Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Understanding Classical Civilization." video.

  1. I agree that Christianity is bound up with Western Civilization and Constantine's acceptance of Christianity as the state religion is a watershed moment between classical culture and Christianity. However, I argue that is not for the overall good. Christianity plunged Europe into a 1000 year scientific dark age after the death of Hypatia of Alexanderia at the hands of a Christian mob (she was a Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician and librarian at the Great Library there. A fine example of the liberties and intellectualism allowed even to a handful of women which was absolutely disallowed elsewhere outside classical Greece and Rome). The moral compass of philosophy was replaced by church rule with a rigid unquestionable theology, which largely banished science. This theological dead hand of Christianity did not affect China, which had scientific amd technological advances during the Middle Ages while Europe languished this way. The renaissance began in Northern Italty with the rediscovery of classical philosophy, coupled with a new decentralism exemplified by the Medici family and their non-state taxes money spent on innovative art and science and gifted polymath experimental scientists like Leonardo da Vinci who was commissioned by these art and science loving elites for their time.
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  2. Early Latin America, apart from the genocide of the native South American Amerindian people, which was not uniform everywhere and affected by differing degree of culling mainly by disease and cultural destruction, was dominated by wealthy estate elites transplanted mainly from Spain or Portugal, plus a state sanctioned Roman Catholic church which accentuated centralism (Protestants tended to accentuate decentralism). The landed estates encouraged large scale plantation slavery in the Lation American countries, which was later in relinquishing slavery in comparison to the Anglophone world. Masses of middle class and skilled artisans, looking for new world opportunities, did not migrate from Europe to Latin American states to the same degree as in North America. Also property rights for migrants were not given as an egalitarian treatment in law or action in Latin America as were in the new Republic of the United States or in British colonies.
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  3. It's interesting to note that it's very true that the Roman elite renewed itself by incorporating social elites on the periphery of the Empire (this is something the Greeks did not largely do). For example, as late as the 3rd century AD, a North African noble from the Roman city of Leptis Magna in Tunesia (the ruins are still a famous archelogical site), Septimius Severus became emperor. Severus did try to conquor Caledonia (Scotland) with his legions, and died in Britain probably of old age while campaigning. This incorporation of emperors from the periphery did strengthen the Roman Empire with new blood, but at the cost of near continual pretenders to the throne and vicious civil wars between competing parties. Hence, the tetrachy (four ceasars) in the late Empire period.
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