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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8493328" data-attributes="member: 18">One of the main problems with Rome is that we really only have ruling-class opinions from Romans, but occasionally they, as people say today "tell on themselves" in their writing. For example, one Roman writer briefly mentions the legal requirement to massacre the slaves of anyone who got murdered by a slave of theirs, and this Roman writer is appalled, absolutely appalled that loads of working and middle class Romans (by his description) oppose this policy, and are really angry about it, and are protesting in the streets about it and making a nuisance of themselves! The implication seems to be they're too dumb to understand why this policy is needed.Knowing humans, I suspect it's more like they didn't like it, and thought it was a bad thing. From this and other evidence, whilst I think total opposition to slavery was probably vanishingly rare in Rome, seeing it as a messed-up institution that primarily existed to benefit the rich (note that poor and middle class Romans were the ones most likely to be forced into debt slavery, of course) was probably fairly common. And even some other Roman writers seemed a bit irked by people mistreating slaves. Eventually Roman law slowly shifted to make mistreatment or murder of slaves more and more illegal.I can't speak for the US, maybe you can go further there. In the UK? I've literally never seen a UK-made show about Rome go further than that, and even Rome got some of the "usual suspects" in the establishment moaning and whinging about how it was "unfair" and didn't adequately show the benefits of Rome.Er... yes? Because they're the most directly affected party? I'm not sure why that's a big question? It seems pretty straightforward. It's not Americanocentric, it's looking at who is actually impacted, right now, by what's happening. It's a broadly applicable concept that doesn't just relate to America.I mean, I think people impacted by Orientalism, particularly the treatment of Asian culture and people as "exotic", "mysterious", "desirable" (not necessarily in a good way), and so on do get to comment on what they perceived (accurately I would say in this case) Orientalsim yeah. Again not entirely sure why that would be much of a question.Christ I didn't even think of that, nice work!</blockquote>

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