Ancient texts are often filled with innacuracies, exagerations and straight up lies that the historian has to sift through and judge whether what is written is truly factual or not. Things like numbers of soldiers are often greatly inflated to be beyond belief, while perfectly believable things, like for example, Theodora's promiscuity are completely disavowed by historians and thrown out as slander by Procopius.
With that in mind, why is it that such a ridiculous statement as "Pompey got rid of literally every single pirate in the whole of the Mediterranean" taken as straight up fact by literally everyone? I mean, it could certainly be that he did it, but it's just a bit too preposterous for every educated and respected Roman historian to unquestioningly accept that this really happened?
>>1338988
well people also accept that Josephus statement about Jesus which we already know is forged proves Jesus existed
>>1338988
Of course he didnt get rid of every single one, but he will have reduced it enough that it wasnt a problem.
>>1338988
I don't think anyone holds to that though, he just made enough of an effort that piracy wasn't a large scale problem anymore.
>>1338988
Romans weren't autists.
Look, man, nobody actually knows what has happened in the past. We have accounts. Some are more believable than others. We can discern probability, but that's still ultimately a scenario we abstractly deduced - a fantasy. Maybe that fantasy is very close to the actual events. Maybe not. Some of these fantasies are constructed through the assimilation of many accounts we've deemed credible. Ultimately, though, nobody knows. Whether you're a historian sifting through all the available material on a time period or some faggot who read something someone said on a website, you don't know. Those numbers you mentioned being exaggerated, maybe they were, maybe they weren't. We guess at what we think is most likely. There are factors that we cannot ever know about anything that has happened in history - what was the social atmosphere at the time, what were the things left unsaid or lost to us, etc.?
I'm not saying that studying history is pointless, or that there is no value in historical accounts, but we cannot, by their very nature, directly know what happened in the past. We guess. This is something that people who talk about the past either understand or don't, historian or student, and it's pointless to talk to someone who claims to "know" without a shadow of doubt because some academic told him so. Stop dwelling on this so much and move on.
