Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "Top 10 Myths of Ancient Rome YOU Thought Were True!" video.

I agree about the part about not judging ancient people's by our own moral standards. We tend to think that our moral standards and ideals are some sort of "ultimate human condition" to the point where some people can't understand how anyone would be capable of thinking differently. Like for example about slavery, equality, empathy and so on. But one has to understand and accept that our morals are not the norm in history. They are the exception. Our ideas have existed for such a short time as to be considered tiny in comparison to the ideas held by ancient peoples. Their civilizations lasted for thousands of years. Our modern day civilization has barely made it through it's first 150 years. And from the looks of the instability and chaos in the world right now, i'm not so sure it will last much longer without being significantly changed. One thing I have learned from personal studies of the way ancient people's thought, is that they had a more categorical mindset compared to ours. People were much more associated with their class and family and profession. There was no such thing as "equality" between classes or genders or ethnicities. This would be a very foreign concept to an ancient person. Some political activists today consider this to be evil. But how can it be evil? The reason we think the way we do about class, equality and human value is because we have the privilige of being schooled by certain prominent thinkers who were born many many centuries after ancient rome. So to dismiss romans or any other ancient people's as evil, is kind of like being religious and dismiss people not a part of your religion as evil, even though they had no way of knowing about your religion and it's teachings to begin with. We don't consider slavery to be evil today because the "yearn for freedom" is some sort of objective and intrinsic human trait that all humans share. We consider slavery to be evil because we have been taught to think that. The ancient romans weren't. They were taught differently.
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