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Earlier (much earlier) in the thread, it was noted that prominent Romans would bankrupt themselves in order to get a chance at a consulship. Is that a bit of hyperbole as to the sort of lengths they might go to, or a relatively common occurrence? With all due respect to honor and glory, they must have expected to be compensated their losses in some concrete way, right? Not everyone could pull a Caesar and start a profitable war (certainly not once a year), so... what? Passing laws and decisions that would benefit their patronage network and get them enough favors to equal and surpass the money they spent? Plundering the treasury? Angling for a governorship that would allow them to plunder someone else's treasury? Also - everything you'd try to do as a consul could apparently be vetoed if the other consul didn't care for your face. So... did they just maintain good relations with their fellow aristocrats, just in case? Ran for consulship in something like friendly pairs? Had an approximation of political parties? (I actually know very little about Roman politics beyond the Optimes / Populares divide)
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Jan 29, 2015 09:39
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http://www.auspsa.org.au/sites/default/files/conceptions_of_political_corruption_lisa_hill.pdf The roman state seemed to literally run off graft and patronage networks. Not a very good stable situation, and once the easy money from conquests ran out, not one that was conducive to civil society. I've been reading up and listening to some Chinese/Korean history podcasts, and the similarities are quite noticeable. However, there are some clear differences. Corruption always seemed to grow over time, but the occasional Chinese emperor seemed to be able to reverse the clock and break up powerful aristocratic families and redistribute land to the peasantry and so on.
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Jan 29, 2015 10:49
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This is somewhat relevant here Colleen McCullough has died Say what you will about the historical accuracy (which isn't perfect, but is pretty good for novel format), she's the person that sparked my interest in ancient history. Everyone should go read the First Man In Rome series if they haven't already. Just don't take it as gospel truth. Edit: Octy posted:Yup, posted end last page. 
Captain Postal fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 11:14
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Article about Seneca in the New Yorker.
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Jan 29, 2015 11:45
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Captain Postal posted:This is somewhat relevant here Yup, posted end last page.
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Jan 29, 2015 12:04
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Octy posted:Not strictly relevant and I've never read her, but I've seen the name Colleen McCullough pop up a few times in this thread in reference to her Masters of Rome series. Anyway, she just died. Goodbye, wondrous femininity?
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Jan 29, 2015 15:17
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Basically you paid back your creditors when you became a proconsul and skimmed the wealth off the top of a province for a few years.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:27
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euphronius posted:Basically you paid back your creditors when you became a proconsul and skimmed the wealth off the top of a province for a few years. It seems like there's only a short window of time where that could be a thing; between the 2nd Punic war and the Social War. Otherwise, you're either stuck in Italia, or getting proscribed for your troubles.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:36
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sullat posted:It seems like there's only a short window of time where that could be a thing; between the 2nd Punic war and the Social War. Otherwise, you're either stuck in Italia, or getting proscribed for your troubles. What, no. Why would you think that.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:37
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Xander77 posted:Earlier (much earlier) in the thread, it was noted that prominent Romans would bankrupt themselves in order to get a chance at a consulship. Is that a bit of hyperbole as to the sort of lengths they might go to, or a relatively common occurrence? It wasn't uncommon for candidates to borrow huge sums of money to finance their elections, and several steps on the cursus honorum were more or less designed to encourage you to do that. (One of the positions had a duty, among other things, to pay for the yearly games. So you had to basically put on a free, adless multi-day Super Bowl out of your own pocket.) As an aristocrat your chief assets were in land, so bankruptcy seems unlikely. But you needed a lot of cash for political expenses and that's where borrowing came in. Borrowing also helped form political alliances, because you knew if you lent a million bucks to loving Quintus and he lost, you weren't going to see that money again. So this would induce people who were wealthy to spread it around and use their patronage networks to support the people who were borrowing from them, who were often younger and getting started out in politics. Pretty much all of those things you listed were things people did, though directly plundering the Roman treasury was a capital offense and there were plenty of people around to watch, so only an idiot would do that. Usually if you needed money, you took a cushy provincial post and had your friends loot everything they could get their hands on and pay you a cut. You could still be prosecuted for this, but it's far more likely you would be acquitted. There were constellations of aristocrats friendly to each other, but nothing really like political parties. In the US political parties are broad enough that they're basically large mutual fund-raising machines, which wouldn't really have worked in Rome. In EU they're more like groups united by some common political beliefs, but in Rome I don't think people other than philosophers had any inclination about "political philosophy" and probably wouldn't have abstracted policies from people too much.
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Jan 29, 2015 17:25
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euphronius posted:What, no. Why would you think that. Well, before then, there aren't any overseas provinces to plunder, and after Sulla/Marius/Caeser get into the mix, the system breaks down and it's easier just to kill people and steal their stuff. That's how Sulla recouped his expenses, for example.
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Jan 29, 2015 19:57
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Proconsular governors were still getting rich off the land. In fact Caesar passed laws trying to tamp down on how much they got away with.
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Jan 29, 2015 20:19
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The cursus honorum didn't just disappear once they made the transition to empire either. The positions lost most of their prestige and power and over time basically became irrelevant, but it was still a way for politicians to make a name for themselves and get rich via wars/taxing provincials.
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Jan 29, 2015 20:23
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When people say plundering a province they usually don't mean through force of arms and more like through economic or legal means. Brutus (the one that stabbed Caesar) got very rich while governor of Cyprus by lending money at >40% interest. You also expect the natives to 'reward' you whenever you settle their disputes. In other words, whenever you take a bribe to give one guy permission to screw his neighbor over. Force is usually not as effective as setting up a system where your subjects create wealth and then willingly transport it to Rome for you. Eventually you end up with Night of Long Knives situation, but that's the next governor's problem. Plus armies are expensive and soldiers get to keep some of the loot. Consider that when Charles Wilson was secretary of defense in Eisenhower's administration he didn't give up his GM stock and a lot of people were upset by the conflict of interest this created. The Romans would have laughed themselves silly at the idea that he would be expected to give up his stock. Or just borrow a ton of money and then murder your creditors, which was a large enough problem in the republic at some points that I recall it being mentioned. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jan 29, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 23:50
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Boat insurance was also a pretty great money maker. Along with the equally lucrative boat insurance fraud.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:23
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McCullough's books are great reads, but yeah just don't take them as anything other than dramatizations of a roughly accurate big picture of history, with her filling in motivations/personalities/relationships etc to fit the story she is telling. Definitely worth reading the books though, especially the Sulla/Marius stuff.
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Jan 30, 2015 03:57
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Ithle01 posted:When people say plundering a province they usually don't mean through force of arms and more like through economic or legal means. The question is - are you sure of getting a rich province to rob? Would you get more than enough even from a relatively poor one? That's the one concrete way of getting your denarii back that was mentioned here - what were the others? ... In other news. The last page kinda focused on horse archery. I was under the impression that Carrhae was actually an outlier - an army trapped on perfect cavalry maneuvering ground, without adequate cav support of their own, with the enemy getting actual baggage trains of arrow supplies as they ran out. The Romans have beaten Parthian armies quite often afterwards, which seems to support the "outlier" thesis. I think that the invincibility of horse archers may be more on paper than in practice - armchair historians discussing mobility and drawn strengths centuries later. Do we have contemporary texts discussing Roman tactics vs horse archers (beyond Carrhae)?
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Jan 30, 2015 13:02
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I dunno, I'm kind of under the impression that the Roman response to horse archers was "gently caress dealing with that" because later conflicts with the Parthians generally involved Rome avoiding pitched battles and going straight to besieging cities instead.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:19
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Ithle01 posted:When people say plundering a province they usually don't mean through force of arms and more like through economic or legal means. Brutus (the one that stabbed Caesar) got very rich while governor of Cyprus by lending money at >40% interest. You also expect the natives to 'reward' you whenever you settle their disputes. In other words, whenever you take a bribe to give one guy permission to screw his neighbor over. Force is usually not as effective as setting up a system where your subjects create wealth and then willingly transport it to Rome for you. Eventually you end up with Night of Long Knives situation, but that's the next governor's problem. Plus armies are expensive and soldiers get to keep some of the loot. Consider that when Charles Wilson was secretary of defense in Eisenhower's administration he didn't give up his GM stock and a lot of people were upset by the conflict of interest this created. The Romans would have laughed themselves silly at the idea that he would be expected to give up his stock. A major plank of Cicero's prosecution of Verres wasn't merely that he'd plundered Sicily, but that he'd done so in a way that had utterly ruined the economy of the province and thereby screwed his fellow Romans out of future wealth to be extracted from it.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:24
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I dunno, I'm kind of under the impression that the Roman response to horse archers was "gently caress dealing with that" because later conflicts with the Parthians generally involved Rome avoiding pitched battles and going straight to besieging cities instead. The Roman response to horse archers was to hire their own. Scythian/Sarmatian/etc. auxiliaries weren't exactly standard issue or anything but they were commonly used if horse archers were expected.
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Jan 30, 2015 14:37
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Xander77 posted:I gathered as much (though... would gambling on provoking a minor rebellion / border war that would allow you to rob the poo poo out out of the losers plausible? Or would you be dismissed even if you won handily?) Horse archers only work well in combination with heavy cavalry. If you take the account of Carrhae for example, you see that they're wounding, sapping morale, restricting maneuver or leading parts of the roman army away with feigned retreats. The cataphracts do the smashing when disorder takes over. Without them, they'll eventually run out of arrows and have to retreat. I'm sure that you can take these basic characteristics and apply them to any successful steppe army. Arrows are expensive compared to shot for a sling, and somebody will have to pick them up at the end of the day. Or simply shoot them back. A dude on a horse is a pretty big target too, and their horses aren't armored or only lightly. So yeah, like Emperor Leo said. Foot archers with big bows will work well, but that doesn't seem to be the whole story, since nobody solved their problems with nomadic people for good until firearms arived on the scene. If you think about the duties around the camp that Thuky and Polybius sometimes mention, you need to send out people to forage and get water, etc. You need to do everything in force if there's enemy cavalry around and defeats turn into bloodbaths for the force that doesn't have cavalry to cover the retreat. I think somebody in the milhist thread made a post about it today. We do have relatively modern reports of how dangerous arrow wounds acutally are (hint: most of the time not instantly, but you're out of luck if the head gets stuck in bone or comes loose), as an army doctor wrote about his experience with treating such injuries in the field. If you're interested, there's some literature: 
Power Khan fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 17:23
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This popped up in a totally random place, but I thought I'd link these articles here: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615 To quote the Mother Jones article: "All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century." I bring this up here because I rememeber the thread discussing the effect of lead on the Roman Empire, and even some theories or speculation that lead poisoning from pipes was a partial cause of the empire's decline.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:57
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Third Murderer posted:This popped up in a totally random place, but I thought I'd link these articles here: I think this thread has been back and forth over the issue of lead. It may have been a minor contributing factor but probably wasn't the cause of the Rome's violent tendencies or the decline of their empire (seriously). Also, all that Mother Jones article points out is correlation. Sure, lead is bad and it's good that we stopped putting tons of it in the air and on our walls but a ton of other factors are at play in the decline in crime. The Freakonomics authors made their big splash by suggesting the legalization of abortion caused the drop in crime (by preventing millions of unwanted children who would go on to be troubled young adults). It happened over the same timespan too. Edit: Back on ancient history topics - what do we know about sub-Saharan African history? Like from the earliest civilizations to late-antiquity?
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Jan 30, 2015 19:44
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Behavior is a super complex thing. While I personally think it's possible, these findings could be a spurious correlation. There's just too many variables that could have more weight than this.
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Jan 30, 2015 19:51
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Was the Eastern Roman Empire ever close to going the way of the WRE and Odoacer in the 5th century? The ERE didn't seem to experience the same level of barbarian settlement that the WRE dealt with- Goths didn't take over Egypt or anything on that scale- but at the very least it looks like there could be a fair comparison made of the political situations created by Ricimer and Aspar in the WRE and ERE, respectively.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:15
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Thwomp posted:
There's Great Zimbabwe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe
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Jan 30, 2015 20:20
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Thwomp posted:Edit: Back on ancient history topics - what do we know about sub-Saharan African history? Like from the earliest civilizations to late-antiquity? The Sahel Region is interesting if you are interested in civilizations. It was home to a good number of powerful states that flourished with trans-Saharan trade. Ghana Empire was considered to be the first and it is believed to be established around 4th century CE. For a long time, they were believed to be founded by Berbers or other Semitic invaders which carried their civilized practices and technologies there. But modern scholarship casts doubt on the classical account which was initially propagated by medieval Muslim scholars. Recent archaeological evidence points to the possibility of independently occurring civilization development. Dhar Tichitt site in Mauritania was already settled by the second millennium BCE and some speculate there is an older and yet undiscovered civilization that set the template for later West African states, possibly emerged during the first millennium. The problem is the Sahara expanded further southwards by that time and settled communities migrated accordingly. If there are any archaeological remains of that civilization, it's very possible they are literally under a pile of sand in the middle of nowhere.
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Jan 30, 2015 22:01
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JaucheCharly posted:Horse archers only work well in combination with heavy cavalry. If you take the account of Carrhae for example, you see that they're wounding, sapping morale, restricting maneuver or leading parts of the roman army away with feigned retreats. The cataphracts do the smashing when disorder takes over. Without them, they'll eventually run out of arrows and have to retreat. I'm sure that you can take these basic characteristics and apply them to any successful steppe army. Arrows are expensive compared to shot for a sling, and somebody will have to pick them up at the end of the day. Or simply shoot them back. A dude on a horse is a pretty big target too, and their horses aren't armored or only lightly. So yeah, like Emperor Leo said. Foot archers with big bows will work well, but that doesn't seem to be the whole story, since nobody solved their problems with nomadic people for good until firearms arived on the scene. I think the Republic-era Roman army, with its emphasis on heavy infantry (good at smashing in the heads of fellow europeans), was simply not effective at dealing with horse archers. Yeah, HAs needed combined arms and co-ordination with heavy cavalry, but the key thing was that the mounted armies always had the tactical initiative and could pick and choose when they wanted to fight. And that location would always be where the opponent was weak. And even where their logistics were the strongest. Also, those US army sources would come from fighting American Indian horse archers. I'd imagine that American Indian horse archery and Middle-east/Central Asian horse archery would have some key differences. American Indians have a reputation for good horse handling, but a poor reputation for actual archery. I don't have good sources, but Amind bows had low draw weights. Their arrows were crude, they were tipped with flint, or glass, or scavenged metal. So a Parthian arrow is more likely to sever blood vessels or retain the energy to break through bones and into the heart or lungs or brain, than an Amind arrow.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:08
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Also british people love to jerk off about their yew longbows, but I much prefer the honorable compound bows glued together over a thousand times.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:12
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quote:Also british people love to jerk off about their yew longbows, but I much prefer the honorable compound bows glued together over a thousand times. I think most people would call that a composite bow. Edit: Oh huh - I didn't know about this: quote:In literature of the early 20th century, before the invention of compound bows, composite bows were described as "compound".[2] This usage is now outdated
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Jan 30, 2015 23:22
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Blah, I meant composite bows. My witty phrase undone by a single word.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:37
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Alchenar posted:A major plank of Cicero's prosecution of Verres wasn't merely that he'd plundered Sicily, but that he'd done so in a way that had utterly ruined the economy of the province and thereby screwed his fellow Romans out of future wealth to be extracted from it. I'm not entirely certain of this, so feel free to point out if I'm wrong, but the impression I got was that Cicero was persecuting Verres as an example to all the other predatory officials that were doing the exact same thing. Cicero seems about the closest thing you can find to a 'decent person' in this time period. Or he was just really good at appearing decent to further his career and used the case as an excuse to get named the greatest lawyer in Rome- but you get the idea. Also in this time period, Sicily was responsible for lots of grain that fed Romans so ruining it was a strike against public health in Rome. It was also a powder keg ready to blow up into a full slave rebellion and the 3rd Servile War was just around the corner so maybe Cicero had the right idea.
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Jan 31, 2015 02:06
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There's elements of patriotism to Cicero, sure, but it was undeniably a career move to prosecute Verres, in addition to whatever itch it might have scratched morally. Cicero had been a quaestor in Sicily and was friends with and/or patron to a lot of people that Verres had ripped off. He was also standing for election as aedile in that year and a prosecution was the fast-track to electoral success. Making it more attractive was the fact that the speaker for the defense was both a consul that year and well-known as one of the best lawyers in Rome, so pulling it off would have been an important coup politically. So I wouldn't undersell the "become known as the best lawyer in Rome" angle there, personally.
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Jan 31, 2015 06:21
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Tao Jones posted:There's elements of patriotism to Cicero, sure, but it was undeniably a career move to prosecute Verres, in addition to whatever itch it might have scratched morally. Cicero had been a quaestor in Sicily and was friends with and/or patron to a lot of people that Verres had ripped off. He was also standing for election as aedile in that year and a prosecution was the fast-track to electoral success. Making it more attractive was the fact that the speaker for the defense was both a consul that year and well-known as one of the best lawyers in Rome, so pulling it off would have been an important coup politically. So I wouldn't undersell the "become known as the best lawyer in Rome" angle there, personally. Trust me, I did do some research before I wrote that. I was thinking about this earlier, but, had Spartacus not been double-crossed by pirates and gotten himself over to Sicily to set off a larger revolt what would that have been like? I imagine in the end it just turns into him dying on an island because the Romans order the Mediterranean pirate problem cleaned up a little sooner, but would the grain shortage been enough to affect Rome to an appreciable extent? I'm not going to suggest a 'Caesar invades Egypt' scenario, but I'm thinking about it.
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Jan 31, 2015 07:18
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Phobophilia posted:I think the Republic-era Roman army, with its emphasis on heavy infantry (good at smashing in the heads of fellow europeans), was simply not effective at dealing with horse archers. Yeah, HAs needed combined arms and co-ordination with heavy cavalry, but the key thing was that the mounted armies always had the tactical initiative and could pick and choose when they wanted to fight. And that location would always be where the opponent was weak. And even where their logistics were the strongest. Oh, of course, their technology is not comparable. The lack of metal tools puts some serious limitations on what you can do. Depends what you'd call weak weapons and poor reputation. The plains indians shot bisons and elk, you've seen above how much # that takes. The parthians didn't have the enemy shooting them with large caliber handguns and rifles, who'd then say "they have weak weapons compared to ours". If you read the article you'd be surprised that the dudes shot actively for the abdominal area, because they knew as the surgeon documented, that such wounds are 100% fatal at that time with 15/15 dead. What's more surprising is, that there's a many injuries to the hands (28 in the sample), which is explained by the men who claim to have seen the arrow coming and raised their hand to protect themselves. Flint isn't so weak as you think, their shot did penetrate the skull. We're very squishy for the most part and unless you're super lucky to injure the neck, heart, lung, a major artery in the abdomen or leg, you're not killing anyone quickly. People die to abscesses and impossible to remove arrowheads alot. Pieces stuck in bone or fractures are a particular shitshow that will make you die slowly.
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Jan 31, 2015 09:35
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I always thought that american indians tried to shoot their game from point blank range, before the air resistance saps all the energy from the arrow. So at longer range amerind arrows would be much less effective than a parthian arrow. It's like when TFR posters debate about "stopping power", where a big 7.62 bullet to the abdomen would make someone unable to fight and bleed out quickly, while a small .22lr bullet to the abdomen would kill someone eventually, but they'd still be able to fight to some extent. In those case studies, could the army soldiers still fight after being shot? Back in the old world, when someone gets shot in the abdomen with an arrow (and ignoring the fact that everyone wore mail when bows were commonplace), could they still fight to some extent? Basically, my conjecture is that an unarmoured man getting hit with an arrow from an old world composite bow at 50m is more likely to be disabled and die quickly, whereas an unarmoured man getting hit in the same spot by an amerind arrow at 50m will die eventually, but can still fight back.
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Jan 31, 2015 10:09
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We often had the link to article about the dubious quick kill in fencing. Literally nobody dies quickly by exsanguination unless it's a lucky hit. Arrows cause just stab wounds and these aren't good at disabling
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Jan 31, 2015 10:29
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Popping back to the bankruptcy for political position stuff for a moment do we have any evidence of rich guys financing young politions on a "maybe you dont have to pay it all back but you do have to make sure such n such a law gets passed" basis? I mean its a very easy assumption to make and in my mind appear very likely to have happened but do we have any evidence?
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Jan 31, 2015 10:59
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JaucheCharly posted:We often had the link to article about the dubious quick kill in fencing. Literally nobody dies quickly by exsanguination unless it's a lucky hit. Arrows cause just stab wounds and these aren't good at disabling Guess I've seen too many movies and listened to too many TFR goons going "hurr hurr my gun can drop the urbans at 100 paces instantly".
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Jan 31, 2015 12:16
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Popping back to the bankruptcy for political position stuff for a moment do we have any evidence of rich guys financing young politions on a "maybe you dont have to pay it all back but you do have to make sure such n such a law gets passed" basis? Crassus bought out entire elections, that was his contribution to the first triumvirate.
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Jan 31, 2015 12:31
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