In 165 CE, everyone is superstitious:
"...apart from a tiny handful of philosophical rationalists." (p. 95)
(They would have been at home in University Philosophy Departments where I have studied.)
"Even they mostly believed in the Gods, they just thought the Olympians didn't interact with humans, so you could discount them." (ibid.)
(The last stage before full atheism.)
Paula Atkins thinks:
"Because I'm black I'm a curiosity here, but it isn't important. I'm black but I'm living before the concept of race was even invented. And that feels just as odd as the rest of it." (p. 109)
This new timeline will have no trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Paula is creeped out both by the fact of slavery and by everyone around her taking it for granted. That it has nothing to do with skin colour demonstrates a lot about how ideas, assumptions, expectations etc are historically conditioned. We keep asking: what will the future of the new timeline be like?
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
No, the next stage would be either philosophic monotheism or conversion to
Judaism/Christianity.
What mattered to the Romans was cultural assimilation and loyalty to the Empire, not skin pigmentation.
There were even weird cases when slaves had their own slaves!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that was quite common for -Imperial- slaves, who often held responsible jobs in government -- senior clerks and so forth, though not "department heads" by 165 CE. And Senatorial families usually had slaves or freedmen running their business interests on a day-to-day basis, since they technically weren't allowed into business. Sometimes Equestrians did so too.
Originally, the Imperial government had been an extension of Octavian/Augustus' household, in which slaves and freedmen usually held executive positions.
By 165 CE, equestrians and Senators held more of the upper positions, as the fact that it was "the government" sank in gradually.
Note that the Imperial government in the 2nd century had about 40,000 total civil employees in a population of 70 million or so, including tax collectors, and that 75% of its expenditure was on the military.
Though that included things like road-building and repair, and soldiers on detached duty were critical to provincial governments, particularly in the 'outer ring'.
The Roman government was radically decentralized by our standards -- most of its area was self-governing city-states. The provincial governors mostly interacted with local bigwigs who ran the city-states, though they also acted as appeals courts.
Our concept of 'race' is a product of the Age of Exploration/Expansion, because that involved sea-voyages from Europe to the ends of the earth.
If you -walk- from Denmark to Nubia, you'll just see gradual changes in physical appearance. Ditto if you walk from Denmark to Korea.
But if you -sail- from NW Europe to West Africa or Korea/Japan/China you get the extremes shoved in your face.
Even so, the original European explorers didn't make much of physical differences in East Asia -- they remarked that southern Chinese had the same complexions as "Moors" (North Africans/Middle Easterners) while northern Chinese had the same complexions as French or Germans, albeit with black hair and funny-looking faces.
Note that in areas like Britannia and northern Gaul and interior Spain and North Africa, the Romans built towns, which they expected local bigwigs to run. The bigwigs were the first to assimilate -- adopting Roman customs, learning Latin, building villas and townhouses. Then it worked down from there, and up from soldier-colonies.
Sean,
Yes, the next stage historically was monotheism but conceptually the next stage after "The gods do not intervene or interact" is "The gods do not exist."
Paul.
Racism of skin colour came from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Not really.
Note that the African slave trade began in about 2500 BCE, from Nubia, then was extended to a trans-saharan by the Garamantiens, and the first mass uprising of plantation slaves was in southern Iraq in the 800's -- they were shipped from the eastern coast of Africa to there.
I gather there was an ancient African slave trade but surely it was the historically more recent trans-Atlantic slave trade that made white Europeans regard black Africans as inferior?
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