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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think we have that information for the Romans. My guess is that soldiers didn't loot individually, they would've looted as a contubernium and each decanus was responsible for keeping order between the men. Possibly doing it by century with the centurions in charge. And my further guess is that they'd loot as a group then divide it up together. I don't think I've ever seen it portrayed in fiction either. Which is odd, considering that there's no shortage of portrayals of military abuses carried out in the modern era. Plenty of Roman battles in fiction, but little of the nasty stuff. I know that the non-citizen Italian allies complained that the Romans were hoarding the loot for themselves, and this was one of the complaints made before the Social War. So were the Italian allies being held back from opportunities to loot/enslave, and/or were the Roman officers confiscating goods from them after they had done so? The latter would imply central management. I'm just finding it hard to imagine how people would go about such things, while still holding to some vision of lawful conduct.
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Sep 19, 2019 00:24
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Corsec posted:I don't think I've ever seen it portrayed in fiction either. Which is odd, considering that there's no shortage of portrayals of military abuses carried out in the modern era. Plenty of Roman battles in fiction, but little of the nasty stuff. grimdark fiction is just as stylized as the stuff it is critiquing
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Sep 19, 2019 00:31
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on the subjects of roads and carriages I read this article recently and i thought it was pretty interesting and seemed well researched, even if it's not a real academic work. It says a lot about some of the practical limitations and differences between different transportation systems.quote:Carrying stuff was the easiest way to go; there was no need to build roads or vehicles, nor to feed animals. But humans can carry no more than 25 to 40 kg over long distances, which made this a labour-intensive method if many goods had to be transported. Pack animals can take about 50 to 150 kg, but they have to be fed, are slightly more demanding than people in terms of terrain, and they can be stubborn. Pack animals also require one or more people to guide them. . . the Chinese wheelbarrow, aided by a second man, an animal, or wind power, could transport up to 300 kg of cargo. This was almost as much as the maximum allowed cargo for horse and ox drawn carts in Ancient Rome (326 kg and 490 kg respectively). The article argues that in both China and Europe, the large road systems built by the Roman and Han empires began to break down in the early Middle Ages, leading to the abandonment of four wheeled carts in most circumstances as the primary transport system in both regions by the end of the first millennium AD, and didn't become widespread in Europe again until the early modern. Without good roads wheeled vehicles just aren't very effective. quote:Because of friction, the nature of a road surface greatly determines how efficient wheeled transport will be. In "Energy in world history", Vaclac Smil writes: "On a smooth, hard, dry road, a force of only about 30 kg is needed to wheel a 1 tonne load. A loose, gravelly surface may easily call for five times as much draft. On sandy or muddy roads the multiple can be seven to ten times higher." In Europe carts were mostly replaced by pack animals which were less efficient. However the Chinese wheelbarrow which developed in this period was nearly just as efficient as larger carts, and could be used on much narrower and smaller scale infrastructure that was more easily maintained on the local community level. turn of the 20th century Chinese paths suitable for porters or wheelbarrows. European observers were routinely impressed by these wheelbarrows or handcarts, so I'm not sure why they developed in Asia but not Europe. I think probably if they had been invented in Europe they would have been used. However Europe may have had less need, since it is blessed by a very favorable geography with most population centers near the coast and many navigable rivers that meant there was less need. sail assisted wheelbarrows could carry even larger loads in favorable conditions  what is probably the earliest known image of a wheelbarrow, from a Sichuan tomb dated to approximately 150 AD
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Sep 19, 2019 00:51
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HEY GUNS posted:i'm wondering why, and my first uninformed opinion straight out of my rear end might be that even the grimdarkiest of grimdark is still supposed to be somewhat of a power fantasy for the reader, and detailed descriptions of magdeburg 20-24 may 1631 are a power fantasy for nobody? Yeah, I think stuff like GoT is undermined in the way that while it attempts to have themes that critique all the abusive stuff it portrays, the presentation and tone tends to fetishize the violence. Like, it makes the audience complicit with the violence through their enjoyment of the spectacle, but then it fails to make them question their own enjoyment of it. On this subject, is the Michael Caine film 'The Last Valley' any good?
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Sep 19, 2019 01:03
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Corsec posted:
Yeah its worth a watch
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Sep 19, 2019 01:05
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Thanks for answering my question. Very informative answer. I have one more baby question. How dark were the "Dark Ages"? From what I understand this is widely disputed as the ages being dark at all and that all that happened is that the Western Roman Empire fell while the Eastern stood and eventually turned into Byzantine Empire.
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Sep 19, 2019 01:06
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Squalid posted:
this is a badass piece of equipment imo
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Sep 19, 2019 01:06
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Dang, it's a cool that they used wind power to travel on land. That's a neat way of getting around not having a body of water to scoot along. I read some recently about native americans just using "travois" to transport things around, which are basically just sleds being pulled along the ground, and I just can't get my head around it. I guess it worked well enough for them though if they used them well after the introduction of horses. Jeb Bush 2012 posted:eh, even if that's true the most undemocratic features of the US constitution are a combination of stuff that came out of grubby political deals and stuff that was never really planned in the first place A lot of the democratic features kinda happened out of stuff that was never planned in the first place, like electing senators. The house of representatives had the amount of representatives determined by a population that mostly couldn't vote. Basically the founding fathers put together a weird skeleton of a system that only vaguely resembled what it would later become after 200 years of legislation, subjective interpretation, and stuff springing out of nowhere entirely unaccounted for in the original system. Which isn't great, but it also means that the system can be further tweaked in theory.
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Sep 19, 2019 01:06
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Corsec posted:On this subject, is the Michael Caine film 'The Last Valley' any good? It'ds good punk rebel ecks posted:How dark were the "Dark Ages"? From what I understand this is widely disputed as the ages being dark at all and that all that happened is that the Western Roman Empire fell while the Eastern stood and eventually turned into Byzantine Empire. the period originally got the epithet because it was "dark" in the sense that there was a dearth of historical records. That's certainly still true even if the modern implication of moral darkness isn't justified.
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Sep 19, 2019 01:28
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Corsec posted:Yeah, I think stuff like GoT is undermined in the way that while it attempts to have themes that critique all the abusive stuff it portrays, the presentation and tone tends to fetishize the violence. Like, it makes the audience complicit with the violence through their enjoyment of the spectacle, but then it fails to make them question their own enjoyment of it. The grimdark is exaggerated but in sort of a...disproportionate way. Everyone's a nihilist, everyone's cynical...and we see women getting raped but not men, which happens in war irl. Voltaire mentions it casually in Candide. Speaking of grimdark settings.
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Sep 19, 2019 01:38
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Nessus posted:He who had the largest dodecahedron had first claim on slaves, last claim on loot. Thats a better explanation than most punk rebel ecks posted:Thanks for answering my question. Very informative answer. I have one more baby question. The important thing they don’t teach you in high school history is that the power structures we associate with feudal Europe were established by the late Romans during the Third Century Crisis. Diocletian set up the practice of serfs bound to land to combat labor shortages, and this persisted after the Empire in the west fell. Not that many people felt the Western Empire fell as the Franks and Ostrogoths loved to pretend to be the representatives of the Empire. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 01:43
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HEY GUNS posted:Also that nobody in GOT seems to believe anything. It's not like you have a binary choice between "naive sheltered child who believes in legends" and "dead eyed mercenary," the historical analogues of those mercenaries probably compare themselves to the protagonists of those legends all the time, they love that stuff. They also take loyalty and devotion to ideals seriously. Yeah, there can be a big difference between portraying amoral people and writing an amoral narrative. It's not necessary to suppose a moral universe in order to show that, in order for a society to survive, it needs to be morally intelligible to enough of it's subjects.
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Sep 19, 2019 02:00
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HEY GUNS posted:Also that nobody in GOT seems to believe anything. It's not like you have a binary choice between "naive sheltered child who believes in legends" and "dead eyed mercenary," the historical analogues of those mercenaries probably compare themselves to the protagonists of those legends all the time, they love that stuff. They also take loyalty and devotion to ideals seriously. Brianne and Jamie aren’t. Off the top of my head. Neither was Robb or nedd or Caitlin or samwell or Jon snow or even the Dragon Woman. (Books here I didn’t watch the show)
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Sep 19, 2019 03:09
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Grand Fromage posted:An example of Roman superiority would be medicine. Roman medical understanding and the ability to treat wounds or conduct major surgery was not surpassed until the 1800s. Any time prior to the discovery of antiseptics (and the Romans had a vague concept of them too), you're likely better off with a Roman doctor than anyone else in the world. of course, the romans considered egyptian doctors to be the best in the world
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Sep 19, 2019 03:16
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euphronius posted:Brianne and Jamie aren’t. Off the top of my head. Neither was Robb or nedd or Caitlin or samwell or Jon snow or even the Dragon Woman. (Books here I didn’t watch the show)
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Sep 19, 2019 03:23
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Grand Fromage posted:I don't think we have that information for the Romans. My guess is that soldiers didn't loot individually, they would've looted as a contubernium and each decanus was responsible for keeping order between the men. Possibly doing it by century with the centurions in charge. And my further guess is that they'd loot as a group then divide it up together. With regards to Roman looting practices, I think it varied from era to era? Like, in early Rome, the soldiers have to loot or they don't get paid. Which means they go deeper into debt, which means they have to sell their lands, which means nobody can afford to be a soldier... In Republican Rome, remember when Cato the Elder was trying to get Scipio Africanus done in for embezzlement because he paid the soldiers a bonus from the Carthiginian spoils instead of delivering it to the Roman Senate for distribution? And then Caeser and Crassus engage in wholesale looting on their campaigns to fund their own personal ambitions. Which seems to imply that the general gets to decide how to distribute the spoils at that point.
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Sep 19, 2019 03:59
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cheetah7071 posted:cowards never invaded ireland smh It was still full of snakes then.
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Sep 19, 2019 07:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:A lot of the democratic features kinda happened out of stuff that was never planned in the first place, like electing senators. The house of representatives had the amount of representatives determined by a population that mostly couldn't vote. Yeah. The United States wasn't intended to be a democracy. It was intended to be a republic made up of the most powerful men in the country. The fact that it was gradually tinkered with and transformed into the longest lasting democracy for a major nation in human history was a complete accident. One could say that the United States's democratic system is the Marvel vs Capcom 2 of democratic systems. Triskelli posted:Thats a better explanation than most Wow I never knew this! Thanks.
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Sep 19, 2019 09:15
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Mr Enderby posted:I don't think you can meaningfully separate the former from the latter. Sharing of knowledge, the sourcing of raw materials, long supply chains are all important factors in technological advancement. Something that could be sent way back in time because it has no real dependencies is the pendulum clock. It would be tedious to make with hand tools and a primitive lathe, but it could be done. The Antikythera mechanism is proof of that, if any was needed. It could even be made of wood. Then there’s the question of what to do with it. What is it good for that cannot be accomplished well enough with some combination of stargazing, water clocks, and structured chants? I don’t have a great answer for that. If you need a better timer for short periods, there’s the hourglass, but it postdates mechanical clocks! One could also imagine timing things by counting passes of a free‐swinging pendulum, set into motion by hand, but there’s no record of anyone actually doing this. They didn’t have a use for it. It would have been like Hero’s engine or the south‐pointing chariot: a curiosity. The conditions exist to create it, but not to appreciate its creation.
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Sep 19, 2019 11:39
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Guildencrantz posted:I'd argue that at least the High Middle Ages were more advanced in terms of tech that would actually affect most people's day to day lives. Windmills are a huge deal if you're a farmer, which most people were, and agriculture in general developed massively thanks to better ploughs and crop rotations. yeah but who needs those when slaves exist?
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Sep 19, 2019 11:42
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Platystemon posted:Something that could be sent way back in time because it has no real dependencies is the pendulum clock. if you could go back and design a proper marine chronometer driven by spring tension rather than a pendulum you'd revolutionize sea navigation possibly thousand of years early. You could run it on twisted fibers working like a coiled spring absent stuff like steel.
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Sep 19, 2019 12:29
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The Romans might have been able to do something with optics. Clear glass is hard enough to make from scratch even today, but the Romans were masters out of their time. There are some immediate applications for optics in the forms of eyeglasses and spyglasses. Eyeglasses are going to make you popular with certain wealthy and powerful men who need them. Spyglasses are more speculative. An obvious use is military scouting. Perhaps they could also be used in communication, like to enable seeing signal flags from great distances. A Roman Empire with a semaphore telegraph network could be an interesting counterfactual.
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Sep 19, 2019 12:38
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I think the only thing worth bringing back in time would be a globe. Anyone going back in time with a more complex invention is not only going to face a language barrier but to going to have to invent new terms to explain whatever device you're bringing. A globe is simple, carries very valuable info (what the world looks like) and doesnt require much knowledge to u derstand. Any somewhat educated roman would be able to recognize what it is.
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Sep 19, 2019 12:40
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Platystemon posted:The Romans might have been able to do something with optics. perhaps some whiskey to go along with the semaphore?
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Sep 19, 2019 12:40
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And double entry bookkeeping to keep track of whiskey profits, and a printing press for advertisements, and...
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Sep 19, 2019 12:44
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Bronze cannon and gunpowder. The gunpowder already existed, you just had to teach them how to make it, and bronze already existed and small cannons could be cast at the time. The Romans already used field artillery like the ballista, so that concept already exists as well. It is also a tech that would exponentially benefit the romans since many of their rivals would not have the means to mass produce them, so things like the barbarian invasions change drastically when Roman border forts have emplaced cannons on the walls firing grapeshot.
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Sep 19, 2019 12:53
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FAUXTON posted:if you could go back and design a proper marine chronometer driven by spring tension rather than a pendulum you'd revolutionize sea navigation possibly thousand of years early. You could run it on twisted fibers working like a coiled spring absent stuff like steel. That requires orders of magnitude more precision than a pendulum clock. It’s good for solving the longitude problem, but the good news is that the ancients didn’t have a great handle on even latitude Make some quadrants and you could revolutionise navigation without the chronometer—if you had worthy ships and destinations, anyway. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 12:53
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Dalael posted:I think the only thing worth bringing back in time would be a globe. The difficulty of replicating the globe is a weakness, IMO, and you’ll want to replicate it to have it in multiple ports and to keep the knowledge through the ages. Better to bring back a flat map. Mercator is a good choice, despite the hate it gets today. e: I say that, but it would be kind of cool to have the one precious imperial globe. You could get scholars to project it onto a flat map and replicate that. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 13:03
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What good is a globe going to do Romans? One that showed modern nations would be useless to them and one that showed landforms wouldn’t impress them at all. Best case scenario they send expeditions to the new world and start enslaving and plaguing the Americans a thousand years ahead of time.
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Sep 19, 2019 13:19
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skasion posted:What good is a globe going to do Romans? One that showed modern nations would be useless to them and one that showed landforms wouldn’t impress them at all. Best case scenario they send expeditions to the new world and start enslaving and plaguing the Americans a thousand years ahead of time. If you look at it from a modern perspective I really wish a bunch of diseased romans showed up one thousand years earlier to introduce diseases that they would have time to recover from and kick the earlier explorers off the shores.
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Sep 19, 2019 14:15
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LingcodKilla posted:If you look at it from a modern perspective I really wish a bunch of diseased romans showed up one thousand years earlier to introduce diseases that they would have time to recover from and kick the earlier explorers off the shores. Would those even be the same diseases tho? Wouldn't mutation over a thousand year mean that they still wouldn't be immune to whatever european explorers brought with them?
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Sep 19, 2019 14:47
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You could possibly introduce photography - more specifically the daguerrotype. The actual camera is fairly straight forward - a pinhole camera is pretty easy to make. Then you'd need a polished silver plate, mercury, salt and halogen fumes. The first three are easy enough, but the the fumes are a bit trickier - iodine might be the easiest as it comes from the waste from making saltpetre, but I have no idea how easy producing sulphuric acid would be during Roman times. The final image would be delicate without a gold chloride treatment, but it would be a start. I think cyanotypes might be feasible, but again, it depends on producing (I think) nitric acid. I have no chemistry training, so no idea how hard that would be.
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Sep 19, 2019 14:53
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Elissimpark posted:I have no idea how easy producing sulphuric acid would be during Roman times. Both of the common modern industrial processes require vanadium as a catalyst, good luck with that. But the older method invented in the 18th century used a lead-lined wooden box and saltpeter, which certainly seems doable.
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Sep 19, 2019 15:24
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Producing nitrogen dioxide seems fiddly, but sulfur dioxide comes from burning sulfur or from volcanic eruptions, so if you time it right...
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Sep 19, 2019 15:47
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Platystemon posted:The Romans might have been able to do something with optics. The Romans did have good glass, albeit not quite enough to make telescopes from, but their glassmaking techniques spread pretty rapidly. I've seen Frankish cups from centuries after the fall of the western empire that are almost as good.
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Sep 19, 2019 15:51
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Platystemon posted:The difficulty of replicating the globe is a weakness, IMO, and you’ll want to replicate it to have it in multiple ports and to keep the knowledge through the ages. I'm not so sure that a globe would be so hard to replicate once you have one of them. skasion posted:What good is a globe going to do Romans? One that showed modern nations would be useless to them and one that showed landforms wouldn’t impress them at all. Best case scenario they send expeditions to the new world and start enslaving and plaguing the Americans a thousand years ahead of time. I agree that a globe with modern nation would be pretty useless other than rubbing in their face that their empire is going to go down the drain. But a globe that simply shows landmass and geographical features would probably have its use. As for not impressing them, I don't think we can accurately measure this. Would your average farmer care? probably not. But generals, people in charge of logistic or someone who wants to launch an exploratory/diplomatic expedition somewhere? I'm sure they could find a use. I also think that, considering how the Romans considered themselves "Masters of the World" having an idea of just how large the world is might give them some perspective.
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Sep 19, 2019 15:51
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chitoryu12 posted:The Romans did have good glass, albeit not quite enough to make telescopes from, but their glassmaking techniques spread pretty rapidly. I've seen Frankish cups from centuries after the fall of the western empire that are almost as good. Additionally, glass was one of the handful of luxury imports imperial China wanted from the west.
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Sep 19, 2019 16:04
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"Centurio, have the battery load double cannister, the goths are approaching."
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Sep 19, 2019 16:59
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One other thing the Romans were good at was not just transporting goods long distances, but mass producing consumer products. Once they figured out molds, they were producing tons of identical ceramic cups, pots, etc. with elaborate decoration that used to take a skilled craftsman. You could just go to the market and find a stall selling a dozen identical cups with floral designs and poo poo.
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Sep 19, 2019 17:02
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Power Khan posted:"Centurio, have the battery load double cannister, the emperor is approaching."
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Sep 19, 2019 17:03
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