One of the best parts of YouTube (and one that is closely related to “Hour-and-a-half-long documentaries about Atlantis” YouTube) is Alternate History YouTube, and the best part of that is, of course, “What If Carthage Had Won The Punic War” YouTube. The incredibly low stakes, the deeply specific knowledge of battle tactics and contemporary weaponry, and the macho angst unite to create a perfect environment for madness to flourish.
[Image via]
Tags: comment sections, youtube
“Surely the Trojans knew about boats…”
Are you sure?
I mean, they sure didn’t know about horses.
New Toast commenting policy: If you’re not a Phoenician or Mycenaean, GTFO.
I actually liked this 1000 times.
Occasionally one wonders, “I wonder what social media would be like if ancient historical figures could use it today. GUESS WE’LL NEVER KNOW.”
Thankfully THESE HEROES are here to save the day, displaying exactly what a Youtube comment fight about the Carthaginians would look like in all it’s petty glory.
“Romans shred”
You guys, Ken has been there. And he’s not buying it.
Don’t you mean “He’s, not buying it”?
Imaging my Classics classes as if we could all comment like this on the professors’ lectures.
“this is pro-Carthage bias, very pc”
“the Romans were just pre-nazis”
“the Germans were alpha males; Romans had gotten weak from empire and had turned into betas”
“the Romans were just pre-nazis”
Classics major here. I once told my academic adviser that I thought Augustus was really cool and his answer was “So you’re a fascist.”
Toast people,are we all either (choose all that apply)
Classics majors
Historians
Librarians or archivists
English or other Lit Majors
Science majors
Witches
Classics major and librarian! Not a Phoenician or a Myceneaen, though, so I should probably stop commenting.
art history/archaeology/museum studies here, but that fits neatly into the interstices of these categories.
came down here to say the same thing – yay art history and museum studies!
I mean, I don’t do anything in those fields these days; I’m a TV and film critic. But that’s my background.
Journalism, with a history minor. Heh, remember when we majored in journalism so we could work at a “news”…”paper”…?
Classics/Archaeology/Museum Studies
Museum Worker (does that fall under Historian?)
Potential Witch
English/Lit major and a witch.
The theory holds!
Same! (with a side of Medieval/Renaissance Studies double major to get some “historian” in there)
Medievalist high five!
History. (Military history even. Hence my intense side eyeing of all comments posted above. For I have met the enemy and he was likely in my Civil War class.)
Ha! I too, met the enemy in a Civil War history class. There was a quiet, begrudging sort of mutual respect between us. He may have had his priorities severely out of whack, but he at least he was moderately well-informed about his opinions and respectful in expressing them. He was a Confederate re-enactor… from a cavalry unit, even. Dedication, devotion, he did not lack.
another classics major! with the potential for library studies in my future, so
lol and I’m the family member who is the current librarian.
Art history, English, minor in library studies and career as a journalist. And a couple of Classics courses for spice. So happy to be in this club.
I was a linguistics major, but I did take five years of Latin and also worked in a library. (So I feel like I should be able to sneak in somewhere there… besides being a witch, obviously).
Two years into a linguistics degree here! I think a mixture of science, English and history probably covers a lot of it.
It’s fun!! I miss it. (I ended up going to law school, like half my graduating class).
My particular areas of interest were sociolinguistics, UK dialects, and Celtic languages. I’m still waiting for people in the street to come up and ask me about Celtic morphosyntax and initial consonant mutation… Someday my day will come.
Classics and English major weeee
Current library clerk, former Art History major, witch wannabe
Science major. Now a lawyer. No, I can’t explain it either
With no degree to my name I guess I just sneak in under witchiness. :/
theologian
(basically witchcraft, with 4 part harmony)
Science major. One year left on the PhD and then I am freeeee of academia (probably)
English/Creative Writing major.
Hah, brilliant. Grant/proposal-writer here, with a degree in foreign service/history, during which I spent the entire time studying medieval history anyway. Aspiring to witchiness.
English major, followup English & Medieval Studies for grad school.
Working assistant archivist, working getting my professional archivist certification. Also I have a BA and an MA in Medieval Studies and I have an info management diploma so I COULD be a librarian, I just choose not to. Archiving is quieter and there are fewer dumbasses. More family historians though, which is another kind of dumbass.
I’m not going to say I’m a witch but I’m also not NOT a witch. I could be a witch.
women’s health nurse practitioner, so technically science major, although I’m pretty sure this also qualifies as witch.
I’m pretty sure it does.
Witch and linguist!
Classics major (and adjunct Classics professor); witch
I just wanted to share that in my freshman philosophy class the professor noted that I had been really quiet in class for a week (after being the only person talking for the first half of the semester) and I said that I was letting other people talk since they were all so excited about the stoics. Then I said that I was also a little embarrassed because they were being really mean about the epicurean hedonists and I kind of identify with them but I didn’t want to fight. It was great. I’m pretty sure I was his favorite person in the world for a second before he started laughing at me.
Personally, I’m a bit suspicious of people who don’t identify with Epicurean hedonists at least a little bit. But not wanting to fight with the stoics-lovers is an entirely reasonable choice. I mean, I love me some stoics, but I’ve found that people who adore them and slam Epicurus (esp. in a college philosophy class) can be stressful.
Augustus – the first and best emperor!
We were reading the Res Gestae in my Latin class in college and everyone was hemming and hawing over what a lying liar Augustus was. I was like, “You guys don’t understand. Yes, he was a lying liar, but he was so powerful that no one was going to say SHIT about it! He gets to write the Res Gestae and defy Virgil’s last wishes just because he was LITERALLY the most powerful man on Earth.”
EVERY WORD OF THE RES GESTAE IS THE TRUTH, how dare you.
In my Roman history seminar, the prof asked us what Octavian was up to around 44-43 BC, and while everyone else was trying to formulate an answer I blurted out all in one breath, “At the age of 19 on my own initiative and at my own expense I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.” We were all weird nerds in that department, but I think I was the only one with chunks of the RGDA committed to memory.
Those first two comments are adorable, lulling you into a false sense of security before things get nasty. Romans shred indeed!
(Also, for a brief moment, I saw “alternate history” and hoped this would be about the comments section on the Mandela Effect website. It is really something.)
Oh man I got so sucked into that a couple weeks ago and it’s really really amazing.
*gasps* it’s BEAUTIFUL
100% need a T-shirt of this, effective immediately.
I want stickers and I want to put them everywheeeeerrrrreeeee
Now do “Romans, Go Home”, but in Latin…
People called Romanes they go the house?!?
Now write it down a hundred times… If it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.
HOW many Romans?
Dear Minerva, I love the Toast comments with all my heart.
(furious applause)
Ohhhh god ok so: a woman I used to know got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist shortly after a bad break-up. It said ‘ego sum promptus’. The first time I saw this I twisted my forehead at it for a while until asking her about it, and she said, ‘it’s Latin for “I am ready”‘.
Now. I had to take five years of Latin in school, and that is… not what that means. What it means, is garbage. The closest literal translation I could come up with would be, ‘I me this person myself [masculine] is available at hand’. Turns out, though, that if you ask Google Translate for the Latin of ‘I am ready’, that garbage is what you get. Which as an fairly savvy 30-something you’d think she’d have known to double-check, but… there you go.
At least she liked it.
Does it have to be lack of savvy, though? How would she double-check? You can’t exactly ask your Roman friend, and looking up the words isn’t enough because of grammar. She could have asked you, I guess, but most people wouldn’t know anyone who can proofread latin (well, strictly speaking, all your friends do. I mean, you could totally jump into these YouTube comments with “EVERYONE I know has at least one friend who knows latin” but that sounds more like a logic puzzle than a common friendship scenario :p )
I disagree. There are heaps of online language-specific resources, even for Latin; and the unreliability of Google Translate specifically has been A Known Issue since its inception. It’s also not news that getting a tattoo in a language one doesn’t know well is fraught with danger. That is why one should take the time to do good research before getting it permanently inked into one’s skin. Just seems like basic good sense, non?
Sorry, but this is a soapbox issue for me! It’s not about time or thoroughness, it’s about knowledge. It’s super easy to over-estimate how much other people know about our own knowledge areas, and there’s an effect I forget the name of where people pretty much can’t remember how they thought on a certain subject before they knew what they know today (huge problem in teaching!). Not everyone knows that Google Translate sucks (meaning, not everyone knows that other translating software could do better). There must be other resources, but it’s usually pretty hard to find them through googling if you have no idea what you might be looking for! I mean, in this fancy Internet age it’s easy to type something into Google, but you have to have real knowledge to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and you need to know that there actually WILL be wheat and chaff even though everything looks the same. A lot of the things I know are self-taught, and people with more education (whether through schooling or through being taught informally by someone in their lives) usually under-estimate the time and effort by, like, orders of magnitude. I’ve ended up in similar pitfalls – not with tattoos, but in other just as important situations. And I’m actually pretty great at self-teaching, if I may be so bold. It’s just a very hard thing to do, trying to learn something without having anybody to ask about anything at all. I’m in college now, and many of the things I worked for hours and hours and hours to find out are just spontaneously mentioned “by the way”. You don’t necessarily learn more or deeper by going to school, but you do get up to scratch way quicker than if you try to learn on your own. Point being, a layman’s misspelled tattoo does not indicate how hard they tried, only that they didn’t have the resources to succeed. (also many people have heard “ego sum something something” and know that it’s correct latin, “ego sum promptus” rings true and understandable to a layman because it’s recognisable latin and then a word that is very easy to guess if you know English)
I believe the phrase you’re referring to is ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’). ‘Ego sum’ is not something that people would have heard precisely because it’s incorrect: Latin doesn’t use personal subject pronouns (like ‘ego’) unless a distinction needs to be made or a very unusual and specific emphasis is desired. The subject’s identity is denoted by the verb.
Just by the way. :p
I saw your reply now, 9 weeks later, and kind of huffed. I would NEVER extrapolate only from “cogito ergo sum”, I KNEW that I had seen “ego sum” somewhere. In a book. Which turned out to be… a Harry Potter translation.
“I am Lord Voldemort” became “ego sum Lord Voldemort”, because the wordplay worked better with the target language (yes they had to invent other middle names) and they must have figured that kids today don’t know Latin anyway.
And I was also thinking of “civis romanus sum” rather than cogito, because this refers to something you are instead of something you do, but it was funnier to lead with the Harry Potter thing. Anyway, many people know that “ego” means “I” or something like that, many people know that “sum” means “am” or something like that, and IF (I admit it’s a big if) they’ve read certain HP translations (or maybe other stuff with the same error??) they’ve already been exposed to “ego sum” and remember it from somewhere. Um, like I did.
I came, I saw, I got swole
If I had known this was what you were going for in internet comments, I would have played this game very differently.
These must be the same people who have impassioned arguments about fantasy politics on ~lore videos~ about the Elder Scrolls games! Death to the Stormcloaks!
Ulfric Stormcloak was THE WORST. Ugh. He didn’t even have the courage of his convictions, he was cooperating with the nazi elfs on the low. Boo stormcloaks.
Skyrim for the Nords! We need a border wall between Riften and Falkreath!
I used to be an adventurer like you…
T and I say “Never should’ve come here!” as a response to each other or as an observation for non-Skyrim parts of our lives (other movies, noticing someone walking into a room at a bad time and walking out immediately) on a weekly basis.
That’s fantastic, I might need to adopt that. My husband and I make falmer sounds at each other and crouch around like weirdos.
I’m totally going to do this to Hamlet and see if he gets it.
My FluffCat character and I share the opinion that both the Nords and the Imperials can stuff it. Just give me some gold and a warm fire to curl up in front of!
This is a very reasonable position and so entirely unsuitable for a YouTube comment.
Would it help if I threw in some extraneous punctuation?
Toss in a few misspellings and typos and you have a deal!
Whenever anyone refers to my glorious Khajit, Mr. Boots, as “cat,” I have to murder them. Same for the “Skyrim belongs to the Nords” folk.
That sounds like something a MILK DRINKER would say!!
[I’m actually all for the Imperials since they’re not as racist/speciest towards my PunchCat character. ;D]
This is my moral compass for all Elder Scrolls game: least racist/speciest? Join ’em! Racist/speciest? Murder ’em for their stuff! (I play Redguard.)
Okay but that’s Serious Cat Serious Business.
It wasn’t politics, but Back In The Day there were massive debates on a Myst email discussion group about how linking books and Riven’s crazy water worked. I once went on vacation for two weeks, during which one of these discussions broke out. I came home to 650+ emails. I kinda miss those days… they were a lot of fun.
I can neither confirm nor deny that I participated in many of these debates myself. I can also neither confirm nor deny that my skill set includes “freelance fictional-culture historian” (I’m not a professional because it’s not my job, but I’m not an amateur because I did get paid to help fact-check a Myst RPG… not that these statements regarding my status as a fictional-culture historian should be taken as confirmation of the same).
I think there’s been Youtube videos of Command & Conquer fans burning the GDI flag.
This is even better than conspiracy theory youtube video comments, probably because while the people are similarly fervent and unhinged, they are also literate? also there probably aren’t as many suggestions for ISIS recruiting videos in the sidebar.
“People called Romans they tear fabric?”
“It, it says, Romans Shred!”
“No it doesn’t!”
“How many Romans?”
My mom used to show this to her high school class when she taught language.
Yes, Sorlendingen82, it sure does make you wonder….or something
I feel like I took a few college history classes with that guy. “Okay, I have a wild idea for my term paper. GET THIS…”
I did, too! There was one guy in particular who I went through all 4 years of ancient Greek/Classics courses with, who started out by giving our (very British) professor all his crazy ideas during class. By the end of 4 years, the prof would just throw a piece of chalk at him to get him to shut up. I miss those classes (and that professor) so much. *wipes away a single tear*
One of my favorite subgenres of YouTube videos are real-time train videos. You can spend 8 hours watching the scandinavian countryside roll by without ever leaving your home! Spouse and daughter prefer the subgenre of horse fart videos. Philistines.
Ooh, I want this! Can you link some favorites?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tnsQ8DjD6YE
From here you should be able to find many others…
It would be pretty easy to combine these two subgenres: if you roll through enough Scandinavian countryside, surely you will encounter a farting horse sooner or later.
That seems like it would be very relaxing! Just to have on in the background while reading or cleaning…
(gasp) I DID NOT KNOW THIS WAS A THING! (frantically Googles)
Ever seen the video for “Star Guitar” by The Chemical Brothers? It’s a train journey where the buildings and train gear outside reacts in time to the music.
I am glad we have taken to the sea, it is clearly a formidable ally.
Where WERE the Ionians during the War of Troy?
Also, does Cindy Ocean think that Carthage is in Iraq?
As Crash Course has taught me, it’s all in the green parts of Not-America.
These are pretty good, BUT did you see the two dudes who got into a best abs fight on FB on a thread about Anita Sarkeesian’s new video?
“Come at me Bro!”
“Oh, I will”
*both kiss passionately*
it was the sea that was the enemy!
She’s a harsh mistress indeed but I think that calling her “the enemy” is going a bit far.
The call was coming from inside the harbor this entire time!
A willing foe is sea room?
Watching people have passionate internet fights about a subject I have NO opinion about is one of life’s small pleasures. There was a great one about building rock cairns on the PCT facebook page, it was glorious. This is also excellent
OMG, I read that discussion. Stumbled on it by accident, and it was a delight.
That whole page is a goldmine for argument-watching. Although one of the more cantankerous and troublesome members just rage quit the whole group in extremely entertaining fashion, so it’s been a bit quieter for a while. Talking about hiking manners apparently brings out the worst in people? Who knew.
Reading such internet fights tends to somehow get me to have opinions about these subjects, so that sucks a bit.
Yeah, occasionally. There’s a fine balance where the subject matter has be somewhat boring to you but capable of producing vigorous and passionate debate to others. I didn’t think of roman military history before but now that mallory has shown it to me I will probably never look away.
ok, but… what do the minoans or the trojans have to do with the punic wars. I genuinely need to know. These timelines make less sense than on Stargate.
Well, I guess if you subscribe to the Aeneid-as-factual it sort of makes sense? Aeneas abandons Dido and that subsequently leads to the Punic Wars?
ok, but in that case the Trojans definitely knew about boats… as they were shipwrecked in Carthage…
I could watch the video in question but it’s more fun to speculate, I feel. Anyone want to tackle those egyptian archers??
Everyone knows there is only one acceptable comment: carthago delenda est
Whoa whoa whoa David Koch, that is some wishful thinking there. Julius Caesar took an army, built a bridge in ten days using local lumber, CROSSED THE RHINE, took a leisurely stroll around Germania, then walked home, dismantling the bridge on his way back, just to prove he could.
ROMANS SHRED
I NEED THIS
There are a couple of listings on eBay; here’s one.
I knew it was gonna be good at
I DESPISE THE ROMAN IMPERIALS
and, of course,
very pc
But it just got better and better. If only my lunchmates were Toasties. Thank you, Mallory, for yet more most excellent use of YouTube comments.
“Samnites teaming up with the Carthaginians? haha. Dream on.” is the best thing ever
Goddamnit, Scipio, how could you betray Hannibal like that? He just wanted you to cultivate your darker impulses as the gifts they are, and also go to Italy with him, and then you fucked it up for everyone.
Wanna hear more about this “Hamburger Hut”. We don’t have those out here in Phoenicia.
Weird late-to-the-party question: but was anyone here in JCL in high school and did you do the Roman Life test? I competed in that and I swear that Scipio was on every one of those illustrating Roman names. On my death bed I will still be able to parse his names and their meanings. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus foreverrrrrr.
Slowly raises hand. I think I have a JCL certificate or ID card in my parents’ house somewhere.
Whenever anyone refers to my glorious Khajit, Mr. Boots, as "cat," I have to murder them. Same for the "Skyrim belongs to the Nords" folk.
is anyone else reminded of that famous “unrest in the grass fandom” tumblr post?
I don’t have a link, or I’d post it here.
Witch and linguist!