[Donald claimed that Celtic slaves weren't repressed because they had the ability to leave. I pointed out this was stretching the definition of the word].
>Then almost everyone is repressed by the circumstances of their lives,
>the need to earn a living preventing a free choice of activity.
But not so to such a degree that people would described them as "repressed".
>Part
>of the problem is that the term is used politically about regimes
>of which the speaker disapproves rather than in any objective sense.
Virtually all the regimes I've seen described as repressive were so. Where politics came into it was that if a person condemned left-wing regimes as being repressive, he would be unlikely to condemn right-wing regimes on the same grounds and vice-versa.
> >And this alters the perception that some people of society X is
> >repressed in what way?
>It doesn't alter your perception, however the people of society X may
>equally well regard you as repressed by the society you live in.
And in terms of low living standards, how do the people of society X regard me as being repressed by society?
> >You really have to distinguish between what the law said and the
> >social practice.
>Well the discussion is about legal rights rather than social practice,
Really? I thought we were discussing societies.
[Donald claimed that the big plus of Celtic society was that the leader could be "appealed to, influenced and even disposed of by the people he ruled". I pointed out that this could also happen in a Roman province.]
>Quite different, all that means is the real ruler would eventually
>take notice of the incompetance of his appointees if the local
>people made enough fuss.
Since in Celtic societies, the leader would only go if people made enough fuss (or he might indulge in repressive tactics to shore up his position), the difference does not seem to me all that large.
> >He is biased but I don't think that you can claim that as a result
> >his social picture of the Gauls is incorrect. It doesn't take too
> >much brains to notice that a farmer is downtrodden.
>It's pretty obvious from the writings attributed to him that he had
>little contact with ordinary Gauls and his dealings with their
>leaders show a little understanding of the social structure.
How is it "pretty obvious"? Because he wrote about how downtrodden they were? If I write for example about how downtrodden Orlanthi thralls or Lunar agricultural slaves are, does that mean I have a poor understanding of the respective cultures?
[Donald raises a question about Celtic Knights. I point out that it's a translation of the Latin word for horse-rider and that all it means is that Celtic nobility fought on horseback].
>That's precisely what I mean, not only do we have Caesar applying a
>term with a precise meaning to something only vaguely similarbut
>Latin scholars following a medieval tradition of translating the
>result as "knights".
So it is inaccurate to imply that Celtic Nobles rode horses? I should only point out that both the Cisalpine Gauls and those in Narbonensis were well-known to the Romans, so if Caesar had been writing patent bollocks about the Gauls, quite a few people would have noticed.
>How may other similar inaccurate translations
>are there? which aren't so easy to spot. It doesn't take much of
>that sort of thing to turn any agricultural society into a feudal
>one.
But he wasn't saying that the Celts were a feudal society, he was pointing out that the ordinary celt was downtrodden.
> >Nobody has any way of knowing this. It can be argued that in
> >a status-proud society, like the norse or the celts, that the
> >plight of a humble thrall is worse than that of a medieval
> >villien. Once again, one should distinguish between the law
> >and practice.
>There's no way of knowing for sure, but the relatively small
>proportion of slaves and the fact that they shared accomodation
>with their masters indicates that they were individually known
>to their masters.
The small proportion of slaves to the general population has little bearing on whether those slaves were poorly treated or not. And I can think of many circumstances in which someone might share accommodation, be individually known and still be badly treated: battered wives being a modern example.
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