this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Rough Roman Memes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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  3. Follow Lemmy.world rules.

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[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Explanation: Cicero's Philippics are a series of speeches made by Cicero criticizing Mark Antony, one of Caesar's former officers and a member of the coalition which avenged Caesar's death. Mark Antony had a reputation as a bit of a lowbrow fellow, apparently not wholly slander, while Cicero was the very symbol of the ultrarefined senatorial elite.

Regardless of your opinions on Cicero, he absolutely torched Mark Antony rhetorically, with the second book of Philippics being particularly damning in calling Mark Antony a brute, a savage, and worst of all, repulsively unmannered!

Cicero's speeches were so infuriating that Mark Antony had Cicero killed shortly thereafter.

[–] drolex@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Classic pen vs. sword argument.

Is the pen actually mightier than the sword? Try to answer that with a sword through your scapula.

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Like, normally, I hate Cicero. Optimate fuck. But in his dealings with Mark Antony, Cicero is my spirit animal. "What, you SPARED me when you could've killed me? What, you want a fucking COOKIE for that, murderer? You want me to lick your boots after you butchered everyone in your social circle who dared have a thimble-full of decency and fucked half the goat pens in Italy? Ooh, so scary, you're drawing your sword and motioning for your goons to cut my throa-"

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

to vulgar childlike poetry so he can actually interpret it

This reminds me of a BlueSky thread I saw linked on Mastodon, of people riffing on the ludicrous and flawed idea that great literary works need to be distilled using LLMs into plain language, to "avoid difficult language": https://bsky.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3lb5og7vrv22j

It's like watching education happening in reverse. Even Orwell would be baffled at these happenings vis-a-vis AI/LLMs.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 9 points 1 week ago

Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick?