Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Being fucked over by your beloved brother kind of does that
Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
- Original Alt. History
-
- Tags
- ancient greece alternate history empire builder civ quest democracy gods save us granary management hubris it's an eretrian thing. let lose the weasels of war lithocracy lithocracy is my fetish maximum hellene my big fat greek divine wedding this granary aint gonna fill itself cetash unwinnable
Droman
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍
We definitely didn't have a choice in the matter, though. It was destruction or survival, hence why there's even a peace party in Taras at all.
Eh. More like second cousins. The Tarentines are Dorians IIRC, and we're Ionian.
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Brothers. Cetash's narrative explicitly uses the term brothers and twins at that.
Look at the option of choosing Taras as our rival. Which explicitly frames the progression of our relationship in the context of Remus and Romulus.
Look at the war itself which is called the Brothers' war. How Myron's mother explicitly frames the two polis as brothers. With Eretria being the monstrous twin wearing the mask of a virtuous hero.
The Ionian/Dorian split never mattered in our relationship. It was not the source of our bond nor the current grudge. We are brothers in spirit once bound by oath and affection like Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark or the Three Oath Brothers of the Peach Garden.
- Location
- Southern Virginia
Phokion is the eldest son of Aristides the Younger, and grand-nephew of the xenoparakletor Kallias. Phokion's father Aristides was named after the Aristides of Eretria who fathered a brood of healthy children as a middling hoplite before the Persian Invasion. Aristides the Elder may have been the citizen to first propose war on the Iapyges at the instigation of his son Kallias, according to the family. While not aristoi the family had descended from such via several younger sons in the Archaic period and had retained some trappings of wealth and pretensions of education as middling farmers.
Kallias having ascended to the aristoi by dint of service to Eretria and a good marriage insured his brothers and sisters were taken care of. His brother Myron, grandfather of Phokion, had a good plot of land and spoils from the Peuketti to establish himself as a successful hoplite. Though not aristoi himself, he maintained connections with his brothers and their families remained a block under the general direction of Kallias prior to his death. That insured Phokion a good education in literature, rhetoric, religion, and mathematics. The family of Aristides remained generally aligned with the Antipatrids with a foot in the door with Deme Drakonia during the period of Eretrian growth.
As a young man with a family of means Phokion is interested in making his name among the ekklesia. His models of effective leadership including Drako and of course Kallias he has sought to be a voice of duty to the city, piety towards the gods, and caution regarding war. But as a young man he still struggles to find his own voice between the fashion for laconic speech and an education in Attic flourishes, and the alignment of his family with the Antipatrids despite their commercial interests. Recently his service in the phalanx against Taras has given him a stronger sense of confidence in going his own way.
Kallias having ascended to the aristoi by dint of service to Eretria and a good marriage insured his brothers and sisters were taken care of. His brother Myron, grandfather of Phokion, had a good plot of land and spoils from the Peuketti to establish himself as a successful hoplite. Though not aristoi himself, he maintained connections with his brothers and their families remained a block under the general direction of Kallias prior to his death. That insured Phokion a good education in literature, rhetoric, religion, and mathematics. The family of Aristides remained generally aligned with the Antipatrids with a foot in the door with Deme Drakonia during the period of Eretrian growth.
As a young man with a family of means Phokion is interested in making his name among the ekklesia. His models of effective leadership including Drako and of course Kallias he has sought to be a voice of duty to the city, piety towards the gods, and caution regarding war. But as a young man he still struggles to find his own voice between the fashion for laconic speech and an education in Attic flourishes, and the alignment of his family with the Antipatrids despite their commercial interests. Recently his service in the phalanx against Taras has given him a stronger sense of confidence in going his own way.
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- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
...I hope we make a Library as soon as possible. And try to keep old things and buildings well maintained into the future by families and the government.
As in...hey its 1998! And in this wing of the Eretrian Museum of History we see the helmets of famous Eretrians. All of them kindly loaned to us by the direct descendants of said Eretrian. Here we see the helmet of famed Drako, on loan by his x generation descendant...
Droman
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍
... Are we the Robert Baratheon or the Eddard Stark in this scenario?
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Hopefully we're in a different work of fiction altogether.
- Location
- Luton Airport
Sideros the Younger, aka "Sideros the Golden", is the grandson of Sideros the Elder (Sideros the Black), the epithets coming from the original building a fortune in the ironworking trade, and his namesake taking the clan into the seasilk trade early.
- Location
- France
Now that Kerkyra's government has fallen, do we still feel beholden to our "alliance"? If not, then that could be an argument for the upcoming talks with Taras. The Xenoparakletor could state truthfully that the original cause of our enmity is gone, and that we could reconcile in time despite past hurts, as brothers do.
- Location
- Central Europe
We haven't been allies with Kerkyra for some time:
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
Continuing my reread of the first thread, now that I've slept:
Hmmm, now why does that sound familiar?
Droman
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍
@Cetashwayo - I'm reading through some Greek vs. Roman mythology comparisons on reddit and I was suddenly struck to ask a question: Who is the war god preferred by Etretia? Is it Athena, akin to our Athenian friends? Do we somehow have a closer relation to Ares? Eris, Moros, Phobos or Deimos? Nike? Apollo? Zeus? The Keres?
I feel like Nike would be aptly suited for our particular brand of warfare thus far.
I feel like Nike would be aptly suited for our particular brand of warfare thus far.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Nike is the favored war goddess of Eretria. Athene is generally seen as the Goddess of cunning in war, but to Nike most war supplications are given and victories dedicated. Near the center of the city along the processional way there is a monument to victory that is a statue of Nike.
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You forgot Aphrodite
Though I think her more martial interpretation was pretty limited to Sparta and the region around it so admittedly it wouldn't make that much sense to see it featured prominently in Eretria though she could be present in Taras I guess.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Hyped for the update
It's in the works, just started working this week so I've been busy earlier in the week.
I hope for you that Pithekoussai conquered Carthage
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I read an interesting thing recently on how using bizarre random auguries to guide your actions in certain fields of human endeavor could actually be a good thing. Why? Because it randomizes your actions, which is something that's very hard for human beings to do on their own.
...
Imagine two conversations in Pyrrhus of Epirus's headquarters tent:
CONVERSATION ONE:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"Hm, the ground's a bit muddier on the right. So probably from the left. Better put the elite troops over on the left."
Now, unless the muddy ground or whatever would normally cause the Romans to 'logically' attack from the left is really significant, the odds are any advantage gained by attacking over better ground is more than offset by the disadvantage of attacking an enemy who predicted their arrival and positioned his best forces to stop them.
Let's try this again.
...
CONVERSATION TWO:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"I have no fucking idea. It depends on how many times an eagle scratched itself or something!"
[throws hands up into the air in disgust]
...
The truly random outcomes of an ineffective augury deprive your enemy of the ability to use pattern recognition skills and advance reasoning to predict that the Romans will "randomly" attack from the left 70% of the time or something- which is the sort of thing that happens when people plan their attacks themselves.
Knowing from experience that he can't predict what a Roman army is going to do, the enemy commander is forced to make preparations against both kinds of attack... which in turn means that he can't prepare very well against either of them. Meanwhile, the Romans are preparing an all-in commitment to do something, even if it's not the optimal strategy.
That's a battle the Romans probably have a better than even chance of winning, all else being equal.
...
Obviously this breaks down if the people using auguries start doing stupid things that are virtually certain to fail in response to their auguries. But it's a surprisingly good way to cope with situations where listening to a random number generator really is better than letting yourself fall into patterns while trying to be "unpredictable."
...
Imagine two conversations in Pyrrhus of Epirus's headquarters tent:
CONVERSATION ONE:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"Hm, the ground's a bit muddier on the right. So probably from the left. Better put the elite troops over on the left."
Now, unless the muddy ground or whatever would normally cause the Romans to 'logically' attack from the left is really significant, the odds are any advantage gained by attacking over better ground is more than offset by the disadvantage of attacking an enemy who predicted their arrival and positioned his best forces to stop them.
Let's try this again.
...
CONVERSATION TWO:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"I have no fucking idea. It depends on how many times an eagle scratched itself or something!"
[throws hands up into the air in disgust]
...
The truly random outcomes of an ineffective augury deprive your enemy of the ability to use pattern recognition skills and advance reasoning to predict that the Romans will "randomly" attack from the left 70% of the time or something- which is the sort of thing that happens when people plan their attacks themselves.
Knowing from experience that he can't predict what a Roman army is going to do, the enemy commander is forced to make preparations against both kinds of attack... which in turn means that he can't prepare very well against either of them. Meanwhile, the Romans are preparing an all-in commitment to do something, even if it's not the optimal strategy.
That's a battle the Romans probably have a better than even chance of winning, all else being equal.
...
Obviously this breaks down if the people using auguries start doing stupid things that are virtually certain to fail in response to their auguries. But it's a surprisingly good way to cope with situations where listening to a random number generator really is better than letting yourself fall into patterns while trying to be "unpredictable."
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
"If we don't know what we're doing, our enemies won't stand a chance of knowing!"I read an interesting thing recently on how using bizarre random auguries to guide your actions in certain fields of human endeavor could actually be a good thing. Why? Because it randomizes your actions, which is something that's very hard for human beings to do on their own.
...
Imagine two conversations in Pyrrhus of Epirus's headquarters tent:
CONVERSATION ONE:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"Hm, the ground's a bit muddier on the right. So probably from the left. Better put the elite troops over on the left."
Now, unless the muddy ground or whatever would normally cause the Romans to 'logically' attack from the left is really significant, the odds are any advantage gained by attacking over better ground is more than offset by the disadvantage of attacking an enemy who predicted their arrival and positioned his best forces to stop them.
Let's try this again.
...
CONVERSATION TWO:
"So, will the Romans attack us from the left, or from the right?"
"I have no fucking idea. It depends on how many times an eagle scratched itself or something!"
[throws hands up into the air in disgust]
...
The truly random outcomes of an ineffective augury deprive your enemy of the ability to use pattern recognition skills and advance reasoning to predict that the Romans will "randomly" attack from the left 70% of the time or something- which is the sort of thing that happens when people plan their attacks themselves.
Knowing from experience that he can't predict what a Roman army is going to do, the enemy commander is forced to make preparations against both kinds of attack... which in turn means that he can't prepare very well against either of them. Meanwhile, the Romans are preparing an all-in commitment to do something, even if it's not the optimal strategy.
That's a battle the Romans probably have a better than even chance of winning, all else being equal.
...
Obviously this breaks down if the people using auguries start doing stupid things that are virtually certain to fail in response to their auguries. But it's a surprisingly good way to cope with situations where listening to a random number generator really is better than letting yourself fall into patterns while trying to be "unpredictable."
The book that @Simon_Jester is talking about reading a review of is called The Secret of Our Success, and after reading the review myself, it's now going on my reading list.
The main point of the book, evidenced through a ton of experimental work and various other studies pulled together by the author, is that our capacity for culture is the main "X-Factor" in humanity's success. As one review says, this sounds like the most vapid thesis ever, but just from reading the excepts, it seems to make it extremely interesting and compelling. The author Joseph Henrich is an evolutionary biologist heavily interested in sociology and psychology, currently chair of the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard, and seems to have taken an evolutionary biologist's approach to looking at cultures, which is fascinating.
Here's the excerpt on how divination rituals and augeries can actually be regarded as an extremely useful cultural adaptation to help us take advantage of randomness:
Another main takeaway seems to be that for large chunks of human history, certainly in a lot of contexts, tradition was both essentially ineffable from an individual perspective, and also often in place for very good reasons that would be hard for an individual to even on their own even in principle. These are adaptations evolved over centuries at the level of a whole culture, not an individual level. The examples about manioc preparation and taboos against pregnant women eating sharks in Fiji were fascinating there.
This is especially interesting from our perspective playing this game, because we're watching and to a certain extent nudging this exact process as it happens for Eretria, in real time. Stuff like lifting the rocks in the assembly, the development of our military and political culture, our conceptions of group identity, it's all developing organically as one big integrated system.
Here's a review on Scholar's Stage, as well as the one I believe @Simon_Jester and I both read. The book seems fascinating and as both reviewers seem to have noticed, also seems to chime very well with the work of James C. Scott. Anyway, it's definitely going on my summer reading list now.
This concludes our daily promotional feature!
The main point of the book, evidenced through a ton of experimental work and various other studies pulled together by the author, is that our capacity for culture is the main "X-Factor" in humanity's success. As one review says, this sounds like the most vapid thesis ever, but just from reading the excepts, it seems to make it extremely interesting and compelling. The author Joseph Henrich is an evolutionary biologist heavily interested in sociology and psychology, currently chair of the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard, and seems to have taken an evolutionary biologist's approach to looking at cultures, which is fascinating.
Here's the excerpt on how divination rituals and augeries can actually be regarded as an extremely useful cultural adaptation to help us take advantage of randomness:
Article: When hunting caribou, Naskapi foragers in Labrador, Canada, had to decide where to go. Common sense might lead one to go where one had success before or to where friends or neighbors recently spotted caribou.
However, this situation is like [the Matching Pennies game]. The caribou are mismatchers and the hunters are matchers. That is, hunters want to match the locations of caribou while caribou want to mismatch the hunters, to avoid being shot and eaten. If a hunter shows any bias to return to previous spots, where he or others have seen caribou, then the caribou can benefit (survive better) by avoiding those locations (where they have previously seen humans). Thus, the best hunting strategy requires randomizing.
Can cultural evolution compensate for our cognitive inadequacies? Traditionally, Naskapi hunters decided where to go to hunt using divination and believed that the shoulder bones of caribou could point the way to success. To start the ritual, the shoulder blade was heated over hot coals in a way that caused patterns of cracks and burnt spots to form. This patterning was then read as a kind of map, which was held in a pre-specified orientation. The cracking patterns were (probably) essentially random from the point of view of hunting locations, since the outcomes depended on myriad details about the bone, fire, ambient temperature, and heating process. Thus, these divination rituals may have provided a crude randomizing device that helped hunters avoid their own decision-making biases.
This is not some obscure, isolated practice, and other cases of divination provide more evidence. In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. Geographer Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy, and lead them to expect floods to be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second…Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year. To reduce the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures. Divination results depend not only on seeing a particular bird species in a particular location, but also on what type of call the bird makes (one type of call may be favorable, and another unfavorable).
The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the 17th century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations. It's possible that, with the introduction of rice, a few farmers began to use bird sightings as an indication of favorable garden sites. On-average, over a lifetime, these farmers would do better – be more successful – than farmers who relied on the Gambler's Fallacy or on copying others' immediate behavior. Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet, it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation. So, bird augury has been systematically spreading in those regions where it's most adaptive.
Another main takeaway seems to be that for large chunks of human history, certainly in a lot of contexts, tradition was both essentially ineffable from an individual perspective, and also often in place for very good reasons that would be hard for an individual to even on their own even in principle. These are adaptations evolved over centuries at the level of a whole culture, not an individual level. The examples about manioc preparation and taboos against pregnant women eating sharks in Fiji were fascinating there.
This is especially interesting from our perspective playing this game, because we're watching and to a certain extent nudging this exact process as it happens for Eretria, in real time. Stuff like lifting the rocks in the assembly, the development of our military and political culture, our conceptions of group identity, it's all developing organically as one big integrated system.
Here's a review on Scholar's Stage, as well as the one I believe @Simon_Jester and I both read. The book seems fascinating and as both reviewers seem to have noticed, also seems to chime very well with the work of James C. Scott. Anyway, it's definitely going on my summer reading list now.
This concludes our daily promotional feature!
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
The largest city of the lot is Pylona with 7,092 free residents, including women and children. The overall free population of the league is 18,746, as compared to 79,732 for Eretria Eskhata.