things my impossibly young looking Roman history lecturer has said
‘listen to your seminar tutors over the booklet, but only for seminars – in lectures i am king. unless you have me as a seminar tutor as well, in which case i am your king and god.’
‘has anybody played Rome: Total War? no?’
‘Cataline tried to burn the city and everyone he hated but he failed because, in short, nobody liked him.’
‘the mediterranean diet didn’t include tomatoes in the ancient world. i know. oh my god. i know.’
‘so of course when Hannibal turns up, the senate goes ‘sod it, lets kick his arse’.’
‘one man’s optimates is another man’s silver-spoon bearing prick.’
‘we don’t have much information about the 70s BC, largely because Plutarch doesn’t care.’
‘i’m not saying Rome: Total War is entirely accurate, but its battle campaigns are surprisingly historically informed.’
[hand drawing a map in chalk because the projector is broken] ‘i’ll give it a go, this is why i hate technology, and oh. well. that’s not italy.’
‘every army needs bakers and prostitutes, this is just a fact of life.’
‘Sulla. He’s a bit of a badass, but also a bit of a prick.’
‘yes, that is a slide from Spartacus. The film, not the series, which is more accurate and less like soft porn.’
‘the Romans liked Campania because its very fertile. they didn’t know this was because of its proximity to a volcano – poor buggers found THAT out later.’
‘Crassus gets given command of Syria and high fives everyone in the senate.’
‘Catullus was very pithy, very hellenistic in style. unlike the Iliad, which is 24 books of tedium.’
‘An Afternoon at Carrhae: the Romans being shot at repeatedly by Parthian cavalry because if there’s one thing the Romans aren’t good at, it’s having a cavalry.’
‘It’s good to have fast legs in war. Caesar moves very fast, not unlike Napoleon. The Usain Bolt of ancient warfare. I’m not sure why I said that, it’s an atrocious analogy.’
‘Athens is the Edinburgh of the ancient world; it has nothing to offer but education and pretty buildings.’
‘Shout out to those of you who spent your teenage years playing Rome: Total War.Which is what I did.’
‘The senate go into a panic and they decide to flee Rome at dawn, but some idiot forgets the treasury. I know. Ridiculous.’
‘Again: don’t use elephants during warfare. They’re not as cool as they look. And given they’re now endangered, it’d just be mean.’
‘I had to use this meme, I’m sorry. You’re all aware of the one does not simply walk into mordor meme right? I’m sorry, we’ll move on.’
‘I put this photo in for dramatic effect but I realise that it’s just a field. I don’t know why people bother going to see battle sites, they’re all really boring. I saw bones once, they were quite interesting. But most battle sites: boring.’
‘Caesar doesn’t tell Rome anything while he’s away in Egypt for a year, so they have no idea Pompey’s dead. All they know is that Antony is being a pain in the ass, which is, in all honesty, not unusual for Antony.’
‘Caesar is very good at one liners. You always draft a pithy one liner before a battle so you have something to say when you win. You don’t want to win and then just be like ‘whoo, thank god for that.’’
This, incidentally, is the methodology I used when I tutored people in history. And D students would end up getting A’s on the subject materials I helped them with. I suspect this is why Shakespeare was considered a fantastic writer too. People pay attention when you’re willing to put something on their level instead of being so caught up in sounding fancy and academia. (Yes, Shakespeare, for his day, was considered quite accessible to the regular people to come to the theater as opposed to only being a high-class affair.) People identify with something when you identify with them. And everyone should identify with history because it’s all human beings who screwed up, some who did some really heroic awesome stuff, and some who got handed a bad hand and turned it around. Sure, it happened in different places and people had ‘strange’ names and fancy titles, but in the end, we see those same people doing the same sort of things today. We spread posts about them, get discouraged at our society’s apparent lack of caring, and wonder how we’ll ever make a difference. Whether we’ll leave our mark. The answer is, we will.
It’s just not history yet.
It will be.
So don’t give up on history. You’re a part of it.
Tag: (and yeah)
Why I Believe Rey is a Solo.
The reason I am mainly seeing to why people don’t believe she is a Solo is because they don’t understand why Han and Leia didn’t recognize Rey when they met her, so at the moment that’s the only point I’m directing.
My reply to this is always, they did.
They did recognize her.
This is the point where people go “No they didn’t??? And if they did, why didn’t they say something or act like it???”
But they did. You can see it in the way Han is amazed by how much she knows about the Millennium Falcon, or how he and Leia look at her when she isn’t paying attention. They look at her with unsure glances. How you would look at a high school friend that you hadn’t seen 10 years.
Or, how you would look at someone who you thought died years ago.
Yes, the reason they don’t recognize Rey or bring it up at all, is because they think she is dead.
Think about it, Han and Leia have two kids, and as we can see, they both have the force. It would only be logical for them to send both of them off to train with Luke, especially if the reason why they’re sending Ben off to train with Luke is because they’re scared that he has Vader in him. If Ben does, what if Rey does too? Might as well send her off as well just to be sure.
This theory also explains why Luke went into hiding.
Yes, sure. You could say that he went into hiding because he failed at training Ben. But. Get this.
Imagine, you’re Luke. Your sister sends to you her son, and her younger daughter. Most likely explaining that they were worried for Ben. So he trains them and the new ‘batch’ of Jedi, up until the point of the massacre.
Now, I believe that Kylo is just as strong and skilled as a lot of people do, but to kill all the training Jedi knights and younglings, is a bit of a stretch to me.
We’ve already been informed of this ‘Knights of Ren’ thing, but not what it is.
My theory is that he did the logical thing, and got a bunch of the Jedi to join him. Rightfully naming them, the Knights of Ren. Even if that is wrong, and they were just a bunch of people under Snoke, my theory still stands.
Anyways. Ben (now known as Kylo) kills all the Jedi. All but one. Rey. Because of course, how could he kill his sister? It’s even seen in her vision. She is lying there (as old her, but we can assume that it was really young her in the flashback) and one of the Knights of Ren, swings to kill her. When he is stabbed and she is saved, by a red lightsaber. Kylo’s lightsaber. Kylo.
He can’t kill her. She is his little sister. At this point, he isn’t strong enough in his hate or ‘darkness’. With roughly 10 years of training to be ‘evil’, he still killed his father with regret, how the heck could he kill his own little sister?
So he doesn’t. He convinces the other KoR either not to tell, or that he will kill her, and he goes off and secretly sets her on Jakku. He erases her memory and possibly gives her fake memories of her ‘parents’ leaving her on Jakku. That way he is assured that 1) She will ever be harmed. and 2) She will never be a problem.
No one knows of this but him. Luke, Leia, Han, even Snoke, all think that she is dead. And that is what pushes Luke over the edge.
Because of him, his sister lost two of the most, if not the most, important people in her life. Because he could not help Ben, his sisters kids are both gone. It makes more sense to me that he would run away because he is ashamed that he let this happen. That Leia will never be okay again. It is shame that drives him to be a hermit, not pain. We’ve seen Luke look straight into the eyes of pain. It’s not always an easy fight, but it would be easier than fighting off shame.
So when Han and Leia see Rey, it only makes sense why Han is so quick to take her under his wing. He see’s her, and he see’s the daughter he could of had if he hadn’t lost her. It explains why he looks at her with that “I know you. I swear, you are just like my daughter… But my daughter is dead.”
Not only that, but why they never bring her up. If your own daughter was murdered at the hand of your son, would you ever want to remember that? It also explains why they only talk about Ben oh so much (then again, killing a bunch of jedi usually does that)
It explains why Kylo screams “what girl?” when he hears that BB-8 escaped with a girl from Jakku, and why he is softer around her.
Another thing that came to mind when I was thinking of this, is what other people have been saying about how the lightsaber called to her. And it made me think of what Kylo says when they are about to fight. What starts the battle between Kylo and Finn.
He sees the lightsaber, and he screams “that lightsaber belongs to me”. After thinking about it, I realized something. That lightsaber is Anakin’s. Not Darth Vader. Anakin’s.
As J.J. Abrams says.
“Kylo Ren idolizes Darth Vader, not Anakin Skywalker. He idolizes what Vader represents and what Vader was trying to do.”
If he idolizes Darth Vader, and not Anakin, why the heck would he care so much for Anakin’s lightsaber?
Yes, you could say that it was because Darth Vader’s was destroyed or missing or whatever generally happened to it, so Anakin’s was the next best thing. But that just doesn’t make sense to me.
What does make sense, is that when they were training, Rey was given Luke’s (Anakin) lightsaber, because Luke decided that it was fit for her.
Now if you look at it through Ben’s point of view, he already feels angry and unloved from his parents, but now he isn’t even given the family lightsaber? He was the first born, shouldn’t that be his?
That theory also explains why when Rey touches it, she get’s her vision of that fateful night. (And why Kylo decided to make his own lightsaber.)
So when he is screaming “that lightsaber belongs to me!” he means it because he actually believes that it should be his.
In conclusion, I’m pretty dead set on Rey being a Solo.
YO SAMMMMMEEEE @buckyonthelam
I don’t agree 100%, but this is a DAMN good theory. Nicely done.
eirenical17 