The Joys of Discovering the Roman Underground | Hacker News Reader

The Joys of Discovering the Roman Underground

smithsonianmag.com

30 pointsulrischa18 comments

I visited Rome two weeks ago but only knew about St Clemente. Too bad I'm only reading this now, would have loved to have visited the other sites too!

St Clemente is great though, and not nearly as busy as other sites. Highly recommended. You can see three different buildings all on top of each other.

Interesting that no one says "The Joys of Discovering the Nazi Underground". Even though the Roman empire was a cruel war machine, with war and slavery being it's cornerstone. What Nazi called "The First Reich" was originally called the "Holy Roman Empire".

But now it's all forgotten and Roman Empire is almost adored.

UPDATE: I honestly don't know what tortures were worse, nazi ones or crucifixions with flayed back, practiced in Roman empire as punishment.

Despite the similarity of name, the "Roman Empire" and the "Holy Roman Empire" are politically unrelated states. One was named after the other, but it was not a successor state.

Exactly, I wanted to point out Nazi _wanted_ to be similar to Romans (as well as way more ancient Germanic people of the HRE, having no connection with Romans.

Italian fashists also used a lot of Roman symbolism, but it's understandable because history.

Fair.

Back to your original point, I would argue plenty of tourism exists for both regimes, focused on what the regime was best known for.

The Romans were known for being an advanced for their time civilization that pioneered many innovations that are still in use today in similar forms. While other things like their tortures existed, it's not how they exist in our cultural consciousness.

People tour Nazi sites that are representative of their place in our cultural consciousness as well, e.g. Auschwitz. Things like the Autobahn are not toured in the same way by WWII aficionados, because that's not their place in the cultural consciousness.

The reality on the ground of "who was worse" is not really relevant, the overwhelming force is how they are remembered.

Context matters. The world has changed quite a lot in 2500 years. We can put higher ethical standards on leaders of modern countries than were made in the distant past.

This kind of moral absolutism heavily breaks down the ability to form a reasoned historical analysis, or give consideration to context. By the standards of its time, the classical period Roman state often showed a remarkable degree of humane consideration to its subjects. If it was also often despotic and cruel, this stands out partly because the more sophisticated elements of that society made it so. Your average nation during classical antiquity on the other hand, could be much worse.

For example, by any modern ethical standards, an emperor like Marcus Aurelius, or his mentor Antoninus Pious would be considered slaving, war-making monsters, but in the context of Rome and most rulers of Rome's time, they were remarkable paragons of forbearance and ethical nuance, and given the context of their upbringing, this makes them remarkable leaders, not just something so simplistic as cruel war mongers.

By the implicit logic you use, we should disregard the vast majority of major figures, systems and philosophies that have ever existed because they lacked the magical foresight of first having also developed our exact modern ethics (which in any case are often broken today by many respected leaders).

Also, please, there's no comparing the truly deliberate monstrosity of the Nazis to the practices of the Romans. Rome never developed intentional industrial extermination of human lives as a deliberate state policy. The Nazis did, and worse still, did so despite millennia of philosophical moral development being available to guide them otherwise.

> Rome never developed intentional industrial extermination of human lives as a deliberate state policy.

Uh, except perhaps for a few centuries worth of persecuting Christians, subjecting them to tortures and deliberately putting them to death by the thousands, creating a basis for the veneration of martyrs in the years to come? Except for that, Rome really didn't intentionally exterminate human lives, right?

So, you completely confused two very obviously qualitatively different things there, and completely misunderstood what I said.

The majority of states, historically and today, sporadically or sometimes intensely take human lives to some degree, but this is very different from something like the policy the Nazis applied of wholesale, mass industrialized genocide of entire ethnic/religious classifications of people in the shortest possible time. As quickly as possible exterminating men, women and children using industrial infrastructure, without consideration for anything except destroying them completely until they were gone from the world.

This (again, obviously) is qualitatively and quantitatively very different from the Romans persecuting and sometimes killing Christians across several centuries.

You're right that the Roman empire was every bit as ruthless as any nation which followed, and very plausibly much more so. But people treat the past as a fictional place when it goes much beyond the memories of people who are alive; and the more powerful and impressive a civilisation was, the more people are interested in it.

It's very hard to find any one really taking the past literally, as events which happened and could easily happen again. One imagines it's a symptom of how we're born and die: before our birth feels unreal to us unless we have some contact in our lifetimes with people who were alive before it.

This effect becomes more concerning when people try to take advise from glorified people of the past: every roman emporer was a genocidal tyrant, none should be immitated. But here we are.

what about the joys of the United States underground, or the joys of the British Empire underground, or the joys of the Mongol Empire underground?

girl it was 2000 years ago??? Unlike the Nazis, they didn't commit a genocide?? And they gave citizenship to people they conquered... I'd say for the standards of the time, they did pretty damn well. It's crazy to compare them to modern standards. And anyways, I'd still rather live under the Romans than the Nazis...

The Roman destruction of Carthage seems like a pretty clear genocide.

The part about modern standards can't be overlooked, though. Somebody from before the 1600s would lack egalitarian values, does that failure deserve blame? That's like saying they should have invented and promoted egalitarianism early. I mean sure, in principle, but it's a lot to ask, and they should have invented transistors too.

Yes, I agree that Romans could be the least cruel and the most humane at their times actually (well, except for Christians). Still, "the Joys of discovering" feels... distasteful.

Is this an AI slop comment?

I'm flattered, thank you. Sad reality is that I'm much dumber than AI. But you feel free to read my other comments, HN keeps comments history public.

Also, I had a few typos there in the comment (like letter case). AIs are typically consistent.

Wellll, there is Berlin Unterwelten. They don't glorify the Nazi past by any means, but they do allow you to visit bunkers from WW2 and the cold war.

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