Re: Anachronisms in LOTR

Douglas Eckhart wrote:

> "Hasdrubal Hamilcar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> > Rome could not even duplicate the science of the previous Greek empire,
> > let alone new stuff.  It was not until Rome was completely dead and
> > buried that the world began to recover from it's waste of 'entropy' as
> > Jeremy Rifkin would put it.
>
>
> Well, I'm afraid you are out of touch with modern academic opinion on this
> one.
> At one time the pendulum was swung so that Rome was everything and Greece
> was insignificant. Then it swung to the opposite pole so that everything
> Rome did was worthless and they never did anything orginal, which is your
> view.
>
> However, that was several years ago. The pendulum has now swung back to sit
> in the middle.
> (Actually, this is the usual procedure for most academic debate - it starts
> off polarised and then eventially sits in the middle).
>
> Yes, most of Rome's knowedge was based on Greek ideas, but the Roman genius
> was utilising them in a way that the Greeks never could have. The dome being
> but one example of this, as well as the world's first true, great
> multi-national state.
> Academics now recognise the genius of both Greece AND Rome, its just that
> the genius of both are different.

Nice of you to point that out to me, although I wonder what the 'genius' 
of a civilization means--you might as well talk about the IQ of the 
entire civilization.

In any case, the Romans produced good government and good practical 
engineering works, but they still did these things on a scale bigger 
than the Greeks.  The qualitative (ignoring the quantitative) difference 
between the two civs remains.



> > > Well, why stop back in 2000 BC, why no go to 20,000 BC--what could a
> >
> > physics professor have done, if he had a metal worker with him, or a
> > coal miner with him?
>
>
> Pardon?
> This means nothing.

This was exactly the point I was trying to make.  Good of you to get 
that!  The "could've done it" line of argument means nothing, as I was 
trying to show.



> Douglas