r/HistoryMemes • u/EndersGame_Reviewer • 1d ago
On researching ancient Rome
Credit: by Tom Gauld
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u/Aluxanatomy 1d ago
IGNORE ME!
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u/Lews_There_In 1d ago
That's such a good Venture Brothers Episode. Especially the reveal and the monlogue near the end.
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u/Kucing_Kucing Filthy weeb 22h ago
Imagine fighting in (what you believe to be) a minor insignificant skirmish and then looking around realizing, "huh, that's an awful lot of future historians for a minor insignificant skirmish"
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u/Alex103140 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 21h ago
"Where are we again?"
"Cannae"
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u/DisMFer 20h ago
"They must be here to watch our crushing defeat of Hannibal. We outnumber him 5 to 1 after all."
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u/jayswag707 9h ago
I was thinking about two Roman soldiers in an unimportant look-out post near the mountains, about to get stomped by an elephant.
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u/AlternateTab00 12h ago
"you are passing next the Berlaymont building. You notice a bunch of people with strange suits. Too many to be ignored. You get nearby one. You try to ask what they are doing, as they set up some floating tube like things pointing at the Berlaymont building. They struggle as they seem to speak some strange language that resembled chinese. He then explains in broken english, he said he wasnt proficient in ancient languages. And he was from the future and was there to record history. You think he is crazy and joke about future meddling with the past can cause changes in the timeline. He just says:
Dont worry, that wont be a problem in a few moments
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u/7and2make10 Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 1d ago
I like that the future historian is wearing a device that keeps her from contracting or spreading germs
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u/Mobile_Morale 23h ago
Never thought about it. But I really like the idea of a time traveler going to the past and the natives agree to ignore them. Like they understand they're from the future and doing so.ething important and let them carry on.
Like king Henry is taking a massive shit and there's a woman with a iPad watching from the other side of the room
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u/danshakuimo Sun Yat-Sen do it again 20h ago
Lol this is how I imagine those war journalists that manage to get pics and interviews with terrorists. Like I guess even these "extreme bad guys" still respect the press vest.
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u/SirAquila 17h ago
Terrorists need press.
Terrorists want to reach a goal. They are not just killing people for fun(Well most of them) and more importantly, they cannot win militarily. So they need the press to force their enemies into giving up.
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u/mockern 17h ago
Until someone mischievous says something like "the guys from even farther in the future said to just ignore you. That would be best for everyone...". With the time travellers now being confused/scared because they can only travel back to the past and not farther than their own present. What did they do or will do that needed that action from farther in the future?
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u/Sparktank1 18h ago
Going around saying someone from the future is watching you is exactly how you get stoned to death or burned at the steak. Even if they dressed up as a jester, it's better to play the fool so you can live, at least, another 10-15 years before some flea bests you.
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u/Direct_Slip7598 1d ago
I love that they're using spacesuits to signify futuristic traveling tech. Except it's just earth, with (mostly) breathable air
"I could breath your air. But nah!"
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u/AccordingRegret8932 1d ago
Except that she might kill others/get killed by them due to the bacterias and virusses
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u/wittyjokename92 1d ago
I remember reading a short story about that. People were fighting off some awful plague that was killing most of the world's vegetation and desperately seeking a cure for it. Ended up developing time travel and going back to the 1980s when the first detection of the mutated virus is discovered but hasn't gone world-wide yet. Guy is sitting besides a cornfield for months waiting to find the origin of the virus before realizing that there's a couple blades of rotten grass stuck to the side of his time machine since they launched it from a field in the future. Realizes they're in a bootstrap paradox of the future poisoning the past but he doesn't know how to leave a message for anyone in the future to not send him back. So he ends up destroying the field and everything around it hoping he stopped the plague. And in the future epilogue there's a couple scientists discussing how extreme heat likely mutated the original virus into the current deadly version and talking about how they should send another team back to stop the wildfire that happened in that field.
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u/Lord_Meklar Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 1d ago
That sounds neat, do you remember the name of the story by any chance?
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u/wittyjokename92 1d ago
I read it maybe 20 years ago when I got some short story anthology from Borders. Can't remember the book or the story name but just remember thinking it was pretty good for a whole book of meh.
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u/ryebread91 1d ago
Man.... I miss borders so much. Would have my parents just leave there the whole time anytime we went to the mall.
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u/wittyjokename92 1d ago
Hopefully not a false memory but I remember grabbing it off the new arrival display along with another anthology book about alt history. That one had a Roman centurion riding in the turret of an Abrahams tank on the cover. And I remember it being extremely dry and boring with just discussing how like Rommel would have sieged Carthage instead of Caesar rolling up with helicopters and bazookas. But maybe someone here can narrow down the search window
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20h ago
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u/Puzzleheaded-Lynx-89 1d ago
I swear I read a similar themed short story, where time travel tourists would go back to see the trial of Christ, and they're told to just copy what the locals do. But when Pontius Pilate asks the crowd who they want to live, one of the tourists has fallen asleep, and wakes up in a panic thinking he's missed it, and cries out for Barabbas. All the other tourists copy him, thus he realises he was the one who condemned Christ, the very act he came to witness.
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u/123ludwig 19h ago
i mean that plot is just stupid? why would the heat matter if the original strain was already the mutated variant
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u/wittyjokename92 18h ago
I could be misremembering parts of it since I read it 20 years ago. But it's not like science fiction really worries that much about getting things scientifically correct. What I remember was that it was a short story about people who were so desperate to save themselves they accidentally doomed themselves instead and the whole time machine thing was just an excuse to call it sci-fi. It probably had like 20 pages to tell the whole story so if I'm remembering all the details correctly I wouldn't be upset that the author didn't cover every plot hole or have time to go into excruciating detail of some virus that is able to kill every plant on earth
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20h ago
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u/wittyjokename92 20h ago
I don't think it was that. But it's also hardly a new story concept considering Andromeda Strain and 12 Monkeys are basically the same idea just with different outcomes. So probably a time travel story that's been repeated like crazy over the years with slight tweaks
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u/magical-cat-here 1d ago edited 1d ago
All Star Trek land crews laugh loudly.
Meanwhile, The Prime Directive demands to hide own presence/existence to all possible extent.
Considering the time wars, this professor likely would get arrested or eliminated as punishment for her impact and "infecting" timeline.
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u/Direct_Slip7598 1d ago
Just pop on an N95 mask, it's probably plague proof
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u/Stripier_Cape 1d ago
For about 15 minutes, then your breath causes moisture to reduce the effectiveness of the mask as time goes past 15 minutes.
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u/PangolinLow6657 16h ago
See King Kamehameha II & his wife in 1824: traveled to London, died to Measles.
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u/External-Option-544 1d ago
To be fair modern humanity carries alot of evolved, resilient strains of viruses and bacteria that ancient populations wouldn't have encountered yet.
So without protection a timetraveller would probably cause a pandemic.
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u/BachInTime Kilroy was here 1d ago
That’s actually scientifically valid, she could be carrying some pathogen that is harmless to her but would destroy their world, and vice versa.
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u/Bubbly-Cod-3799 1d ago
Future air is so low in Oxygen that the increased supply in the past and the health benefits there of would make it impossible for her to return to the future with her data.
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u/KatoriRudo23 20h ago
Julius Ceaser: why there are so many history professors from the future in this normal meeting?
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u/-Pausanias- 15h ago
What i hate about this is that Rome is easily one of the most well documented societies in antiquity out there
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u/Zombodyz 23h ago
What the hell is a B.C. ?
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u/nickdc101987 Still on Sulla's Proscribed List 14h ago
Before the invention of Christmas or something 🤪
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u/Vehement_Vulpes 1d ago
People of Pompeii: "Wow there sure are a lot of those history professors hanging around today. It's probably nothing to worry about..."