What does Veeky Forums think of this...

you missed the point entirely.

By Eurocentric I meant Roman history from the perspective of traditional western historiography e.i. from the perspective of aristocrats. Only the wealthiest Romans could afford literacy and they were the only ones whose works survived, so for many years that was all that people knew about Rome. Nowadays thanks to modern material sciences like archaeology, forensics, and chemistry, we can paint a far more vivid picture of the kind of lives they lived, including the lower classes

it makes you toscano, then.

My family was from Rome, and I enjoy studying the history of the city, from ancient times to the modern day.

I don't understand why that confuses you

The show doesn't focus on lower class Romans at all. I can't recall a single moment where it doesn't show the Romans in uniform.

I don't have a problem with showing the bad side of the Romans, because they definitely had a bad side, but making the Carthies into plucky heroes against tyranny is kind of weird as they were really no different than the Romans, an exploitative empire ruled by a oligarchical republic

>actual history

>trigger neoliberals

What? The only reason it has a black berson as Hannibal is neoliberalism you moron.

>the staid eurocentrism that previously defined pop history

Are you being fucking serious right now? When the average historically illiterate thinks of Rome, they think of concrete and slaves.

>I don't know what neoliberalism is
Neoliberalism is like Thatcher and Reagan, what you're probably imagining is progressivism

>an exploitative empire ruled by oligarchical Jew-ish merchants

t.fixed

get a load of this illiterate

WE WAS SLAVEZ AND SHITZ AND WE FOUGHT FOR FREEDZOM!!! SHUITTTZZZZZZ

Called Freedom Fighters, literally all the societies represented in the show had slaves of some form

meh

Carthies were more mercantile, Romans more agrarian (though Carthage had a shitload of agriculture going on in Africa), but in the end it was really just two regional powers fighting for territory, wealth, and dominance.

>Be Atilla
>Be leader of a tribe of nomads
>Sack a few poorly defended villages
>Get beaten in fair open combat
>Get intimidated by the pope and leave Rome
>Choke to death while eating
>Centuries later people make t.v. shows that you're an unstoppable freedom fighter

No user you don't understand, all empires are inherently evil expansionist states in spite of their merits and everyone else are benevolent defenders of rights and freedom.

dude that's nothing see the total war atilla trailers they really hype him up as the scourge of god

No. I'm not talking about progressives. I'm talking about neoliberal capitalism

The only reason why Hannibal is black because white consumers do not care about ethnicity of actors, but representation has a huge effect on minority sales.

Neoliberal capitalism is the whole reason why every white character is retconned as black.

Blacks care, whites don't.

Oh, and btw: don't be so presumptuous

At least they show him as the man he actually was: a self-interested conquerer with an obsession for destroying things

>experts suck
>muh womyn power and black hannibal for no fucking reason

It's alright

Are americans capable of making non-ADD docs yet?

No, all the good directors are dead

so according to these people it took several hundred years of war numerous disasters civil wars economic failure and plagues for Rome to be beaten for being evil only for those people to be a hypocrites

>American entertainment

These experts are retarded

Rome was no worse than any of her neighbors and an average citizen in europe didn't enjoy the same luxuries until the 17th-18th century. Even if you were a slave you were still treated pretty well depending on your circumstance, if you were a PoW obviously it was shit but if you were just some boring slave cleaning a rich dudes house you had a pretty good life and even had a chance to eventually own your own property.

Americans need a good guy to cheer for, a liberator, what they fail to mention is Hannibal and his armies committed mass rapes and genocide just like the romans did and in some cases even more because his army was full of barbarians and mercenaries who had very little discipline

funny how they didn't mention rome's allies but they did Hannibal's then when that part was over they mention how standard roman procedure was to make allies with local tribes

It's fucked up because that was one of Romes biggest strengths, they did an excellent job making friends with their enemies enemies, it's one of the reasons they ever did get to invade Carthage in North Africa.

>Hannibal
>black

I enjoyed it until the black carthaginians meme

He's depicted as black in the show ya dingus. Of course I and every other knowledgeable person know that he wasn't full on negroe

by lower classes I meant Non- Romans, who were often comparatively poor

>average historically illiterate thinks of Rome, they think of concrete and slaves
No, they think of swords and sandals and Julius Caesar

In other words, the entertainment for it's minority of citizens and the single most important aristocrat in Rome's history.

We wuz Phoenicians an sheeyit

Why do we care what the plebs think? If they can delude themselves with a false narrative because it makes them happy, fine. Its just when that bleeds into academia that it becomes a problem.

>the same luxuries until the 17th-18th century
That's a gross oversimplification. Architecture, medicine, metallurgy, legal systems, education, mathematics, and farming techniques were superior in the middle ages than they were in the Roman era. Economic and political systems were far more stable and their societies weren't continuously plagued by domestic revolt.

Certain luxuries that require a huge, interconnected network of international trade went missing, along with the sort of giant infrastructure projects that can only be funded by a state as large and wealthy as the Roman's, but to suggest that Europe didn't fully recover from the fall of the Roman Empire until the dawn of the industrial revolution is utterly lacking in historical perspective.

Cuckold: the post

>Why do we care what the plebs think?
Because I'm a commoner in my own society just like you are, so understanding what life was like for them helps me put my own situation in perspectie

Nice fetish you're projecting. Do you have anything of substance to add or are you just going to keep shitposting?

Then you can pursue it. The problem with the History channel is that it's made for people who would never have any real interest in history so any narrative you spill out on there is their only knowledge. If you ask me, I'd rather have the masses know nothing about a subject than have them know only a little about a subject, because then they can twist it into agendas.

>Superior
>I require a village to raise a single cavalryman.jpg

>I'd rather have the masses know nothing about a subject than have them know only a little about a subject, because then they can twist it into agendas.
The opposite happens when they're less well informed: they're still going to twist ideas into agendas, they're just going to be ideas that are even more wrong or misguided, and it's more likely to provoke them into doing something stupid or violent. In the words of Socrates himself: there is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

>Oh boy I love watching media were my pale ancestors are depicted as evil slave drivers who get beaten by a non-European black person

Nope no cuckoldry here

No, if people don't know anything about something they just won't care about it at all

>education was superior
>only literate people were the clergy

sure

They didn't show him as a freedom fighter at all dude. Everyone in the show refers to him as a savage asshole and all of his speeches are about himself.

I liked the PBS Barbarian series more

even if they implied that Hungarians are the bastard child of the Huns

>Americans need a good guy to cheer for, a liberator, what they fail to mention is Hannibal and his armies committed mass rapes and genocide just like the romans did and in some cases even more because his army was full of barbarians and mercenaries who had very little discipline
Didn't catch the Hannibal ep but they didn't paint the barbarians as altruistic angels. They have a scene of Boudica burning trapped women and children alive.

>history channel

It's a different perspective that I'm not used to that I can appreciate without dragging my sexual hang ups into the equation the way that you are.

And it's not factually wrong to say that Rome was a slave-based conquest economy, utterly dependent on other people's money to continue functioning.

Verses classical times when only the very wealthiest members of society were literate.

And by the time of the Catholic universities you had doctors, engineers, and lawyers all with a papal license to practice their trade anywhere in Europe.

Your suggesting that all that graffiti in pompeii was done solely by the rich?

Tbh I think functional literacy was more widespread than we think. It dropped sharply after the fall of Rome before getting back to its previous levels from 800-900 ad

>graffiti in pompeii
That was vulgar Latin. The language of education was Greek.

The reason why we called it a "dark" ages is because the Germanic ruling classes which succeeded the Greco-Roman one did not read and write in Greek, so there was a big gap in the historiographical record between when educated elites stopped writing and thinking in Greek.

And it was the regime of Charlemagne that first started pushing widespread education in Europe.

>different perspective

Its a falsification.

Would it be a refreshing differing perspective to cast ghengis khan as a scandinavian looking man?
Shaka Zulu as a Han chinese?

>I'm Roman Italian by descent

american muh heritage fag detected

>Would it be a refreshing differing perspective to cast ghengis khan as a scandinavian looking man?
>Shaka Zulu as a Han chinese?
of course not, but do I have a problem with an African being played by an African?

meh, I can live with it.

In fact it's kind of missing the point to dwell on the casting choice instead of on the content of the episodes, which were solidly done and paint a vivid visual of life on the ground in the war against the encroaching Romans.

And it's no sin to admire your enemies. Pic related, the Romans did it too, that's what made them such fantastic, flexible soldiers.

Nah, you're thinking of Lost Cause Southerners. It's the empty can that rattles the most. Most Americans don't sperg out about their heritage and use it as a source for introspection and study. The only reason I even brought it up was to deflect criticism from romaboos for not needlessly glorifying the past the way that they do.

>of course not
>an african played by an african

Then whats your problem with Ghengis Khan as a Scandinavian?
An Eurasian played by an Eurasian.

No, that's just being melodramatic. We know for a fact that Ghengis Khan was not a fair skinned Scandinavian, while Hannibal’s physical appearance is ultimately unknown and that his ethnicity cannot be easily identified or mapped onto modern identities. There are no primary historical sources which described his appearance. It's completely plausible that he was a dark skinned man, but it's a question for which the answer is almost certainly lost.

If whites don't care then why am I disgusted whenever I see somebody portray Hannibal as black? He wasn't a fucking sub-Saharan Bantu but people still have the gall to portray him as such. Carthage began as a phoneacian colony. They. Were. Not. Black!!!!

he probably most likely looked something like this.

He wasn't black and he wasn't white. Those are modern social constructs based around ethnic grounds which didn't exist in the 3rd century BCE

>grounds
groups*

Exactly. But everything today has to fit some sort of agenda, and God forbid if your documentary centered around Ancient Rome doesn't meet the diversity quota. Then you would be a disgusting racist who perpetuates the rape of minority cultures.

Actually we have an idea how carthagians looked like.
It was a phonecia colony.
Phonecians are middle eastern semitic people whose appearance was definitly not subsaharan.

The natives of north africa who inhabit this place since several thousand years are berbers.
Berbers look like mediterran caucasoids, actually pretty lightskinned.

Phonecians and berbers may have mixed in carthago. They may have mixed with other people from the mediterran too.
But they did not assimilate subsaharans.
Getting to subsaharan africa the kind of legendary voyage you would have been getting famous for.
Some carthagians sailed down the west african coast, but they only colonized around marroquo describing -and this is from the only voyage log thats known-any men they met further down as wild hostile savages or simply strange people who ran away.

There is no way a highranking general of carthage would have been a subsaharan african as berbers and negros were divided not only by the sahara but also by the kongo jungle.

Also how do we know for a fact that ghengis can wasnt scandinavian looking?
If your reasoning relies on similar assumptions as mine you might realize why I see black hannibal as a plumb falsification for the afroamerican audience.

>But everything today has to fit some sort of agenda
which is why we don't jump to conclusions until the facts present themselves
>doesn't meet the diversity quota.
But Ancient Rome herself was a diverse place. We have records of actual sub-Saharan Africans serving as legionaries.

>Then you would be a disgusting racist who perpetuates the rape of minority cultures.
but by being inclusive we're encouraging them to integrate into our culture rather than become insular and detached.

>Phonecians are middle eastern semitic people
Who were perfectly capable of being dark skinned

>Getting to subsaharan africa the kind of legendary voyage you would have been getting famous for.
Or you could use the Garamantian oases to make it a much less historically noteworthy journey.

>Also how do we know for a fact that ghengis can wasnt scandinavian looking?
Because we have DNA samples of his direct descendants, bones of his riders, reliable primary and secondary sources

are you saying black and white people didn't exist in the 3rd century BCE? If you're white or black thats because of your genes, its not a social construct

>use it as a source for introspection and study.

exactly. That's the very definition of sperging out about your heritage

>Who were perfectly capable of being dark skinned

What do you consider dark skinned? Most non-muslim lebanese (who represent the gene pool in hannibal's time) are only dark skinned compared to gingers

Please, PLEASE. Show me one piece of credible evidence to show that even one sub-Saharan black ever served in the Roman legion. Which if it were true, would require that these sub-Saharan people would have somehow acquired Roman citizenship, which was necessary to become a legionary. Legio I Italica probably had an all black cohort didn't it? :/

>are you saying black and white people didn't exist in the 3rd century BCE?
Yes

None of the ethnic groups alive today were alive back then. Latins and Phoenicians are both extinct ethnicities. There were completely different racial dynamics at play and Romans didn't have any concept of genetics from which to base racial supremacist theories upon, so they wouldn't have looked at a sub-Saharan Africans with the same sort of superiority complex that you do. In fact olive skinned Romans and Greeks would just as soon look down on "pink-skinned" Germanic.

>Please, PLEASE. Show me one piece of credible evidence to show that even one sub-Saharan black ever served in the Roman legion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Maurice

>sub-Saharan
>born in Egypt
>nothing in the entire article lending any credence to him being sub-Saharan
>the only depictions of him date from at least 1000 years after he died

Gonna have to try harder than that.

I agree with you generally but Maurice does not prove any point about sub-Saharan Africans in Roman service. Maurice only began to be portrayed as "black," that is to say sub-Saharan African, in the Middle Ages. If he existed, he was a native Egyptian, and while he could still have been "black" in the sense of skin-tone (Egypt likely had some pretty dark-skinned people here and there) he wasn't from sub-Saharan Africa and we have no evidence that he was descended from anyone there.

blackpast.org/gah/africans-hadrians-wall
Black African Roman soldiers are attested in Northern Britain both in records and skeletal remains (some leg bones in a Roman military cemetery have been deemed to be 'negro', though skeletal race classification without even a skull is a very imprecise science).

In the records an 'Ethiopian' soldier is said to have approached Septimius Severus during his tour of Northern Britain with an omen - 'Ethiopian' was the Roman term for a black African.
books.google.com/books?id=J8rVeu2go8IC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=septimius severus Ethiopian legionary&source=bl&ots=MtZ8-6SMB_&sig=hqsByUt5rh3bvzpnBQmc1rLBhxA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjyhuyxo8rNAhXBdD4KHXQ8DZ8Q6AEIajAO#v=onepage&q=septimius severus Ethiopian legionary&f=false

It seems likely that a greater proportion of the North African population was what we would call 'black' in antiquity, Romans described 'western Ethiopians' and 'black Gaetulians' in what is now Morocco and Mauretania, and a French archaeologist has stated a full 20% of the skeletons he's analysed at pre-Roman Carthage were 'Negroid'. Also there always had been a sizeable black component in Egypt. All would have contributed men to the army, whether as citizen legionaries and auxiliaries would have varied between regions and even families.

Roman and Greek authors even write about Carthaginians looking down on other Phoenician colonies for their practice of intermarriage with Libyans, Nuraghics or Celtiberians.

That's just a Roman copy of a Greek statue you dipshit

>blackpast.com

Let's find some actual sources there m8

>Yes

So what did europeans and sub-saharan africans look like in the 3rd century BCE?

>Romans didn't have any concept of genetics

Yes they did

I have an italian name so I can decisively tell you that this series is garabage. Its full of niggers that don't belong being >we wuz ROMAINES n SHIET

fuckin garabage, never again. Liberals ruin everything AGAIN. welp, time to rebuild civilization my fellow romans!

t. authentic "italiano" /amaericano/

>Hannibal is a nigger
D R O P P E D

While Attila is usually greatly overrated, you're definitely underrating him.

>Sack a few poorly defended villages

Nah. He sacked many of the most important cities on the Danube like Naissus which had been lynchpins of Roman control of the Balkan provinces. The loss of some of these was partially why it was so easy for the Slavs to later on break into the Balkans and end Roman culture in Pannonia, Moesia etc.

>Get beaten in fair open combat

Catalaunian Plains was hardly a defeat, more of a stalemate.

>Get intimidated by the pope and leave Rome

This is a myth. Attila had made his point and earned his loot, and his army was suffering badly from malaria. He withdrew of his own accord.

>Choke to death while eating

He died in his sleep from throwing up in his own mouth or something like that.

>author Peter Fryer
>Peter Fryer (18 February 1927 – 31 October 2006)[1] was an English Marxist writer and journalist.

Nobody said that the Romans were a particularly creative or original bunch, but that didn't stop them from building more statues to Hannibal than they did to Scipio Africanus

Jesus Christ you people are dense. Is it really that important to you to show that black Africans couldn't exist and function in Roman society?

I'd post links to academic sources but the system won't let me for whatever retarded reason

They looked like ethnic groups which no longer exist and didn't have the same racial dynamics that you and I have.

>Yes they did
haha no. They lived about 1700 years before Gregor Mendel.

Do you have any proof that the Romans created more statues of Hannibal then of Scipio Africanus the Elder?

History is 90% bullcrap tbf

so this is historically acurate

and literacy in vulgar latin was significantly more than dark age europeans had.. when did Charlemagne himself learn to read in any language?

Where can I watch this?

It's a little newer so you might have to wait for torrents to show up.

they'll probably rerun the whole thing next week

are you really saying they had two Scipio Africanus?

If I recall correctly it was Scipio's grandson who was the commander that sacked Carthage during the third Punic war. As a result he too was given the title of Africanus or conqueror of Africa.

>They looked like ethnic groups which no longer exist

which is what? if we saw them would we call them white?

also pretty much all the european and african ethnic groups which existed back then still exist

I'm an Italian, I was born in Rome and I live in Rome, i study history in my university to become a professor. That fictional show is full of crap i never saw such dishonesty in a so-called documentary. I see that day by day History Channel is becoming a huge amount of crap.
1 "Rome consider Carthaginans barbarians"
This is simply not true, Carthaginans maybe be considered the worst of the enemies but barbarians, no, romans recognize the great cultures of the medetirrenian civilized.
2 And the most obvious Hannibal portraited as a sub-saharian, this must be an american thing, carthaginians were semitic not negroid, descendant from the phonician, and don't try to tell me that because hannibal was part berber he is sub-saharian, berbers are caucasian semitic too.
3 the armors of the carthaginians and the romans are terrible it seems that they wear plastic halloween costums.not to mention that i saw some lorica segmentata before the first century a.C.
4 the description of the battle of Canne is so stupid that i really felt ashamed for them, what kind of troops hannibal bring, the strategy taht they describe is totally wrong, it seems like hannibal wait for the attack then he suddently wakes up and move some elites troops(what kind of troops?) on the flanks and bring the cavalry to attack behind, rome have no cavalry from some reason. etc etc.
5 no description of the habits or culture of carthage.
And this is just the first 30 minutes of the first episode i prefer to stop here before writing an essay about it.