Now that the dust has settled, we can finally all agree that Mary Beard is a retarded hack fraud and is nothing more than a cynical leftist propagandist. Shes literally no different from David Irving.
No one cares about your latest crusade.
>>18465805You mean Beards crusade to intentionally lie about history in order to "own the chuds"?
>>18465801I think Beard is a good classicist, the only issue I've had with her work is I think she goes too far in downplaying the horrors of Roman slavery. She likes emphasizing that things were not really that bad for freedmen, there are many examples of freedmen becoming highly successful because their former masters had helped them make connections and remained on good terms after freeing them, and pointing to the surprisingly high number of slaves freed by their masters. Something that particularly rankled Greeks as strange behavior.While all that is true, it downplays that the successful urban freedmen were the exception, and the vast majority of Roman slaves were agricultural laborers or miners who lived nasty brutish and short lives with no hope of being freed and becoming a successful businessman. Though she doesn't shy away from the master/slave rape piece, that Roman slaves were considered sex toys as much as they were considered farm tools.I think about this description of the slaves working for a Roman baker in Apuleius' book "The Golden Ass">Good gods, what sorry excuses for human beings I saw. The pale welts from chains crossed every patch of their skin like brush-strokes. Their flogged-up backs under sparse patchwork were no better covered than stretches of ground that shade falls on. Some of them had thrown on. . .[sparse clothing], which extended only to the loins, yet all were clad so that their scraps of tatters kept no secrets. Their foreheads were inscribed with brands, their hair half-shaved, their ankles braceleted with fetters, their pallor hideous, their eyelids gnawed by the gloomy smoke of the murky fumes, which left them less able to access light at all. Like boxers who fight bathed in fine dust, these men were filthy white with floury ash.
>>18465801Literally who?
>>18465819he then compares the slaves to the beasts of burden working in the baker's mill>And the beastly barracksful I now belonged to – what can I tell you? How would I put it? They were just indescribable, the ancient mules and the broken-down geldings gathered around the manger, their heads submerged as they demolished masses of chaff, the skin on their necks loose as bellows leather from rotting, running wounds, their nostrils battered, by ceaseless coughing, into flaccid, yawning chasms, their chests covered in sores from the unending gouging of rush ropes, their ribs laid bare—bare to the bone—by perpetual chastisements, their hooves splayed to cover a grotesque amount of ground as a result of those multitudinous circular coursings, and their entire hides rough with inveterate dirt and mangy starvation. While this was in a work of literature by an ancient Roman, I think this disturbingly squalid and unhealthy description was the true face of Roman slavery.
>>18465821Mary Beard, a classics professor who has written some pop history books about ancient Rome. Here's a BBC documentary she did in 2012 that I think is pretty good.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rggk_H3jEgw
>>18465819Thats the thing, shes clearly educated, but shes said some really obviously stupid shit over the years. Shes said ancient greek statues of athletes were "idealized" because she thinks no one could actually look like that without steroids, something only a pudgy soft nerd would actually think is true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkr3VezdFJ4https://www.youtube-transcript.io/videos?id=Gkr3VezdFJ4And so you've got far right alt-right racist white supremacy groups. What do they use as their logo? They use white classical sculpture. It doesn't take very long to sit down with somebody and to say, "Look, you know, we have created a particular image of the classical world as if it's white. Let me show you what these sculptures once upon a time look like." They were in our view possibly quite garish, but they weren't, they didn't have that kind of sense of legitimating any kind of white supremacy at all. Right. So is it true that they were commonly painted and and decorated? Normally ancient sculpture not always, probably, but it's normally painted. There is a debate about how it's painted because the there are only microscopic traces of the paint left and it's quite hard to to to reconstruct accurately the color scheme of these studies. But one school of thought does produce what we would think of as a kind of Disneyland version of these sculptures. Now you have to say look I mean I find that quite reassuring because it's a wonderfully easy way to say to people stop it you have invested and invented a kind of classical past that never existed.You can tell she is desperate to say "heh, you love your classical sculptures, huh.. well ackchually they were painted brown!"To be fair her previous comments about "diversity" are not totally incorrect, there were plenty of Jews, Syrians and Punics milling around the Roman Empire. They were painted, but usually only the undercoat survives while the details are lost, so for historical accuracy the reconstructions displayed that rather than speculating. Even so they are overwhelmingly phenotypically northern European except the paintings in Egypt or the last Emperors like Alexandria slaughtering Caracalla and Elagabalus the transsexual.
well duh. that is everyone in academia ever. is also the reason why conservatives never actually conserved anything not even former slippery slope progressive positions of 50 years prior they would have opposed had it been in their own time.
>>18465839they clearly are idealized though
>>18465854they arent and you clearly have no concept of physical fitness or the ancient greek mindset. The Polykleitos sculptures are 100% attainable natty, they arent giant muscles roid freaks, they are all just lean and built athletic builds. Plus we also have early photographs from the 1800s of people with even more muscular bodies.
>>18465863can you post the statues you are referring to? I think something like this is obviously not intended to be realistic.
>>18465899I literally look like this, and no I won't "post physique" you massive homosexual. I won't fall for that one again.
>>18465902you do not, no one has obliques like that
>>18465853The majority of people are shlubby normies whose lives are consumed by mass media and conforming to mainstream society. How are we supposed to compete? If someone like Mary Beard says "a black woman invented the telescope" they will believe her with zero thought.Our only saving grace is the fact most people don't care about history and those that do hold to some basic level of standards of proof, so it outright fabricating history would lose them more supporters overall. They can only fray the edges and say "it is open to interpretation how they were painted, so I propose we make reconstructions as brown as possible to stick it to the heckin' Jan 6 white supremacists!"
>>18465801Oh, well if some guy on shitter calling himself "Raw Egg Nationalist" says so...
>>18465808What history has she lied about? Give examples.
>>18465903I do, and I'm not going to show you. I know you're just jealous.
>>18465899You think it's difficult to look like this through regular exercise an ancient person could do?
>>18465959Yeah
>>18465801Why should I listen to anyone named "Raw Egg Nationalist" or "Roman Helmet Guy"? These sound like satire.
>>18465919One such example is in the OP. The idea that the statues were originally of "vibrant colors" (i.e ugly) instead of white is a recent angle devised entirely to make the classics less appealing to le chuds
>>18466040They of course never missed the chance to lecture you about racism
>>18466041I remember my faggot professor at an Ivy giving a lecture on something completely unrelated to trannies and he had to pause and give a nervous look and say "this philosophy is trans inclusive", as if somehow we gave a shit. Half the class had vodka in their cups and the other half was on iMessage chatting away about shit that didn't matter. No one gave a fuck, and if some tranny was in the close no one remembers or cares. What a waste of God damn money and time, I should've become a soldier.
>>18465899This guy is less jacked then most hollywood action stars.
>>18466040>>18466041Basically they tried to retcon classical art into pop art. It's the same shit as saying that urban graffiti is beautiful or something. A total subversion of beauty.
The one bit of discourse I hate is this retarded meme that the ancients coloured in a disgusting monochrome as if they were not professional artists making them and we have literal examples of paintings where they used colours effectively like any professional could do today. The ancients were not colorblind retards who did not see any aesthetics, nearly all of the Roman and Greek elites were skilled artists in their own right as they learnt how to draw from a young age
>>18466057>any professional could do today"Art" today is ugly trashy and subversive. You see ancient art as "disgusting" because you were taught that art can only be deconstructionist counter-culture slop so whiteness is disgusting to you. Likewise you probably think comedy can only be about "punching up" and you view people who eat "bland food" with contempt.
Imagine being so pathetic as to get offended by the mere suggestion that people from thousands of years ago had a different sense of aesthetics than you in the modern day lmao. Who cares, whether it's true or false should have no bearing on your politics. To be expected from people who think a guy who calls himself "Raw egg nationalist" has opinions worth repeating I suppose.
>>18466073>the mere suggestionIt was "suggested" specifically because they knew it would not appeal to people they deemed politically icky. You trying to reverse the dynamic by claiming that pointing this out somehow makes you a whiner is abhorrent. There is bearing on politics necessary involved, the Classics are a field of interest and if you find yourself interested in them of course it should bother you that modern academics attempt to retcon it out of political spite.
>>18466040Why did they choose this tactic? Like why would garishly colored clothing on statues diminish the whiteness if their skin is nonetheless white?Is it because garish colors are associated with the aesthetic of some brown countries like India or LatAm?
>>18466068>"Art" today is ugly trashy and subversiveIf you imagine every artist alive today is taping a banana to a wall and that it isn't a minority then you have no idea what you are talking about. Hell you could look at mainline comic book art where they put their actually skilled artists on the job of drawing and doing colour and see good art. Most artists are not deconstructing anything, and those that do so tend not to be very good ones. Even in the comic book industry the preachy woke sort of comics are often just writeoffs where its one persons passion project and they'd rather die then let them touch or draw for any of the actually successful series.
>>18466084It's associated with urban counter-culture aesthetics. It's an elaborate we wuzzing by homosexual progressives
>>18466083You retards will believe anything some literal who on twitter tells you. Here's an article talking about ancient greek statues being painted from 1946>https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed023p314
>>18466098Are you even aware of the discussion? The specific claim that was pushed in the last 5 or so years was the use of garish "vibrant" coloring in the statues. This agenda was politically driven as Beard readily admitted.
>>18465915Not an argument
>>18465801I fail to see how a the belief that statutes were painted is in any way connected to a riot that didn’t have any thing to do with white supremacy anyway.
>>18465841>So is it true that they were commonly painted and and decorated? Normally ancient sculpture not always, probably, but it's normally painted.If the material is base white without any texture, then it was probably painted. For a while. As far as we can tell from sources, maintenance was probably somewhat infrequent and exposed colours faded fast.
>>18466149But impossible to tell exactly how it was painted, and she admits that they pushed the garish angle to scare away political undesirables.
>>18466102Yes and it's a retarded claim, here an example from 2007 (I know it says 2013, I assume that's when the photo was taken, it was painted in 2007) >https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iskender_lahdi_2013-06-02_20-34.jpegYou can find tons of examples older than 2020 just after a minute of googling. You people just want to be offended by things, and you're too lazy actually think or research for yourself. Regardless of what Mary has said, maybe it's true for herself, she is not an art historian and this is not a new or political thing. But anyway my central point is this is a stupid thing to get upset about. If you're identity is actually so fragile that it can be damaged or "subverted" by the idea of a bit of paint on an ancient statue, then it deserves to be destroyed.
>>18466165I don't think anyone said that absolutely no one before presented classical art in garish coloring, simply that in recent years there was a specific push to claim as a historical fact that the classics were garish, and this push was politically motivated.As for your cute psychoanalysis, no one takes that seriously anymore. >if you point something out you're fragileWhatever bro. Are you going to dismissively use the term "culture wars" next too?
>>18466168>No one claimed it was new>But people only started pushing it as fact recently. Make up your mind, is it new or is it old? It can't only be have been "pushed" as a fact now when art historian have been "pushing" it as fact for decades. What you've got is one pop historian repeating something that's been considered a fact by many for decades. Not an idea made up for entirely political reasons. And your attempts at belittling are no substitute for your complete lack of arguements.
>>18466194Again, you confuse "classical statues were painted" with "classical statues were all garish vibrant colorings just like counter-culture pop art".The only historical fact is that it's impossible to determine how the statues were painted, only that they were. Obviously through the years there were many portrayals of painted classical art and much of it was bound to have garish colors. The angle that it was definitely garish is a recent politically-motivated push, yes.>attempts at belittlingYou call people fragile for pointing things out, I said no one takes that seriously anymore. Who's doing the belittling?
>>18466162>But impossible to tell exactly how it was paintedWe can accurately map regions of pigments on statues and identify specific colours by analyzing samples. What isn't possible to recreate is the shading wash that would've gone on top of the garish base colour, which must've been there as well. Because if the Greeks and Romans were real bad for that kind of abstract paint-by-the-numbers stuff, it would've shown in some other surviving art.Mind, that doesn't totally preclude it, as much of this art was Fresco placed way too high up, which might've necessitated colour modulations to make sure that they're still clearly readable at those distances. So the garish colours could've been accurate, but not intended for the way they're currently being displayed in museums.tl;dr: The reconstructions are only scientifically accurate.
>>18466199>Again, you confuse "classical statues were painted" with "classical statues were all garish vibrant colorings just like counter-culture pop artYou did look at that previous example I provided yes? I know what I am arguing.>The only historical fact is that it's impossible to determine how the statues were painted, only that they were. No, we have the pigments used on surviving examples, we are aware of their chemical composition and in what ratios they were in, we know exactly what color they were. There is an argument to be made they faded over time to be more mute. There is no arguing about what colors they were and what they would have looked like when new. None of this is a new claim, and while some may have used it politically recently, it was considered factual by most in the field before it became so. >much of it was bound to have garish colors.You are of course welcome to provide counterexamples. >You call people fragile for pointing things out,I'll retract it if you can satisfactory answer why what colour ancient statues were painted should have any affect on my modern political opinions.
>>18466165>>18466102>>18466199Reminder that the White Antiquity was created by Winkelmann, a homosexual.He did so while standing among freshly excavated statues that still had some of their original paint adhering to them, which makes it even funnier.As for the fight between adherents of Winkelmann's White Antiquity and people who had eyes to see the paintings on the wall at Pompeii, it first broke out during the early 1900s. The statue thing was just thrown on the pile during the 90s or so because somebody took photos of them with an IR cam or something, which revealed the remains.
>>18465801Mary Beard is a qtThe thing is this interview was a political interview with a subsidary of The New Statesmen and left wing news journel in the UK. I think a lot of what she said in the interview is ridiculous but I don't think it carries much into her actual work. It is embarrasing though to see academics retroactively project modern politics onto the past but I think Mary Beard is a minority among the top historians
>>18465801I like how he made himself so angry with the first part of his post that the second part ramps up and ends with some delectable vitriol. Godspeed, eggman.
>>18465919Bot post
>>18465899The absolute state of modern man. There is nothing special about this build. It’s a regular stocky athletic dude.
>>18466165>If you're identity is actually so fragile that it can be damaged or "subverted" by the idea of a bit of paint on an ancient statue, then it deserves to be destroyed.You can say this about any type of identity
>>18466165>maybe it's true for herselfSomething’s either true or it’s not little bro.
>>18466165>But anyway my central point is this is a stupid thing to get upset about. If you're identity is actually so fragile that it can be damaged or "subverted" by the idea of a bit of paint on an ancient statue, then it deserves to be destroyed.She is the author of bestseller SPQR, the supposed go-to coffee table book for someone who wants to read about Roman history, and all we are doing is pointing out she is incorrect on a Malaysian carpet weaving webphorum.People like Mary Beard were fighting an organized culture war over the past 20 years while we sat and said "you're wrong, but let's agree to disagree" and look where it got us. They formed cult-like little cliques and excluded the "reasonable" people who gave them the benefit of the doubt and allowed them to rise to positions of authority. It is not just academia either, every corporation and government department racially discriminates against the not "diverse". It goes beyond "fragile identity" or whatever meme psychology you picked up from twitter, it actually affects our lives, our civilization.But of course I am a heckin' racist chud and by proving feminist icon and professional victim Mary Beard wrong I'm overreacting over a little historical tidbit. We should just do what we have always done and allow hack frauds to worm their way into positions of authority and mislead the public. History isn't that important, we should just allow these people to fabricate it and make shit up as they go along. I must be out to get her and you and ethnic minorities like Nassim Taleb! Nah, if anything I'm vastly underreacting. You should be scolding us for being lazy.
>>18465801I was in Rome a decade before muh jan 6 and that one famous Augustus statue in the vatican was already re-painted.
>>18466283Imagine your balls slapping against her chin while she's deep throating your wang and you're nutting.
>>18466367>We should just do what we have always done and allow hack frauds to worm their way into positions of authority and mislead the public.Yes, your people did vote for Trump.
>>18466040>>18466041>>18466047Your headcanon is not real life anons.
>>18466381Trump didn't cause the politicization of academics and science, nor did he cause the discrimination against white men, nor did he cause the replication crisis.
I always figured this was the case. Like how academics all claim ancient greece and rome was full of gay pedophiles and nobody minded. It all just sounds like made up bullshit by some fuckin faggot
>>18466433Tbh that was true. Rome even had a gay pedophile emperor cult (Hadrian/Antinous)
>>18466333Yes>>18466337That was poorly worded, I meant that she might have a political reason to teach it, but the origin of the assertion is non-political. >>18466367>People know ancient statues had their clothes painted bright red and green, western civilization has fallen, billions must die.
>>18466433>present in contemporary accounts>unanimous consensus by all historians and scholars of every background for two milllennia>made up bullshitI can understand and forgive some retarded beliefs. But not this one. This a declaration of war against reality on the same level as tranny delusions.
>>18466433>Like how academics all claim ancient greece and rome was full of gay pedophiles and nobody minded. It all just sounds like made up bullshit by some fuckin faggotYou can just read the ancient texts yourself to see that that's true. Nietzche talks about it. Schopenhauer talks about it. Wagner. Hitler. Evola.
>>18466439>People know ancient statues had their clothes painted bright red and green, western civilization has fallen, billions must die.But here's the thing, this discourse wasn't started by chuds complaining about colorful statues, it was started by lib academics and other libs suddenly deciding to use colored statues as this weird spiteful vector of attack against "whiteness". First time I ever heard of this was some breadtuber who years ago triumphantly announced that ancient statues were colored and not just white marble, and that this is somehow an own against white nationalism o algo
>>18466462>First time I ever heard of this was some breadtuber who years ago triumphantly announced that ancient statues were colored and not just white marble, and that this is somehow an own against white nationalism o algoImpossible. The left just wants you to have healthcare, they don't care about culture war nonsense... right?
>>18466462Just because you personally learnt of it from a misrepresenting breadtuber doesn't mean it was invented out of thin air by them and therefore incorrect you moron. That's like claiming your math teacher who taught you trigonometry years ago must've been Archimedes in disguise.
>>18466471>they don't care about culture war nonsense... right?It's funny how libs successfully retconned the culture war thing as something that the right started, considering most of it was a product of 2010s Internet liberalism: Feminist Frequency, microaggressions, rape culture, cultural appropriation and other Tumblr trends, BLM, campus protests, etc. I think the reason why the retcon is successful is because the second Trump presidency rests its legitimacy on the culture war and owning the libs, so now it seems like a "right-wing thing" because rightoids in power are retarded
I’ve gotten the impression that between spqr and emperors of Rome, the latter is considered good here. How are Adrian Goldsworthy and Harry Sidebottom? Are there any other modern classicists writing accessible books (not 60 dollars textbooks) on antiquity?
>>18466491>Just because you personally learnt of it from a misrepresenting breadtuber doesn't mean it was invented out of thin air by them and therefore incorrect you moron.Mary Beard in the OP video literally explains the discourse was invented by lib academics. Then it trickled down onto lib youtubers apparently. If you think Mary Beard is lying, post some proof that obsession with statue paint was started by chuds, otherwise STFU
>>18466429Good that we agree that him and his fellow travelers are hack frauds who wormed their way into power and that they are misleading the public then.
>>18466492The real reason is that the retcon wasn't successful and all they did was ensure they gave themselves away whenever they concern trolled with the term "culture war".
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