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Grand Fromage posted:The fact that Romans figured out concrete that would harden underwater is still mindblowing to me. The idea of figuring that out without any scientific understanding of chemistry or physics. That seems like something that could be discovered by accident. Like, one time some liquid concrete wound up in water and they found that it would still set.
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Dec 19, 2014 13:40
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Exioce posted:Which brings up an interesting question, was there ever something like a Department for Scientific Discovery? Like specialists employed by the state whose sole job was to conduct experiments and come up with new stuff? Like GF said, none of which we are aware. It does bring up that same interesting void I've mentioned before, with respect to centurions and how they knew their trade. The Roman Empire wasn't a collection of huts squatting on the North Sea. It was an incredibly intricate and advanced civilization, spanning thousands of mile and millions of people. And those people and miles are getting protected and fed pretty well for a very long time. There's a degree of sophistication there which is very unlikely to be achieved without a lot of clever people working very hard, and I'm not talking about the Senate. The education required for this could not have been just entrusted to the laissez faire Roman educational "system" that we know of, in my opinion. The centurions are a perfect example. Guys with a very high level of knowledge and practical skills, also with a high mortality rate. Yet the Roman army never really loses the body of knowledge possessed by the centurion corps. Doesn't matter how many you kill, they always get more of them, and they always still know how to walk into a forest with an axe and a bunch of semi-educated grunts, and walk out days later rolling a siege tower. They know how to assemble and transport complex siege weapons, over land and sea. How to read maps, pack a cargo hold, how much food to carry, how many nails to bring. How to run real logistics. That's got to be institutional knowledge. I think some group was collecting and disseminating that information, and making sure Rome never lost its military edge. Other societies could get their poo poo together for a generation or three, but Rome keeps this going century after century. This had to be more than just centurions chatting over campfires, or trusting to luck that enough of one generation hangs around to teach the next one. If Caesar had put even one line in Gallic Wars about shipping someone back to Rome to learn how to hammer a ballista together, we might have our answer. But he didn't. It's sort of a missing link. Maybe there was a group of Roman military academies, and if so, there may have been civilian ones as well. It would explain a great deal.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:13
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We at least know they had military manuals, since some survive today and even more were around in the Middle Ages for medieval kings to crib ideas from. But I agree, I'd be very surprised if they didn't have some sort of officer's schools. If there's any one hallmark of the Romans it's organization, and that's just such an obvious idea I can't imagine they missed it.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:17
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Grand Fromage posted:We at least know they had military manuals, since some survive today and even more were around in the Middle Ages for medieval kings to crib ideas from. But I agree, I'd be very surprised if they didn't have some sort of officer's schools. If there's any one hallmark of the Romans it's organization, and that's just such an obvious idea I can't imagine they missed it. I think a lot of it was also built into the cursus honorum -- at each stage, you saw higher and higher levels of management, until you were promoted past your level of competence and sued into oblivion.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:41
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That might work for the nobility but the centurions are another thing. We know the legions had formal training and officers who were in charge of that. Legionaries were required to learn all sorts of basic field construction and engineering. I think centurions mostly were for leadership, which is something that could be developed without formal schooling, and the legions had full time engineers who knew how to design and build the sorts of machinery they would use in the field. There were various types of specialist soldiers who were excused from camp duty because they had specific skills like constructing siege equipment. Presumably they had some way of teaching that to new soldiers, though.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:46
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Made me think of this bit from Frontinusquote:. The highest is New Anio; next comes Claudia; the third place is taken by Julia; the fourth by Tepula; the last by Marcia, although at its intake this mounts even to the level of Claudia. But the ancients laid the lines of their aqueducts at a lower elevation, either because they had not yet nicely worked out the art of levelling, or because they purposely sunk their aqueducts in the ground, in order that they might not easily be cut by the enemy, since frequent wars were still waged with the Italians. But now, whenever a conduit has succumbed to old age, it is the practice to carry it in certain parts on substructures or on arches, in order to save length, abandoning the subterranean loops in the valleys.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:54
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Tunicate posted:Made me think of this bit from Frontinus Frontinus was as far removed from the first aqueduct as we are from Shakespeare.
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Dec 19, 2014 20:32
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Exioce posted:Which brings up an interesting question, was there ever something like a Department for Scientific Discovery? Like specialists employed by the state whose sole job was to conduct experiments and come up with new stuff? I work for the modern version of this, and one of our biggest thing is we created a new type of concrete that will last 100 years, making it by far the longest lasting since like 200AD.
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Dec 19, 2014 21:00
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sbaldrick posted:I work for the modern version of this, and one of our biggest thing is we created a new type of concrete that will last 100 years, making it by far the longest lasting since like 200AD.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:51
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physeter posted:Like GF said, none of which we are aware. It does bring up that same interesting void I've mentioned before, with respect to centurions and how they knew their trade. The Roman Empire wasn't a collection of huts squatting on the North Sea. It was an incredibly intricate and advanced civilization, spanning thousands of mile and millions of people. And those people and miles are getting protected and fed pretty well for a very long time. There's a degree of sophistication there which is very unlikely to be achieved without a lot of clever people working very hard, and I'm not talking about the Senate. The education required for this could not have been just entrusted to the laissez faire Roman educational "system" that we know of, in my opinion. Fascinating, isn't it? If we had some sort of ruin to point to and say "this is the academy of roman centurions", it would be so easy to comprehend, but it's probably institutional knowledge? Like a certain way that learning was organized in the army and passed on. Maybe these dudes didn't even need a roof, it's just ideas and social relations. Nothing that leaves direct traces. Also, not just like a few super specialized people that send the whole institution into a tailspin when they're gone, but many guys that "learned to learn" and are somewhat educated, who can fill the gaps and train others and keep the machine running. If nobody put these ideas to paper, we just see indirectly what they archieved. Anyway, soldiers spend an incredible ammount of time waiting, so why not put it to good use?
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Dec 19, 2014 23:40
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bean_shadow posted:What are people's opinions on the Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis? I re-read Silver Pigs for the first time in ten years and really enjoyed it and am now on to the second book. I've enjoyed the ones I read and burned through the first four in about a week. Then I got stuck because a bunch aren't available on Kindle and I'm trying to read them in order.
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Dec 20, 2014 03:14
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Tunicate posted:Made me think of this bit from Frontinus This is an interesting theme in Roman writing. You get another similar line from Trajan writing to a governor about how barbarians or ancients might accept anonymous testimony at trial, but "we modern Romans" have advanced beyond that. There's very much the opposite current in Chinese writing, which tends to elevate the past and denigrate innovation. You can find examples of both of course in both cultures, but the Romans certainly seem to have been forward-looking while the Chinese were past-looking. It was this staid adherence to hundreds-year-old norms that caused Li Si, Qin Shi Huang's second Chancellor, to flip out and order the burning of Confucian texts when one too many scholars confronted him with moronic arguments about how his institutional innovations* would never work because that's not what the Duke of Zhou did 500 years ago. *Li Si's institutional innovations lasted almost 400 years and left a permanent mark on Chinese thoughts about governance. You also get the same nostalgia in Roman writing but it's not dominant.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:38
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Europe bounced between the two. Romans definitely had a strong respect for the ancients and tradition but you're right, they were forward-thinking overall. I suspect that goes with being a state built on the ideal of endless conquest, empire without end as Jupiter promised them (according to the Aeneid anyway). Then medieval people totally threw out the idea of progress and spent centuries thinking the classical age was the peak of civilization and everything now is slowly degrading into poo poo until Judgement Day ends it all. And then in the Renaissance the idea of progress returns and the Enlightenment thinkers make it central to everything. It's pretty interesting. E: Do you know much about Chinese expansionism? I was thinking about when we were talking about Trajan and Hadrian, and it's totally reasonable to me to buy that someone like Trajan's ultimate goal as emperor was to invade and conquer India. That just fits the Roman way of things. But the idea of a Chinese emperor deciding to do that strikes me as absurd. Yet China has had its expansionist and imperialist eras, as is obvious by comparing maps over time. And as far as the emperor was concerned he was rightful sovereign of the entire planet anyway. What was their philosophy on that? Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 05:48
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I think simple geography kind of explains why China never invaded India. Or really a lot of places. At some point you hit endless steppes or mountains or Siberia. And they invaded Korea and Southeast Asia at various points. I know they had a kind of gift-tribute system in place with most of the surrounding nations as well. e: I mean its basically impossible to move an army across the Himalayas before the modern era, you would think. There's a reason the only war between India and China happened in 1962.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:05
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Mantis42 posted:I think simple geography kind of explains why China never invaded India. Or really a lot of places. At some point you hit endless steppes or mountains or Siberia. And they invaded Korea and Southeast Asia at various points. I know they had a kind of gift-tribute system in place with most of the surrounding nations as well. I still like that there's a point in history when you could fairly reasonably say you only had to enter two polities from the coast of China all the way to the Med. Tang China -> Abbasid. Sure, for both powers you're getting into proxy states in Central Asia, but they had a throw down with their relative armies and everything.
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Dec 20, 2014 07:36
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You mean the Battle of Talas? That was more like two world powers got dragged into a fight they didn't care about or understand very well by two squabbling client states. Very appropriate that it happened in the 'stans.
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Dec 20, 2014 07:57
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Arglebargle III posted:You mean the Battle of Talas? That was more like two world powers got dragged into a fight they didn't care about or understand very well by two squabbling client states. Very appropriate that it happened in the 'stans. Sure, but they dragged the standards out and made a proper mess of things is what counts. A pre-modern empire rules, more or less, wherever its armies happen to be so that's close enough for me.
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Dec 20, 2014 08:08
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I haven't read the primary sources but I've heard that tang dynasty china around that time you have people writing stuff like: where are we fighting? Why? This stuff is so remote from us why are we wasting blood and treasure out in these far-away steppes and deserts? And indeed those policies resulted in these veteran desert and steppe armies bringing the government crashing down only 4 years later. The battle may have happened but the reaction in both empires was a shrug.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:05
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In Our Time has a pretty good episode on the Battle of Talas if anybody is interested!
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Dec 20, 2014 17:38
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Arglebargle III posted:I haven't read the primary sources but I've heard that tang dynasty china around that time you have people writing stuff like: where are we fighting? Why? This stuff is so remote from us why are we wasting blood and treasure out in these far-away steppes and deserts? And indeed those policies resulted in these veteran desert and steppe armies bringing the government crashing down only 4 years later. Nah, An Lushan revolted out of the North. The armies faffing about off in the West gave him a chance to pull his poo poo, and the armies went back to put down/join the rebels, thus shrinking Chinese reach out West considerably. I mean, yeah, there really wasn't much point in it, a bit like the Romans reaching too far out into Parthia or the Umayyads pushing into Tours, Mongols reaching Japan/Ain Jalut/Vietnam. They did it, made it out there, had a scrap, lost, and then there was other poo poo to do so they went and did that instead.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:57
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bean_shadow posted:What are people's opinions on the Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis? I re-read Silver Pigs for the first time in ten years and really enjoyed it and am now on to the second book. They're really enjoyable books, though I haven't read anything new since Saturnalia was published. They're basically humorous private eye stories that happen to be set in Ancient Rome and rely perhaps a little too heavily on leaning on nods and winks to the readers about well known people/events, but they're still a lot of fun. They're also a pretty great example/reminder of,"Ancient people are pretty much exactly the same as modern people."
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Dec 21, 2014 06:44
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Ardent Communist posted:Sorry mate, but I heard they just figured out how they did it in 200AD. Volcanic sand added to the mix. That's pretty bad luck, mate. They have no been able to get that process to work in the modern world, its still missing something.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:22
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JaucheCharly posted:Fascinating, isn't it? If we had some sort of ruin to point to and say "this is the academy of roman centurions", it would be so easy to comprehend, but it's probably institutional knowledge? Like a certain way that learning was organized in the army and passed on. Maybe these dudes didn't even need a roof, it's just ideas and social relations. Nothing that leaves direct traces. Also, not just like a few super specialized people that send the whole institution into a tailspin when they're gone, but many guys that "learned to learn" and are somewhat educated, who can fill the gaps and train others and keep the machine running. If nobody put these ideas to paper, we just see indirectly what they archieved. Anyway, soldiers spend an incredible ammount of time waiting, so why not put it to good use? That may well have been the case. Caesar said specifically that he was promoting on merit, alot of the legions did. So if he promoted a legionary to bottom-level centurion, he presumably doesn't send that guy all the way back home for additional training. It's an expeditionary force. But if it's done on the march, the level of espirit on those guys had to be almost impossibly ridiculous. It's not like Caesar or Antony is going to go down there and make sure a new centurion is learning how to properly plane lumber, build axles for siege towers and sight a ballista. The upper class leadership just didn't have the skillset anyway. Everything would be clear if combat engineering were included in the list of important traits to acquire for young noblemen alongside swords and oratory, but it wasn't. Agrippa is the only one I can think of who ever appeared to give a crap about mechanical stuff, really. Without a physical situs for the knowledge, like their version of Annapolis or Sandhurst, the centurions themselves would have had to have been internally regulated and motivated far beyond our modern day picture of highly paid sergeants-in-splintmail. One day we may luck on to a diary kept by one of these guys, and I think it's going to revolutionize how we see the institution of the Roman army.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:44
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At what point do we see the Roman military system abandoning the legionary model? Like when do Romans cease to really talk in ways of legionnaires, centurions, auxiliares etc. I know eventually the east moved to the themes system which seems quite different but don't know the details of that transition.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:55
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Generally speaking, the shift was gradual as the empire stopped expanding. Once the empire set its outer-most boundary in Germania, the need for border defense outweighed everything else. Legions were still...Legions, just at the border instead of in the field. As time marches on, the empire starts shrinking/losing provinces, the border becomes more porous and cities begin walling themselves up. To deal with incursions through the porous border, you see the widespread rise of cavalry for its speed and mobility. The Legions are now not really Legions and more city-specific garrison brigades. Now you've got two fully separate forces: garrisons to defend cities and almost solely cavalry units in the field for response. At least, I believe that's how it went. It's all very gradual and, like the fall of the Western Empire, it's hard to defend any exact dates/times. You're right about the East though since they very much were still warring with neighbors so their military went about a very different transition. Thwomp fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 20:07
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physeter posted:That may well have been the case. Caesar said specifically that he was promoting on merit, alot of the legions did. So if he promoted a legionary to bottom-level centurion, he presumably doesn't send that guy all the way back home for additional training. It's an expeditionary force. But if it's done on the march, the level of espirit on those guys had to be almost impossibly ridiculous. It's not like Caesar or Antony is going to go down there and make sure a new centurion is learning how to properly plane lumber, build axles for siege towers and sight a ballista. The upper class leadership just didn't have the skillset anyway. Everything would be clear if combat engineering were included in the list of important traits to acquire for young noblemen alongside swords and oratory, but it wasn't. Agrippa is the only one I can think of who ever appeared to give a crap about mechanical stuff, really. Putting things on a list would require the fact that they're something out of the ordinary. You know, something that people would need to learn from scratch or that were in short demand. I mean, would they put farming, conserving food or woodworking on such a list? The people that they recruit have a certain age, they'd already learned a trade. Vegetius tells us about how the ideal recruit should be and that certain professions were prefered, it's at a later time, but still. It's not just "pick the strongest dudes". I do a little woodworking on the side with the bows, and in the back of my head there's this idea to make an authentic reconstruction of the Fayum shield when I have more time. I work mostly with the same tools and glue that would have been used to make such things, and let me tell you, making something like this is no joke. Especially sawing and planing such slim laths precisely is hard, you need a good workshop for that, and there's more with the steambending and glueing process involved. The process is even somewhat similar to making composite bows. Really sophisticated stuff. Isn't there mention of Caesar's men having to resort to makeshift shields out of wicker or something like that, because something happened? The laminated shields will be as sensible to moisture as the bows were. Didn't the legionaries have leather bags for their shields while on march?
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Dec 23, 2014 10:48
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I think they had leather covers, yeah. A legion also would've brought a shitload of spares, and they had mobile forges and workshops and stuff for making/repairing equipment in the field.
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Dec 23, 2014 14:28
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This sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go to to make an item people are going to be trying their hardest to gently caress with. Was it worth it?
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Dec 23, 2014 15:34
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Yep! They wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't worth it. The scutum provided an excellent balance of protection, offensive options (remember that shields are also weapons), and cost/ease of construction; it was the best shield of the ancient world.
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Dec 23, 2014 15:40
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep! They wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't worth it. The scutum provided an excellent balance of protection, offensive options (remember that shields are also weapons), and cost/ease of construction; it was the best shield of the ancient world. Speaking of Scutum.... Its my understanding that later in the empire's history, they changed the type of shield they were using for smaller ones.... Was that a cost cutting measure or was there a practical reason? Or maybe a change in tactics?
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Dec 23, 2014 15:46
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I think they were easier and cheaper to make. Also the legions had changed into more of a border defense force, they didn't fight in mass formation so often. By then they had been split into rapid reaction cavalry forces and infantry spread throughout rows of forts to use as a defense in depth. The scutum is a good shield in any situation but it's primarily made to be in a formation with a big wall of shields, which (as far as I know--late antiquity isn't my strength) they just didn't do very much anymore by then. The oval shields must've worked better for their needs. They weren't idiots, they wouldn't have switched without a good reason. I can't swear to exactly what that reason was though.
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Dec 23, 2014 15:50
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If I had to think of a big military innovation that happened in the late Roman/early Medieval period it would be the stirrup.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:26
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The reason was they were using overlapping shields in a phalanx like formation, with spears as the primary weapon. The oval or circular shield is better suited to such tactics, the rectangular scutum is optimized more for fighting with swords which in late antiquity are relegated to side arms. I don't have sources handy for this, but I read not so long ago that the late Roman field army was not cavalry centric at all, in fact the percentage of troops mounted changes little from the 2nd century to the fourth. The army remains predominantly infantry based throughout the history of the Western Empire, as illustrated in late antiquity by the battles of Strasbourg and the battle of Adrianople, evidence from both of which indicates Roman tactics still centered around strong infantry formations. Interestingly in both those battles much of the cavalry fought as mounted archers or cataphract, illustrating how even at the end the Romans never missed an opportunity to steal a good idea.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:36
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They weren't cavalry centric, but the cavalry played a much bigger role. The descriptions I've read is small forces, mainly of cavalry, were deployed right at the borders. They would intercept anybody coming in, and try to deal with them. If the enemy force was too big they would shadow and harass them, herding them into an area with fortifications and infantry to deal the killing blow.
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Dec 23, 2014 16:42
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Wasn't some cavalry actually just infantry who used horses for transport? Or am I mixing up WWII Poland with the Romans?
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Dec 23, 2014 17:35
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No, that's a thing in many places through history. Lots of knights mostly fought on foot too, and really ancient horses were so tiny people don't think they would've been useful in combat and were just transportation. Samurai probably did this a lot, Japanese horses were fairly small for a long time. Shetland pony sized I believe. By the Roman era the horses have been bred larger (though they're still a lot smaller than what you picture for a medieval warhorse) so people are regularly fighting on horseback, but they're also useful for getting around the battlefield. I think average modern horses are smaller than medieval warhorses too. They bred them big and strong for obvious reasons. Edit: Wikipedia says that's wrong, medieval horses were around the same size/maybe a bit smaller than average riding horses today. But there's also a lot of dispute so who knows. I've always found horses to attract a certain level of sperg like trains do. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 17:39
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Parthian mounts were pretty large. Nisean horses were famous for that. Good for carrying cataphracts. e: On the shields. Yes, they're alot of effort to make, but collagen based glues are much like hard plastic when dry. Very resilient if the glueline is even and not too thick. If you dry hideglue on a glass surface, it will tear off parts of the glass if you try to remove it mechanically. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 18:02
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People were smaller so maybe horses were relatively larger?
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Dec 23, 2014 18:16
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I think I've heard in this very thread that even in its peak, the WRE outside of Rome proper was comparatively rural and that the east was more cosmopolitan. What were the big cities in the east anyways? Alexandria, Antioch, Tyre, Byzantium? Were those period names?
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Dec 23, 2014 18:59
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All of the cities of greece and macedon, too, don't forget. And all of the cities of asia minor.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:14
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