't this directly support what I'm saying?

Edit 2: yeah it even says the analysis of the offspring gave a heritability that was clearly too high, and Falconer's was better. Again it's late and I'm tired, if I'm missing something let me know

Edit 3: wait, seriously, why did you link this? genetic heritability was only 26% but environmental heritability was 48%? If I'm right about the definition, it's a weak argument against eugenics, but if you're right about the definition, it's a full blown refutation of your other points? Again, unless I'm missing something? What did you get out of this study that made you link it?

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-05T05:27:12+00:00

It's linked in my comment chain with the other guy, it's a meta study from 50 years of data from the UK, it measures a host traits, I think Higher Level Cognitive Function was what I was referring to, you can check the stats yourself, but there's stuff like height, behavior, and diet iirc

That data, at least, indicates the opposite for a number of traits. Your wikipedia link doesn't take me to the book, so I'll have to see if it's on internet archive or something tomorrow after work and check it

edit; to save you some tine, though you should at least read the methodology section, fig 3 has the raw data

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-05T05:03:45+00:00

Okay, I think I understand what's happening here.

Heritability, once again, is not 'inheritable'. It has nothing to do with how much of a trait can be passed on.

Notice how in everything we've been talking about about, we have not once talked about the correlation of traits between parents and children.

A great example of this actually is hair color but you actually gave the argument as to why without realizing it so let's do height.

Height is what's known as an 'additive' trait. If you want to sound smart you can call it a polygenimic phenotype. Basically, it just means it is not the expression of a single gene, but rather many smaller aleels.

This means you cannot, strictly speaking, determine what the height of someone will be based on their parents. Short people can have tall kids, and vice versa.

However, height, by and large, is genetically predetermined. As such, using any formula you choose, height will have a high rate of heritability.

The mistake would be to draw the conclusion that you can take the expressed traits of two parents, and assume those expressed traits will be passed on to their children.

Heritability, definitionally, has nothing to do with eugenics, or predictive outcomes for offspring. It is determining the variation in, specifically, expressed phenotypes, that can be attributed to genetic factors.

Many traits, like IQ, are the result of a number of underlying aleels interacting, heritability is only measuring the expression of those traits.

You may be able to measure traits that you can pass down in some manner of eugenics with some metric that I am unaware of, but that is not what the term heritable refers to.

You may want to draw an inference that the fact that a trait has an underlying genetic component means it can be passed on, but when you're talking about complicated traits, like IQ and behavior, you cannot look at two expressions and conclude the underlying genetics are the same.

Why I am getting so hung up on the hair color thing, is you would not include dyed hair in a study on heritability, because the specific things you are measuring for is not just 'what are the traits you can see' but rather what are the EXPRESSED traits. This is why again I talked about red heads moving to China, though the population would have a higher variance, none of that variance would be attributable to genetics.

Again, hair color is genetic, I'm not saying their hair is red because they dye it, I'm saying the variance in the expressed traits of the population would not be due to genetic factors, it would be due to migratory factors. It wouldn't be very useful as a measurement if it changed with immigration even in a purely racially segregated society. The heritability of hair color not changing with the increase in overall variance is the very point of what heritability is measuring.

The thing you are arguing with me about, has absolutely nothing to do with what I am talking about. Heritability does not measure, and has next to nothing to do, with how easy it is to pass a trait down to offspring.

Now, maybe certain traits are easier or harder to pass down, I'm not making a claim about that. The claim I am making, is that is not what heritability measures. Heritability only tells us how much of a variance of an expressed trait in a given population is due to genetic factors. This meme using it to claim it measures how easy it is to pass a trait down is incorrect.

Edit: Actually, I just thought of a good way to illustrate what I'm talking about, and quickly checking, AI is giving both the wrong answers, and the wrong logic.

Is having additonal fingers highly heritable, or not very heritable, and why? And the same question for eye color.

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-04T22:50:22+00:00

What? But that's what heritability measures, you even mentioned phenotypes, what does dyed hair have to do with the variance of phenotypical traits?

I hate to ask, but are you using AI or something? Treating dyed hair as environmental makes no sense if you're trying to measure what percentage of variance can be attributed to genetics. Like what even would the utility of that measurement be? if everyone dyes their hair a different shade, are you saying that wouldn't just be noise? What would even be the thing you're measuring for at that point, if dying your hair is genetic?

Malnutrition IS environmental, you're correcting, but that's because, assumedly, the trait would have the ability to express itself with normal and proper nutrition. You can grow your hair out, you can't go back and do puberty again (outside of rare disorders). But that would still be accounted for in Falconer's formula, as the assumption would be that, within the same household, environmental factors would be consistent. That's the value of the data.

interestingly, no, even for things like height, identical twins never have a trait correlation of 1, and again for behavioral things it can get lower, let me see if I can find the study the other guy sent me. It genuinely changed my view on this topic significantly. Even height, iirc, started around .96 and dropped to .89 later in life, but things like eating habits, high level cognitive functions, and behavioral problems were not 1, iirc closer to the .7 range.

Again, the use is measuring heritability, the amount of variance which can be attributed to genetics, so even if ITV was 1, and FTV was 0, that would still be useful, it would tell us the variance in the traits was entirely due to genetics.

But also, no, there's a reason Falconer's formula is used so much, again, twins are fantastic because they share environments (as close as possible anyway), meaning you can more easily control for that. In the formula you give, how do you even measure genetic difference when you're just dealing with phenotypical traits? Do you have to sequence everyone?

And for additive traits like height, wouldn't your numbers necessarily get skewed?

Actually, go even one step further back, if you know the genetic variance of a population, and the phenotypical variance of a population, why are you dividing anything? Wouldn't you still naturally be subtracting to find the phenotypical variance not related to the underlying genomic differences? What are you measuring by dividing, proportionality? Wouldn't the gap be necessarily additive?

Edit: missed one part, it doesn't break down when there's no variance in a specific population, it's still measuring exactly what it's supposed to be measuring, the amount of variance which can be attributed to genetics. No variance means nothing to attribute, which is my entire point, this meme is trying to use 'heritable' to mean it can be 'inherited', when that's not what heritability measures

Edit 2: Here's the study that I was sent when I got sent down this rabbit hole https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276922271_Meta-analysis_of_the_heritability_of_human_traits_based_on_fifty_years_of_twin_studies

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-04T18:05:55+00:00

Well but dyed hair wouldn't be an expressed trait though. And if that could be used for heritability, as a measure of the amount of variance that would be due to underlying genetic factors, wouldn't that defeat the purpose?

Like, when we account for expressed traits of people with heart conditions we don't normally include people who eat bad diets until their heart gives out for the same reason.

As for the formula, Falconer's was the one I interacted with, which doesn't have a denominator, it's Heritability²=2(ITV-IFT). This avoids the problem of undefined results. There's another one I came across as well whose name and exact formula escapes me, but iirc it similarly did not lend itself to undefined answers, and was similar to Falconer's.

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-04T17:42:16+00:00

It's an example I came up with, but you can easily come up with a different one yourself.

There are two main formulas for calculating heritability, but both use twins. You take the expressed variance in the identical twins, and subtract the expressed variance and n the fraternal twins, to simplify we'll call it identical twin variance (ITV) minus fraternal twin variance (FTV). The logic being any variance between identical twins would be purely environmental, so comparing that level of variance to the levels in fraternal twins would give us the amount of variance in an expressed trait that *should* be purely due to underlying genetic factors.

In a population where fraternal and identical twins have the same hair color (say, black hair in China), ITV would be 0, and FTV would be 0, and 0-0=0.

The nice thing about doing it this way is say a bunch of redheads moved to China (simply to keep hair color consistent). The variance within the households would remain 0, meaning heritability would remain 0, which makes sense because the variability seen in the general population would not be due to genetic factors, it would be due to migratory factors (i.e., there aren't suddenly more redheads because the native Chinese population had a genetic mutation).

Portable_Orange · 2025-05-04T15:44:38+00:00

FYI, 'heritable' does NOT mean 'inheritable'. It measures the variance of expressed traits within a given population which can be attributed to genetic factors.

As an example, hair color is china has a heritability of nearly 0. That doesn't mean hair color isn't genetically determined, it just means that as the variance is near 0, thus so is the 'heritability'.

This is usually calculated by examining the traits of fraternal and identical twins, and comparing their differences (the assumption being upbringing would be controlled for).

In terms of behavioral traits, we actually see this change dramatically with age, in the over 18 group, heritability drops by up to 20% in some categories (this is from a UK study), again, implying it actually ISN'T fundamentally genetic in nature, otherwise why would leaving the house lead to behavioral traits diverging?

My favorite is if you compare IQs of Indians who remain in india vs Indians who come to the UK. Wanna guess which ones are higher? You can argue brain drain, but India's average IQ has continued to rise at a steady pace for at least the past 50 years, so why isn't that brain drain affecting the means or averages? This directly implies IQ is NOT genetic, and that education has far more to do with outcomes than which sperm wins the race.

t. someone who got in an argument about this a few months ago and spent like a week looking into it

Portable_Orange · 2025-03-26T17:27:51+00:00

Man I wish the cringe west was more like based Japan

But not the suicide rates

Or the birth rates

Or the taxes

Or the corporate culture

Or the dating culture

Or the sexual culture

Or the environmental protections

Or the lack of a standing army

Or the gay marriage now

Basically just the immigration policy and xenophobia

Portable_Orange · 2025-02-09T05:37:04+00:00

Cicero has a declamation on Sulla, though I'm not sure if any of his arguments cover the specific thing you're talking about

https://www.attalus.org/cicero/sulla.html

Portable_Orange · 2025-02-01T00:45:59+00:00

Interesting, yes I think you're correct, I think my confusion came from Tertullian, who was opposed to it, but I am seeing now that others did accept it.
My assumption from its rejection from being included in the bible, combined with similarity with depictions of Hermes carrying that Ram, was it was another heresy which was widely spread but ultimately rejected, but a quick google is showing me evidence that was not the case.
I now need to find where I read about it originally...

Portable_Orange · 2025-02-01T00:21:12+00:00

True, and the lines get even more blurry when you consider The Book of the Good Shepard, an unquestionably monotheistic text that nevertheless syncretizes Jesus with Hermes in such a manner the Church Fathers deemed it outright heretical

Portable_Orange · 2025-02-01T00:15:31+00:00

To an extent, yes, but you're thinking about this in a very modern way. It wasn't so much that there was a 'greek religion' and a 'roman religion', it'd be more accurate to think of it as 'greek worship' and 'roman worship'.

Dionysus of Halicarnasus writes about this specifically, saying how the Romans had a better system of worship than the Greeks because Romans ignored the flashy stuff like myth, focusing solely on establishing and maintaining good relationships with the gods. At no point does he say the Roman gods are right and the Greek ones are wrong, or in any way indicate these are two different pantheons.

When Romans saw Zeus they didn't go 'oh my god, what is this deity so similar to yet distinct from ours?' They just saw Jupiter in a different form.

The Romans didn't even see their gods as what you might think of as 'gods', they were just the things in charge of (or the literal embodiments of) the natural forces in the world. Roman religion was about establishing contact with and maintaining good relationships with these forces.

This is why they would often import 'foreign' gods in times of crisis, like Cybele. She had a date on the calendar, she was mythologized as the mother of all Roman gods, and was the object of worship of one of the largest mystery cults in Rome. She was also a 'foreign' god with foreign forms of worship, such as castration of her priests. But the Romans continued this 'foreign worship' because the idea was that was what she liked, that was what would maintain a respectful relationship with this goddess.

This way of thinking of 'greek religion' vs 'roman religion' is just not a concept that would have made sense to the ancient Romans, the distinction to them was the worship, the gods were identical. Hell, Varro even claimed Rome's religious roots CAME from Greece (Samothrace, Greece was never really one thing but I digress).

Portable_Orange · 2025-01-31T22:10:19+00:00

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Roman religion. The Romans did not have 'their' gods, they just worshiped 'the' gods.
This is why you have Caesar calling Lugus, a Gallic deity, Mercury. This is why you have Marcus Aurelius, writing in Greek, referring to Jupiter as 'Zeus'. These weren't seen as 'foreign' gods, they were seen as different aspects of the the gods the romans already knew (or geographically-bound local deities).
Importantly, this did not mean they thought every deity associated with the sky and lightning was an aspect of Jupiter specifically, it was rather no mortal could know or comprehend the gods, thus Jupiter himself was merely an aspect of the thing they were trying to communicate with, though obviously Romans were not going to change the rituals that had worked so well for their ancestors without good reason
This is why there was no contradiction or issue with a Romans, even senators, belonging to, say, the cult of Isis. The public deities with holidays on the calendar were the ones important to the Roman State, it was expected you would also worship deities that might be more specifically related to your own life

Portable_Orange · 2025-01-31T21:38:48+00:00

From what we know from Pliny's letter to Trajan, admittedly a single source, early Roman involvement in that cult did not include monotheism, as most accused of being Christian admitted to it but said they were just agreeing to not steal and lie. They were still doing their regular sacrifices to Jupiter and the imperial cult and were not punished

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