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Tao Jones posted:The alternative would be to appoint a tax official, and given that it's Rome, that tax official was probably going to steal as much as he could get away with stealing anyway. Selling the rights to collect taxes in some area for $X guarantees that the state is going to have revenues of $X regardless of how much extra the tax farmers collect. It also lets the government shield itself from abuses by allowing people to make an argument like "the government's taxes are fair, but those rotten tax farmers, you see..." During the reign of Bush II, Congress tried privatizing some tax collection efforts away from the IRS. The program was quietly scrapped in 2009, and a recent study showed that the private tax collectors had worse results along with worse customer service scores; but the spirit of tax farming lives on today.
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May 13, 2014 04:28
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rock rock posted:From a week and a page ago: I have been thinking about this since you posted it and have not arrived at an answer yet. I can tell you that there were regions beyond the Rhine, particularly in North Germany, that never adopted serfdom, or at the very least abandoned it sooner than everyone else. The Carolingians are a likely possibility and you probably should ask in the medieval history thread - whatever the answer is, it's post-classical.
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May 13, 2014 23:39
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How did mercenaries work in antiquity? Like, Would there be established professionalish mercenary 'businesses' or was it normally just a case of roaming around from town to town trying to get any energetic peasants you can to fight for your cause? I can imagine it being pretty intimidating to see a foreign army coming into town, all of the soldiers looking manly and strong, promising to you that your nations enemies will destroyed, and all the loot you can carry will be yours if you join up in arms. I'd be like "gently caress yeah" if Hannibal marched into my hamlet and promised me to fight for him. He was so successful that his soldiers literally worshiped him. All that plunder his army got from the Italian country side was probably pretty mountainous until the Romans wised up against him. Imapanda fucked around with this message at 05:33 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 18, 2014 05:30
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There were essentially two categories of mercenary. One were mercenary companies which work about the way you'd expect. There will also be people who just want to fight and aren't in any sort of formal company, they roam around. The majority were guys who knew how to fight and didn't have anything else to do. Say the king of Buttfuck needs to attack the king of Whateverville. He raises a bunch of soldiers and has a war. After the war, the soldiers are released from service. They will do the following: A) Go home to their farms. This is what the majority do. B) Go home to their farms but whoops they've been burned and everything is gone. Now you either have to rebuild, move somewhere else, or take all that military equipment you have (now your only possessions) and go make a living fighting. C) Stabbing people in the face and looting their villages was awesome! I don't want to go farm anymore. Time to find a new king who will pay me to fight. There are enough governments and enough wars going on throughout the classical world that guys can be roaming around fighting for different people literally their whole lives without much difficulty. Celts and Greeks did a lot of it. Being a mercenary on the winning side of a war against rich people was a good get rich quick method in the ancient world since you'd get plenty of loot, in addition to your payment.
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May 18, 2014 05:36
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That was also kind of the one weird trick Romans did that was good, idle men with weapons leads to a lot of issues. So now you give them land or a pension or when youre not fighting youre building roads. But they also gave to much power to generals which became a never ending crisis because rich assholes with personal armies is never a good thing.
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May 18, 2014 22:39
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Berke Negri posted:That was also kind of the one weird trick Romans did that was good, idle men with weapons leads to a lot of issues. So now you give them land or a pension or when youre not fighting youre building roads. The thing is, in the early Republic having a farm, land, money or whatever, was the requisite for serving in the army, the small land owners were the backbone of the Republican army for a long time, the poor just didn't have a meaningful position in it. But in the time of the late Republic, a farm was not a requisite to serve in the army, but the final reward for it. Such irony.
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May 18, 2014 22:48
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Berke Negri posted:That was also kind of the one weird trick This sentence sets my teeth on edge.
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May 19, 2014 15:30
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WoodrowSkillson posted:This sentence sets my teeth on edge. Parthians hate it!
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May 19, 2014 18:06
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Strategic Tea posted:Parthians hate it! taste my blade
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May 19, 2014 18:31
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Grand Fromage posted:There were essentially two categories of mercenary. One were mercenary companies which work about the way you'd expect. Actually, can you go into any detail on the late Ptolemaic dynasty, and how they were viewed by the native Egyptians and the Romans? I kinda got the impression that they were viewed as degenerate. And not in the glamorous Kardashian way, more like the Honey Boo Boo way.
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May 19, 2014 20:13
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Berke Negri posted:or when youre not fighting youre building roads. Who was the Emperor who got murdered because he was overheard joking(?) that he wanted the army from this point forward to occupy itself doing nothing but public works during peacetime?
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May 20, 2014 05:38
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Jerusalem posted:Who was the Emperor who got murdered because he was overheard joking(?) that he wanted the army from this point forward to occupy itself doing nothing but public works during peacetime? Aurelian?
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May 20, 2014 05:44
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Deification of the Emperors. Any records on how seriously this was taken? Did people actually believe the Emperors became gods, or was it seen as more of a pleasant but meaningless posthumous honour? I'm trying to imagine the chain of logic, and the best thing I can think of is: there's an afterlife, we all go there, but Emperors can't be expected to mix with the poors in heaven, so they'll probably be chilling with Zeus. Or was it really believed that they are literally living gods with the power to end drought and answer prayers, etc.
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May 20, 2014 07:12
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Oberleutnant posted:Deification of the Emperors. Any records on how seriously this was taken? Did people actually believe the Emperors became gods, or was it seen as more of a pleasant but meaningless posthumous honour? I'm trying to imagine the chain of logic, and the best thing I can think of is: there's an afterlife, we all go there, but Emperors can't be expected to mix with the poors in heaven, so they'll probably be chilling with Zeus. Or was it really believed that they are literally living gods with the power to end drought and answer prayers, etc. I thought it was more about the right to rule which was derived from the honor of ones own ancestry. You're the son of a spanish nobody, I'm the son of a god. My right to rule is greater than yours. Claiming that if I was made ruler I could ask divine favor from my deified father for the benefit of all romans everywhere was probably just icing on the cake. Similar to how before the emperors, everyone who was anyone wanted to claim ancestry from a patrician family, and patricians wanted to claim ancestry from gods and demigods (Julians -> Venus, Antonians -> Hercules etc). If you were a plebian family with the same name as an unrelated patrician family, it was assumed that at some point in the mists of time your ancestor was a slave to the patrician household, unless you could prove otherwise (often through claiming descent). But I'm no expert.
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May 20, 2014 07:35
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Origin posted:Aurelian? No, he's the one who was killed by a conspiracy spearheaded by a guy who was scared he was going to get fired/punished for some minor bullshit and so made up a story about Aurelian preparing to arrest a bunch of high ranking guys and execute them. Once Aurelian was dead and they realized they'd been played, I'm pretty sure they straight up murdered the guy for basically loving up the entire Empire with his bullshit. It's a drat shame, because all signs seem to be that Aurelian was getting Rome's poo poo together and after his death things were pretty lovely till Diocletian came along.
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May 20, 2014 07:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Can you go into any detail on the mercenaries that made up the Ptolemys' armies in the late Republic? The late Ptolemaic army had mercenaries from all over the place. Kleopatra VII had a royal guard of Galatians. There were other nationalities such as Nabaeatan Arabs, Libyans and Jews equipped as heavy to light infantry. There was also several thousand roman soldiers that had settled down earlier under Ptolemy XII, that functioned as part of his guard.
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May 20, 2014 09:46
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Oberleutnant posted:Deification of the Emperors. Any records on how seriously this was taken? If you are making oblations to your dead grandparents, making oblations to dead emperors does not seem like particular stretch. To a common person everything would be magical and under an influence of the spirits, would it be not?
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May 20, 2014 10:32
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Augustus had some sneaky poo poo going on in his lifetime which, while just about avoiding the look of deifying himself as a mortal, would almost certainly have put him in line for being believed in when he popped his clogs. People happened to be making altars to the numen of Augustus, and Augustus let it be known that while he would never conscience altars to him, he was pretty OK with altars to an indefinable, immortal spiritual part of him. Turning from that to worshipping the dead Augustus in full is a very small stretch.
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May 20, 2014 12:59
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On worshiping Emperors, it varied but in general the eastern part took it more seriously than the western. The west tended to find it outrageous or silly, while the east had a long history of doing it. You can't forget how different the ancient and modern concepts of God are. If you think of the modern all powerful, all knowing, creator of the universe and stick a human in the role, it sounds silly. But take a Greek or Roman myth, with gods who supernatural, but limited, powers, are fooled all the time, and didn't create anything, and stick a human in that, they fit much better. My favorite is still the Emperor who, on his deathbed, said "oh dear, I'm turning into a god."
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May 20, 2014 14:30
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Any word on how the Romans understood history before the founding of Rome? They knew the Egyptians were ancient of course but I'm interested in how the Greeks and Romans would view the likes of Sumeria, Gilgamesh and the pre agricultural societies they descend from. I've long had a pet theory that Herakles represents some kind of civilizing force from this time period.
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May 20, 2014 15:18
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My favorite story about the deification of emperors is Vespasian's last words, a bemused "Dear me, I believe I am becoming a god."
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May 20, 2014 15:45
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I'm fairly sure it was Antoninus who actually threatened to refuse to don the purple if the Senate didn't deify Hadrian (his adopted father). I don't know how much impact it had on actual impressions of legitimacy/right to rule simply because actual Imperial dynasties weren't the norm. That said I can believe it was taken far more seriously in the East, where cults and kings as gods had far more heritage. And yeah, when you've got a culture that venerates the ancestors and believes they can affect your fortune and events in day to day life then it makes sense that someone who could affect the life and events of most of the known world in their life would be pretty big deal in the afterlife as well. Modern ideas of a totally separate heaven/hell with an all-powerful single God are so different from Classical conceptions (and in many other places today) that using the same words actually kind of confuses the issue.
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May 20, 2014 16:16
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Bitter Mushroom posted:Any word on how the Romans understood history before the founding of Rome? They knew the Egyptians were ancient of course but I'm interested in how the Greeks and Romans would view the likes of Sumeria, Gilgamesh and the pre agricultural societies they descend from. I've long had a pet theory that Herakles represents some kind of civilizing force from this time period. PS: sure there were philosophers and other ne'er-do-wells that thought otherwise and would wildly fabulate on the matter after they drank too much wine. Gladi fucked around with this message at 19:30 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 19:26
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Jerusalem posted:No, he's the one who was killed by a conspiracy spearheaded by a guy who was scared he was going to get fired/punished for some minor bullshit and so made up a story about Aurelian preparing to arrest a bunch of high ranking guys and execute them. Once Aurelian was dead and they realized they'd been played, I'm pretty sure they straight up murdered the guy for basically loving up the entire Empire with his bullshit. Probus. Though there are conflicting reports on whether he died to disgruntled solders, or died when a more liked usurper arose and his men defected.
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May 20, 2014 20:08
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"Vae, puto deus fio" were Vespasian's words when his final illness started to become apparent (or at least, that's what Suetonius would like to believe). As for his last words: imperatorem ait stantem mori oportere. E: Since I just thought of it - what kind of crazy provincial hick grammar is this, Vespasian? puto fio? Sleep of Bronze fucked around with this message at 22:04 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 20:45
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Gladi posted:Sumer's big thing is that before the archeological finds nobody knew about them. ( since then we dug out few more "forgotten" civilizations) The oldest civilizations known were Babylon and egypt, but then again they were not known like they are today. Romans did not have the roll of kings nor archives of written sources. The historical narrative went from myth to actual historical facts. As I understand it though, they did not have this idea of Progress. The ancestors of Romans were never hunter-gatherers. Gods made them and their civilisation wholesale. They certainly knew quite a bit about Egypt, wouldn't surprise me if they had access to more historical records from Egypt than we do today; Rome always seemed captivated by its ancientness.
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May 20, 2014 21:33
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Beamed posted:They certainly knew quite a bit about Egypt, wouldn't surprise me if they had access to more historical records from Egypt than we do today; Rome always seemed captivated by its ancientness. While there most likely was more information of certain type and some few hobbyist even went looking for them, there is one thing. There is less time difference between me and Augustus, than between Augustus and the builders of the pyramids. The interested romans and greeks would most likely ask egyptians about the pyramid and got a stock narrative. I do not think that the idea of digging looking records and breaking into tombs to look at writing would even occur to them.
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May 20, 2014 22:13
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Vespasian was pretty cool. Apparently he was shown an invention once that could do the work of several men and save the empire a lot of money, and he declined to make use of it because then he'd have a bunch of unemployed people sitting around with nothing to do and he knew that wasn't going to work out well for anybody.CharlestheHammer posted:Probus. Thanks, yeah that's the poor bastard I was thinking of.
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May 20, 2014 23:19
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Oberleutnant posted:Deification of the Emperors. Any records on how seriously this was taken? Did people actually believe the Emperors became gods, or was it seen as more of a pleasant but meaningless posthumous honour? I'm trying to imagine the chain of logic, and the best thing I can think of is: there's an afterlife, we all go there, but Emperors can't be expected to mix with the poors in heaven, so they'll probably be chilling with Zeus. Or was it really believed that they are literally living gods with the power to end drought and answer prayers, etc. Mostly "pleasant posthumous honor" but a little bit of "you could actually pray to Julius Caesar". The Roman divine world had different aspects to it -- the quality that distinguished a deus(ie. Jupiter) was that he/she possessed numen, or divine power. But there were quite a lot of spirits who were supernatural or divine but did not possess numen or possessed it only in some lesser capacity. These included things like household gods, gods of a particular neighborhood or locality, ancestral shades, heroes like Aeneas, your conscience, and so on. These have some degree of divine power, but not numen. (I'm not Catholic so I might be off-base, but I imagine it's a bit like Catholic saints -- they have some limited intercessory power and if you're in trouble within their domain it can't hurt to light a candle to them.) On the fringes of that were the di parentes, or honored ancestors, who were accorded a ritual cult and existed on the fringe between the earthly realm and the divine realm. These were real flesh and blood people and if your great-grandfather or whoever was accorded this honor, you could actually pray to him and people wouldn't think you were weird. At the beginning, the imperial cult was more along the lines of auto-including the recently deceased emperor as an honored ancestor to every Roman, on the basis that he was paterfamilias to all of Rome. As time went on, this shifted to include living emperors and then title creep set in, to the point where the living emperor Caracalla was described as "he of the numinous presence". In a theological sense, what happened to the spirit of a deified emperor was left to the imagination. The word used to describe them, coelicola, might be translated as heaven-dweller, which is different than the word used to describe a shade.
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May 21, 2014 03:17
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Was the Emperor being considered the paterfamilias of all Rome something that came up right from the start, or only after Augustus was able to eventually tie in the Pontifex Maximus role to all his other many honors? My understanding was that the Pontifex Maximus was considered THE moral authority for all Rome, but maybe I'm just putting the cart before the horse and it was only considered such a prestigious role because of Julius (and later Augustus') time in the role?
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May 21, 2014 03:30
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Jerusalem posted:Was the Emperor being considered the paterfamilias of all Rome something that came up right from the start, or only after Augustus was able to eventually tie in the Pontifex Maximus role to all his other many honors? The Pontifex Maximus was a very, very important post even before Caesar and Augustus. It was basically a post created (according to myth, but seems a pretty likely version) after the overthrow of the king. As with many cultures back then the king was the one who was supposed to intervene with the gods in favour of his people. When they killed the last king there was of course a need to still continue this role - and the Pontifex Maximus is exactly that. He was the chief/high priest of the Roman state, high moral authority, presided over major religious (and state) festivities and ceremonies and had a prestige in many ways by far outstripping that of the Consuls, but he had no direct political power. However I wouldn't say the paterfamilias part of the Emperor came from it (or at least not for the most part), I think the clients system has probably far more to do with it, and how Augustus (and then his successors) saw himself and acted with the whole Princeps concept. Decius fucked around with this message at 11:44 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 11:40
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Could you make an analogy between the Pater Familias and, say, the British monarch? The latter in practical terms is the highest authority in the land and head of the established religion but doesn't have any practical political power. Obviously they diverge quite a bit if you consider powers on the books but as a loose analogy of the role...
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May 21, 2014 13:36
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MrNemo posted:Could you make an analogy between the Pater Familias and, say, the British monarch? The latter in practical terms is the highest authority in the land and head of the established religion but doesn't have any practical political power. Obviously they diverge quite a bit if you consider powers on the books but as a loose analogy of the role... I'm not sure the analogy holds up very well. The Pater Familias had authority and accountability, whereas the later Western monarchs had sovereignty. Sovereignty was more akin to imperium than to auctoritas.
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May 21, 2014 14:52
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Gladi posted:While there most likely was more information of certain type and some few hobbyist even went looking for them, there is one thing. There is less time difference between me and Augustus, than between Augustus and the builders of the pyramids. The interested romans and greeks would most likely ask egyptians about the pyramid and got a stock narrative. I do not think that the idea of digging looking records and breaking into tombs to look at writing would even occur to them. Sure, but as you said, Egypt is incredibly old; there's still quite a bit we don't know about the Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, etc. that I'd be willing to put money on at least the Ptolemies having an idea about; the pyramids were entirely an Old Kingdom construction and not really relevant to Egypt's long history.
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May 21, 2014 15:58
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How common was wage labor in the Roman economy? If I remember correctly in traditional Marxist thinking ancient slavery supposedly marginalized other forms of work, but I'm curious if that was really the case.
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May 21, 2014 18:30
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BurningStone posted:On worshiping Emperors, it varied but in general the eastern part took it more seriously than the western. The west tended to find it outrageous or silly, while the east had a long history of doing it. It's also worth considering that the veneration of emperors as deities changed over the course of the empire as well. During the Principate, emperors were primarily deified posthumously; they were not literal ruling gods, they would just later become gods. This changed in the dominate, when it became standard for emperors to be deified while living. I have heard (probably from the History of Rome podcast) that this was a conscious attempt to elevate the emperors above the "normal people" to avoid a repeat of the crisis of the third century. If the emperor's just a regular guy, then anyone can become emperor. If the emperor is a literal god walking among us, that suggests it isn't a position you can just usurp your way into.
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May 21, 2014 19:00
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deadking posted:How common was wage labor in the Roman economy? If I remember correctly in traditional Marxist thinking ancient slavery supposedly marginalized other forms of work, but I'm curious if that was really the case. Even slaves got paid wages, of a sort. Well, I don't know if that extended to all slaves, slaves working in mines might not. But you're already dead in that case.
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May 21, 2014 19:43
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Some slavery related questions. To what extent did slaveowners have a duty of care towards their own slaves in the greco-roman world? Could you kill or maim them just for fun. Could someone legally own another member of their own family as slaves? (For instance, a man goes bankrupt and becomes a slave, could his brother legally buy and own him?)
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May 21, 2014 23:22
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To give one example, Roman law prohibited masters from castrating their slaves except for medical reasons. The stuff I've read, however, generally suggests that this prohibition was either a reaction to eunuchs' perceived foreignness (although eunuchs were fairly popular as slaves) or an attempt to protect a Roman sense of masculinity rather than concern for the welfare of the slave.
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May 22, 2014 03:16
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Baudolino posted:Some slavery related questions. "Duty" is overstating it. There was a societal motif that only a shithead would abuse his slaves to no purpose except his own pleasure, but there was nothing forcibly preventing a slaveowner from killing his slave just because he felt like it. We've talked a bit about slavery in the thread before, and it's important to keep in mind that slaves could be valuable members of the household -- doctors, accountants, teachers, scribes, et cetera, as well as menial labor. While ancient slavery was undoubtedly a cruel practice, it was different from American chattel slavery in many ways. So in some cases, there were practical restrictions on what a master could do -- just because you wouldn't want to start beating your accountant or physician because you feel like it. I'm not entirely sure about taking kin as slaves. Rome was a very family-oriented society, so that situation seems like it would be outlandish and a transgression against social mores. Going bankrupt and selling your son into slavery to someone else was perfectly legit, though.
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May 22, 2014 04:21
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