Quote from: nullius on February 24, 2020, 07:29:30 PM

A Salutary Lesson from the
Gang of Philological Pedants
Membership: 1

V8s, fillippone, mayhap I counted too soon?

I propose a new gang, which I will call the Latin Kings in honour of Aeneas.

V8s: You did snip the part whereby I sensibly distinguished the adjectival versus substantive uses of nullius, which would be declined differently; and a professor somewhere would probably yell at me for ignoring the modern form of the apex. That is the TL;DW of what will anyway be TL;DR for but the few. ...das will spielen, so lets keep this fun! :-)

Quote from: Last of the V8s on February 27, 2020, 10:10:24 AM

If Classics Twitter wasn't rife with liberals I'd get the question posed there but it is so I won't and will live on in ignorance.

With due apologies, my good gentleman, I had two reactions to this:

Please excuse me whilst I vomit at seeing the words Classics and Twitter mashed together into a phrase. pls dont say that, 🤮 its bad so sad, 😭 i h8 twittr killin litarecy, u get me? 😕 😿 😡 #IlliterateTwits CAN I HAZ WORDS PLS?? kthxbye

But it has a blue checkmark!

* nullius has heard many fine academic jokes that end with the words, standards are falling. Hah, hahonly serious!
What, you would trust the just-so stories of libtwits as to the classics, of all things?

Quote

Nullian Rule: Modern so-called liberals are past masters of cultural misappropriation.

I would expect for twitlibs to know about as much about the classics as Margaret Mead actually knew about Samoans, or cared to.

Lets see: How fast would the people of great Graeco-Roman antiquity meet a fearsome brigade of shrill tweets from the libtwits of Classics Twitter (!)?

Rome was a strictly class-based society more or less ruled by the patricians, with family units run as miniature dictatorships under the authoritarian rule of the paterfamilias. Patron: Mars ♂, the god of warwhom the Romans also nominated as the god of agriculture, what with farmers being notoriously liberal throughout the ages. (Damn kulaks.)

Because the Romans were men in their more or less natural state, and not reactionary manosphere twits with feminist-mommy issues, they were honoured to also claim descent from Aeneasthe mortal son of Venus ♀, the goddess of sex and fertility, who was born because a woman (or even a goddess) cant have a casual fling without getting pregnant and having a baby.

* My dick is bigger than a twitlibswhere dick has a subtextual meaning of supreme mastery of hermeneutics, and its size is an allegory for my powers of mythological interpretation.

Aeneas, a Trojan, had to flee his native landbecause the Greeks were so liberal that they totally annihilated Troy, and exterminated or enslaved the Trojan people, all for revenge against the dishonour of a Trojan prince fucking some Greek dudes wife. Upon his arrival in Latium, Aeneas, blessed for victory by his goddess-of-sex mother, won himself a wife the old-fashioned way: Killing his rival. He then became the Latin king.

Protip: When a nice guy wants a princess, he buys her diamonds
#ToxicMasculinity ♂ #MakeLoveNotWar ♂ #CodeOfConduct
(Image: Aeneas kills Turnus)

Nietzsche was a doctor of philologyindeed, before he took up demolishing ~~philosophers~~ philosophasters, Herr Professor Dr. Nietzsche was the youngest-ever chair of the department of Classical Philology at Universität Basel. Unlike me, he was a real classicist. I hear the echoes of Vergils Aeneid when I read, Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

(To avoid unduly discomfiting tender-minded liberals, I will avoid mentioning the later Rape of the Sabinesor the etymology of the word rape.)

The Romans were, of course, strictly honourable men; and I am reluctant to discuss too much such things in the presence of hoi polloi, given that I have seen aforesaid reactionary twits twist Roman culture just as badly as the libtwits dobut for the purpose of portraying the Romans as a bunch of wifebeating whackjobs, for to support their own embrace of the feminist false caricature of manhood.

Nevertheless, the point stands: I would not trust the instruction of twitlibs on the subject of classical antiquityor, for that matter, on any other subject.

I invite libtwits to explain away the foregoing in 140 characters or less. ;-)

Compare my recent remarks obiter dictum in another thread:

Quote from: nullius on February 15, 2020, 03:53:54 PM

Quote from: nutildah on February 15, 2020, 01:00:31 PM

in the spirit of Ancient Rome, what has been democratically decided

A small historical aside: Rome was never a democracy. In the era of the Republic (including the time of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage), it was a society divided into rigid social classes, with most of the power held by patricians as a sort of a large, hereditary quasi-aristocracy. In the time of the Empire, obviously, Rome was a dictatorshipliterally, a dictatorship, starting with the Senates grant to Julius Caesar of a lifetime title^* of dictator perpetuo. That was whilst he was alive; after he was dead, they passed a law declaring him to be a god, and the name Caesar became a title forever synonymous with Emperor; lifetime dictator not only in Latin, but also in German (Kaiser), Russian (Czar), and other languages.

(* In Roman law, the position of dictator had previously a short-term position of emergency power for leadership in times of existential threat to Rome; cf. Cincinnatus, who was glorified for voluntarily renouncing his absolute power of dictatorship as soon as the crisis was resolved15 days into his six-month legal term as dictator.)

Athens had a bout with democracy. The right to vote was reserved to free adult male citizens, thus excluding women, metics (legal resident aliens), and a massive slave populationonly about 10% of the population had the vote. The system was still so unstable and prone to corruption that it lasted for less than a century in truly democratic form.

Worst moment of Athenian democracy: The vote to kill Socrates. Best moment of Athenian democracy: The rise of a strongman populist leader, Pericles, whose very name grew to symbolize the glory of Athens at its height.

* nullius doubts that this democracy thing ever really worked as advertised, or ever will.

1111