Friday, November 17, 2017

Interesting Quora

I answer questions on Quora as someone who understands Ancient History. It’s been an interesting experience, because the readers over there are less knowledgeable about the subject matter than the people that come here. They also have different agendas. I’ve answered 160 questions since May and there are many new questions each day about ancient history.

The questions break themselves down into about four categories: Really good ones, what ifs, time machine, and do my homework.

An example of a really good question is “Why didn’t Caesar choose Marc Antony as his successor?” That person had read the history but what seemed obvious to him, wasn’t.

What ifs are questions about changing an event in ancient history. For example, “What if Caesar hadn’t been assassinated. Would the Republic have survived? Most of these are easy to answer because important trends in history develop their own momentum, which cannot be stopped by changing a single event. The Republic was doomed to fail because of inevitable failure of the Senate to control the entire landscape of the Republic.

Time machine questions are my favorites and are usually good for a laugh. For example, if the American Army went back to the ancient world, could they have defeated the Spartans? Or a variation of this is “If the Spartans had AK47s, would they have controlled all of Greece?” 

The last, and most egregious type of question is “Do my homework.” For example, “Give the three most important reasons why the Roman Empire fell and write them in complete sentences.” LOL.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

We will never know the answer to the question of - why is actually Caesar did not choose Mark Antony as his successor. We can only get lost in guessing why it may happened. Who knows how it could have been from different reasons. I knew many of interesting facts before I began to study the history of ancient Greece. Of course, during the studiyng it, I satrt to have an additional questions, the number of which increases with time. Sometimes I dream of finding myself in ancient Greece for a while, feeling the subtleties of this being. On the question of why this why the Roman Empire fell, on this, I was recently answered by https://www.assignmentexpert.com/ for my first small project. I needed reliable facts. Now there are a lot of sources with false information, you know. This way, I had a full understanding about the history of this incident.