Novosedoff

And as final goes the modern Russian juzz band called the Marimba (Tatiana would often sing in English)

And in order to continue to acquaint some of the local crazy folks (incl. myself) with Russian culture here goes some Russian-made classic stuff produced the very last years before the collapse. The movie was filmed in Yalta, Crimea. The movie is sh*t, in my humble view, but it gives pretty good background coverage for a couple of music tracks

Yeah, I remember Philip Glass for his Koyaanisqatsi 🙂 However today, as a Russian joke goes, we'll be listening to the Iranian music just to irritate the Americans 😅 (unlike the US, Russia has good diplomatic relations with Iran) This is in fact beautiful Iranian prog-rock stuff produced before the Islamic Revolution

My remark about the Afghani green-eyed girl was inspired by media and wikipedia quotes, such as the following one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdia The girl, in fact, has fled Afghanistan for Italy in the very end of the last year.

The other day caldrail wrote that "Augustus was republican in his heart", not mentioning anything about how Augustus made his fortune, the proscriptions, the Cicero's destiny, the reshuffle of the senate, assemblies etc. So I shan't be surprised by anything on this forum now 🙂 However the consequences of the Roman intervention still echo with new myths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Girl?wprov=sfla1 As teenager I lived next to the border with Afghanistan in a small closed military town and have to admit that green-eyed folks would be unusual among the locals

Sounds a bit like gypsy music 🙂

A couple of weeks ago someone shared this relatively modern Italian stuff, which sounds good. Never heard about them before.

This is good stuff. I used to screenshot anything that I read and found useful or just curious. Over a couple of years I collected a batch of such screenshots all sorted in various folders. Then I realized that it just made more sense to start tagging the images. So here it goes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_digital_image_metadata_editors For audio one can also choose from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_editor But I've chosen the one which is not even listed in the above wiki article: http://fastphototagger.sourceforge.net/about.html It has both the Windows and Android versions which is quite nice, considering that I am accustomed to reading from tablets. It also supports the hierarchical keywords which took me a while to understand. The author is American bloke called Dennis, who is always ready to respond and to help. I mean once I started using the app it takes me literally seconds to find a page from a particular publication I screenshotted a year ago, while I would normally swallow 20 to 50 publications per week, containing multiple figures and tables, which often results in over 100 images saved in a week. The only drawback is that, as you point it, the process of meta-tagging is labor-intensive, no matter how fast and handy the app may be. I tried to raise the issue on the exiftool discussion board, probing the very idea of automatic meta-tagging (which in my view is feasible, given all the OCR and machine learning technologies that we have at hand now), but it seems such technologies are not yet around for wide audiences. More important is sharing, because these days the information grows just too fast for one person to be able to read everything through (a known Russian scientist complained about it recently too). But the idea of sharing is not that simple because of the copyrights rights. If someone has published a book containing some interesting findings and I screenshot a few pages from it and share with anyone else, then the writer has the right to file a claim to stop me. The other issue relates to the fact that there are too many data sources one can find on the Internet. We've got arxiv.org for publications in natural sciences, academia.edu for historians, plenty of specialized journals, each of which runs its own archive. But they all are disconnected from each other, so users ain't able to run one search query across multiple sources, which is a pity. While Web 3.0 should be all about making the semantic search easier.

Hi there all, I thought it might be a good idea to raise this practical issue because the data is becoming extremely abundant in the modern world, but the main problem is that the data is often unstructured and difficult to search. It all starts from the very basic habits that everyone of us has acquired. Some old school folks still prefer to use printed books, they often make notes right on the book pages, and it takes them quite a bit of time when they need to find a paper they read 10 years ago. So for them it's all analog, in very slow motion. Modern folks read from the screen, on tablet or computer. The notes they make are easy to share, but still hard to search when the notes are all about plots, tablets and graphics. Lets say in 5 years you wanna find a page from a 500-pages book you have read over the last week. What would you rather be doing now in order to make it happen fast in 5 years when both the name of the author and the title of the book are gonna be completely forgotten? For a researcher reading over 20-50 new publications per week, the problem of recording and searching becomes even more persistent. So I am curious how you folks manage your notes and memories of the read stuff? What programs are you using? Thanks.

It would be interesting to probe the Persian sources on the Crassus defeat, I don't know how comfortable you are with Eastern foreign languages. The whole history of the Roman empire is basically a big propaganda myth. Germans screwed it all over the place, but they barely even documented their defeats.

Thanks, Peter. Although mentally I am on the Plebes side, I certainly appreciate the amenities of being able to post more content as I hope everyone else would 🙂 It may be a good idea to delegate some of your functions to old patricii around here, in case you hit by a car, electrecuted by a thunderbolt or suffered a heart attack, or perhaps this is just the professional side of myself a bit too overcautious about such risks, given the forum's rather low number of active participants 🙂

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Huns?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiongnu?wprov=sfla1 In Russian language both words Huns and Xiongnu have almost identical roots and sound almost the same. Xiongnu were defeated by Chinese and had to flee to the West.

Yep, I decided to quit the thread because I don't know much about it anyway. So, all facts are at yours disposal now, you can use whichever you like. By the way, Google search has produced quite a few results on the corruption laws in the Roman society. Here is the list of some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Baebia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Acilia_repetundarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Cornelia_de_maiestate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Aurelia_iudiciaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Acilia_Calpurnia

Well, I think I've given a few facts to prop up my point of view. You seem to have given none to support yours. I think you'd better illustrate your view with some solid examples. Because to me the claim that Augustus was republican in his heart sounds like the claim that a serial killer can be kind in his heart, considering everything Augustus had done. Frankly, it all started before Augustus when dictator Sulla forced the 2 new consuls stay in Rome, thereby depriving them of any control over army legions (at other times one of the consuls, sometimes even both of them had to stay with the army outside Rome, while the other half of the army would obey the orders of the remaining consul - this allowed to counter-balance their powers), and when Sulla intervened in the work of assemblies. Later Caesar was officially recognised by the Senate as dictator and consul at the same time, but the other new thing was when the senators made Caesar a consul for life time. As for Augustus, the major change of the electoral process concerned how the split of functions was reorganized between the Senate and assemblies. Before Augustus any new laws that assemblies passed had to be pre-approved by the Senate, but new magistrates to lead the assemblies would still be elected by assemblies without consulting with the Senate. Under Augustus that was changed, so effectively any new magistrates would have to become pre-approved by the Senate too.

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I'd love to read a systemized research book on this topic too. Many modern researchers seem to give an extremely gullible view on the ancient world, as if it was run by gods almost and everything was arranged in perfect order, so people would sniff flowers under the blue sky and play badminton. They were killing each other on the forum in the center of the city next to the building of their senate, and crowds were watching this all day long! The number of people that fell victim on the arena of Colloseum is estimated as 200,000 at least (wild animals are not even included in the calcs). They got only 25% emperors who died by natural death, meaning that there was a 3:1 chance to be murdered. They got pirates all over the place in the mediterranean. They even burnt their old senate building, and noone could do nothing. In fact, before Numa Pompilius they officially practised human sacrifices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Crime_and_punishment_in_ancient_Rome

Btw the very fact of the existence of the lex repetundarium that was passed in 123 BС kinda indicates that the corruption in the ancient world was widespread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Acilia_repetundarum The usury business of publicans was run on the idea of corruption too.

You seem to stick to the point that Augustus was the most democratic ruler ever, almost like Mr. Kim Jong-un delivering master-classes to the world leaders via youtube on how to govern democratically 🙂 Augustus was a dictator who turned down the official proposal by the Senate to become "a dictator" only because he wanted to look decent, so instead they made him a tribune for life time or tribunicia potestas (it's worth reminding that a tribune had the power to overrule any new law of the Senate by his only vote). Even though Augustus restored the rights of the assemblies that were lost during the civil wars, any new nominees for the high magistrate offices had to be approved by the Senate via mechanism called "auctoritas senatus", which effectively gave the Senate the power over assemblies. Augustus ruled as the chairman of the Senate and introduced money penalties for any senator who didn't attend the obligatory meetings, but once he became fed up with his own incentives for new reforms, he established the consilium principes so that he could rule without even leaving his own palace (so he arranged for himself a remote workplace as we'd say these days). To me this all looks as pure hypocrisy 🙂 It's better to illustrate what Augustus did with the following example. Every new year the Senate would have to choose 2 new consuls, so Augustus would present the Senate the list of 4 candidates pre-approved by him personally. Did the senators have a choice? Yes, they did, but the choice was limited by Augustus. Sometimes the Senate would have to choose 16 new praetors, and Augustus would give the list of his 12 candidates, so the Senate would only have to find 4 other candidates to fill the remaining positions. But the majority of magistrates would still be chosen by Augustus. As for corruption and bribery, in my view this was inherent in the very foundations of the Roman political institutes because Romans didn't pay salaries to their magistrates (consuls, tribunes etc). The official studies of the Roman history somehow support the very naive view that one had to be rich in order to engage in the Roman politics. I'd say, this is complete nonsense! One had to be skilled and corrupt in order to skim for the sake of his own pockets from any new political motion by delivering justice in the most beneficial way to secure a kickback (while the Senate finally became the high court during the emperial period with the functions stretching as far as overwatch of the construction works in provinces and expenditure, overwatch of the religious matters etc)

I may have been mistaken about the complete transfer of the legislative and electoral powers to the Senate under Augustus, it appears the assemblies were still functioning under Augustus, however in his last will Augustus advised Tiberius to change that by shifting all electoral powers to the Senate (how many last wills, of which we would know, have, in fact, been fabricated?), which Tiberius did. Later emperors tried to change it back again a few times, however by the end of the first century all the legislative power became finally concentrated in the Senate. Nonetheless all the historians report that under Augustus the most important seats would be given to his nominees, he even openly bribed the voters, which leaves very little space for doubts as to in whose hands all the real powers were 🙂

I may have misunderstood the initial point of your first post in the thread. To me it seemed you have claimed that there was very little republican left during the late republic, so the transition to the principate and the fall of the republic are much exaggerated. I tried to point at few different things that in my view constituted a significant shift in the political landscape. The elective powers though highly dispersed used to be represented by the assemblies before Augustus. Augustus changed all that by transferring the electoral powers, such as the right to elect the magistrates, to the Senate. The Roman soldiers used to have the right of vote in their Comita Centuriate to elect new consuls, Augustus effectively took away from them the right to do that. The Senate had become the only supreme place for such decisions to be taken. So can we say the transition benefited the Senate in any way? Sure, it did. But when one takes away something from someone, something else must be given in return. So Augustus offered his soldiers the generous social retirement package, which soldiers were happy to accept. It appeared that they were happy to sacrifice their electoral powers for pension plans. Before Augustus the Senate was the only place to take decisions on starting new wars and making international deals. The army used to be controlled by the decions of the Senate, which would appoint its commanders to execute their technical and tactical military duties (not political). The rise of Augustus changed that, the Senate lost any control over the army (again) to be able to replace Augustus as chief commmander and overcome his political decisions. From then on the only legion that obeyed the direct decisions by the Senate would be the legion based in Africa (not for long though, btw if I ain't mistaken there were about 43 legions at the time of Augustus) Here is a good infographic map from the English wiki article Constitution_of_the_Roman_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Roman_Republic#/media/File:Roman_constitution.png But anyway to me it all looks like quite a big political change. So I'd argue with the view that there was no fall of the republic.