askhistorians

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Japanese NES games like The Legend of Zelda are known for being terribly translated, but I've always wondered, why? How did localization work for these old games? How did it always turn out so bad? Was it a budget thing? Or was "professional" localization really that primitive in the 1980s?	1077
A girl today looks at marriage and says "its about love"; but given that the concept of marriage for love wasn't invented until late medieval times, what would a Roman girl say about marriage? What would marriage mean to her?	303
If women in ancient Rome and (at least in Athens) especially Greece were to dress incredibly conservatively, why do we have so much art depicting a kind of "Casual Public Exposure" in Greco-Roman culture? (examples in post's body, btw)	183
Women in Ancient Rome/Greece were NOT allowed to flaunt their sexuality in public, and were expected to cover up in a way not unlike women in Saudi Arabia. Given this, where did the tradition in classical painting of showing women of antiquity casually exposing themselves in public originate from?	82
What qualities would a Roman (let's say during the early principate) mother/father seek to instill in their children? What character could a Roman youth exhibit to make their parents proud of who they became?	67
I've read here and there that for as friendly and communal the Iroquois were to their in-group, they were known to torture, enslave, and kill men, women and even children captured in war. Is this true? Or is this just another bout of propaganda by Europeans, spread to justify them "civilizing" them?	62
In Plato's Republic, Plato's perfect polis is, to us, deeply alien. But to the people of Athens of his time, what elements, if any, would they have seen as strange? What would be seen as normal? What might they see as controversial?	51
Today we have the "Nuclear Family", ancient Romans had the Paterfamilias, but what kind of family structure would Greco-Roman era Israelite Jesus Christ have lived in? How were families in his culture organized?	50
What were ancient Roman (pre-christian) cultural rules with regards to nudity? For example, today we see women's exposed breasts as inherently sexual, but did they? How do our cultures differ in this respect?	49
I've read that the Greek/Roman statues we see were not only painted, but even clothed with fabrics and robes. How much of this is true? What did Greco-Roman artists intend for their works to look like?	44

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