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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:The Romans didnt actually ever bother to conquer down the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Red Sea, did they? Augustus sent his prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus in that direction. I don’t think it worked out though.
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Mar 20, 2024 17:57
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e: misread sorry
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Mar 20, 2024 17:58
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skasion posted:Augustus sent his prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus in that direction. I don’t think it worked out though. edit: requoting the map for the new page AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 18:02
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skasion posted:Augustus sent his prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus in that direction. I don’t think it worked out though. Probably for the best, can you imagine the Romans with coffee
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Mar 20, 2024 18:09
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:The Romans didnt actually ever bother to conquer down the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Red Sea, did they? That's Arabia Felix, which was sort of in Roman control though considering it Roman territory is maybe a bit much. The Red Sea was a vital trade route so there were outposts all along there, both trade ports and military to keep the area safe. There's a port on the Egyptian side that connects to the Nile, Socotra and Yemen were vaguely subject to Rome, and a couple of Red Sea islands that had Roman forts. For the most part Arabia was just such a brutal environment without anything there of value that Rome didn't hold it directly, but they had a whole web of alliances in the area to keep it under control.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:13
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Oh interesting, thanks. I figure the Romans may have had some interest in what was out that way considering their trade ties in the Indian ocean, but the Arabian peninsula is just so desolate and mountainous I'd be surprised if they actually did anything permanent. The Hejaz is actually relatively nice and arable, it's the interior desert that's really hostile. There have been pretty large settlements along the coast for millennia.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:14
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Oh interesting, thanks. I figure the Romans may have had some interest in what was out that way considering their trade ties in the Indian ocean, but the Arabian peninsula is just so desolate and mountainous I'd be surprised if they actually did anything permanent. I'd imagine there were outposts or something, waystations for ships and stuff, but afaik Rome never really "owned" that land. but back then that is a far more nebulous concept anyway. There was no bigger dog there to enforce like, taxes, on a Roman outpost so I'm sure were countless tiny Roman "settlements" scattered outside the actual borders.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:14
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Here’s a full account of the campaign complete with Augustan-era spin (“only seven men perished in war”). Sections 22-24. Sounds like a cluster gently caress tbh. I wonder if any of these place names are traceable? https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/16D*.html
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Mar 20, 2024 18:17
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That map is just being very uh, generous with Rome's borders. The entire empire was surrounded by areas that were not really part of the state, there was no direct Roman control, but were under Roman domination through a combination of threat and alliances. Sphere of influence I suppose. Roman power extended over much of Arabia without it actually being part of the empire.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:19
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I was thinking the Romans might want coastal outposts and forts and ports along the Red Sea coast in order to control/protect/tax/de-piratize the trade passing through, but then I thought about how an isolated coastal outpost that occasionally had ships with spices and silks docking at it would would just be constantly raided by desert nomads*, and yeah maintaining a loose network of tributaries and alliances was probably the better policy. * At least until the Romans unlock Ornithopters on the tech tree, according to this documentary I saw in IMAX recently.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:22
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Eagerly await the "map of the United States at its height" which colors all of NATO as American, in a few hundred years
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Mar 20, 2024 19:02
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cheetah7071 posted:Eagerly await the "map of the Douglas McCarthur's United States at its height" which colors all of NATO as American, in a few hundred years ftfy
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Mar 20, 2024 20:28
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When the Helvetii tribe decided to invade and settle into new territory, they torched all their stuff. Burned down 400 villages and 12 towns. Then Caesar stopped them, and they had to return back and rebuild. How lovely must that have been.
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Mar 21, 2024 00:18
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It’s pretty loving barren so I’d guess fresh water was a huge issue.
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Mar 21, 2024 01:18
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cheetah7071 posted:Eagerly await the "map of the United States at its height" which colors all of NATO as American, in a few hundred years Wouldn't be wrong.
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Mar 21, 2024 08:34
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Europe really doesn't care as long as the military support keeps coming. The US is really not socially compelling here except to ultraconservatives.
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Mar 21, 2024 17:55
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Strategic Tea posted:Europe really doesn't care as long as the military support keeps coming. The US is really not socially compelling here except to ultraconservatives.
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Mar 21, 2024 19:17
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That's the ultraconservatives 
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Mar 21, 2024 19:44
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Nessus posted:Isn't American youtube cooking the brains of all of your home grown maniacs I've seen right-wingers over here talk about their first amendment rights like they have any.
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Mar 21, 2024 20:47
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I remember people digging into Youtube's algorithm to explain how Pewdiepie got big from living in scandinavia and italy and england while broadcasting so that his videos got scattered across different countries. God knows how the algo works now. But Europe has also been marinating in American TV, movies, and music for decades longer, so that cultural domination might as well make them part of the American empire. And then there's all those military bases.
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Mar 21, 2024 22:14
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So this all reminds me that one of those things about Rome is that most people inside the Roman empire seemed to like being Roman, enough so that unlike unpopular empires like Neo-Assyria, Rome survives stuff like Epirus' invasion, the Social War, etc etc and most of all the Crisis of the Third Century, and even after Rome falls people fuss about being Roman-style and invoking Roman traditions down to, well, today. My assumption my whole life has been that it isn't really possible to relate the kinds of evidence we have pre-popularity polling to the way we talk about popularity polls today, basically I just kind of assume that there's no way to reasonably speculate on "if you asked a Roman in Gaul in 200CE what they thought of Rome, what would they say" in a way that maps to our 21st century ways of talking about approval polls, but I'm curious if anybody's tried to pursue that just to see if it works or not. Also I guess more curious more broadly about what we can say other than "well, people seem to go out of their way to rejoin the Romans a lot" in terms of how people felt and talked about being in the Roman empire (more interested in non-elite perspectives but y'know, sources).
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Mar 21, 2024 23:04
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It's one of those things where we'd need much better and different sources than we have. But as you say the circumstantial evidence is very strong that for the most part, people liked being Roman. There are very few rebellions with the explicit purpose of not being Roman anymore, and most of those happen relatively soon after the Roman conquest of an area. Even the Social War wasn't about leaving Rome that much, the socii were mostly mad that they weren't being given the Roman privileges they thought they were due. They rebelled because they wanted to be more Roman.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:16
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Acts 22 posted:24 The chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging; that he might know wherefore they cried so against him. c. AD 100 I think. I’d want to be a Roman too.
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Mar 22, 2024 01:30
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what's not to love? these freaks that love to go to war handle all of the business of defending your poo poo for you and even have the courtesy to set up reliable supply lines so they aren't constantly devastating friendly territory just by walking through it. you're connected into a trade network that might as well be globalized by the standards of the ancient world. you don't get hassled about religion* or culture or anything really. sucks that your great-grandparents had to live through a nasty conquest and all that it entails but it's done, might as well enjoy the upsides. that's not to say that roman rule didn't suck tremendously for some people, sometimes, or that the lovely parts of roman society like slavery weren't lovely. but the durability of the empire depended on making it not suck for most people most of the time and the imperial elite were generally aware that that was the implicit social contract everything rested on *monotheism not included
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Mar 22, 2024 02:29
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Jazerus posted:what's not to love? these freaks that love to go to war handle all of the business of defending your poo poo for you and even have the courtesy to set up reliable supply lines so they aren't constantly devastating friendly territory just by walking through it. you're connected into a trade network that might as well be globalized by the standards of the ancient world. you don't get hassled about religion* or culture or anything really. sucks that your great-grandparents had to live through a nasty conquest and all that it entails but it's done, might as well enjoy the upsides. that's not to say that roman rule didn't suck tremendously for some people, sometimes, or that the lovely parts of roman society like slavery weren't lovely. but the durability of the empire depended on making it not suck for most people most of the time and the imperial elite were generally aware that that was the implicit social contract everything rested on
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Mar 22, 2024 03:31
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the process of building a hegemony is extremely bloody, but things do tend to be more peaceful while they last. A bit of a pradoxical knot to untangle.
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Mar 22, 2024 03:42
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Grand Fromage posted:It's one of those things where we'd need much better and different sources than we have. But as you say the circumstantial evidence is very strong that for the most part, people liked being Roman. There are very few rebellions with the explicit purpose of not being Roman anymore, and most of those happen relatively soon after the Roman conquest of an area. Even the Social War wasn't about leaving Rome that much, the socii were mostly mad that they weren't being given the Roman privileges they thought they were due. They rebelled because they wanted to be more Roman. I mean, I live in a country where one major center of political power resides in a Senate that meets in domed classical building on a hill called "Capitol" that is decorated with fasces and eagles.
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Mar 22, 2024 03:43
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
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Mar 22, 2024 04:12
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FMguru posted:For me, what sets Rome apart from, say, the Assyrians was that even when it fell apart, people still clung to their Roman identities and looked to the legacy of that empire for legitimacy and validation for centuries and eventually millennia afterwards. Charlemagne presenting himself as re-founding the Roman Empire (even traveling to Rome for his crowning), Moscow calling itself "Third Rome" after 1453, the way the barbarian kingdoms that overran Rome in the fifth century still adopted Roman titles and imagery, the ongoing use of "Tsar" and "Kaiser" as titles of authority, the continuation of a ramshackle Holy Roman Empire into the 18th century - people wouldn't be doing that if the cultural memory of Roman rule was "Ugh, those assholes." I think that says more about the Assyrians, at most, than it does about Rome. All of that means very little to, say, your average East Asian, whose ruler was titled something that contains one or both of the characters 皇 and 帝, in reference to a man 2,000 years ago who titled himself both of those in reference to rulers 1,500-2,000 years before himself, up until around a century ago, and who has the understanding that while their state has continuity of government dating back to at earliest 1868 their country has had a fairly solid historically-attested definition for millennia and any changings of hands were just civil wars or unfortunate forced satrapies.
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Mar 22, 2024 05:40
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Yeah I'm not really sure what "a rebellion to reject roman-ness" would really look like in comparisons to the rebellions that did happen, and I don't think that sort of rebellion was common in the ancient era anyways. There are a couple areas that just kinda got used to being under the domion of one empire or another It can also be pretty easy to just elide over any individual revolt/rebellion/civil war when you're judging 500 years all at once since they seldom last more than a year or seven, and were usually localized. There were a lot of them when you really get poking though. I guess there was a pseudo-egalitarianism to the Imperial apparatus being able to accept leaders from any part of the empire, so I guess it was generally less likely that people would create a powerbase outside the imperial apparatus which would be what would define the empire ending, so instead any big general already knew the basics of the system and so would perpetuate it in the event that they could seize power. It was only the growing power of autonomous German tribes within the empire that finally formed the basis for people to eventually say that the new guys who took over weren't Roman, even though they still used parts of the imperial apparatus for the convenience, and those imperial apparatus bits continued to exist in some way for a very long time. FMguru posted:I mean, I live in a country where one major center of political power resides in a Senate that meets in domed classical building on a hill called "Capitol" that is decorated with fasces and eagles. Except the general intent with all that was to evoke pre-imperial Rome.
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Mar 22, 2024 06:28
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Something which springs to mind as I pour a nightcap is that it also wouldn't surprise me if there was a large element of claiming plain, material, territorial successorship for most of history, more than Rome being some kind of platonic empire in a philosophically idealistic conception, given the obvious example of Rum.
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Mar 22, 2024 06:43
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Grand Fromage posted:It's one of those things where we'd need much better and different sources than we have. But as you say the circumstantial evidence is very strong that for the most part, people liked being Roman. There are very few rebellions with the explicit purpose of not being Roman anymore, and most of those happen relatively soon after the Roman conquest of an area. Even the Social War wasn't about leaving Rome that much, the socii were mostly mad that they weren't being given the Roman privileges they thought they were due. They rebelled because they wanted to be more Roman. Yeah this is pretty much how it looks to me. I guess it's partially just me thinking about how I'll read news reports and such about "President Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden is the most illegitimate ruler ever" and I'm like "where's the peasant revolts, surely we can put peasant revolts in here as some sort of evidence one way or another." And yeah to be clear (and also responding to SlothfulCobra's thing about rebellions) is that what stands out about Rome isn't that they fully lacked rebellions, they obviously had tons of rebellions and civil wars. It's that when those happen they don't trigger revolts from separatists in every part of the empire, which is far more normal for Western empires. When the Akkaddian, Neo-Assyrian, half a dozen different types of Persian, Macedonian, etc empires start having rebellions, every other client kingdom in the empire kind of goes "now's our chance" because they've been eyeing the door for decades, sometimes centuries. Mandoric posted:I think that says more about the Assyrians, at most, than it does about Rome. All of that means very little to, say, your average East Asian, whose ruler was titled something that contains one or both of the characters 皇 and 帝, in reference to a man 2,000 years ago who titled himself both of those in reference to rulers 1,500-2,000 years before himself, up until around a century ago, and who has the understanding that while their state has continuity of government dating back to at earliest 1868 their country has had a fairly solid historically-attested definition for millennia and any changings of hands were just civil wars or unfortunate forced satrapies. Among Western empires the Roman empire does seem to be the outlier, rather than the Neo-Assyrians. The revolts against Wu Zetian are actually a huge factor in why I'm thinking about revolts in these terms. To clarify for people with less familiarity with Chinese history, Wu Zetian, emperor of the Tang/Zhou dynasty (she's really complicated), was direly unpopular with the aristocracy of the time, but because she was very popular with the peasantry, people who tried to revolt against her found that their armies suffered crippling desertion and were totally ineffective.
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Mar 22, 2024 07:27
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Peasant revolts, yeah that's a good point. Rome had very few things that would qualify. The Conflict of the Orders has some similar conceptual vibes, though that's a long political struggle and never really turns into full revolt, the closest is the plebeians basically going on strike. I think there's like one or two proper, though small, peasant revolts. There were the Servile Wars which I suppose in a Roman context you could consider being equivalent to peasant revolt.
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Mar 22, 2024 07:43
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SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah I'm not really sure what "a rebellion to reject roman-ness" would really look like First & second Jewish wars probably.
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Mar 22, 2024 15:26
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Grand Fromage posted:There were the Servile Wars which I suppose in a Roman context you could consider being equivalent to peasant revolt. Doesn't sound very servile!
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Mar 22, 2024 16:18
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Movies never show barbarians with moustaches. Probably because it would look too modern. But moustaches were definitely popular among them.
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Mar 22, 2024 17:22
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Nenonen posted:Doesn't sound very servile! Yes, that was the issue. It was a war against servi (slaves). Spartacus and all that
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Mar 22, 2024 17:39
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Why shouldn't the Visigoths look like Hawkwind?
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Mar 22, 2024 17:55
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MeatRocket8 posted:Movies never show barbarians with moustaches. Probably because it would look too modern. But moustaches were definitely popular among them.
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Mar 22, 2024 18:02
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MeatRocket8 posted:Movies never show barbarians with moustaches. Probably because it would look too modern. But moustaches were definitely popular among them. 
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Mar 22, 2024 18:14
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