> is there a smaller denomination of Sun County currency than the Wheel?
> If there isn't, how do you purchase small items? Or is Sun County
> predominately a barter culture?
All of Glorantha runs a predominantly non-monetary economy, IMHO. Coins are used by people who don't have *really* valuable things to offer, like work or skills or sheep or cows or beer... :-)
Most farmers don't use coinage. And most people are farmers.
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Andrew Behan and Pam Carlson ask about ancient propaganda.
A> Propaganda is a bit anachronistic, surely? I can't really see a Goebbels A> figure swaying the masses in what is supposed to be the Bronze Age.
P> I hate to be a party-pooper, but did ancient empires really bother with P> populist propoganda? Isn't it a more modern thing? (Maybe they did - P> I'm open to examples.)
I'll just take a brief spin through the Romans, as they're one of my major specialities, and also a useful parallel for the Lunars in many respects. I know this ain't very Gloranthan, but hope to show how many different forms "populist propaganda" and "swaying the masses" can take.
The Roman imperial cult was a blatant propaganda tool: all civic gatherings commenced with ritual praise and burnt offerings to His Sacred Majesty. Later on, this ritual was used as a "loyalty test" to weed out closet Christians (who had some absurd objection to making such sacrifices), similar to the flag-saluting antics popular in certain countries.
Months of the calendar were re-named for great leaders: I have at home the Cypriot month-names from first century AD, when every single month was honorifically linked to the Roman Empire. (Not just July and August -- ALL of them!).
Statues of leaders, politicians, generals all served propaganda purposes. Erecting them could be a political statement affiliating oneself with the person commemorated (just as orating at a state funerals could be used to wrap oneself in the mantle of the dear deceased - "Friends, Romans, Countrymen!"), or a self-glorifying act. Caligula knocked the heads of statues of the gods and had them replaced with his own (rather naughty).
Civic buildings and public works projects have a similar role (Pompey's Theatre; the Appian Way; Augustus's "Altar of Peace" and closing the doors of the Temple of Bellona). Augustus left a statement of his deeds ("Res Gestae Divi Augusti") on public display near his tomb, and copies were sent to other cities in the empire so that all his subjects would know how wonderful he had been.
Entertainments were sponsored by politicians on the make, who sought to outdo each other in providing spectacles for the masses, to win their votes. Pompey included the spoils from his Eastern campaigns as stage props in the first performance at his theatre (a yawnathon, by contemporary accounts); Caesar arranged for four hundred female gladiators to fight in silver armour, in order to make a splash; later, the emperor Commodus dressed as Hercules and shot wild animals in the arena to impress the mob.
The walls of Pompeii are covered with political slogans (alongside - and often interchangeable with - surprisingly modern obscenities): "The petty thieves support Decius for the Urban Praetorship", and the like. Rabble- rousing politicians hired mobs to heckle their opponents' speeches. The emperor Nero (one of our models for Argenteus) had specially-trained squads of "clappers" to lead the applause for his turns on the stage, and on his tour of Greece he participated in (and won!) every event in the Olympic Games - even the chariot race he had failed to finish (the judges opined that had his chariot not crashed, he would surely have come in first).
Political speeches are riddled with both crude and subtle populist appeals: read anything by Cicero for an example (in a sense, *all* Roman oratory is political), but especially the Catilinarian Orations and the Philippics. These strove to present "Romanitas" - Roman-ness - as a wonderful and virtuous thing, as well as blackening the names and characters of the current enemies of the state. All Roman politicians in the Republic were orators, whose rhetoric was directed towards the masses in great public assemblies as well as smaller groups in the Senate and the courts.
The "Aeneid", the Roman poet Virgil's epic story of how the Trojan hero Aeneas escaped the fall of Troy and settled in Latium, is an explicitly propagandistic piece (including visions of the wonderful Roman future that awaits the hero's descendants: "Here he is, the man you've been waiting for for so long: Augustus Caesar!"), as is the poet Horace's hymn of praise written for the Secular Games (a big-budget public celebration). And it appears likely the poet Ovid gave up his "Fasti" (a trek through the Roman ritual year) just before hitting the recently-renamed months of July and August precisely because he couldn't stomach the thought of all the brown-nosing tripe about the virtues of Julius Caesar and Augustus that he'd have had to write...
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