Who do you believe was the most influential Roman woman? Who would you like a future episode on? Join this channel to get access to perks: ru-vid.com/show-UC7Jx8j3giv0rsDX0wgz9uGQjoin
Theodora, she had a direct influence on her husband's policies, helmed the empire while he was incapacitated by the plague and saved his regime during the Nika riots. She was a true co-ruler with her husband and the two of them had a genuinely loving and powerful relationship. Procopius can Cope and Seathe.
@@josephlongbone4255 She is so interesting - certainly one of the most dynamic women of antiquity. I'm not as well read on the era, but I would love to feature her in the future.
@@tribunateSPQR yeah, it's pretty crazy that you can talk about "the Romans" and be anywhere within an almost 2000 year span. You'd have to be crazy or a genius to be an expert on it all .
I was just marathoning your channel, then opened a new tab and I see this. Very excited to watch- just because women were restricted due to patriarchy doesn't mean their stories aren't worth telling. More so, in fact
The understanding that I’ve always had is that Roman women, more specifically the daughters of influential patricians, wielded a degree of “soft” power in society by influencing their husbands who had the real authority. The “behind every great man is a strong woman” sort of dynamic. Obviously a small portion of the population, but it isn’t nothing I guess.
Most efficient way to organize society: make sure 50% of the population is rejected out of hand from the majority of the work force and most especially the only avenue to climb the social ladder.
Indeed, the best way to structure a society is to depress wages by artificially bloating the labor pool by over half and setting the reproductive aged individuals against one another as competitors rather than equal halves to a whole! Very intelligent.
@someshtbaglcpl5455 You don't think competition between the sexes is natural? It's a shared trait among a ton of sexually dimorphic species. From a pov of valuing efficiency I would argue that the "plans" 3.7 billion years of evolution creates is going to be more developed and neutral than some human's ideas on how it "should" be.
@@thenameisbluEvolution only promotes such type of behavior that leads to sex and birth, I.e. continued reproduction - if a species lived by such instincts that males raped the females and the latter tolerated it “for the kids”, then we’d still consider it malign, even though they manage to reproduce and survive. Being able to discuss fairness is what differs us from animals.
@@thenameisblu I get where you are coming from but humans are more of a communal/herd species than tribal. That is to say in nature instead of adolescents breaking off into new packs we tend to form larger and larger communal rings. It’s kind of a misnomer of media that the average tribe was a dozen or so individuals, it’s more like every human society is realistically thousands of humans with varying degrees of orbital groups depending on the environment
@@CommanderShaker I agree with you for the most part. I just took issue with shtbag's claim that competition in a breeding population is somehow bad. I would think its kind of obvious that competing for reproduction is a good thing. My mistake for invoking the "natural" argument.
One book I recommend about the various forgotten women of Roman history is "A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women" by Emma Southon. The writing style is very informal/conversational so if you want a purely academic work it might rub you the wrong way with the jokey nature of some parts, but it's a good starting point about women's Roman history. Basically if you want Cunk on Earth's tone in a book about Roman history, I'd recommend it.
I wish that history was taught more from the point of view of the little people. Of course, such accounts are rare because of the nature of ancient history. But our framing of history is so often from the frame of those who were at its commanding heights. This leads to nostalgia. If Rome existed today it would be culturally similar to the Taliban. That is the fly in the ointment
@@benjaminmontenegro3423i dont know if its common throughout the greeks but athens in particular had several cultural and political rules for city or noble women that were extremely stiffling
@benjaminmontenegro3423 “Misogynistic” is an extremely relevist term, borne from modern biases, but if that’s the word you want to use-yes, is the short answer.
@@benjaminmontenegro3423 Athens specifically was, but this was due to a law that very strictly forbade Athenian men from marrying women born outside the city, because of the "corrupting barbarian influence" that flowed into Athens from their port on the Piraeus. The result was that the daughters of Athens lost a lot of rights.
@@benjaminmontenegro3423neither the Greeks nor the Romans were "misogynistic", they merely were not afraid of exercising their powers of pattern recognition. something which 99.9% of human beings have had in common and only recently we have lost
Thank you very much for this, very enlightening. Only recently I was told by a scholar about the impressive legal rights afforded to Roman women... compared say to the Celts.
The story of the Sabine women is obviously propaganda. A Founding Myth, not unlike George Washington and his father's cherry tree; meant to teach a particular moral framework. This was extremely common in pre-modern (and even modern) cultures.
Marxists and leftists are entirely incapable of doing anything except their one trick, which is applying their extremely limited, reductionist, Spirit list, lens of modernist materialist critique to everything, and then believing they have developed some kind of understanding of it.
@@williamchamberlain2263the assumption that we know anything detailed about minoan culture, never mind the relationship between the two Sexes they're in, based on a couple of fragmentary pieces of literature and some frescos with next to no context is more than a bit amusing. Every successful, powerful, and enduring civilization has treated its women more or less the same, especially when accounting for differences due to geography and climate.
8 :45 to 8 :55 word choice seems non objective (couched in a way to make history more palatable to the speaker) but other than that overall a great video with a fantastic quotable lines at the end.
The idea that it is somehow self-evident that Rome would be better, stronger, rich or whatever if women had participated more in public life is resting on the unfounded assumption that more is always better, which is simply not true. This is kind of like saying that a family in which the two parents make decisions is good, but one in which every decision is also equally participated in by their three infant children is better. The only way one could even tentatively believe this is if one believes that men and women are completely identical, have no differences between them biologically intellectually or metaphysically, and may as well be interchangeable congruent parts. This is at diametric opposition to reality.
Excellent commentary, quality post! You’re certainly the type of man I want my daughters marrying! What an embarrassment you are to whatever ideology you claim to adhere to.
