Why is the West so proud of its Greco-Roman heritage, but not its medieval period...

Is this how HRE was born?

How so?

>Generalizing The West as people with universally standard views and thoughts

Well this is off to a good start

Because the Greek and Roman civilizations were exceptional.

Medieval European civilization really wasn't.

Because a bunch of Italian scholars found Greek and Latin texts in the 14th century and loved it so much that they started LARPing as hard as Afrocentrists and neopagans do nowadays.

mostly because of renaissance greekaboos cursing their own germanic heritage who spent literally decades on fabricating an imagine of the middle ages that is blatantly false

Because in those thousand years Europe changed dramatically, and so did the world. The legacy of Rome was based in the East, in Constantinople, while Europe developed its own identity under, for the most part, the Catholic church. It's a hell of an understatement to call this just a little hiatus when European warriors, sent by the Pope, were sacking the capital of the existing Roman Empire.

We essentially became a different civilization.

Greek and Roman civilizations as imagined by Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars never existed.

Most people were ignorant and superstitious, just like Medieval Europeans and if they could maintain a elite of philosophers and scholars, it was because of slavery.

>the dark ages weren't dark

The memes have gone too far fellas.

Because they never quite managed to achieve anything to trump the former.
A lot of people will wrongfully talk about muh dark ages, muh void left by Christianity, however they are fedoralords.
Personally i like it a lot.

>first functional republics anywhere in the historical record
>insanely advanced science
>many economic indicators like mining and shipping took until the early modern era to return to Roman levels

MUH ROADS

It's the same with big construction projects in Ancient Rome. Certainly impressive, but they exist because of a authoritarian system that enslaved millions.

Saying society regressed because it couldn't build like that anymore is like saying society regressed in Romania because after the fall of communism, they don't build something like the Palace of the Parliament.

>authoritarian system that enslaved millions

So kind of like feudalism?

the middle age kingdoms were in every way more advanced than the roman era mate

nah m8

Greeks and Romans are romanticized to all hell.

People get fed Hollywood bullshit for years about how Greeks were so sophisticated (by modern standards) and were all philosophers while the north was just barbarians. The reality is that they were pretty much all dogmatic village people that modern 'intellectuals' would brush off as ignorant racists who drank too much and killed goats to cure the flu.

Yes, at the time the Romans and Greeks were advanced and even things today, such as philosophy and mathematics, are still valuable but that's for the time period but the west in the medieval ages was so much more advanced.

Peoples view of history and cultures is completely defined by popular media. My entire family is Greek but it's just bullshit.

Said every historically and archaeologically ignorant person, ever.

There were a lot of really critical advancements during the middle ages, dudes.

Look, I'm not shitting on Classical Greece or Rome. They laid the foundation for our entire civilization. But we COULD NOT have jumped from classical Athens or the Roman Empire at its height straight into the Renaissance -- and no, not just because renaissance means rebirth. I mean the scientific, economic, and artistic leaps we took during the Renaissance would not have been possible without the previous 1000 years of development.

No, worse. Peasants weren't slaves, they had it good, mostly.

>no roads from Spain to Palestine
>no cities of a million people
>no massive aqueduct system
>no million man armies

nah

just nah

>ignorant racists who drank too much
I don't know about the goat thing, but drunkenness was HEAVILY frowned upon in Ancient Greece, and racism in the modern sense literally hadn't been invented yet.

I mean, yeah, they were all "fuck those barbarians and Persians, amirite" but there was a lot more going on there than "ignorant racism."

...

they were smaller in size sure, but in terms of actual advances they were further ahead
11th century churches shit on every single roman building in terms of complexity PE

The Colosseum and Pantheon cast a wary look in your direction.

Also, concrete.

significantly less complex mate

those churches manage to stay up despite fuckhuge holes in their walls, you try that trick with a roman building, you end up with a pile of rubble

>drunkenness
Stumbling and bumbling wasfools frowned upon.

They drank more wine than water. There's a reason why athletes were advised to cut down wine consumption.

>racism in the modern sense literally hadn't been invented yet
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

I know you're going to make a semantic point out of this but holy fuck you're retarded.

How to tell if somebody never studied history in a formal setting: they dismiss the idea of the medieval ages being completely fucked.

I don't think you understand what I was trying to say, most likely, I suppose, because I did not express myself clearly enough.

The people in the Middle ages were not living in the Middle ages. They started living in the Middle ages once the scholars of the Renaissance started looking back to the old civilizations; once their time was realized as being a hiatus.

The changes that happened in the Late Antiquity resulted, as you said, in an entirely different civilization. Europe was no longer united by the borders of the Roman empire, but by the Christian faith. Christianity brought new ideals, new ways to explain the world, a new beauty, found in the spiritual world, and a rejection of the material. Look at the sculpture, look at the miniatures the monks were painting, look at the icons. The Renaissance brought back the ideals of the Greeks and Romans.

Why is the West so proud of its Greco-Roman heritage, but not its medieval period?
Analyze the culture you have absorbed and tell me which age do you feel closer to you. You cannot reconstruct the past without analogies from the present.

Again, if that are your standards, you probably consider the Soviet Union to be the pinnacle of human civilization.

They had different structural needs.

Gothic architecture arose in the north, where you needed to squeeze every conceivable ray of sunshine out of the sky.

The Romans didn't really need this, on the contrary, they built enormous awnings over the Colosseum to block the hot Mediterranean sun.

Certainly, jack arches and flying buttresses represent an advancement in structural engineering, but nobody lived in carved marble houses in Medieval Europe.

On the other hand, a lot of people drank from filthy-ass rivers because they didn't have spring water piping in from the mountains.

that theory is retarded there where many other slave societies that had more manpower that achieved nothing close to what the greeks did intellectually. You boiling it down to this simple factor is so stupid.

In this metaphor the Roman Republic is the US and Han Dynasty China is the USSR.

building a gothic church requires a great deal of knowledge
carving marble requires a lot of time and resources, but is relatively low in knowledge

Well, the Romans didn't really need to build gothic style buildings.

The huge number of windows is specifically an adaptation to the needs of lighting in the northern climate. Height and light.

Gothic temples were built out of the same materials that the Greeks and early Romans built temples out of, just using a much different structural system. As it turns out, if an arch has a point at the top instead of a curve, you can make it much taller, and you can have rectangular vaults instead of square shaped ones. And you can support a column without putting more columns inside the church itself by having flying buttresses supporting the walls from outside the church.

When the Romans wanted to build something nice, they could pull off something really complicated like a poured concrete dome with different mixes of concrete at each level to taper off the weight, or a hundred foot high stadium seating like 30,000 people, with a massive leather awning manned by sailors from Ostia in case the sun was too bright or it rained.

>lol we forgot what sewer systems are better dump shit in the streets
>die vomiting and sharting because muh kingdom doesn't know how to poo in loo
Nah.

They cut their wine with water. Actually, it's more accurate to say they cut their water with wine -- a minimum of 3-5 parts water to one part wine, sometimes more, which they did because plain water was fucking disgusting back then, especially in Greece (seriously, it's not a very hospitable place without modern technology). Drunkenness was considered humiliating. Forcing people to drink unadulterated wine was literally a method of torture. Seriously, you have no idea what you're talking about.

>I know you're going to make a semantic point out of this but holy fuck you're retarded.
We're talking about the meaning of a word, of course it's a semantic point, you idiot. "Semantic" doesn't mean "minor." It's a well-accepted and well-understood point, too. I'm not trying to claim that the ancient Greeks were all prejudice-free hippies, but the concept of RACE, in the modern sense, hadn't been invented yet. Cultural, ethnic, linguistic identity, and prejudice based thereupon -- that's as old as human society; "racial identity" / "racial prejudice" are VERY modern concepts.

That buildings is not Greek but Minoan

More or less

Not that guy, but what was the typical alcohol content by volume of their wine? Reading the Odyssey, I found myself wondering this frequently.

Nice try. "The middle ages were filthy and backwards!" has been considered discredited for a long time in academia. In archaeology the term "dark ages" has even been redefined -- it's rarely used in the original sense at all.

They had water in their wine because the wine back then was a lot more thicker, due to the different grapes they gathered. You could put it in a handkerchief.

Not him, but i'm a sucker for the trans siberian railway.
One of my wishes is to one day ride on a train from Moscow to Vladivostok.

They certainly were not in terms of hygiene.

Early moderns shat on the medievals to promote change and it worked.

Because chr*stianity.

>Cultural, ethnic, linguistic identity, and prejudice based thereupon -- that's as old as human society; "racial identity" / "racial prejudice" are VERY modern concepts.

While that is accurate, it is not hard to find examples of ethnic prejudice in premodern history that any ordinary person today would readily identify as racism. So although correct, the "racism wasn't invented" meme can be misleading.

Racism wasn't invented

>racism wasn't invented
>ends in another dispute
>over terminology again
>next comes the definition of invention

I love Veeky Forums

If I posted Ibn Khaldun's remarks on slavs without citing him, they'd be indistinguishable from /pol/ and you'd say they were racist.

Hence the "racism wasn't invented", you fucking retard

Nobody knows what the alcohol content would've been exactly. The general feeling is that it might've been somewhat stronger than ours in its undiluted form, but not vastly stronger. I'm not an expert in alcohol preparation, ancient or modern, but for the higher end, something in the high teens, low twenty percents would be reasonable (Your average wine today is about 14% alcohol, give or take, though high and low alcohol wines obviously do exist.)

There's a limit to how high you can get the alcohol content of wine through fermentation alone and although they definitely knew how to distill it to get a somewhat higher alcohol content (to make it more compact, easier to transport, sort of like a syrup), there's no evidence that any of the really efficient methods were at all widespread. So although some people have claimed that their alcohol was more like our hard liquor, to us it'd probably have tasted and felt like slightly-stronger-than-average wine.

After cutting, it was probably comparably to light beer, e.g. 5% alcohol or thereabouts. Sometimes they may have cut it even more, twenty parts water to one part wine, but that's assuming the 3-5 parts estimate was more typical.

Ah, thought you were the other guy. Sorry, but it really was, even if this is an academic point irrelevant to most use of the word.

What do they call people who drink light beer all day instead of water?

American.

Nope.

A lot of people think it was somewhat stronger than modern wine (and I wrote about that in my prev. post), but saying it was "thick enough to carry around in a handkerchief" is really, really silly, man.

That's fair, but I think on Veeky Forums it's a valid (and important) distinction to make. In a casual conversation out there in the real world (with Joe Random Stranger, and not a classics major or archaeologist or whathaveyou) I obviously wouldn't butt in with "B-BUT RACE IS A MODERN CONCEPT."

>That's fair, but I think on Veeky Forums it's a valid (and important) distinction to make. In a casual conversation out there in the real world (with Joe Random Stranger, and not a classics major or archaeologist or whathaveyou) I obviously wouldn't butt in with "B-BUT RACE IS A MODERN CONCEPT."

I agree it's valid and sometimes important but a lot of people get trigger happy with it.

Since we're talking monoliths (""""the West""""), then it's proud of a civilization that was seemingly unified, scientific, philosophical, and had elements of democracy

Frankly it's a reductionist, black/white view - an all too common mistake, but it's sad the Medieval period gets swept under the rug like that. FTR I identify with it more.

Race is a modern concept.

Racism hasn't meant strict racial theory for a long time.

Prejudice against other ethnicities, which is what the actual modern understanding of "racism" is, has existed as long as people have

Joking aside, how did the Germanic people come to adopt Greco-Roman culture? I would think there would be some conservative backlash against it, especially in its early days with >muh ancestors

1. one was more civilized, in general,than the other-- preferential memory for good times
2. the west does actually romanticize the shit out of medieval times and loves the iconography those times and some of the stories and innovations of that period, it's just different from how they look up to Greco-Roman times

>Joking aside, how did the Germanic people come to adopt Greco-Roman culture? I would think there would be some conservative backlash against it, especially in its early days with >muh ancestors

They got onboard pretty quick with some parts. Here's an altar for a local god in Domburg from somewhere in the first three centuries AD.

And those critical advancements were made mostly by the Byzantines aka not snow nigs.

Pretty reasonable folks if the water quality is as crappy as it was in ancient Greece et al (especially in large urban environments like Athens).

There are a lot of sources on this, dude, the Greeks & Romans wrote about drinking quite a bit. You find classical-era writers TIME AND TIME AGAIN warning about the dangers of drinking to excess (ranging from "you'll look like an asshole" to "you'll literally go blind and shit yourself to death") and railing against the degenerate slobs who did so -- and they had sensible reasons for cutting their water about as much as they did. As many other societies have done when they had trouble getting pure water. That's the reality; characterize them however you want.

well, it's existed as long as ethnicities have, and it's hard to be sure how long that is

But we love our medieval heritage. If you don't look in the mirror every morning, see a knight in shining armor, rub your eyes, see that it is gone and feel an overwhelming sense of sadness because of it you can't call yourself a white man.

>bunch of societies had slaves and political systems structured to benefit the aristocrats and despots
>most of them didn't work, but with Rome and Greece it did, even though a lot of said beneficiaries were wasteful spending degenerate fucks

meanwhile
>Feudalism in medieval europe is perhaps the most stable method of supporting an aristocracy and channeling aside funds for scholars and scribes
>literally both of the two main churches in Europe structured their institutions to have guys who did nothing besides read / write / copy / argue books all day
>their contributions are however, insignificant in scale to Greco-Roman period

Well, our current society looks more like Greco-Roman society than medieval Europe.

>governed by republics
>science and shit
>widespread trade

Greece and Rome was when the west dominated both Europe and it's neighbors

Medieval period was when muslims sealed Europe shut like a pack of sardines

Greece and Rome was a period of scientific and artistic achievement

Medieval period was when they thought it was witchcraft

>>Feudalism in medieval europe is perhaps the most stable method of supporting an aristocracy and channeling aside funds for scholars and scribes
>Suddenly: succession crisis, baronial wars, robber barons, de facto independent principalities.

That's what they like to say in the EU and in school books when they want to encourage a pan-European identity and pretend to be democratic like those ancient Greeks, but when it boils down to it all they talk about is their kings and emperors between the medieval period and the cucked-by-America-after-WW2 period.

Most Europeans states have their roots in the medieval period. Even Italians and Greeks owe more to the Italian city-states and the Byzantine Empire even if they won't shut up about their ancients.

>building a gothic church requires a great deal of knowledge
It seemed like it required a great deal of artistry and practical skill instead. There's not a lot in the way of advanced literary theory of the time on gothic architecture, and even the few blueprints that did exist involved the most rudimentary trigonometry for the most part. A lot of churches were built over several decades very slowly, with many having collapsed during construction.

So it was the other way around. Carving marble required a great deal more knowledge in transporting and construction than a gothic cathedral which were more touch-and-go affairs relying on personal experience and artistic talent.

Greco-Roman romanticized history is the basis for what most people see as the foundation of Western structure. Greek philosophy and an idealized view of Athenian democracy are generally cited as the basis of our contemporary structure in the West. Rome tends to be clumped in because it too leaned on Greek ideology and culture and was a huge well-documented Western power. The medieval period is fairly unconnected from these moral ideals with religion taking the role of moral and ethical arbiter. That said, those things are small parts of a much more complex society.

They weren't. Actual historians call it "early medieval" and have done for a while. It's only plebs who think that Monty Python was a documentary and everything was grey and covered in shit.

>the entirety of medieval European operated exactly like Elizabethan London

Fucking whigs plz go.

Western Greek heritage is a sham. It was perpetuated by romanticism of enlightenment era thinkers that wished for philosophical ground of Athens.

At the time of renaissance Europe was more alike to Iranians the Greeks hated than the Greeks. Living in a system of Kings. Rulers more alike to Shahanshahs of Persia with feudalism than city-states and democracy of Greece. By the time it was over, absolute monarchies took over instead, living under tyrants, which Greeks despised the most.

Burning witches happened in renaissance not medieval period.

i prefer the medieval period desu, the 'enlightenment' rewrote the medieval history in a negative light. modern scholars are only now trying to undo the damage and pull history into line with reality. It's not like the 'renaissance' happened overnight, like the switch of a light, it was an extension of the middle ages.

they did all that stuff during the roman period too.

>science didn't exist in 'middle ages'
this is what i mean history is inaccurate in regards to the middle ages. the University system took form in the middle ages.

>Certainly impressive, but they exist because of a authoritarian system that enslaved millions.
So it's more advanced? Animals are largely equal, the further you go down in complexity the more equal things get, bacteria are basically equal, and atoms are identical.

>atoms are mostly identical
>ergo, humans should be treated as identical too

:^)

>universities == science

Nah. There were scholars studying things that are now parts of science, but science is a distinct modern institution and medieval scholars were no more scientists than ancient ones.

that's patently ludicrous. science didn't spring out of the ether in the enlightenment.

A thing can be both continuous with its precursors and distinct from them.