QuoteReplyTopic: A New Forum: "Rate Historical Figures" Posted: 10-Nov-2009 at 05:33
I think there should be a forum in AE for the historical figures of the world where we can discuss about them and compare them with each other, so "Rate Historical Figures" was added to AE forums, in this forum and its sub-forums you can create polls about these historical persons, I am also creating some pages to show the results of these ratings.
"As he explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of character—good or bad—on the lives and destinies of famous men. The first pair of Lives—the Epaminondas–Scipio Africanus—no longer exists, and many of the remaining lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae and/or have been tampered with by later writers."
It is most obvious that modern historians, as well as pre-modern historians, had, for the most part, little if anything to write about? But, it seems they wrote about it "anyway?" Laugh!
Interestingly, there were no responses to my post above? Does that mean that "I WIN?"
YEAH!
Well the above post made by me was certainly stupid, and did not elicit any response which I now see was to be expected. So, I will merely edit this response, concerning Plutarch with the below;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives
"Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st Century. The surviving Parallel Lives (in Greek: Bioi parallèloi), as they are more properly and commonly known, contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well as four unpaired, single lives. It is a work of considerable importance, not only as a source of information about the individuals biographized, but also about the times in which they lived.
As he explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of character—good or bad—on the lives and destinies of famous men. The first pair of Lives—the Epaminondas–Scipio Africanus—no longer exists, and many of the remaining lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae and/or have been tampered with by later writers.
His Life of Alexander is one of the five surviving secondary or tertiary sources about Alexander the Great and it includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that appear in no other source. Likewise, his portrait of Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar."
The above is where I got the idea to mention that the word "lacunae" might be important. I failed to mention that the author of the Wiko article also mentions that some of the "lives" might well have been "tampered with by later writers." This tampering, if it did indeed occur might have well be deliberate and performed by professional "redactors!, employed by the RC Church.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redaction
"Forms of redaction
On occasion, the persons performing the redaction (the redactors) add brief elements of their own. The reasons for doing so are varied and can include the addition of elements to adjust the underlying conclusions of the text to suit the redactor's opinion, adding bridging elements to integrate disparate stories, or the redactor may add a frame story, such as the tale of Scheherazade which frames the collection of folk tales in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.
Sometimes the source texts are interlaced, particularly when discussing closely related details, things, or people. This is common when source texts contain alternative versions of the same story, and slight alterations are often made in this circumstance, simply to make the texts appear to agree, and thus the resulting redacted text appear to be coherent. Such a situation is proposed by the documentary hypothesis, which proposes that multiple redactions occurred during the creation of the Torah, often combining texts, which have rival political attitudes and aims, together; another example is the Talmud.
Redactional processes are documented in numerous disciplines, including ancient literary works and biblical studies. Much has been written on the role of redaction in creating meaning for texts in various formats. For example, in the field of biblical studies, see John Barton, Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5: 644-647; or Odil Hannes Steck, Old Testament Exegesis, 2nd edition (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 74-93.
In business and law, a document can have certain parts "redacted", meaning sensitive names and details were removed for various reasons."
And; "Redactional fatigue
Redactional fatigue is an important related concept: when making changes to a large text, a redactor may occasionally overlook a piece of text that conflicts with the redactional goals. Since many important ancient texts are likely to have been redacted at least once, such snippets open a window into an earlier form of the text. The nature of the conflict between the bulk of a redacted text and the contradictory windows can suggest what the goals of the redactor might have been."
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