[lbo-talk] Kees van der Pijl

[Shane Mage]

Dwayne wrote:
>
>I think it was the mid-twentieth century French
>philosopher/activist Simone Weil who once remarked
>that the Roman Empire was a sort of plague that befell
>ancient Europe.
>
>Despite acqueducts, roads and all the other things
>people continue to admire the Romans for, they also
>brought the insistence that all of the cultures under
>their thumb must be Latinized.
>
>'We have no idea,' she said (paraphrasing from memory
>now), 'how various peoples would have developed if
>left to their own devices because Roman intervention
>brought self-development to a halt.'

This is only partly true.  The Greek world was not in the least
Latinized because the Romans (at least the educated classes)
all spoke Greek and regarded it as their own second language.
And Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt (Alexandria) was so central
to the Roman Empire that its capital was moved to Byzantium
around AUC 1100 and remained there for another millennium.
>As for the question of "how various peoples would have developed if
left to their own devices" we can look at Germania (east of the
Rhineland) and Scandinavia.  It doesn't seem to me that the
Teutons and Vikings developed in a way that should be inspiring
to anyone but rapists and brigands. In any case, the most
successful of them (Franks and Normans) "Latinized" themselves
as far and as fast as they could.

  Shane Mage

"immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living their deaths, dying their lives"

Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 62