Barbarism and Righteousness

[erudito]

Constantine was the first Christian Emperor of Rome. He was also the first Emperor to ban gladiatorial games in 325AD. Given the long transition from the pagan to Christian, such games did not finally peter out until the 450s, with the last known gladiatorial games in Rome itself being in 404. Thus ended a tradition that is recorded as having

Comments

[pollyanna_n]

This is a deeply stupid view. Let us suppose the average married couple is married for 25 years, has sex once a week and gets pregnant 3 times. That is once per 433 sex acts. So, something which occurs in a fraction of one percent of cases is the purpose of the act

Informed

[erudito]

This is why one posts on LJ. So people who know things can tell you said things.

2 year intervals works for me. Presumably, however, folks did not, even in peasant societies, just have pregnancies whenever. They certainly couldn't have done so in hunter-gatherer societies.

Re: Informed

[erudito]

Perhaps strong social taboos? The pattern in some Oz Aboriginal cultures of young women marrying older men and widows marrying young men would both allow transmission of knowledge and keep the birthrate down.

The difficulty with hunter-gathering is you have to carry everything, including young kids. Even in places where the food supply was so rich one could be sendentary, children would have to be supported. (Agrarian societies can support much higher populations than hunter-gathering, that's essentially farming's only advantage from which all else flows.)

Given the resource-investment human babies represent, control of reproduction has to be practised to allow a group to persist.

Re: Informed

[pollyanna_n]

Infanticide was commonly practiced in many hunter gatherer societies (including aboriginal)

Re: Informed

[erudito]

Yes, that makes sense.

I have been told of one of the first white woman to work with Aboriginals in Central Australia staying up all night to protect twins from the older women, it still being the way at that time to kill one of twins.

I have also been told that one of the major shifts in Aboriginal culture was from regarding whites as not part of the 'who you can marry' system and so excluded (resulting in killing of mixed-race babies) to to being not part of the 'who you can't marry' and so included. Hence it is actually easier to marry whites, since you do not run afoul of complicated "acceptable partner" systems.