Forerunners of the Romans

Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Randall-MacIver

The standard Roman histories, especially when written by authors who have an undisguised contempt for archaeology, give very little idea of the civilization and development of Italy before the later days of the Republic. They are histories of Rome but not of Italy. And so the reader is subconsciously led to suppose that the Romans were the most important and the most advanced people on the peninsula, who gradually extended the benefits of their superior civilization over a series of more or less barbarous neighbours. This is a complete inversion of the real facts. The Romans of the Republic were a rather backward people, and it was hardly before the second century B.C. that they could begin to rank as the equals of the Italian provincials in general refinement and culture. Incessantly occupied with the wars which were essential to their very existence, the Romans had no leisure, even if they possessed the inclination, to cultivate the arts and humanities. But, while the future head of the world was struggling for bare life, a rich Italian civilization had been born and developed in the independent territories which had not yet fallen under her sway. Before ever they came under the organizing and levelling domination of the central capital, Etruria, Venetia, Lombardy and Picenum had each evolved its own distinct and very valuable local culture; while the whole south from Naples to Brindisi had been civilized by Corinthian and Ionic influence. Rome when she conquered and annexed these territories in due sequence fell heir to a fully finished product. Italy had been created, but not by Rome; the task that fell to the Romans was much more suited to their peculiar abilities—they had to organize and administer the country.

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Danilov

The article discusses the meanings of life and value priorities of the post- Soviet society. The author argues that, at present, there are symptoms of a global ideological crisis in the world, that the West does not have its own vision of where and how to move on and has no understanding of the future. Unfortunately, most of the post-Soviet countries do not have such vision as well. In these conditions, there are mistrust, confusion, paradoxical manifestation of human consciousness. The main meanings that determine our life-world are: the desire of citizens for social justice and social security, the desire to figure out and understand the basic values of modern society, how honestly and equally the authorities act toward their fellow citizens, and to what extent they reflect their interests. The meanings of life, which are the answers to the challenges of the time, are embodied in the cultural code of each nation, state. The growth points of new values, which will become the basis for the future sustainable development of a new civilization, have yet to be discovered in the systemic transformative changes of the culture. In this process, the emergence of a new system of values that governs human life is inevitable. However, modern technology brings new troubles to humans. It has provided wide opportunities for informational violence and public consciousness manipulation. Nowadays, the scenario that is implemented in Western consumer societies claims to be the dominant scenario. Meanwhile, today there is no country in the world that is a role model, there is no ideal that others would like to borrow. Most post-Soviet states failed to advance their societies to more decent levels of economic development, to meet the challenges of the modern information age, and to provide the population with new high living standards. Therefore, in conditions of growing confrontation, we should realistically understand the world and be ready to implement changes that will ensure sustainable development of the state and society without losing our national identity.


Author(s):  
Matthew Rendall

It is sometimes argued in support of discounting future costs and benefits that if we gave the same weight to the future as to the present, we would invest nearly all our income, but never spend it. Rather than enjoying the fruits of our investments, we would always do better to reinvest them. Undiscounted utilitarianism (UU), so the argument goes, is collectively self-defeating. This attempted reductio ad absurdum fails. Regardless of whether each generation successfully followed UU, or merely attempted to follow it, we could never get trapped in endless saving. The real problem is different: without the ability to foresee the end of the world, UU cannot tell us how much to save. Discounting is a defensible response, but only when coupled with a rule against risking catastrophe.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062098639
Author(s):  
Aya Nassar

In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopolitics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not only at the threshold of geography and the arts and humanities, but also the intersections of geography and politics. I primarily propose that viewing geopoetics as an open space for experimenting allows for disrupting masterful understandings of the academic self and counters a univocal, universal narrative of the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-168
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Nikolsky ◽  

To reveal the theme of Russia after October, 1917, Nickolai Ostrovsky's book «How steel was tempered» is one of the most significant. In it, in its purest form, there is a portrait of an ideal revolutionary – a Bolshevik, merciless not only to the enemy, but to himself and others as well, a man, from whom, according to the poet's figurative expression, there could be made the strongest nails in the world. The book was enthusiastically received by the thirteen million army of party members and Komsomol members. For some, Pavel Korchagin was an ideal to emulate, for others – an image that reinforced their own myths about past heroic deeds, allowing them to settle warmly in the present. For the authorities, the story, cleared by censorship from the Bolshevik democracy of the first years, was an artistic forerunner of the future Stalinist «Short course of the AUCP history». One of the most thoughtful Soviet literary critics, Leo Anninsky, considered the story to be a story about people «engaged to an idea». In a sense, this is true. However, the engagement prevented both Ostrovsky and his Soviet interpreter from seeing the real historical process in its tragic depth and contradictions. For the hero Pavel Korchagin, there are neither the beginnings of Stalinist totalitarianism, nor the tragedy of a collectivized, starving village. Living as if out of time, he preaches the same thing – a class struggle that never fades for a moment. It seems that the fire of struggle will be extinguished and the hero's life will be interrupted. In fact, this is not allowed to happen: the constant intensity of the class struggle, which, as Stalin said, will grow more and more as we move towards socialism, is the secret of Soviet totalitarianism, represented and justified in an artistic form by Nikolai Ostrovsky.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Reeder

Providing a comprehensive history of Italy from around 1800 to the present, Italy in the Modern World traces the social and cultural transformations that defined the lives of Italians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book focuses on how social relations (class, gender and race), science and the arts shaped the political processes of unification, state building, fascism and the postwar world. Split up into four parts covering the making of Italy, the liberal state, war and fascism, and the republic, the text draws on secondary literature and primary sources in order to synthesize current historiographical debates and provide primary documents for classroom use. There are individual chapters on key topics, such as unification, Italians in the world, Italy in the world, science and the arts, fascism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and Italy in the twenty-first century, as well as a wealth of useful features for students, including: * Comprehensive bibliographic essays covering each of the four parts. * 23 images and 12 maps Italy in the Modern World also firmly places both the nation and its people in a wider global context through a distinctly transnational approach. It is essential reading for all students of modern Italian history.


Author(s):  
William H. McNeill

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....


Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge

This chapter explores the dialogue between Piero Salabè and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Kluge's book Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (Next Door to Another Life, 2006). Kluge claims that there are always two aspects to sadness: it isolates, but it can also bring people in contact with one another. Sadness and crying are capable of dissolving hardened relations. When asked whether he believes in progress, Kluge answered that he does not believe in linear progress because for him “the past is always coming at us from the future.” Instead, he believes in circular movement like those in whirlpools. The concept of enlightenment must begin with the real phenomenon that time does not actually pass. Kluge says that “we must continue to tell stories about problems in the world, and with storytelling we must also push back against these problems that people fail to respect.” Storytelling means dissolving in the literal sense of “analyzing.” Kluge believes that this is the great, unfinished project of enlightenment. Salabè and Kluge also discusses the individual's capacity for differentiation.


Inception ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
David Carter

This chapter looks at the specific artistic references in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). One artist is referred to by indirect reference and visual simulation of some of his works, and another is paid homage to by the inclusion of one of his works in a scene. The artists in question are M.C. Escher and Francis Bacon. The Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, famous for his works featuring constructions which would be impossible in the real world, is not directly named in the film, but he is referred to indirectly by the mention of a phenomenon which he utilised in his work: the so-called 'Penrose Steps'. Meanwhile, in a sequence in which Cobb is talking to Mal, there is a painting visible on the wall of the room, Bacon's Study for a head of George Dyer, 1967. Nolan clearly shares some perspectives on the world with Bacon: a fascination with distorted reality, a sense of horror as in a nightmare, and, in some cases, the real world being actually torn apart.


1968 ◽  
Vol 72 (687) ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
A. H. Wheeler

Predicting the future for Agricultural Aviation is rendered even more uncertain than predictions for most forms of aviation because in this case the future depends on two entirely separate sets of unknowns. These are the normal unknowns affecting aeronautical development but, more important, there are the unknowns affecting the development of agricultural chemicals. Also, in predicting the future evolution of any activity one must normally look back over the rate and the trend of developments in the activity, so far as they are relevant, from the past and then project this rate and trend into the future, bending and extending the line of projection in accordance with known or foreseeable influences. Here again we get a third set of unknowns related to future farming techniques, although these unknowns are perhaps less significant because the main expansion in agricultural aviation will probably lie in the vast undeveloped regions of the world where the farming techniques will merely be brought up to present standards, or just introduced where there was literally no agriculture before.


Author(s):  
Mona Farouk M. Ahmed

The Quran is the holy book of Islam which has been almost translated to all languages of the world. The translation of the words of God is a great work which include a responsibility of conveying the accurate meaning of God’s words. The researcher of this paper studied the Korean language and participated in Korean-Arabic translations over twenty years. Accordingly, the researcher felt the responsibility of which she tries through this paper to shed the light on the Korean translation of Quran hoping for reaching the most accurate translation for Quran. This paper focused on one word of the noble Quran, tracing the Korean translation to examine its accuracy as a sample of other words that may include difficulties in the Korean translation. The choice of the word “wali: Guardian” was based on its Islamic specificity and its possible impacts on the right understanding of Islam. The study began with the definition of the word and its Islamic particularity. Then, the study presented an analysis of the Korean translation of the word through exploring the Quranic verses containing the word. Finally, the study gave suggestions for the accurate translation of the word which would include recommendations for the future translation of Quran. * This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A6A3A02022221). * هذا العمل مدعوم من وزارة التعليم الكورية والمعهد الكوري القومي للبحوث (NRF-2018S1A6A3A02022221).


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