Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 April 22

= April 22 =

Was the moneyless system thing originally a democratic invention?
Recently, i noticed that a moneyless society was a Communist thing, but my question is this: Was this system originally a democratic invention? Rmaster1200 (talk) 14:00, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Has a moneyless system ever been implemented? (Aside from the USSR, about which Will Rogers said, "They ain't got no income tax. But they ain't got no income!") ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:16, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Ahem... -- Jayron 32 15:43, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Not to mention that there was in fact an income tax in the Soviet Union. Bugs's sentence should be enshrined as some tribute to efficiency in making wrong statements. --Golbez (talk) 16:55, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Will Rogers was a satirist. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:37, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Not sure what you mean by moneyless system. Do you mean the barter system ? StuRat (talk) 17:47, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * A Gift economy is another alternative to a money economy. Iapetus (talk) 18:49, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * One of the many left-leaning teachers in my 1970s comprehensive school espoused the idea of the intentional community, exemplified by the kibbutz system. He thought that if fully adopted it could replace capitalism. Apparently, everyone would be fed and clothed communally and would rotate jobs every few months so that nobody had to do the menial work for more than a short period. He was unable to explain how any sort of manufacturing would take place if nobody had any skills; apparently that sort of thing wouldn't be needed. Alansplodge (talk) 00:42, 23 April 2016 (UTC)


 * See Pantisocracy for another historical example. Tevildo (talk) 08:56, 23 April 2016 (UTC)


 * "I'll buy that for a pair of bell bottoms and even toss in an old acid washed pair as a bonus." StuRat (talk) 23:05, 25 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I really don't want my doctor to be assigned as a gardener the day befor he operates on me!DOR (HK) (talk) 06:39, 27 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Especially if you see a circled R on your chart. That was in a movie I saw once, where a gardener/doctor used that notation to  denote objectionable plants or people to be "removed", for the good of the community. StuRat (talk) 23:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Theogony and the classical Greek myth timeline
in Theogony, Hesiod describes the succession of Greek deities and heroes. However, I don't recall him providing any definite timeline. Did anyone in classical antiquity attempt to deduce or impose a timeline on the Greek myth in some form? Can you recomend some good references / sources to read? Also, if such a timeline does exist, what would be the most likely dates (years) of Heracles' 12 labors and of Arachne's unfortunate contest with Athena? ( Just to make sure my question is clearly formulated: I am not asking what we know now of the actual timeline of Minoan, Achaean, etc. civilization and culture. Rather, I am asking what did the Greco-Roman world think then - let's say between 600 BCE and 300 CE - that the timeline of Theogony was. ) --Dr Dima (talk) 22:35, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Just my thoughts: The Greek Gods weren't like ours, they imagined them interacting with "mortals" on a daily basis, and those mortals were Greeks or at least people the Greeks knew. Therefore, it wouldn't have been from a time thousands of years earlier, but rather from a time within their collective memory.  So, maybe a few centuries.  You might compare with the accounts of the Trojan War, which similarly was from a time just a few centuries before Homer recorded it in the Iliad.  Also, the invention of writing figures in, since, if these events occurred after the Greeks acquired this skill, then numerous written accounts would be expected.  So, such myths would be set in the pre-literate era.  StuRat (talk) 05:31, 23 April 2016 (UTC)


 * You can get some idea of what Hesiod and later Greeks thought from our Ages of Man article. More simply than that, the Greeks considered that there was a mythological past, when the universe was created and the myths of the gods and early humans took place, but they didn't really think those myths occurred at any specific date, just "the past" in general. Assigning a specific date to creation was not necessary. Then there was an Age of Heroes, the Greek Heroic Age, which is sort of conflated with Greek mythology in general nowadays, but was certainly separate for the Greeks themselves. It was set in the near past, maybe a few hundred years earlier than the classical period of the 5th century BC. They may not have known exactly how far back it happened things, but like the Trojan War, the Argonauts, Heracles' labours, and the legends about the foundation of various royal dynasties pre- and post-Trojan War were historical. In fact they often seem to be mythologized accounts of what happened when the Greeks actually migrated into Greece after their subsequent history - founding cities, understanding that cities like Mycenae and Argos used to be powerful states even though they were in ruins in the classical period, contact with other cultures like Egypt and the Minoans, the fact that there was some sort of Trojan war and Bronze Age collapse, different waves of migration being responsible for the different kinds of Greek culture and dialects, etc. All that is dated back to the Age of Heroes, and the classical Greeks seem to have remembered it correctly, more or less. (This is in contrast with the true myths, which are inherited from general Indo-European myths that long predate Greek culture.) The gods still interacted with humans as late as the Heroic Age, and the heroic ancestors of the classical Greeks were often considered to be sons of a god/goddess and a mortal woman/man.


 * The classical Greeks didn't really think the gods still interacted with them on a daily basis. They lived in the Age of Iron, which was pretty crappy all around and the gods weren't really present anymore...there is a weird episode from the 6th century BC where Peisistratus and Megacles dressed some woman up as Athena, but it doesn't sound like people were convinced (and a century later, Herodotus didn't believe it).


 * We should also remember that there was no real "canon" of Greek myths and legends, and they changed over time. The myths recorded by Hesiod, for example, often differ greatly from the myths compiled by, say, Apollodorus, and then they are further changed by the Romans (a lot of what we think of as Greek mythology actually comes from Ovid). There is no single "Greek mythology"! So, it is also hard to say what "the Greeks" considered the actual timeline.


 * Anyway, any good introduction to Greek mythology should have a discussion of this. The one I have is "Classical Mythology" by Morford and Lenardon, I highly recommend it! As mentioned, Wikipedia's own Ages of Man article and related links are also a good start. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:19, 23 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you Adam for a great and very detailed reply! This was very helpful. All the best, --Dr Dima (talk) 18:03, 25 April 2016 (UTC)