Jim Choate wrote:
> > ca. 1500 in italy is certainly a lot closer to the source than ca. 2000
> > in northern america, right?
>
> Ad hominims...so sad. You are of course welcome to your opinion.
this is not ad homini, it's a simple statement of fact. unless, of
course, time and place have become meaningless since I last checked.
> So what? We're only just over 200 years after our own countries
> independance and we don't seem to understand that?
just more reasons to give more credit to people the closer they are to
something, don't you think?
> What makes you think he
> had some insite to Rome over and above anyone else who understood
> politics? Do you seriously believe that considering the history of
> printing (Guttenberg dies the year before Machiavelli was born) as well as
> history/archiology he had anywhere close to the storehouse of information
> about Rome that we have? I will grant he probably had access to a lot of
> grandiose stories handed down to promulgate the glory days.
now given the fact that printed books became available shortly
afterwards, it must seem that those stories were what we find as OUR
history records today, right?
you shouldn't forget that people living in a mostly oral culture will
most likely have had a much better idea of how it works and how reliable
it is then we today have with the often deceiving impression of the
truthfulness of written records.
just because it was written down doesn't mean it's any more true than
the conflicting verbal version. do YOU have a perfect measurement to
find out which version to rely on? I don't. I just have a rule-of-thumb
that the believability of an nth-hand version depends a lot on the value
of n and is usually much better for lower values.
> Believe it or not sometimes distance provides a clearer picture.
definitely. but the question of whether this is such a case hasn't been
answered yet, and the evidence points to the contrary.
