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Deptfordx posted:Depends. How many Panzers does he have? *extremely 1940s French voice* Zero
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Jan 26, 2018 19:07
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Grand Fromage posted:Witnessing was a big deal. Any legit Roman could get witnesses, either people you knew or clients. I am also 90% sure that signet ring wax seals were a thing but that's from memory and could be talking out of my rear end. Signet rings were 100% a thing. There are a ton of them that have been found and ample literary evidence (most famously Augustus, whose signet was a sphinx.)
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Jan 26, 2018 23:28
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Zombie Dachshund posted:Signet rings were 100% a thing. There are a ton of them that have been found and ample literary evidence (most famously Augustus, whose signet was a sphinx.) Did he pick it after he became Augustus? Because if so then I'm sure it was mainly to spite Antony and Cleopatra's corpses
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Jan 27, 2018 20:01
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Guildencrantz posted:Did he pick it after he became Augustus? Because if so then I'm sure it was mainly to spite Antony and Cleopatra's corpses Apparently no. It was his seal during the triumviral period including the final war with Antonius. After the war he began to use a seal with an image of Alexander the Great, and later one with his own likeness.
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Jan 27, 2018 20:07
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skasion posted:Apparently no. It was his seal during the triumviral period including the final war with Antonius. After the war he began to use a seal with an image of Alexander the Great, and later one with his own likeness. The sphinx was associated with the god Apollo, and Augustus was a devotee of Apollo and claimed Apollo as a patron. He also built the Temple of Apollo Palatinus in his home on the Palatine after the place had been struck by lightning, dedicated his victory at the battle of Actium to Apollo and expanded the sanctuary of Apollo Actius there (in the Aeneid, Virgil has the god Apollo intervene at Actium to ensure Augustus's victory) , and, when he reinstituted the Secular Games, added a hymn to and sacrifices for Apollo and Diana. Dude really liked Apollo, in other words.
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Jan 27, 2018 20:21
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Also his whole persona was all mysterious and Sphinx like.
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Jan 28, 2018 17:35
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So I read Mike Duncan's new book. I know next to nothing about antiquity and I was pretty shocked at the casualty numbers claimed for a bunch of the Republican battles. Like, well into six figures? They had that many dudes to use in the first place, and that many of them actually died in a battle? edit - I really enjoyed the book bewbies fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jan 29, 2018 |
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Jan 29, 2018 16:37
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Casualty means wounded or died. American propaganda stopped using it to disguise numbers in the Iraq war (2003).
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Jan 29, 2018 16:42
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euphronius posted:Casualty means wounded or died. Also, deserters, captured or otherwise MIA
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Jan 29, 2018 16:52
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bewbies posted:So I read Mike Duncan's new book. I know next to nothing about antiquity and I was pretty shocked at the casualty numbers claimed for a bunch of the Republican battles. Like, well into six figures? They had that many dudes to use in the first place, and that many of them actually died in a battle? He seems to be accepting the ancient numbers in the Cimbri war. I'm not sure about it, I don't actually know that much about the battles he's referencing so I'm not going to claim he's wrong, but the only time we really think the ancient writers were accurate was for Cannae. That is accepted as genuinely being 50,000+ deaths at minimum. That said, by the era of Gaius Marius the Republic had we believe around a million soldiers available, so losing 100,000 is entirely possible. One of Rome's chief advantages was massive manpower compared to other states. We think the Second Punic War cost at least 100,000 Roman battle deaths and probably quite a bit more. This is on top of casualty not equaling death that the above posters mentioned.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:03
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late republican/early imperial rome was also more or less the peak of battlefield medicine until roughly 1900; wounds that might have killed soldiers in most armies throughout history through infection were survivable if your legion had properly trained medics
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Jan 29, 2018 17:07
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Grand Fromage posted:He seems to be accepting the ancient numbers in the Cimbri war. I'm not sure about it, I don't actually know that much about the battles he's referencing so I'm not going to claim he's wrong, but the only time we really think the ancient writers were accurate was for Cannae. That is accepted as genuinely being 50,000+ deaths at minimum. How on earth was Italy able to support that many people? I guess I'm coming primarily from a medieval perspective where a 5,000 man army was an indescribably massive horde so my perspective is skewed by that, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how an ancient culture could field an army large enough to suffer six figure casualties.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:12
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Jazerus posted:late republican/early imperial rome was also more or less the peak of battlefield medicine until roughly 1900; wounds that might have killed soldiers in most armies throughout history through infection were survivable if your legion had properly trained medics Yeah if you're going to be injured you want to be Roman or post-antiseptics. Nothing between is a good idea.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:14
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In the mid/late Republic the Romans also scored quite a few lopsided victories against the successor kingdoms, even if the casualties are likely exaggerated. In one such battle the Seleucids attempted to stop the Romans at Thermopylae (yes, the same one) but the Romans, being aware of history, remembered about the pass the Persians had used and took the same route. The result was the Romans allegedly destroyed the entire Seleucid force holding the pass (~10,000 men) at the cost of only 200 losses.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:14
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bewbies posted:How on earth was Italy able to support that many people? I guess I'm coming primarily from a medieval perspective where a 5,000 man army was an indescribably massive horde so my perspective is skewed by that, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how an ancient culture could field an army large enough to suffer six figure casualties. Good logistics was how they could field armies of that size. As for supporting that many people, Italy's pretty fertile and the climate seems to have been quite favorable up until late antiquity. Also by the time of the late Republic we're talking about a full fledged empire, and it's being supported by outside food supplies. Rome by this point is probably half a million people and is fed almost entirely by grain from Sicily and Africa. When you have the infrastructure to ship in massive quantities of food from Sicily, Africa, and later Egypt you can support huge numbers. Even in the middle ages Italy is the only part of Europe with a whole bunch of cities of 100,000+ people, don't underestimate how densely populated it's been since antiquity.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:17
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bewbies posted:How on earth was Italy able to support that many people? I guess I'm coming primarily from a medieval perspective where a 5,000 man army was an indescribably massive horde so my perspective is skewed by that, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how an ancient culture could field an army large enough to suffer six figure casualties. it's the difference between an urbanized centralized slave society and a rural decentralized peasant society. by the time that we know rome was definitely fielding these massive armies for real, slave labor plantations had displaced family farms and rome was bursting to the seams with dispossessed people who viewed military service as one of the few upwardly mobile paths available to them. retired legionaries, at least hypothetically and often for real, got a chance to live the dream of returning to the landowner class if they made it to retirement after the imperial period begins and the class divisions in italy start to smooth out a bit, citizenship is attached as a bonus for non-citizens that serve in the military to keep recruitment high. at that point you're talking about a much larger population than just italy though.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:24
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I haven’t made a whole lot of study of this but I’m not sure I find well-into-six-figure casualties super credible. Even the Philippi campaign in the liberators’ war, which was probably the largest single massing of Roman forces we know of, had maybe 200k troops on each side, with an optimistic assessment of how many auxiliaries were involved (the sources only count legionary regulars but it’s entirely possible that they composed as little as half the total forces). Given that the losing army entirely capitulated and was incorporated into the forces of the winners, I guess you could count them all as casualties, but apart from that I don’t see how you could really get six figures — maybe marginally.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:37
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The property requirement to serve in the legions gradually decreased, which opened it up to more people. By the time of the end of the Punic Wars it had been decreased something like 95% from what it had started at, and even then the Romans were having manpower shortages so Marius is finally able to change it to have no property requirement whatsoever. This sucks up all the displaced urban poor Jazerus is talking about and is key to the legions having so many available men. Later once people can serve in the auxilia for citizenship (the auxilia were more or less identical to the actual, citizen legions) the Romans can draw an absurd number of men from across the entire empire and have no manpower issues at all for a couple centuries. Caracalla extending citizenship to all free men undermines that and begins Rome's slow loss of manpower, leading to the situation in late antiquity when military service becomes hereditary in a desperate attempt to keep the legions full enough to fight off all the enemies.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:37
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Even before the Marian reforms it's also worth keeping in mind that for most of the Republican period the Romans demanded their allies supply legions for Roman campaigns, and everyone tends to get lumped together as "Rome" in a lot of the sources/history books for simplicity's sake. Prior to the Social War you may read that Rome had five legions present at a battle, but the reality may have been that only two of those legions were Roman citizens, two more might have been from the other Latin states, and the fifth might have been a legion supplied by an allied/subjugated group like the Samnites.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:44
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Pretty much any time you read about a Roman army past oh, 200ish BCE you should assume that the majority of that army is not made of Roman citizens. The Social War is an exception since it was Rome fighting against its allies. The typical imperial Roman army is thought to be a third to a half actual Roman citizen legions and the rest various types of auxilia. Some are trained/equipped as heavy infantry, virtually indistinguishable from Romans. Others would be the specialists you think of like Numidian cavalry or whatever.
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Jan 29, 2018 17:48
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euphronius posted:Casualty means wounded or died. Yep. KIA numbers were around 8-10% of total casualties in 2003. I remember noticing the public numbers only included KIA and not wounded. That said, the KIA rate was much also lower than 20th century wars due to the additional protection afforded by body armor and the almost magical effect of that coagulant powder. (Even as early 2003 it made a difference, with only a fraction of troops equipped with newer body armor.) </sidebar>
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Jan 29, 2018 19:59
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah if you're going to be injured you want to be Roman or post-antiseptics. Nothing between is a good idea. Honorable mention to egypt
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Jan 29, 2018 20:31
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Can anyone comment on the historical accuracy of Colleen Coullogh's Rome series (The First Man in Rome, etc)? The eye-glazing complexity of all the legal and political bits certainly has the ring of truth to it...
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Jan 29, 2018 23:31
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Tree Bucket posted:Can anyone comment on the historical accuracy of Colleen Coullogh's Rome series (The First Man in Rome, etc)? The eye-glazing complexity of all the legal and political bits certainly has the ring of truth to it... They’re necessarily pretty fictionalized as to the details and sometimes she gets a bit ridiculous what with young Caesar being superboy and Mithridates making GBS threads himself all over everything, but as far as the plots go, they’re pretty well researched and rarely outright ignore historical sources when they can just embellish on them.
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Jan 29, 2018 23:40
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bewbies posted:How on earth was Italy able to support that many people? I guess I'm coming primarily from a medieval perspective where a 5,000 man army was an indescribably massive horde so my perspective is skewed by that, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how an ancient culture could field an army large enough to suffer six figure casualties. Productivity in the middle ages was way, way lower because of the self-sufficient manorial economic model. Trade and interconnectivity increases production of goods by a lot, like more than double in a lot of example cases.
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Jan 29, 2018 23:59
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skasion posted:They’re necessarily pretty fictionalized as to the details and sometimes she gets a bit ridiculous what with young Caesar being superboy and Mithridates making GBS threads himself all over everything, but as far as the plots go, they’re pretty well researched and rarely outright ignore historical sources when they can just embellish on them. Except for when they do things like have Sulla secretly assassinate Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus 8 years before he actually died. Oh, also, Sulla is the only gay man in Rome. Those rumors about Caesar are completely false, because Caesar is a Real Man. Oh, also, Aurelia is a gang boss who has her own secret cadre of assassins and extortionists.
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Jan 30, 2018 00:22
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Epicurius posted:Except for when they do things like have Sulla secretly assassinate Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus 8 years before he actually died. Oh, also, Sulla is the only gay man in Rome. Those rumors about Caesar are completely false, because Caesar is a Real Man. Oh, also, Aurelia is a gang boss who has her own secret cadre of assassins and extortionists. That sounds when at the end of HBO's Rome Atia promises Livia that she will not relinquish the status of Rome's first woman easily, and then in real history Atia had been dead for a decade by then
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Jan 30, 2018 00:24
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I think the other thing to note manpower wise is post Marcus Aurelius, huge swathes of the population died of various plagues. Compounded again in the timw of Justinian. All those urban poor that swelled Roman armies were likely the hardest hit. I liked the History of Byzantiums nod that after Justinian... and really up to probably the Macedonian Dynasty there were periodic plagues would pop up every generation or two and wipe out any population growth. Meaning less people growing less food to feed a smaller pool of soldiers. Then once these plagues drop off you get the big population boom of the middle ages until the black death comes back with a vengeance. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 02:07
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Justinian's plague is considered a notable contributor to the rise of Islam because it hit the urban, sedantary societies in Rome and Persia really hard and mostly skipped over the more nomadic Arab populations
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Jan 30, 2018 02:10
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Was there a reason there were more plagues then than in other periods?
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Jan 30, 2018 05:49
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Koramei posted:Was there a reason there were more plagues then than in other periods? There's a possibility population density and ease of travel had something to do with it.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:51
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Sulla actually being gay/bi and the allegations about Caesar's supposed homosexual trysts being nothing more than nasty rumors is the most common view of historians too so idk why McCullough gets singled out.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:23
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Koramei posted:Was there a reason there were more plagues then than in other periods? If my understanding of the underlying biology is correct (it may not be), the chance of a new plague developing in any given year is something really low like 0.1% or something, but that's still high enough that over the centuries it's bound to happen eventually and then kill a bunch of people before we get genetic resistance to the disease. The conditions at places like Constantinople and Ctesiphon were almost tailor made to increase that chance to more like 0.5% or 1% as well, and also well-suited to turn an outbreak into an epidemic. (Numbers in this post made up to demonstrate the point, I don't know how you'd even go about calculating something like that)
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Jan 30, 2018 06:33
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Crowded conditions where people are also living in close proximity to lots of animals is how you get new plagues. This is why most of them seem to start in Southern China, it's the most densely populated area of Eurasia for most of history. Even today there's all kinds of crazyfuck diseases over here. We talk about "bird flu" but here in China there's like 20 different strains of bird flu with unique flavors and people talk about the different types. H9N2 is the latest one I heard about.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:39
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I remember reading somewhere that India was the only part of Eurasia to have positive population growth during the 1300s, due to the climate being unsuitable for the bubonic plague. Might be bs, however.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:55
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Mantis42 posted:Sulla actually being gay/bi and the allegations about Caesar's supposed homosexual trysts being nothing more than nasty rumors is the most common view of historians too so idk why McCullough gets singled out. She gets singled out for portraying homosexuality as something unmanly. Which is pretty anachronistic for a Roman of the time, as long as he's the penetrator. The negative part about Caesar's trysts in the East (regardless of real or not) for the contemporaries was not that it was a homosexual act, but the implication that the was the penetrated by a foreign king. Decius fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 07:30
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Jazerus posted:late republican/early imperial rome was also more or less the peak of battlefield medicine until roughly 1900; wounds that might have killed soldiers in most armies throughout history through infection were survivable if your legion had properly trained medics skasion posted:I haven't made a whole lot of study of this but I'm not sure I find well-into-six-figure casualties super credible.
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Jan 30, 2018 08:03
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Decius posted:She gets singled out for portraying homosexuality as something unmanly. Which is pretty anachronistic for a Roman of the time, as long as he's the penetrator. The negative part about Caesar's trysts in the East (regardless of real or not) for the contemporaries was not that it was a homosexual act, but the implication that the was the penetrated by a foreign king. I guess its a case of 1980's mentality seeping through in the story. Yes, its incorrect but i dont see much reason to place 2018 ideas on it and go ''bad book!''.
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Jan 30, 2018 10:41
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9-Volt Assault posted:I guess its a case of 1980's mentality seeping through in the story. Yes, its incorrect but i dont see much reason to place 2018 ideas on it and go ''bad book!''. I don't think it's a bad book at all. Teenage me devoured that book after my mom brought home from the sale table at Barnes and Noble, and I made sure to get every sequel out of the library the day they had it. That series is what got me interested in Roman history. That being said, they're novels, not histories, and it's a mistake to read them as histories. She arranges events to suit her purposes, she invents personalities and character traits, she clearly thinks that both Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar are the bees knees, and tends to fall into a "heroes and villains" narrative, all of which makes for good novels but bad histories.
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Jan 30, 2018 13:25
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Decius posted:She gets singled out for portraying homosexuality as something unmanly. Which is pretty anachronistic for a Roman of the time, as long as he's the penetrator. The negative part about Caesar's trysts in the East (regardless of real or not) for the contemporaries was not that it was a homosexual act, but the implication that the was the penetrated by a foreign king.
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Jan 30, 2018 17:17
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