18 Comments

And 39 years after the fall of the Roman Empire Columbus sailed to America.

Put another way, the final Roman Empire fell 13 years after the printing press.

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This is how I see it, and I think it's a more sensible take than the classical view of 476.

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Fun post, Andrew!

But I already knew a lot of it. After all, I watched the famous documentary with Russell Crowe called "Arena Fighting Guy" or "Cage Warror" or something. You should check it out!

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Oh yeah dude, "The UFC Before the UFC" was one of my favorite documentaries!

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Yeah it's up there with "Mortal Kombat: Rome" and "Tarquin Tekken."

They don't make them like they used to.

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"Tarquin Tekken" would have a lot of appeal for incels, I'd imagine.

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You're inspiring me to learn more about Rome! The legend of Remus and Romulus seems similar to some of the Greek myths. Do you have any insight into how those might be related?

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There are certainly plenty of common themes across Greek and Roman myths, but I really don't know about any particular Greek influence for this specific tradition. Romans were particularly proud of this eponymous myth - naturally, perhaps - so they would have at least imagined it to be unique to Rome, or so I would guess.

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Yes, I am not aware of a direct analogue to this myth in Ancient Greece, but it’s certainly possible that this story has a pretty ancient root in the mythology of the Proto Indo-European language family that likely goes back to Bronze Age Ukraine or Russia. There’s a common myth cycle involving a cow and twin brothers that shows up in India/Persia, Norse, and others and the Roman myth is pretty likely a distant relative of that story. Hard to prove the connection for sure but I like to think so!

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Thanks for sharing this observation here, James!

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For sure, I’m a total nerd for this topic:)

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To be fair to Romulus, Reme just wouldn’t have sounded as good, would it? Excellent post, as always!

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Thank you! I think you do a really great job with presenting a little of the big picture and a lot of details. My main goal is mainly to focus on context, above all else, like zooming out really far to see the reason why something's even interesting. Rome makes it pretty easy to do that.

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Are you a Mountain Goats fan? They have a song that goes “our mother has been absent/ever since we founded Rome/but there’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home”

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Oh wow, first time hearing of them! I love that line.

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I think you’d like em. The song is “up the wolves”. I think the Romulus Remus legend is one of my favorite origin myths. It’s cool how it seems to be a riff on some of the other IndoEuropean creation myths like Vedic Yama and Norse Ymir. The idea of an animal kind of acting as a wet nurse seems pretty deeply entrenched, but in Rome she’s a predator and not a cow or something. Interesting

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Oh man, I encourage you to cross-pollinate some of the other comments with this info. Very cool to hear of similar specific examples of this.

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