A friend of mine tells me that Plato created Socrates as an example of a perfect man. However I really can't find any evidences in this. Is he bullshitting me, or is there something to the myth?

I have read of Baron Sinha, but the creation of this barony seems to be a singular case as far as I am aware. Thanks.

They are written as though they rhyme, and Thou was the second person informal of middle English. The second person informal in French/Spanish/Italian/Portugues is Tu. The second person in German/Norwegian/Swedish/Danish is Du. They have the same vowel sound as You. So why does everyone pronounce "Thou" like "TH-OW"?

Also, is it something that was added by historians after the fact, or were they generally given during a monarch's reign? (Presumably some, like Charles the Bald, wouldn't have liked this).

Hunting and gathering seems like something that would make sense to, well, hunter and gatherers. But how did people come to realize that the seeds from a dry grass could be ground into a powder, mixed with water or oil, and be baked into something edible? It doesn't seem very intuitive, but if early peoples didn't know about making bread then why cultivate grains?

Hi all. I checked the reading list, and unless I misread, did not find anything really related to these periods and concepts. I have read much of Beard's and Heather's stuff, and am working my way through the world of Late Antiquity right now. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Was looking at all the little islands that make up to Florida Keys and was wondering why they would finance so many long bridges to connect them all. I guess the highway followed the rail track which was constructed first. But I don't get why they connected them all in the first place.

I'd like to get someone who has knowledge on the social history of Sengoku Japan to shed some light on these topics for me.

As I understand it, the Sengoku era was a period of upheaval in Japan, where there was no central authority, and society was organized along feudal lines, or to describe it less anachronistically, personal ties were the glue that bound people together, rather than loyalty towards something more abstract. Again, correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not an expert.

Now, in a situation like this, how was crime and punishment dealt with? I'm assuming that most judgments involving those with relatively little power would be made by local authorities. But what if a member of one powerful family committed a crime against another powerful family?

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the daughter of a powerful daimyo was raped brutally by the son of another powerful daimyo, and she was so traumatized that she committed suicide, and left a note accusing her attacker of being responsible for her death. Pure fiction, but it seems plausible in virtually any era.

How would the father of this girl go about seeking redress? Was rape even considered a crime? And since the girl is dead and can't elaborate on her story, is there even enough evidence to move forward with some kind of legal proceeding? If the attacker was convicted, what punishment would he face? And finally, if the powerful family of the victim could not receive satisfaction through legal means, would this mean a feud between the two clans, perhaps duels, or maybe even war?

Were all, or most, members of the clan typically descended from a common ancestor/clan founder? How was marriage handled given possible inbreeding concerns? Was it more like a conventional village with many different families who just paid fealty to a clan chief? Did all people who lived in the social structure of the clan use the clan surname? Would it matter of they were blood relations with the clan chief? Etc...

Given that the vast majority of the world's wealth before the rise of communism was already concentrated in the West?

I would expect the gallic or germanic tribes to hold that honor. I saw this in a reading I had comparing the han dynasty and the roman empire.

One would expect that a communist revolutionary would support a communist revolution, especially at a time when the German state was so weak.

I am currently reading Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, and I came across a Belgian military leader named Eugen Rommel. When I looked up whether he was related to Erwin Rommel, I discovered Erwin's middle name was Eugen. Is this a coincidence, or are they related? How common have military lineages like that been? Is it out of the ordinary that an ancestor, or descendant, would have a leadership position in a foreign military?

I've been watching the Netflix show, Medici: Masters of Florence. When Cosimo de' Medici is exiled to Venice, he's given a woman named Maddalena as a slave; later, when he goes back to Florence, she continues to be considered his/the family's slave.

Obviously I don't expect much from a tv drama in the way of accuracy to Cosimo's life/personality, but in the case of the broader social context - is this accurate? Was the enslavement of Italians by other Italians happening during this period?

I PM'ed /u/alriclofgar about this, and they thought it would be a good idea to make this a public thread.

I've been interested in some of the recent genetic and archaeological data that are changing views on the old conquest/invasion narratives that dominated early Medieval English history.

My question is in regards to the 3 groups of new arrivals - Saxons, Vikings and Normans:

Though having departed their initial (secondary in the case of the Normans') homelands at different times, weren't all three groups largely from the Scandinavian/North Sea/Germanic areas, and thus didn't they share a common gene pool?

(Again assuming I'm not mistaken in thinking that the Normans were the remnants of Viking invaders of the 9th-10th century in northern France.)

If all three "new arrivals" shared genetic, if not cultural, traits, how does that impact modern genetic studies of England's population? (Like the ones that try to assess the Saxon-ness of Essex say)

What if anything, do modern genetic/haplotype studies of various British populations tell us about the migration and settlement of these populations?

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