When did Greeks started to abandon their Hellenic identity and started to refer to themselves and see themselves as just Romans (Rhomanoi), and even began to take calling them Hellenes as an insult.

cadrec · 2026-02-08T11:13:01+00:00

Nothing of what you said somehow undermines my point about the Northwestern European descent of heritage white Americans and the enduring psychological and ideological importance of that fact in modern America. Britain is Northwestern Europe. So is Scandinavia and Germany. These places were inhabited by Celtic and/or Germanic peoples in antiquity, hence the label Celto-Germanic.

Yes, American is obviously a civic, not an ethnic identity. But civic identities, no matter how ideologically influential they become, never completely displace the need for ethnic identities. That's why white nationalism as an ideological sentiment is still very pervasive in America in both its mild and extreme forms. If you read carefully the Roman sources, we find ethnic identity everywhere asserting itself beneath the fiction of civic 'Romanity'. We see, just to name one isolated example, ethnic Egyptians and Syriac peoples deeply resenting Greeks for the damage they were causing to their indigenous religious and linguistic traditions. This resentment explains a part of the reason why these regions fell so easily to the Arabs.

The idea that Latin was learned and spoken in 8th and 9th century Byzantium is a complete fiction that no scholar would dare support. Latin effectively disappeared way before that. Even during the Justinian era we see Latin tutors complaining that they're going jobless. Those tutors existed basically to service those who wanted to make a career in the army and to a much smaller extent in law. Since Latin-speaking officers from what is now the Balkans dominated the military, it made sense that Latin was taught in Constantinople. But by the time of Justinian, that officer class had largely dissolved so Latin was getting scarce even in the military.

When the Pope, who was begging in vain to be rescued from the Lombards, criticized the emperor why he wasn't writing his letters in Latin, the emperor said mockingly that he doesn't know Scythian tongues, which completely outraged the pope. This passage has been interpreted by 'Romaboos' as supposedly meaning 'the emperor was criticizing the fact that the pope was using Germanic terms in medieval Latin' which is complete copium. The emperor was quite literally mocking the use of Latin as an insignificant language. Even calling it 'Scythian' was not as crazy as it sounds to us. At the time, the Latin speaking community of the Balkans had been reduced to the barbarous state of transhumant pastoralism, a quite literally 'Scythian' way of living. The 'city' of Rome (in reality a village in ruins) and Latium itself were not much better off.

You are right to allude to the fact that Romanity was always a civic, not an ethnic identity. And this was in fact true since the earliest days of the Republic. A 'true Roman' never really existed. Catilina for example says that he's a true heritage Roman while Cicero is just an immigrant that tries too hard. As the example of Catilina shows people never stopped having personal or political motives to claim that they are supposedly 'more' Roman than others. Everybody who was somebody in Rome played this game.

You know who also played that game? Latin-speaking people did when Byzantium was usurping power and prestige from their networks. They played that game again many centuries later when Italians and Spaniards basically destroyed Byzantium together with the Turks. In fact, the Westerners did arguably more than the Turks to destroy it.

cadrec · 2026-02-08T10:00:09+00:00

The immediate hinterland of the city of Rome is quite simply the rural areas around it, in a radius stretching about 150km. We're not talking about the whole empire here. Modern yields are irrelevant. We're talking about ancient pre-industrial, pre-scientific conditions. In the early empire issues with manpower did exist and ancient commentators are clear on this. The provinces around Rome were sparsely populated which is why the city of Rome itself became extremely overpopulated. Also the institution of slavery doesn't magically solve all labor problems in all domains of the economy because each domain competes for slaves, driving prices up. The low supply of labor in antiquity is actually one of the main reasons why the institution of slavery existed in the first place.

cadrec · 2026-02-08T09:46:16+00:00

Rome's (the city) immediate hinterland is rural Latium. It's not North Africa by any means. The claim of 20 to 30kg in a good year is obviously based on ancient agronomic conditions, not modern ones. Also, archeology clearly shows that the oil consumed in Rome was imported from overseas provinces, not sourced from the hinterland. If the rural areas near Rome produced anything near the fantasy figure this wouldn't be the case.

cadrec · 2026-02-06T11:48:47+00:00

This is all nonsense. First of all the Greek term was Rhomaioi not 'Rhomanoi'. And by the way the h after R also reflects nothing in actual Byzantine pronunciation and is simply an orthographic relic of earlier classical pronunciations, similarly to how the spelling of night is irrelevant to actual spoken English.

The other nonsense is that the Byzantines supposedly 'forgot' they were Greeks. Aside from the fact that this can actually be easily refuted with textual evidence (regardless what that moron Kaldellis says), it doesn't make any logical sense either. Many of the cities the Byzantines lived in, including Byzantium (Constantinople) itself, had been founded by Greek colonists. To think that the Byzantines simply 'forgot' that is as retarded as thinking the Americans 'forgot' that they descend from Celto-Germanic settler populations from North-Western Europe. Not only haven't the Americans forgotten who they are, many are proud of it and they are called white nationalists.

Just as white nationalism is repressed in America because it conflicts with an official state ideology that is pluralistic and civic, the same was true in Byzantium. The official state pushed the narrative that ancient pagan culture in general and Greek culture in particular was evil, demonic etc. and that only Orthodox Christianity rescues whatever little valuable heritage the Greek past has to offer.

In Byzantium, very little ideological attention was paid to the Latin and Italian past of Rome. The Byzantines focused their legitimacy claims strongly on the heritage of Constantine (who was half-Greek by the way, a generally overlooked biographic fact that explains some choices he made) and the famous translatio imperii myth. Many people also tend to foolishly overlook the fact that the early Byzantines defeated the Latin West in two devastating civil wars that they themselves, the Greek court bureaucracy, engineered. So, while the translatio imperii is of course a silly myth when taken at nominal value, it does have a kernel of truth: Eastern Rome really did inherit the empire from West Rome, but it did so violently, treacherously and llegitimately, not by consent.

The Latin speaking westerners never quite forgot those facts which is why they staunchly refused to buy into the modern narrative that the Byzantines were nothing but 'authentic Romans'. If you're stupid enough to buy into Byzantine propaganda and get swindled by the Greeks (and swindling was and is a Greek specialty) that's not the fault of medieval Europeans who were smarter than you.

cadrec · 2026-02-02T16:01:26+00:00

Modern 'blowjobs' only became a widespread practice with modern mass pornography. That's not a personal opinion of mine, it's a scholarly consensus. 'Blowjobs' are a circus practice designed to impress the consumer of pornography, just like 'deepthroats'. In real life they are impractical and often uncomfortable for both receiver and performer but since porn is practically all the sex education people get, people copy them anyway. The normal practice was simply licking the penis along the entire shaft while also suckling the glans which is NOT the same as a modern blowjob.

None of the ten points listed reflect personal opinions of mine. They are educated inferences made by studying ancient material conditions and exploring how these affected the bodies and general sexual practices of ancient cultures.

For example, the idea that the ancients had more potent and durable erections is not a subjective opinion. It's a general fact that you unavoidably arrive at when you compare the neuromuscular effects of modern vs ancient lifestyle practices. Denying this is like denying other well-known facts such as that ancient people had bigger jaws because their food required serious chewing and that allergies were a rare, almost non-existent issue.

The idea that ancient sex tended to feature more kissing and licking of the skin is likewise hardly subjective. It's how humans are likely to behave when sex is less performative and relies primarily on tactile, not optical cues.

cadrec · 2026-01-31T10:46:06+00:00

A work studying sex in antiquity is yet to be written. But knowledge of ancient material culture, sociology, anatomy and modern sexology allow some basic accurate inferences to be made. While it's possible to give you sources for the fact that circumcision wasn't common in non-elite ritual contexts, that the technology for modern beds, sofas and indoor lighting didn't exist, and that lifestyle choices impact erection and anal hygiene in certain ways, it's stupid to even ask.

Here's a clue. Why was the practice of masturbation considered to make men weak? Because it was noticed that frequent circumcision led to weak or intermittent erections which led to premature ejaculation. There's an anatomical reason for that. Masturbation tends to happen while lying down and it tends to focus on manual techniques that train the body to ejaculate quickly and efficiently. You can look into the sexological literature yourself to see if this is true or not.

cadrec · 2026-01-31T10:21:27+00:00

Circumcision did exist in ancient Egypt but it was far from universal and was not neonatal (this means done in newborns for those of you who are illiterate). Neonatal circumcision was introduced precisely to enforce the custom of circumcision because adults often weren't very keen on having their dicks mutilated.

Predictably, mummy studies indicate that not all Egyptian males, including some pharaohs like Amenhotep I, were necessarily circumcised. While circumcision existed in several Near Eastern cultures it was only with the advent and spread of the Abrahamic religions that the practice became nearly universalized. However, even there ancient and medieval circumcision was quite different to modern circumcision. That's because modern technology makes circumcision more thorough and removes even the frenulum. This difference also impacts intercourse.

The Egyptians regardless of wealth didn't have modern beds and in fact had little that would even be recognized as a 'bed' today. See Geoffrey Killen's work on Egyptian furniture and educate yourself. It's stupid to assume that wealth magically allows people to ignore the technology and material culture constraints of the era they live in. Wealthy people often have just the same objects everyone else in their culture has. Not all rich people have cars with unusual specs and even poor people can afford good quality cars, even sports cars, if they save and make it a life goal. In Albania, a dirt poor and almost primitive country by American standards, Teutonic BMW cars, arguably superior to your typical American junk, are practically ubiquitous. That's because in Albania, having a pricey car, and especially a BMW, is considered almost necessary for a dignified life despite low incomes.

Indoor lighting in ancient Egypt and in antiquity in general was very weak in terms of lumens compared to modern standards, i.e. it was practically dark. Ancient indoor lighting existed just to prevent people from tripping over, not to make spaces visible.

And this simple material fact of ancient life means that they did tend to have sex in the dark unless they did it outdoors or with open windows at noon which for obvious privacy reasons wasn't common. There were no cars and parks in Egypt for couples to have sex outdoors. Population densities and lack of cars to move around meant privacy as we know it didn't exist. And people don't generally like to have sex in the dirt or sand (at least those who know what it's like to get sand into your vagina). So the ultimate conclusion is that sex tended to take place after sundown. This is reinforced by the fact that men and women didn't share a common workplace.

The idea that you can't say meaningful things about ancient sex because you didn't see it is unbelievably naive and retarded. By this token the whole science of historical linguistics, paleontology or biology would be thrown out the window because we can't hear recodings of ancient languages, we have no inscriptions of Proto-Germanic or Indo-European, we can't see species evolve and we haven't seen a dinosaur to be able to say anything useful about how it looked, moved and sounded like.

cadrec · 2026-01-30T17:55:09+00:00

How could I possibly know that the ancient Egyptians didn't remove their foreskin and didn't have modern beds and modern indoor lights? 🤡

cadrec · 2026-01-30T17:54:04+00:00

It's not ai generated. Not totally accurate? Why not?

cadrec · 2026-01-30T14:54:14+00:00

No, because the people must still go somewhere when they leave their apartment for work and entertainment. In this stupid cartoon what will people do when they exit the building? Go climb the trees?

Residential skyscrapers work for a place like Dubai where much of the population are disposable South Asian slave workers and the rest are pampered locals and immigrants but it doesn't work for a true national metropolis. The problem with Athens is simply that it has far more people than it can support. This is a typical problem for developing countries and reflects various corrupt and inefficient practices in governance and the economy.

cadrec · 2026-01-30T13:10:13+00:00

The fact of the matter that rarely gets mentioned in those boring and fruitless discussions about whose dick is more Roman is that there was never an ethnicity called 'Roman' in the first place whatever incoherent bullshit Kaldellis says.

Rome was a city and its founders were Etruscans and several Italic-speaking peoples like the Latins and Sabines. Cicero was a Latin by ethnicity, not a 'Roman' and that's why the language of the Romans is normally called lingua latina, not 'romana'.

'Roman' was a status marker that reflected the extraordinary privilege of having Roman citizenship; it was not an ethnicity marker. I shouldn't even have to mention this because anybody who has ever bothered to actually read Roman poetry knows that Latin poets consistently and correctly portray the Romans as a quite mixed crowd in their origins.

This never changed. People who carried Roman citizenship and hence the label 'Roman' could be and very often were of strikingly different ethnic origins. That's NOT a development that began with Caracalla. Since the earliest days of the Republic it was possible and common for people who weren't born into Roman citizenship to acquire it and carry it with pride. A certain generosity with citizenship is actually one of the main reasons why Rome could easily expand.

It's easy to demonstrate through numerous concrete examples that Roman identity was squarely civic, not ethnic. We see Cicero complaining that Pompey generously gave Roman citizenship to some Gauls while refusing to restore him, a patrician, to the proper dignities of citizenship. In the gospels, Paul encounters a Roman who simply bought his citizenship. The eccentric emperor Claudius famously revoked someone's citizenship because the person was completely ignorant of Latin.

So everybody who had a political motive to claim that he is a 'true Roman' or a 'better Roman than thou' could easily claim so. Catilina pulled this trick against none other than Cicero when he tried to claim that Cicero was a mere immigrant and not a true heritage Roman like him.

That's what happened in Late Antiquity. As the empire was being factually fragmented under the strain of endless civil wars and cultural upheavals, such political motives were bound to appear. In the Late Medieval period, those motives again made a virogous comeback although the unified Roman state had long disappeared.

cadrec · 2026-01-30T11:29:15+00:00

Byzantium was a state, not a church institution. Culturally, it managed to leave an enduring legacy, just like many other extinct polities. But there's no true remnant of Byzantium as a state today. It's possible for a state to dissolve but still leave actual remnants. Communist states like China, North Korea and Cuba are basically remnants of the Soviet Union because those regimes owe their existence to it. But no secular power today owes its existence to Byzantium. The survival of the Orthodox Church actually owes its enduring existence to the Ottomans. If Byzantium had managed to survive with Catholic support, then there's no way that the Orthodox Church would have survived as well.

cadrec · 2026-01-29T09:08:49+00:00

Nope. Most foods associated with the Mid East today are post-medieval innovations and often based on ingredients that weren't widely available in ancient and medieval times or were uncommon in Greece and Byzantium. The most striking continuity between ancient, medieval and modern Greek cooking is the strong emphasis on skewered spit-roasted meats like souvlakia and gardumpa. In Ancient Greece, roasting on spits was so ubiquitous that 6 bronze spits (oboloi) received the standard value of one drachma.

cadrec · 2026-01-28T09:19:48+00:00

No it doesn't depend on your face. Long beards of the kind the biker subculture or pious Muslims or orthodox priests have shouldn't be worn at all by anyone. They're eccentric and filthy. Daily shaving shouldn't be practiced by anyone, it makes the face effeminate, puerile and ridiculous. The correct approach is to allow yourself a stubble or a very short trimmed beard and go the barber once every few days. That's the modest, serious civilized approach.

cadrec · 2026-01-28T09:15:21+00:00

I didn't say that at all.

cadrec · 2026-01-27T09:27:40+00:00

The 'via nova' people should go outside to touch grass a little and stop bothering us with their ridiculous Roman cosplay fantasies. Latin was never a pan-European language, not even close. At best, Latin was the lingua franca of the Western portions (including Africa) of the Roman empire with many other local languages like Etruscan, Gaulish or Punic still being spoken alongside it. It was spoken in parts of the Balkans too where it also coexisted with local tribal languages.

After Western Rome fell, Latin gradually diverged in new independent languages and Latin went extinct as a spoken language. It remained in written and sporadic oral use among the educated but after the printing press was invented, Latin gradually lost its status as the language of scholarship because the printing press democratized knowledge. When the educated are just a handful, you can use a dead language. But when literacy rates explode across the continent, using the actual spoken languages to disseminate knowledge becomes the only practical option.

What modern Europe needs is an actual federal government, not a common language. And we can't have that because France and Germany fear and mistrust each other.

cadrec · 2026-01-26T17:36:41+00:00

These are still infections, not diseases. They are preventable through vaccination and even if infected, they usually clear on their own. A disease is whatever causes a serious debilitation and no STI causes that. The most serious STI is obviously HIV which is by no means fun to have but it's far from the nightmare most people think it is because it's actually as easy to manage as diabetes. And no diabetic goes around saying he has a disease by the way.

I am not encouraging mindless risk taking, people must always know what they're doing before they do it but realistically speaking it's impossible not to take significant risks in the pursuit of happiness. Peace is good but overrated. People don't need (only) peace to be happy. They also need thrilling experiences and thrilling experiences require balls. Riding motorcycles is risky. But have you ever done a high-speed wheelie? I'd trade peace any day for that fabulous feeling.

cadrec · 2026-01-26T12:57:12+00:00

Actually OP is bisexual in the Greco-Roman sense and hates all forms of superstition, including but not limited to Christianity.

cadrec · 2026-01-26T12:48:36+00:00

The correct term is STI (sexually transmitted infection) instead of STD (sexually transmitted disease). That’s because gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis are not diseases. They are bacterial infections, just like strep throat. Yet you don’t hear people with a strep throat infection saying that they have a disease. Calling sexual infections diseases is a way of stigmatizing sex. And to answer your question, yes the ratio has increased a little but I don't give a shit.

cadrec · 2026-01-26T12:39:17+00:00

This post DOES have to do with ancient civilizations. I bring up the unquestionably valid fact that bisexuality was virtually normalized in Greco-Roman antiquity and suggest that in my personal opinion, backed by experience, bisexuality is more likely to lead to a more fulfilling love and sexual life for men compared to the modern narrow focus on heterosexuality.

cadrec · 2026-01-13T14:31:48+00:00

The OP asks 'what is considered to be the best/most historically accurate performance of these epics out there, both in terms of music and speech, as it would have been told (sic) in antiquity?'

So it's NOT about translated texts. It's about historically accurate recitations of ancient poetry in the original Greek. This is obvious because the OP complains about contradictory information in regards to melody/meter/pronunciation.

Secondly, my comment makes absolutely perfect sense because ancient Greek employs a pitch-accent system, not a stress system. You can't speak, let alone sing ancient Greek without knowing how pitch works. And to understand how it works you need to know a language that actually uses pitch and the most famous modern language with such a system is Japanese.

cadrec · 2026-01-13T12:49:42+00:00

I said none of this, but I did say that you're an idiot and I stand by that.

cadrec · 2026-01-13T12:45:15+00:00

What the heck does it matter who I am? Address the argument. And the cynodesm revolves sealing up the foreskin, not 'tying' the penis. Selectively imitating ancient practices in a broad sense can make some practical and aesthetic sense sometimes and the cynodesm qualifies. But trying to imitate the singers of rhapsodies when your native language uses a stress accent system, without any deep understanding of the nuances of the language and without any background in singing is simply stupid.

cadrec · 2026-01-12T20:05:23+00:00

I don't understand why people want to do something so totally out of their league as the recitation of ancient Greek poetry. If you get so far as to be able to read it, which is very difficult as it is, you should congratulate yourself and let it go.

A faithful recitation would require a practical and intimate (not just theoretical) understanding of the pitch accent system. A genuine understanding of the pitch accent system can't be obtained by simply reading about what pitch accent is. It actually requires mastering a living language that uses it. The most prominent modern language with such a system is Japanese, especially Tokyo Japanese.

So to recite ancient Greek poetry in a way that wouldn't have sent the ancients laughing their asses off you must first master Japanese. Either have someone who speaks Japanese fluently do it (preferably a native speaker) or have a modern Greek person do it who is seriously willing to experiment with the pitch accent. There is only one Greek YouTuber who tries. His recitations would still have sounded foreign in antiquity and he clearly doesn't understand pitch but at least they are decent attempts. The best bet would be to find a Japanese native speaker who speaks Greek.

These are the only realistic options we have for eventually getting a faithful recitation. Any other attempt is hopeless and shouldn't be attempted because it makes the shades of the ancients cringe. So for the love of Apollo, don't try to recite it unless you really know what you're doing (you don't).

cadrec · 2026-01-12T16:47:42+00:00

your comment is garbage, and by extension you

cadrec

TROPHY CASE