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Slim Jim Pickens posted:New Jersey was settled by Swedes! God damned, Swedo-Lapplander filth! They're basically Finns. e: more on topic, did Romans ever do anything extravagantly corrupt enough to top the Renaissance Papacy? Ex Urbe posted:I think because they were afraid of alienating their audience with the sheer implausibility of what the Renaissance was actually like. Rome in 1492 was so corrupt, and so violent, that I think they don’t believe the audience will believe them if they go full-on. Almost all the Cardinals are taking bribes? Lots, possibly the majority of influential clerics in Rome overtly live with mistresses? Every single one of these people has committed homicide, or had goons do it? Wait, they all have goons? Even the monks have goons? It feels exaggerated. Showtime toned it down to a level that matches what the typical modern imagination might expect. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 9, 2015 |
# ? Mar 9, 2015 22:26 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 23:42 |
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Not an expert, but off the top of my head, the semi-mythical founder of the Shang dynasty of China supposedly came to power by overthrowing the terribly corrupt last king of the even more mythical Xia dynasty. Almost literally every dynasty after that suffered to a greater or lesser extent from corruption (often cited as a reason to rebel by the founders of new dynasties) because it turns out that hey, keeping an eye on a lot of land and a lot of people is pretty fuckin' difficult! Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the four Chinese Classics, notably has a running theme throughout the novel wherein prisoners are supposed to be beaten a hundred times upon entering a new prison to break their spirits - however, should the prisoners offer a suitable bribe to the warden, they can complain about "having taken ill on the journey" and so be permanently let off the beating until they "get better." There's also an amusing sequence wherein a prisoner fails to produce a bribe and is reviled by the warden for being utter scum, a waste of oxygen, a stain upon society doomed to die as nothing, but upon being presented there and then with a bribe by the same prisoner, turns around immediately and starts praising the prisoner's reputation to the stars, claiming that it's clear and obvious that he'll go far in his future and that this temporary imprisonment is a mere setback to such a noble fellow. Hell, in the novel, characters noted for their generosity and goodness of spirit were those who dispensed bribes high and low throughout the government whenever they needed to in order to help someone else out, because that's how you can tell when a man is noble - when he's willing to pay off government officials on someone else's behalf. And as for modern China, well, let's just say that the central government has a constant and running headache with local officials being corrupt as all hell and pissing locals off enough to riot. Edit: Come to think of it, in Outlaws of the Marsh, some of the "evil" characters are actually those who AREN'T willing to take a bribe because they insist on, y'know, actually prosecuting the bandits they caught. Apparently, trying to curry favor with the Imperial government was considered more evil than respecting the code of chivalry that the outlaws supposedly adhered to. Edit edit: Oh, and let's not forget the Chinese concept of "face" while we're at it. Terrible lot of trouble involved there...such as, rather famously, the Qing Emperor refusing to meet with the British Ambassador because he refused to kowtow, and so meeting him would have involved treating the British as equals instead of supplicant barbarians. Tomn fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Mar 9, 2015 |
# ? Mar 9, 2015 22:28 |
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Agean90 posted:Atlantis still isnt in Bolivia I kind of read this thread sporadically so I missed this derail, do you have a link to it?
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# ? Mar 9, 2015 22:34 |
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Tomn posted:because that's how you can tell when a man is noble - when he's willing to pay off government officials on someone else's behalf. That is interesting but bribing for something that isn't your own big dick swinging around sounds very unusual to my experiences haha. I am very ignorant of Chinese history too many people are. No one in Roman history is notable for being generous and having a good spirit in any positive way though. They are always driven by personal ambition poo poo. Anything for a collective good was populist smokescreen stuff it seemed or at least that was how they perceived it at the time, as grabs for tyranny. Romans seemed to condemn people using their political office for making people's lives better because you were reflectively accused as being a tyrant, cynically gathering favor with the masses to further yourself, like it was alien to them at the time, or at least in their rhetoric, that any other drive for a person would exist. China/Asian history is always generalized as having a sense of community or common good in people's actions, from my knowledge. I watched Marco Polo and heard it criticized for that stuff like it was racist for Mongolians to care about Mongolia and not about themselves but I have no idea. Whereas Roman culture was all about your name and personal gravitas and "the glory of Rome" was a joke they all got as "the glory of myself." I would LOVE more information on China's philosophical self-reflection on the nature of people's motivations and ambitions and whatnot, or any other ancient culture that isn't you know Western-centric.
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# ? Mar 9, 2015 22:38 |
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Woke up this morning, got myself a pilum
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# ? Mar 9, 2015 22:42 |
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Smoothrich posted:No one in Roman history is notable for being generous and having a good spirit in any positive way though. I can think of a few off the top of my head.
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# ? Mar 9, 2015 23:17 |
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Smoothrich posted:No one in Roman history is notable for being generous and having a good spirit in any positive way though. I think I should quote this bit that the author of Outlaws of the Marsh loved to repeat every so often: "Reader, remember this well - from their stronghold in Liangshan Marsh, the outlaws plundered and robbed." The biggest and most generous hero and leader of the book took and bought a mistress for money and later murdered her because she was "being outrageous." A common recruitment tactic for the bandits in the book was somehow smearing their target's name and so giving them no choice but to turn outlaw - notable instances include pretending to be the target and then going on a mass murder spree, and killing a VIP's child that another target was supposed to be looking after. Outlaws of the Marsh is kind of an unusual book for its time in that it glorifies bandit culture, where one is supposed to pay proper respect to others in the gallant fraternity, and disrespect was a perfectly good reason to kill someone over, and slaughtering a garrison, taking over a town, looting the treasury, and killing an entire family was a perfectly fine way to take one's vengeance against one dude in particular. Being a "good guy" in Outlaws of the Marsh meant that you followed a code of chivalry, which had only a passing relation to what modern people might call a moral code. I couldn't tell you what exactly that code entailed, though "being loyal to and helping out others who live by the code, no matter who gets in the way" seemed to be a notable component, where personal relations mattered a whole lot more than government decrees or even worrying about collateral damage (though almost everybody claimed to respect the Emperor himself and only wanted to liberate him from his disloyal and corrupt advisers). That being said, Outlaws of the Marsh is very explicitly fiction - sort of China's answer to Robin Hood, and with about as much relation to reality, though it's still notable in mapping what was considered "good" and "bad." If you want a slightly more historical example of corruption and power-mongering and personality clashes on a grand scale, for all that it tries to dress it up in noble and high-flying terms, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is essentially about a government collapsing into civil war when over-powerful nobles began to realize that they held real power and money - not the Emperor and not the Imperial Court. Cue decades of China beating itself senseless to determine who got to climb to the top of the greasy pole, all while paying lip service to the Emperor. Spoiler: Pretty much everybody lost. Ask Arglebargle if you want more details on the real history there, though. Incidentally, there WERE at least a few cases of Emperors and their governments getting suspicious of governors and generals who were making themselves too popular with the common folk, it being a possible prelude to an uprising. After all, if the people love you, that's a power base right there...
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# ? Mar 9, 2015 23:23 |
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Tomn posted:I think I should quote this bit that the author of Outlaws of the Marsh loved to repeat every so often: My favorite part of Outlaws of the Marsh is when Wu Song is in a town and starts talking about being a man of chivalry, and his host fucks right off because he doesn't want any part of it. That book is a great example of how people have always been the same - the stuff that Black Whirlwind does is way crazier than anything you can manage in GTA.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:11 |
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homullus posted:I can think of a few off the top of my head. Also the famously loyal and incorruptible Agrippa. Whereas Cincinnatus is very poorly historically attested, Agrippa certainly is not. Anyway, drawing a direct line from Roman corruption to corruption in New Jersey makes as much sense as drawing a line from Barbarian mobs to modern football hooliganism. edit: of course, historicity aside, how Cincinnatus' story was used in rhetoric and argument as what Roman leaders should aspire to (well, during the Republic) tells us a lot. NLJP fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Mar 10, 2015 |
# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:12 |
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Ugh, wasn't going to wade into this, but Urukagina's rep is as a great reformer and fighter of corruption, as attested to by the reformer Urukagina. So when pointing to examples of corruption, you should probably point to the guys who preceded and succeeded him. But I suppose you're probably a supporter of those Ummites and Lugal Zaggesi.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:22 |
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Which Celtic people fought naked? I heard something like that once.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:28 |
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:e: more on topic, did Romans ever do anything extravagantly corrupt enough to top the Renaissance Papacy?
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:31 |
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sullat posted:Ugh, wasn't going to wade into this, but Urukagina's rep is as a great reformer and fighter of corruption, as attested to by the reformer Urukagina. So when pointing to examples of corruption, you should probably point to the guys who preceded and succeeded him. But I suppose you're probably a supporter of those Ummites and Lugal Zaggesi. The point he was making was basically, reading between the lines, how much Urukagina was needed because of the huge corruption. Also the palpable sense of relief when he turns up. So your point is his.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:33 |
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sullat posted:Ugh, wasn't going to wade into this, but Urukagina's rep is as a great reformer and fighter of corruption, as attested to by the reformer Urukagina. So when pointing to examples of corruption, you should probably point to the guys who preceded and succeeded him. But I suppose you're probably a supporter of those Ummites and Lugal Zaggesi. Hey, what can I say, you scratch my back, I'll scratch Ur's. ^^^^Also that. homullus fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Mar 10, 2015 |
# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:33 |
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Kurtofan posted:Which Celtic people fought naked? I heard something like that once. It seemed to have been a specific group of professional naked-warriors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaesatae Wiki calls them mercenaries, but I'm not sure how blurred the lines were between "tribe" and "mercenary group" was in those days. In any case, they were naked because Gauls.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 00:44 |
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When the Roman classics were first discovered, didn't the soldiers try to follow them, with rotating men and units forward and back in battle? I seem to recall that it was a bad failure.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 01:00 |
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BurningStone posted:When the Roman classics were first discovered, didn't the soldiers try to follow them, with rotating men and units forward and back in battle? I seem to recall that it was a bad failure. And the countermarch and the caracole own actually HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Mar 10, 2015 |
# ? Mar 10, 2015 01:04 |
Tomn posted:When the Bolivian Atlantis guy is hinting that you ought to cut back on your posting, you should probably cut back on your posting. This isn't the New Jersey politics thread. Well, it is kind of complicated! You have to consider two sides of the Republican system to understand the tensions involved - the political side, and the economic side. Much of the tension in the Republic arose from rising wealth inequality and land consolidation; increasingly, Rome itself was home to large numbers of former farmers who were now reliant on the subsidized grain that was a perk of living in Rome itself to survive, because large landowners (such as, say, Crassus) would buy their land during economic downturns to add to their large plantations. This was a very long-term economic trend that first came to a head during the tribunates of the Gracchi brothers a century before the fall of the Republic, and resulted in a string of murdered tribunes of the plebs when they brought forth demands for land reform. This is the backdrop for Sulla's actions as dictator after he ousted, well, the Marius administration if not the man himself, being already dead. Sulla made several changes to the political system, including barring former tribunes from the cursus honorum in order to make it an unattractive office - Sulla was rather conservative and was keen on ending the whole land reform question, which (among many other unsightly poor-people demands) had been the perpetual hobby-horse of the tribunes and rather few others. These changes were intended to make the Republic harder to subvert in exactly the ways that Marius and Sulla had just done, but they also further increased the underlying economic tensions. Sulla then stepped down as dictator and went off to party in his retirement, which is actually a rather important detail, because it means that even the strongmen are not breaking with the Roman tradition of being dictator just long enough to get poo poo done. Caesar, on the other hand, is a hard man to get a read on, but much of his political career was built on populism, land redistribution, etc. and he made several moves in that direction during his dictatorship, as well as going further than Sulla in remodeling the constitution of the Republic to accommodate the expanded territory of the Empire, place the economy on a more even keel, reign in the governors, and essentially eliminate all of the deeper causes of civil war, while slowly restoring normal governmental function. His death means we'll never know, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in a timeline with gay black Brutus where he survived the assassination plot that he peacefully stepped down from the dictatorship a few years after that. All of this work at taking a city government that had become an Italian government that had become a sea-spanning empire without ever fundamentally changing and making it make sense was taken up again by Augustus, for the rather different purpose of creating the Empire. So uh I guess the short answer to your question is "no", because the people who were terrified of strongmen and who could have made productive reforms were so utterly bound to the status quo that the reformers were required to use force and become the very strongmen that the conservative Romans feared. The alternative was the eternally popular fate for maximum socialism land reform advocates in Rome: death.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 02:13 |
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I apologize since this is only somewhat of an ancient history question but it started off in this thread so I feel this is the place for it. I started listening to the Imjin War podcast and at the beginning of the podcast the narrator says that some historians claim that you could field two armies; one from 500 BCE and another from 1500 CE and that the result of the clash would be a toss-up. I'm guessing this is supposed to be a comment about the innovation of firearms, but my first reaction to this was an emphatic "gently caress no". Not just because of the societal and military organization changes that occurred during this time frame, those alone would make the idea of fielding two similar armies laughable, but there's no way that the crusader Men of Iron and late Medieval heavy cavalry bear any similarity to an army from 500 BCE is there? The Roman Empire eventually started fielding cataphracted cavalry and from I recall they were adopted from whoever they were fighting in Iran at the time so I imagine the practice goes back even further than 200-ish CE, but how much change was there in metallurgy and horse-breeding over those two thousand years? I'm aware that the weapons of war are tools to get a job done, but it just seems to me that it's wildly implausible that the iron (or bronze) and horse, as well as production techniques, didn't undergo some fairly large rises (and falls).
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 02:24 |
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The 1500 AD army would wipe the floor with their Classical counterparts. They have steel, they have gunpowder, and they have cannon. Edit: Also it's not the middle ages any more; the age of the domination of armored cavalry is over. This is infantry and artillery time, and what they have is lots of gunpowder weapons.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 02:31 |
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HEY GAL posted:The 1500 AD army would wipe the floor with their Classical counterparts. They have steel, they have gunpowder, and they have cannon. I assumed that the 1500 CE part was just a rhetorical flourish to highlight the effect of gunpowder weapons in Japanese hands versus the less developed Chinese and Korean firearms, but the way it was phrased threw me off. I mean, a couple decades after this point the Ottomans are throwing a hundred thousand men at Rhodes with flame throwers, arqubusiers, and hand grenades and there's no way that all popped out in a couple decades. Hence my disbelief that anyone in 500 BCE or even 500 CE is going to have anything even close to that level of sophistication. edit: in retrospect, 500 CE may not be the best date to use, but I mean 'throughout the whole period of the Roman empire up until the fall of the West'.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 02:50 |
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Ithle01 posted:I apologize since this is only somewhat of an ancient history question but it started off in this thread so I feel this is the place for it. This is ludicrous. 500 BC is dudes with half bronze, half iron armor, iron spears and small iron swords. The Roman Army under Trajan could probably have held its own until maybe around 800-900 AD. Once good steel starts spreading though, that's it. The steel that arming swords and brigandine and other such tools of war are made from was much much better then anything the Romans were spitting out. 1500 AD is literally knights in articulated steel plate armor, line infantry with brigandine, steel helmets, steel halberds, bills, pikes, longswords, arming swords, etc. And then you'd also have early guns as well on top of advanced crossbows and longbows.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 04:02 |
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If the 1500s army was starving, suffering from iodine deficiency, exhausted, led by an idiot, and on bad terrain and fighting an ancient army that was well-fed, salted, fresh, under the best general their empire produced, and on excellent terrain I'd still back the 1500s one.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 04:24 |
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Imagine how effective nuclear weapons would be against ancient armies.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 04:29 |
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karl fungus posted:Imagine how effective nuclear weapons would be against ancient armies. Very cost-ineffective, you only kill a few thousand people per bomb.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 04:32 |
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Tao Jones posted:If the 1500s army was starving, suffering from iodine deficiency, exhausted, led by an idiot, and on bad terrain and fighting an ancient army that was well-fed, salted, fresh, under the best general their empire produced, and on excellent terrain I'd still back the 1500s one. Is this a reference to the Moroccan invasion of Songhai? Because I think that's basically what happened.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 04:34 |
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This is why I reacted with disbelief. Barring some extreme set of circumstances the steady progress of warfare technology would weigh the outcome towards the later period armies. So, on a similar topic, how about within the time frame of the Roman Empire itself. What kind of advances would you see over the span of about 500 BC to 0 CE or 500 CE? I'm just using Rome because of the relative wealth of knowledge we have for it, but feel free to tell me about Greek, Persian, Chinese, Indian, or other cultures as well.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 05:15 |
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WoodrowSkillson posted:This is ludicrous. 500 BC is dudes with half bronze, half iron armor, iron spears and small iron swords. The Roman Army under Trajan could probably have held its own until maybe around 800-900 AD. Once good steel starts spreading though, that's it. The steel that arming swords and brigandine and other such tools of war are made from was much much better then anything the Romans were spitting out. 1500 AD is literally knights in articulated steel plate armor, line infantry with brigandine, steel helmets, steel halberds, bills, pikes, longswords, arming swords, etc. And then you'd also have early guns as well on top of advanced crossbows and longbows. I'd kind of disagree with you here, simply because of the relative scales involved. Roman armies were much, much larger than their contemporaries in the 15th century. Most medieval armies would have perhaps 15,000 soldiers at their height, many of them organized into conscript companies with poor logistical trains that couldn't stay in the field long. That's only three or four legions - Ceasar conquered Britain (then nothing more than a poorly defended backwoods on the edge of the world) with five legions as well as auxiliary cavalry corps and naval support. The largest battle in the War of the Roses involved about 30,000 professional soldiers to a side, while the largest Roman battle saw perhaps 150,000 legionaries and auxiliaries on the field (fighting each other, to be fair). Rome, as an empire, would frequently find itself fighting multiple medieval-sized armies at the same time. Sure a knight could probably run down a legionary, but that's not the same thing as an average European army fighting their equivalent Roman legions. Probably what we'd really be looking at is whether or not 15,000 professional European retinues and mercenaries could hack their way through 35,000 legionaries. To my mind, the economic advantages of the classical empire outweigh the technological advantages of the medieval kingdoms. Kaal fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Mar 10, 2015 |
# ? Mar 10, 2015 05:53 |
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WoodrowSkillson posted:The difference between shield walls could be substantial, such as a between a full hoplite phalanx and the kinds various "barbarian" cultures used. The difference between the legionary and say, a gaul who fought in a shieldwall, was the type of shield used and the use of a sword as the primary weapon opposed to a spear. Legionaries were equipped for semi-single combat as opposed to a formation that was dependent on a close order formation and unit cohesion. The soldiers had 3 feet on either side within a rank, and 6 feet between ranks. This let them have space to fight. Their big shield gave them a lot of protection, and their strategy was to use it to be able to close in on the enemy and use their short(ish) swords where they were the most effective. This went with the overall philosophy of legions as flexible fighting forces. They cut their teeth against phalanx based armies, and in the end the Romans being able to split off cohorts and take advantage of openings was a huge advantage. I very nice visual of this roman formation you are describing can be seen in the first episode of the first season of Rome (The HBO production). The soldiers are fighting in formation with some space next to them, allowing them to easily withdraw to the back of the line to rest while the guy behind them could take his place. Smoothrich posted:You know just cuz some poster wanders in here asking what's the deal with all the Roman bs that sounds greedy and petty like the Praetorian Guard and reminds me of my mafia-generalized home state with seemingly relatable problems like a pervasive exploitation of working class people and civic institutions that exist as money bags only doesn't make me a racist or crazy haha. No. But wandering in here trying to equate the idea that all italians are corrupt does. RZApublican posted:I kind of read this thread sporadically so I missed this derail, do you have a link to it? Against my better judgement, here is the post that started the Atlantean derail. Not nearly as good as Ney Jersey is corrupt because of Italians's derail tho. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486446&pagenumber=293&perpage=40#post439423610 Dalael fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Mar 10, 2015 |
# ? Mar 10, 2015 06:57 |
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You can't divorce war from the society fighting it so it's hard to compare medieval and Roman armies. While you can point at the fact that Roman armies were larger than medieval European armies, medieval armies were typically fighting for smaller polities (not even really states) and fighting for limited objectives within the bounds of feudal law. In Frankish lands warfare was almost too trivial in that the lords and knights on the losing side would rarely suffer more long-term consequences than losing some holding. It's not until you get to the early modern states that warfare in Europe resembles the wars that the Roman Legions were fighting at the height of Roman expansion under say Trajan. If you want a more fair comparison, you can compare the Roman civil wars of the Imperial period to the European wars of the middle ages because that's more like what was going on. You can't compare an empire the size of half of Europe deciding to go invade somewhere with the Duke of Normandy fighting the King of France. And the army sizes look more comparable if you do. The numbers aren't that different. For example Claudius invaded Britain with about 20,000 men, while William invaded Britain with about 13,000. Those numbers are both in the same ballpark. You may say that well the Romans would have won because bigger armies etc but again you have to look at who is fighting and where. Would Rome crush medieval France? Yes, but look at the relative sizes of those two states. That's not even close to a fair comparison. Do we have an example of what medieval Europe as a whole could put on the field when it wanted to? Yes, we do: the Crusades. During the Crusades medieval Europe fielded armies that were similar in size to Roman armies: between 30,000 and 120,000 men. It's worth noting that these are invasion forces and thus compare favorably to the Roman military's total size of ~300,000-400,000 men at its height. Clearly the total armed forces of Christian Europe were significantly larger than the number of men they were able to send a thousand miles away. This is not even getting into siege warfare which while the Romans might have been the masters of their day had progressed a lot by the 11th or 12 centuries. Roman fortifications don't compare that well to Norman-era castles much less the huge castles of the 14th and 15th centuries, and the counterweight trebuchet is a big step up from the Roman onager or mangonel. So I dunno while I think it's not a great comparison to be making in the first place Rome is oversold as compared to medieval Europe. If I had to bet money on a contest between Pax Romana Rome and the 11th century Holy Roman Empire I'd probably put my money on the Germans with armored cavalry and trebuchets.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 07:00 |
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homullus posted:Hey, what can I say, you scratch my back, I'll scratch Ur's. This is the worst post in the past four pages of terrible posting. The 500 BCE to 1500 CE comparison is bad but say like Caesar's legions and a European army around 1000 CE wouldn't be all that far apart technologically. I'd put my money on the Romans purely on training and logistics. E: And of course we have plenty of battles between Romans and medieval states up until 1453. Now, your average dirt farmer 90% of the population peasant's life? That didn't change a whole lot between 500 BCE and 1500 CE.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 09:19 |
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Jazerus posted:Caesar, on the other hand, is a hard man to get a read on, but much of his political career was built on populism, land redistribution, etc. and he made several moves in that direction during his dictatorship, as well as going further than Sulla in remodeling the constitution of the Republic to accommodate the expanded territory of the Empire, place the economy on a more even keel, reign in the governors, and essentially eliminate all of the deeper causes of civil war, while slowly restoring normal governmental function. His death means we'll never know, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in a timeline with gay black Brutus where he survived the assassination plot that he peacefully stepped down from the dictatorship a few years after that. All of this work at taking a city government that had become an Italian government that had become a sea-spanning empire without ever fundamentally changing and making it make sense was taken up again by Augustus, for the rather different purpose of creating the Empire. This is honestly one of the coolest counterfactuals I've ever heard of. What would have happened if the Republic had not only survived a little longer, but was reformed into a proper national/imperial government that might have lasted long enough to inspire at least some of its successor states to try and follow up on it? That's deep into gay black Caesar territory, though, so here's some more realistic questions. I don't know much about the exact social and political reforms Caesar and Augustus carried out, so now that you've mentioned them I'm pretty curious. What exactly did you mean when you said that the economy was placed on a more even keel? If the constitution was reworked to accommodate the expanded territory of the Empire, was there ever any idea about making the Republic a broadly representative government for all citizens within all its territories - and more importantly, how was that supposed to work given the size of the Empire and the state of ancient communications (I understand that Roman communications were pretty good considering, but organizing elections across half of Europe for representatives to meet and live in Rome still seems like it'd be a logistical nightmare)? When you said that Augustus completed the work of creating the Empire, what exactly DID he change from the old days, and what did he keep intact?
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 11:08 |
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So guys I haven't read this thread in a bit, how'd y'all manage 160 posts in just a few...
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 11:37 |
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:So guys I haven't read this thread in a bit, how'd y'all manage 160 posts in just a few... I saw all the new posts and hoped they'd finally found a copy of Lives of Famous Whores
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 11:40 |
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Jerusalem posted:I saw all the new posts and hoped they'd finally found a copy of Lives of Famous Whores Did you know Lives of Famous Whores is a direct cultural cause of the Real Housewives of New Jersey? Let me tell you about Italian women...
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 12:11 |
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:So guys I haven't read this thread in a bit, how'd y'all manage 160 posts in just a few... Here is recap of most of these: Some guy hates Italians because he thinks they are the reason New Jersey is awful and corrupt. He tried to veil his
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 12:13 |
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Jerusalem posted:I saw all the new posts and hoped they'd finally found a copy of Lives of Famous Whores Sorry, your mom's still working on her autobiography.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 13:05 |
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Lives of Famous Hooers, as they say in New Rom... I mean Jersey.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 13:15 |
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Grand Fromage posted:Sorry, your mom's still working on her autobiography. What's Latin for "Hiyo!"?
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 13:24 |
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# ? Jun 3, 2024 23:42 |
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I am unable to get the mental image of Julius Caesar on the MTV show Jersey Shore out of my mind. They'd call him Julie C or something and you know he'd be fist pumpin at the club like a gorilla.
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# ? Mar 10, 2015 13:30 |