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Because being the consul for a year was a huge prestigious thing and it was important to let people at the top feel important and let other top magistrates and senators be consul. The cursus honorum still was going on. And also you could just have pro-consular authority and pretty much do the same thing. Augustus, by end, had tribune (the old plebe office) power (tribunicia potestas) for life (which let him propose and veto laws and sit in the Senate), and pro-consular authority in Italy and the imperial provinces (the important ones). He also had to power as pro-consul to overrule other consuls ( imperium proconsulare maius) There were other offices, but those two, together, gave him legal and military authority. He was also the richest dude ever which is important to remember. Also to answer you last question, the office of Dictator was banned for ever by Marcus Antonius after the death of Caesar and no one ever held that office again. euphronius fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 19:39
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Jazerus posted:Sulla paving the path for Caesar shouldn't necessarily be looked upon as necessarily leading to the death of the Republic, either - Caesar had cogently identified many of the real problems with the Republic's government and treatment of non-citizens within the Republican empire. I have always suspected, though there can never be any proof, that Caesar fully intended to step down like Sulla once he had completed a vast, semi-revolutionary revamping of the Republic's constitution. Would he have effectively reigned in the potential for marches upon Rome, as Augustus later did (for a while)? Who knows. Caesar's dictatorship is a muddled and confusing mess from this much historical distance, vacillating between rank nepotism and narcissism on one hand and genuine attempts to prevent future constitutional crises by coming down on the side of the people/non-citizens on the other. What happens if Crassus doesn't get himself killed? What happens if Pompey doesn't back Caesar into a corner? I think it's important to remember that Caesar doesn't choose to have a war - it's forced on him.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:06
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Alchenar posted:What happens if Crassus doesn't get himself killed? What happens if Pompey doesn't back Caesar into a corner? More like "chose this course because it offered the least amount of being sued to China and back and probably sentencing to the mines or some such" instead of forced.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:12
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Thwomp posted:More like "chose this course because it offered the least amount of being sued to China and back and probably sentencing to the mines or some such" instead of forced. That amounts to forced in the political climate of the time, don't you think? The laws he was accused of breaking were very selectively applied, because your average proconsul was in with the Senate and so never faced war crimes or corruption charges. I'm not trying to justify the treatment of the Gauls, but Cato and the other optimates didn't give a poo poo about that when they drew up the lawsuits and charges of treason. If it hadn't been for Pompey, Cato et al. pushing him to either march his army in or be exiled the whole thing could have been resolved peacefully. I will forever maintain that Cato the Younger bears the lion's share of responsibility for the fall of the Republic, if any one person can be said to. He was so fixated on ruining Caesar in court that it always reminds me of "IMPEACH OBAMA!!!!"
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Nov 6, 2013 21:35
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Godholio posted:Goddamnit...looks like my JSTOR access probably ended on the 1st. http://www.jstor.org/stable/526336 If you go by the proper URL you'll see that it's one of the ones you can get via the free MyJSTOR thing. Don't need full institutional access. Sleep of Bronze fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 22:48
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It only gives me the first page as a sample, and wants $12 for the rest.  Edit: I have the free account.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:27
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One of the things that comes to my mind, and hopefully if I'm wrong you guys can set me straight, or postulate alternatives, is that: The republic as a whole was SO strong, and SO wealthy, that even if Marius and Sulla never happened, and it short-circuited the entirety of Caesar - I don't know that it was 'better' the republic failed. Even with the dynastic changes and wars, Rome had so much power and money it rolled unphased for 120+ years without any serious losses or threats afterwards, just basically coasting on military and political victories using the accrued power base the republic gained for it in the preceding 1-2 centuries despite being in an atmosphere still very much like the political log jam at the very end of the republic under those figures. I often wonder how much more that power could have carried on had the political stalemate in the government been allowed to continue. Yes, it was corrupt, and yes it was top-heavy, but it had been successful for a very long time, and that success is what allowed the first Caesars to do what they did. I don't know that they were necessary for the gains made. Can you say that even the stagnating republic couldn't have accomplished that or even bettered it? Though, I am aware that there's a ton of happy figures ready to be usurping-marching-on-Rome General types during this period, assuming that the post-Gracchi republic operated in a relative vacuum and prevented them from doing what Marius-Sulla-Caesar did...who knows. I just always question the 'it was better the republic failed' thing along those lines.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:48
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Halloween Jack posted:Population density was very, very low during the Paleolithic, and people had a lot of leisure time to gently caress around. That goes a lot further toward explaining cultural development than the benefits of raw vs. cooked meat. That, and rapidly improving nutrition in infancy, which is crucial to brain development. My paraphrase probably doesn't catch the nuances of the documentary's argument. The point was that rather than spending all our free time scrounging for nuts and fruit (like the other apes) or lying about to conserve energy (like lions), cooking food (not necessarily just meat) meant our bodies were able to process the good stuff more efficiently, meaning we spent less time worrying about feeding ourselves and giving us the leisure time to gently caress around in. Not the be-all and end-all of human development, granted, but a handy leg-up over the other organisms. Ultimately, I'm not a archeao-nutritionist or evolutionary biologist - just thought it was an interesting idea.
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Nov 7, 2013 02:48
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Big Beef City posted:I often wonder how much more that power could have carried on had the political stalemate in the government been allowed to continue. Yes, it was corrupt, and yes it was top-heavy, but it had been successful for a very long time, and that success is what allowed the first Caesars to do what they did. I don't know that they were necessary for the gains made. Can you say that even the stagnating republic couldn't have accomplished that or even bettered it? I think the Republic actually was unsustainable. The Senate was unwilling to grant concessions on wealth (land) distribution and this intersected with Rome's rise to power in a mutually exclusive way. Either you could be a city Republic with extreme levels of wealth inequality or you could be a multinational empire with more fair distribution. Not both. Marius chose empire, but I think if it hadn't been him someone else would have made the plebs into an army anyway. And once the plebs were an army the senatorial ranks were doomed to lose their monopoly on power. You can't have a person like Caesar, with an army like Caesar's, and keep the Senate as it was. I'm saying that the army is as much or more responsible as Caesar here. I'm trying to say that once you build a society like that, you can't keep it in thrall to a bunch of old men and unfair laws. The increasingly empowered lower orders were going to get themselves a government more to their liking eventually, and since the Senate refused to bend it was broken.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:08
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I appreciate your response, and agree with you that in almost any reality, the power structure was broken or breaking and eventually usurpation or rebellion was nearly inevitable. I suppose my argument centers around how long that giant powerbase could have wobbled around its axis without the Caesars coming onto the scene and without falling into empire in a purely theoretical way. I do think though, that you may be incorrect about the senate refusing to bend, it had been doing so consistently at the demands of the people and populari elements of their leaders. Given my obtuse argument, it's possible they continued to bend enough to prevent outright rebellion enough to still ensure their status. Big Beef City fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 03:30
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Dan Carlin makes a good point in his History of Rome podcast that as soon as it became apparent that a person could gain power by becoming a reformer and a champion of the plebs, it was basically inevitable that the Republic would fall, or at least turn into something that was definitely not the Republic. The crux of his argument is that with Rome's hyper-competitive atmosphere, if there was a path to power, someone was going to take it. Then, each reformer in turn would look at the ones that came before, see how they got power but also how they got killed, then work out a way to get to the same power without getting killed. It took a few of them to get to the point of Sulla, who basically provided the blueprint for how to get absolute power. At that point, Carlin argues that there was no possible way the Republic could survive, since even though Sulla stepped down from his position, and even if Caesar had done the exact same, it was only a matter of time until someone would not step down, and then we'd be in Empire. I'm not sure how much this is backed up by scholarship, but it was a very compelling argument when I listened to the podcast. Would anyone be willing to comment on it?
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Nov 7, 2013 03:45
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What Carlin says in that podcast series is basically all in line with the common opinions of modern scholarship. The Roman system was designed to push the most capable people to the top and reward ambition/risk taking. In a society with strict taboos on taking too much power, a state first mentality, and functioning republican institutions this worked pretty well most of the time, providing a lot of very capable men in leadership positions. But it contained its own destruction and as soon as people realized they could push past the boundaries and succeed, it was inevitable the system would consume itself and turn into a monarchy with regular civil strife. Don't underestimate the taboos. People probably honestly believed that bringing troops into Rome would cause the gods to literally strike you down for your violation of the sacred barrier. Then it happened, and nothing happened. Put together enough of that and all of a sudden nothing is stopping you from taking universal power.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:07
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If only someone did carry out the punishment of the gods the first time it happened, things could have gone very differently. A well timed arrow or the like.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:55
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There's a very fun - and very stupid, even more stupid than these things are wont to be - [want of a] nail for you. Sulla crosses the pomerium with his soldiers and has a well timed heart attack. The taboo is reinforced a thousand times over. Military power doesn't become irrelevant but has to be applied in ways which are at least a little more subtle. Interesting new directions appear for the twilight of the Republic.
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Nov 7, 2013 10:54
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Yep, it's really far out, but it goes to show how little was keeping ambitious Romans from carrying out their will militarily even back home. He did it, and succeeded massively, which not only showed the taboo to be a hollow threat, but that you don't even suffer misfortune as a result.
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Nov 7, 2013 11:40
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Please list all historical inaccuracies kthanks.
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Nov 7, 2013 12:09
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Roman's didn't have yellow skin, and they had five fingers, not two.
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Nov 7, 2013 12:33
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I think the armor is a bit off too, at least on the sculpted abs.
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Nov 7, 2013 13:29
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veekie posted:I think the armor is a bit off too, at least on the sculpted abs. That's obviously supposed to be Antony, are you trying to imply he wasn't the kind of guy that would go all in for a sweet custom-sculpted breastplate?  Edit: It's actually a centurion but I'll never apologize for an Antony joke Jazerus fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 15:09
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Eifert Posting posted:Please list all historical inaccuracies kthanks. Starting with what I presume to be Caesar. Caesar was bald, so the hair's all off. Romans also did not typically write dispatches on plastic scrolls the size of their torsos. The quotation is accurate, but the presentation is all wrong. His toga has some issues as well. The way the toga was wrapped, the left arm was essentially useless, so having it out and holding the scroll is just not possible. It isn't draping down his arms at all, either. As for the color and the fastener, they had lots of designs so no way to really call that. I can't tell if he's supposed to be wearing caligares or not. Now for our centurion. There were probably multiple designs of the fan on the helmet, but typically they were half circles. That one is a bit short. The helmet itself is actually quite good, using the one you gave me to see the sides. We can presume the cheek guards are hanging loose and that's why they're not providing much protection. The armor appears to be far more Greek than Roman. Right around the shoulders we have the plates of lorica segmentata, but the sculpted abs part I'm not sure we ever saw in Roman armor. And it wouldn't be paired with the shoulder pieces, anyway. His gladius is far too long, that's more like a spatha, and judging by the rest of the figures it's not from the right time period to be using a spatha. It's hard to tell what's going on with his legs, but it looks like it could be the skirt thing so it's fine. Again, unsure about the feet. The legionary is the most accurate of the bunch, I think. Lorica segmentata wasn't as widespread as it's pictured, but legionaries did use it and it looked basically like that. Again, it's lacking arm parts. The scutum is good, perhaps a bit small. The spear is puzzling, since that looks like what a triarius would be armed with, but I am pretty sure lorica segmentata came into use after the Marian reforms. However, it's not unreasonable that a legionary could have a spear for a special reason. The murmillo has some issues. The helmet is appropriate. The gladius again looks too long, though it's not entirely unreasonable that a murmillo would have a nonstandard weapon. They were equipped the same usually but who knows. He has the correct belt/torso, so that's good. He lacks an arm guard, which would be on his sword arm. The shield is also wrong; murmillos were equipped with a scutum, not a circular shield. They were intended to be heavily armed and well protected. I have no idea what's up with his legs.
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Nov 7, 2013 15:14
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Toga is much to red.
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Nov 7, 2013 15:29
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The real problem is that the goddamn legionaries are all sold out and going for like $15+ apiece on ebay (iirc the original price is 2.99). Edit: Saw this at the SLC Comicon. 
Godholio fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 18:23
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You guys are missing the most obvious problem, to go back to height chat, Romans weren't 3 inches tall
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Nov 7, 2013 21:09
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Godholio posted:The real problem is that the goddamn legionaries are all sold out and going for like $15+ apiece on ebay (iirc the original price is 2.99). That is cool and all but please post a picture of what looks like a giant castle next to it!
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Nov 7, 2013 21:19
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I didn't actually take a picture of it, but it's in the background of this pic of the Argonath from Lord of the Rings. Edit: Helm's Deep to the left.
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Nov 7, 2013 21:41
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For starters, don't they know that's geographically incorrect? Helm's Deep is nowhere near the Argonath. At least I don't think so. Time to go look at the map!
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Nov 7, 2013 21:47
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Mr Wind Up Bird posted:
I must be an idiot because I don't see it? And since I'm posting: 1)I remember reading about forestation in Europe 2000 years ago, this was in a pop sci mag so make what you want of it, thing is if you take Caesar's descriptions of Gaul and match it with today's France it's pretty much the same. Sure there was probably more trees but the difference may have been less dramatic than we imagine with today's 16.9 million hectares (41 million acres) of forest. 2) The ancient Greeks purported colour blindness: I always assumed that "bronze" did double duty as "shiny", so a bronze sky is a brilliant sky? French historian Michel Pastoureau has published a series of books on colours through history, mostly on their symbolic significance and such, and he admitted that trying to describe the colour green in ancient Greek is a real challenge, there is simply no word for it. 3) Tell me about the Dorian Invasion? Yeah, Wiki gives me the common run-down but digging around a bit and even the most basic aspects are open to interpretation; for starters the verbs used by the Greeks themselves (katienai and katerchesthai)to describe the event aren't really those of invasion or return but rather "come down/ come down upon" or even "be thrust down", as in To come down from a plateau to a valley, or from Earth to Hell. I remember hearing a lecturer (either McInnerney or R.C.Hale) airing his pet theory in that the Dorians were in Greece all along, just at the lower rungs of society and eventually overthrew the ruling class. He admitted to having no evidence of this, just that he liked the idea. 4) Barbaros: foreigners speak funny, sounds like bar-bar-bar to me, amirite? This is the common explanation, so often repeated it counts as litteral truth and yet it irks me beyond reason, it's so pat. I'm not suggesting the Greeks didn't look down their noses at foreigners, we know they did, but this just seems so uncharacteristic; a jab from a Greek is an ironic thrust with sardonic barbs dipped mockery. Add to it that Barbaros wasn't even always pejorative. The earliest occurence of the word is a Mycenean inscription (in linear B possibly?) and transcribes as Paparo which to me suggests a different origin. Thoughts?
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Nov 7, 2013 23:15
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I guess Augustus was the guy who finally perfected what Marius and Sulla started and Caesar took to the next level. He got himself ultimate power, then offered to give it up only for the Senate to beg him to retain his ultimate authority over them - he got to have his cake and eat it too, because he'd set the situation up perfectly so that nobody could handle the idea of him not being around to tell them what to do*. * Just don't call yourself King while you're doing it! 
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Nov 8, 2013 00:08
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Octy posted:For starters, don't they know that's geographically incorrect? Helm's Deep is nowhere near the Argonath. You're totally right. Helm's Deep is in the northwest of Rohan near the Gap of Rohan, not far south of Isengard actually. The Argonath marks Rohan's southern border with Gondor at least 300 miles away from Helm's Deep.
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Nov 8, 2013 00:18
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Grand Fromage posted:The murmillo has some issues.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:10
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Mr Havafap posted:2) The ancient Greeks purported colour blindness: I always assumed that "bronze" did double duty as "shiny", so a bronze sky is a brilliant sky? I think the issue is not so much color blindness as a labeling issue. We have words for ROYGBIV, roughly, but those aren't 'inherent' values. Just names that we know because well, this is red we all agree so let's call this red and so red becomes red. Things get weird around the edges. E.g., when faced with a greeny bluey sort of color we get: 'Dude, that's totally Green' 'nah man, it's blue!' 'the word is teal.' That last response is actually important; having a word for a wavelenght that someone else would lump into a single 'color' increases your ability to differentiate within what that one person considers just one 'color' (this is a pretty much 100% mental thing, not rods or cones) The classic example of this is Russian, which sort of has two words for what English speakers would call 'light' and 'dark' blue. So if you put the two next to each other, both me and my Russian friend would say 'oh yeah, those two are totally different,' but in a vacuum, I'd go 'blue' to both where as he'd give a different response. This translates to him doing better at differentiation tests w/r/t blue. ANYWAY this gets really interesting when you aren't dealing with labeling sub divisions between what you'd consider 'one color' but rather the dividing line between one color and another. I'll try to be more clear. Color is a spectrum, so let's say we call this red, orange, and yellow: :-----:------:------: But then we run into a culture that has different words for colors. Call it ared, aorange, and ayellow. :--------:------:---: So you do that translation thing where you grunt and point and go 'me Tarzan, you Jane' until you get to colors. And you point to a firetruck and go 'red.' And Jane says ared. Then Jane points to a traffic cone and goes "Red!" And you say "no Jane you dumbass, that's orange." And then she points to a person on Jersey Shore and says "aorange" and then you say "Oh, that's orange too." And then she says "Tarzan you dumb rear end you just pointed to that ared cone and said it was orange and now you're pointing to that aorange douchenozzle and calling him orange too, what the gently caress?" And then you start arguing about what color lemons are an the whole thing goes to poo poo. Anyway, yeah, translating old poo poo can be hard because we look at them describe an abronze bronze thing and are like it translates to bronze! And then they call something, I dunno, red abronze and we all get very upset.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:30
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the JJ posted:Anyway, yeah, translating old poo poo can be hard because we look at them describe an abronze bronze thing and are like it translates to bronze! And then they call something, I dunno, red abronze and we all get very upset. Well I think we all know how to resolve this issue. Carthage must be destroyed.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:05
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Grand Fromage posted:Starting with what I presume to be Caesar. Caesar was bald, so the hair's all off. Romans also did not typically write dispatches on plastic scrolls the size of their torsos. The quotation is accurate, but the presentation is all wrong. His toga has some issues as well. The way the toga was wrapped, the left arm was essentially useless, so having it out and holding the scroll is just not possible. It isn't draping down his arms at all, either. As for the color and the fastener, they had lots of designs so no way to really call that. I can't tell if he's supposed to be wearing caligares or not. Obviously an aged Augustus pointing to the scroll and shouting to no one in particular "Like THIS Quintilius Varus! THIIIIS!!"
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Nov 8, 2013 02:52
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On the colour thing, additionally (as has been mentioned before in the thread by people who know more than me), most of the Greek writings we've got that get used as a basis for this are poetics and we don't really know what kind of role colour descriptors might play. They describe the sky as bronze, maybe for them that did just stand for bright. The sea is the colour of wine, perhaps they are conveying the darkness and depth of the sea at that time rather than saying it was literally a light red because they were all red/green colour blind. Basically it's an explanation that should have a lot more in the way of physical evidence today (relative proportion of colour blind people in the area isn't really outside the norm) and could be explained in ways that require far less unsupported and unlikely hypotheses. It's a neat little idea and it's not totally impossible but it's a bit like finding a plane that looks vaguely like our idea of a flying saucer in Polynesia and asserting that this ancient culture had some understanding of modern aerodynamics. It's one explanation but there's quite a few that are much better.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:22
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I think I brought up before that the word green is new over here in Korean/Japanese, and green things are still commonly called blue or drawn as blue. All the traffic lights in the English books I teach are drawn as red, yellow, and blue, despite them being the same colors as in the US. But the word used for the green light means blue, so. The sun is also always drawn bright red, which I assume is the same deal.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:25
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The Chinese have a word for brown but they hardly ever use it. Everything from bright yellow to mahogany is yellow. They also have two words for green, one for green and one for a more subtle(?) green that was described to me as "the green that comes out of black"  Western people without jet black hair have to get used to hearing about how yellow our hair is.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:34
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Big Beef City posted:Obviously an aged Augustus pointing to the scroll and shouting to no one in particular "Like THIS Quintilius Varus! THIIIIS!!" This is kind of a segue but when I was young I did the whole GSL thing in Ohio in high school and I would make a Latin themed board game each year. My senior year I made this:  The Game was "Give me back my legions." You would answer a trivia question, and if you got it right there would be a number under the answer based on difficulty. Whatever number that was you'd be able to flick the dowel rod and slam Augustus's head into the wall. Every time you flicked Augustus's head into a wall, there was a slim chance the mechanism would trip and the rubberband in the internals would cause the wooden legionary to flip up. Your goal was to trip the mechanism three times, causing Augustus to hallucinate his three missing legions. It broke in transit.  I won nothing. On the bright side my double doctorate (physics/medicine) medical pioneer Grandfather said it was the "cleverest drat thing" he'd ever seen and cackled like mad when I showed it to him. He apparently kept it until he died; it was in his family room after he passed. He was notoriously tight-fisted with praise so 
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Nov 8, 2013 05:15
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Arglebargle III posted:They also have two words for green, one for green and one for a more subtle(?) green that was described to me as "the green that comes out of black" Dark green?
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Nov 8, 2013 05:43
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Eifert Posting posted:Your goal was to trip the mechanism three times, causing Augustus to hallucinate his three missing legions. Amazing, your Granddad was right to be proud.
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Nov 8, 2013 06:34
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Arglebargle III posted:The Chinese have a word for brown but they hardly ever use it. Everything from bright yellow to mahogany is yellow. They also have two words for green, one for green and one for a more subtle(?) green that was described to me as "the green that comes out of black" In Taiwan it's pretty common to hear something described as 咖啡色 or "the color of coffee". This is what is now taught in textbooks as the official Chinese word for brown.
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Nov 8, 2013 08:10
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