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MikeCrotch posted:Romans loved to gently caress though, Julius Caesar famously loved shagging senator's wives Who in the gently caress ever didn’t like to gently caress? Quote monks all you want, good luck that, i answer with the entire Catholic Church. Also, 322 new pages in this sleepy but valuable thread? Hum.
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Aug 5, 2022 06:15
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Otteration posted:Also, 322 new pages in this sleepy but valuable thread? Hum. Ea-Nasir has wracked up a lot of customer complaints.
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Aug 5, 2022 21:07
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332 new pages means not having checked the thread since September 27, 2019. That's very sleepy!
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Aug 5, 2022 21:34
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Otteration posted:Who in the gently caress ever didn’t like to gently caress? I'm pretty sure there were Christian monastic orders in the early days that were both co-ed and actively encouraged loving.
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Aug 6, 2022 05:16
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Every generation thinks they invented sex
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Aug 7, 2022 16:21
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Otteration posted:Who in the gently caress ever didn’t like to gently caress? There are a couple tiny Christian sects that basically not-hosed themselves out of existence since they also did not super actively recruit.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:13
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The Cathars we're pretty anti sex, but they had a lot of help in becoming non existent
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Aug 8, 2022 03:17
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Telsa Cola posted:There are a couple tiny Christian sects that basically not-hosed themselves out of existence since they also did not super actively recruit. The Shakers did that. I think there are two left as of a few years ago. They had some pretty big communities at the peak.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:24
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Gaius Marius posted:The Cathars we're pretty anti sex, but they had a lot of help in becoming non existent There's more modern groups, I'm blanking on the name but they were on the east coast of the US and made furniture, i think there is like 2 left or something. Edit: drat beaten haha. But glad we had the numbers correct.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:26
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Bar Ran Dun posted:The Shakers did that. I think there are two left as of a few years ago. They had some pretty big communities at the peak. they got a new member last year
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Aug 8, 2022 03:28
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Who knows anything about Roman Army General Staff? Permament staff organizations crop up around 1800’s and before that there are staff-like structures in many armies but they are one offs and not codified by anyone nor clearly defined by doctrine. From my readings, I’ve sometimes gotten the picture that some Romans had a staff, but of its organization and style I am more ambiguous. And it seems that the staff isn’t doctrinally defined, but changes depending on the general. I’ve also read of Army Staff structures in the Old Kingdom in 2600BC but the explicit structures are not known.
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Aug 8, 2022 04:15
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I assume from context that "staff" here is a specific term I'm not familiar with and not a general term for low-level officer, but there were a lot of NCO analogues in successful ancient armies. This blog post might have the info you need: https://acoup.blog/2022/06/24/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiib-officers/ the question you're specifically answering will definitely change wildly by period because "roman history" is a long-rear end time
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Aug 8, 2022 04:35
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cheetah7071 posted:I assume from context that "staff" here is a specific term I'm not familiar with and not a general term for low-level officer, but there were a lot of NCO analogues in successful ancient armies. This blog post might have the info you need: Imagine the biggest man of the tribe leading an army. He directly tells his subordinate commanders what to do, who then tell what to do. Every great man leads troops to battle. These are commanders. Staff in a military organization is when there are officers who do not lead troops, but achieve ancillary tasks. A finance officer who worries about pay, a clerical officer who writes orders and organizes records, a supply officer who organizes supplies, an intelligence officer who briefs you every morning of new developments. These staff officers have their own subordinates who assist them, in what americans often call ”shops” like intel shop. These groups work for the staff officer in charge, who in turn reports to the general. Nobody leads combat troops. A lot of militaries have left the non-combat tasks to the commanders to just wing on the side. A staff allows people to get proficient in their jobs and to establish continuity and best practices. US Grant had a lovely time getting organized until Captain Rawlins as Grant’s chief of staff in the Civil War made sure Grant could focus on the big picture, and Rawlins built an elaborate staff that had a huge number of people to run daily non-combat stuff. That’s the best way I can quickly explain it. Modern military staff is usually traced to von Clausewitz, but as said, even Egyptian armies sometimes used it but it was not uniform. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 04:43
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I think most of what you're describing was the responsibility of what I described as NCOs--decani led groups of 8 soldiers (plus possibly two non-combatant servants or slaves, given the clear etymology in the name, but if they existed, the sources don't attest to them), called a contubernium. Contubernia seem to have been the unit that got supplied, rather than supplying men directly. For example, each contubernium got one pack mule, I think. Presumably the decanus was responsible for making sure that his contubernium was well-supplied, in addition to maintaining discipline within it, though I don't think our sources directly say so. In the opposite direction, top-down, the general had a number of commissioned-officer equivalents (tribunes) whose job description was basically to take care of whatever top-level tasks the general assigned them, while learning and studying so that they could lead armies of their own someday. It seems like an extremely reasonable guess that, say, if a pack mule died, the decanus for the contubernium it was assigned to would go to a tribune that had been delegated the task of keeping the pack animals straight. The Roman army in particular seems to have had a very low percentage of non-combatants in general, both compared to other ancient armies and especially compared to modern armies. There's tons of stories of generals kicking all non-combatants out of the army, and the army continued to function no problem (perhaps at a cost to morale as you kick out the merchants selling salt and more delicious food, or the soldiers' girlfriends). A medieval army, for example, would often have non-combatants (often women) who would handle the food preparation, but Roman soldiers were issued scythes, mills, and other grain preparation equipment, so the entire process starting from harvesting the wheat in an enemy's field could be done entirely by combatants. From the same blog, this post looks into the ratios of combatants to non-combatants primarily from the lens of establishing how hard it is to feed them all, but it probably answers some of your questions, and it has a bibliography at the top which presumably answers it even more thoroughly if you want to follow it down. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 04:57
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a roman army was not broken up into departments and such like that, generally legionaries either all performed a task - like building camps - or cycled through logistical roles like carrying water, perhaps with some level of personal preference involved in who accomplished which tasks. generals did have trusted officers to carry out high-level ancillary tasks, but there was no universal, formal structure to it, and many tasks that would be performed by a general staff in a clausewitzian army are simply tasks performed by the general himself as pre-modern command involved less high-level planning on a day to day basis by the general. good generalship was often considered to be manifested more in carrying out these "staff" tasks to keep the army fit and efficient than in any tactical brilliance; the romans preferred a general who was an average commander but had developed proficiency at the auxiliary tasks over a general with the opposite skillset, because the degree to which you can even command an army in battle was rather limited no matter how brilliant you were. and, as cheetah mentioned, a lot of this stuff is just taken care of on a unit-by-unit basis by centurions and other NCOs during the republic, it was pretty common for young members of the senatorial class to start their careers as staff to a general, but i don't actually know of any detailed accounts about the duties of those positions or how seriously they were taken as military offices rather than political ones. might be a place to start for looking into the subject, tho
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Aug 8, 2022 05:02
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Vahakyla posted:Staff in a military organization is when there are officers who do not lead troops, but achieve ancillary tasks. There's not really anyone in the Roman command structure (which was not as rigidly formalized as a modern army, in any case) who was purely non-combat, but the position of optio, the second in command of a century, is somewhat like staff officer. They typically weren't in direct command of troops unless the centurion was indisposed for whatever reason and handled a lot of administrative tasks.
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Aug 8, 2022 05:10
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Grand Fromage posted:There's not really anyone in the Roman command structure (which was not as rigidly formalized as a modern army, in any case) who was purely non-combat, but the position of optio, the second in command of a century, is somewhat like staff officer. They typically weren't in direct command of troops unless the centurion was indisposed for whatever reason and handled a lot of administrative tasks. There has to be some dedicated dudes involved in backfield logistics. Or were they just not considered military? Or did they just skip out of the fight when they got overrun (for good reasons)? Do we know what happened to the baggage train at Teutoburg, et al? I’d guess the archeology hasn’t got that far back in the line yet, and they just weren’t yakked about much at the time. There had to be some logistics military dudes at Vindolanda and up and down that line that said, nope that’s not me! Yeah, not many, but it’s a fun question.
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Aug 8, 2022 05:38
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Far as I know we have next to no information about the logistics corps, whatever it was. We know it was there but they weren't Noble Virtuous Men Stabbing Dudes so unworthy of detail in the sources. The legionaries handled logistics themselves to some extent, soldiers carried a lot of supplies and there are references to mule trains and stuff. And we know camp followers were a thing. I'm genuinely not sure we know anything more than those couple of sentences though. E: Hey look convenient timing. Going to read this myself and see how dumb I am. https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 05:41
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There was a large baggage train at the Teutoberger Wald. Cassius Dio says that Varus’ forces “had with them many waggons and many beasts of burden as in time of peace; moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them”. When the army found itself under attack, though, they burned or abandoned the wagons and anything else likely to slow them down—Dio presents this as beneficial to their marching order and ability to defend themselves from the immediate threat, but it’s hard to imagine it was good for their logistical situation or their morale.
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Aug 8, 2022 07:03
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Telsa Cola posted:There's more modern groups, I'm blanking on the name but they were on the east coast of the US and made furniture, i think there is like 2 left or something. The furniture making guys you were thinking of may have been the Oneida Community, but that was more of a socialist sex cult. It turned into a Silverware firm that still exists. Sorry, they were Christians of a kind, I just read about them in a book describing utopian socialist communities in the US so I lumped them together with those. Grevling fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 12:06
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IIRC, even the Roman Legions tended to be made up of basically part-time soldiers by modern standards, especially since they wouldn't get much done outside of campaigning season, so I imagine it wasn't uncommon in ancient armies to have soldiers pull double duty using the skills from their downtime job. Legionaries were also specifically trained to do a variety of tasks. The scale of ancient warfare probably isn't quite big enough to justify having too many dedicated specialists like that.
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Aug 8, 2022 13:31
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I'm pretty sure there were Christian monastic orders in the early days that were both co-ed and actively encouraged loving. Not to dispute you but wouldn't that just turn into a (particularly religious) village within a span of a few years? I guess it depends on how you define monastic.
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Aug 8, 2022 13:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC, even the Roman Legions tended to be made up of basically part-time soldiers by modern standards, especially since they wouldn't get much done outside of campaigning season, so I imagine it wasn't uncommon in ancient armies to have soldiers pull double duty using the skills from their downtime job. Legionaries were also specifically trained to do a variety of tasks. The scale of ancient warfare probably isn't quite big enough to justify having too many dedicated specialists like that. Again this depends enormously on when in Roman history you are talking about, since you could either be talking about a citizen's militia made up of landowning classes or literal hereditary professional soldiers with a bunch of stuff in between
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Aug 8, 2022 15:50
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Kylaer posted:Not to dispute you but wouldn't that just turn into a (particularly religious) village within a span of a few years? I guess it depends on how you define monastic. I'm no expert but I think this was pretty common? Monasteries weren't always just a bunch of (male) monks in a church, that's a middle ages and especially a western thing from what I understand.
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Aug 8, 2022 18:23
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:I'm no expert but I think this was pretty common? Monasteries weren't always just a bunch of (male) monks in a church, that's a middle ages and especially a western thing from what I understand. More or less; by the Middle Ages that had become almost exclusively the sole model for monasticism (with a wide variety of rules). During Late Antiquity monastic traditions were much more varied.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:12
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And of course monks n nuns broke those rules a lot, based on the fact that 1) anti-clerical medieval thinkers complained about it a lot and 2) rules about clergy not fuckin had to be reissued a lot.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:33
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Judgy Fucker posted:More or less; by the Middle Ages that had become almost exclusively the sole model for monasticism (with a wide variety of rules). During Late Antiquity monastic traditions were much more varied. Yeah, I recall Time Team digging a couple co-ed monasteries. I don't recall the dates of them, but I think they were Saxon.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:33
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Kylaer posted:Not to dispute you but wouldn't that just turn into a (particularly religious) village within a span of a few years? I guess it depends on how you define monastic. Attempts to have a community apart from the world where people try to live in the Kingdom of God. The apartness from the world is the thing that make it monastic.
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Aug 9, 2022 02:40
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skasion posted:There was a large baggage train at the Teutoberger Wald. Cassius Dio says that Varus’ forces “had with them many waggons and many beasts of burden as in time of peace; moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them”. When the army found itself under attack, though, they burned or abandoned the wagons and anything else likely to slow them down—Dio presents this as beneficial to their marching order and ability to defend themselves from the immediate threat, but it’s hard to imagine it was good for their logistical situation or their morale. Yeah. I’m wondering who was in charge of that train on the backside, since this mini discussion started about non-combat Roman soldiers. I’d propose that they rotated, but both the front and back take extremely different skills. Nope, I just changed my mind: there must have been non-combat trained Roman soldiers, unless there’s a whole auxiliary I don’t know about.
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Aug 9, 2022 07:59
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skasion posted:There was a large baggage train at the Teutoberger Wald. Cassius Dio says that Varus’ forces “had with them many waggons and many beasts of burden as in time of peace; moreover, not a few women and children and a large retinue of servants were following them”. When the army found itself under attack, though, they burned or abandoned the wagons and anything else likely to slow them down—Dio presents this as beneficial to their marching order and ability to defend themselves from the immediate threat, but it’s hard to imagine it was good for their logistical situation or their morale. The legion was all pretty much dead by that time anyway. Tried to think of a happy thing to say, but nope. Probably some of the backside of that train ran the gently caress away and merged with local folks. Otteration fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Aug 9, 2022 |
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Aug 9, 2022 08:11
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Iirc since they owned a lot of land the church often made money renting space to people so they could bone (since privacy at home was basically nonexistent), a thing we know about because people complained about the church doing this all the time
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Aug 9, 2022 11:07
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Here is a good article from the pov of England https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
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Aug 9, 2022 12:09
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Attempts to have a community apart from the world where people try to live in the Kingdom of God. The apartness from the world is the thing that make it monastic. Ohh, okay. That makes sense.
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Aug 9, 2022 13:23
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MikeCrotch posted:Iirc since they owned a lot of land the church often made money renting space to people so they could bone (since privacy at home was basically nonexistent), a thing we know about because people complained about the church doing this all the time The origin of the motel, or "monk hotel"
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Aug 9, 2022 16:32
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cheetah7071 posted:I think most of what you're describing was the responsibility of what I described as NCOs--decani led groups of 8 soldiers (plus possibly two non-combatant servants or slaves, given the clear etymology in the name, but if they existed, the sources don't attest to them), called a contubernium. 'General staff' in the modern usual English sense of the word are super, super not the same as NCOs, being generally of much higher rank. These are the people running armies, not squads.
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Aug 9, 2022 16:39
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Otteration posted:Yeah. I’m wondering who was in charge of that train on the backside, since this mini discussion started about non-combat Roman soldiers. I’d propose that they rotated, but both the front and back take extremely different skills. Nope, I just changed my mind: there must have been non-combat trained Roman soldiers, unless there’s a whole auxiliary I don’t know about. The Persians by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones describes how their logistics works and it was basically by senior Royal slaves so I would guess the logistics of the legion where run by whatever Generals household went with them. And while they didn’t have formal military ranks given their status as acting for the General they would have had real power. And of course, Medieval society did have a general staff even if it became hereditary with roles like the lord Marshal, Butler or Mayor of the palace. A general staff has basically taken those roles over given the rise of professional armies.
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Aug 11, 2022 03:39
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https://twitter.com/Citizen09372364/status/1557665431888056320?s=20&t=1G8s4bhPXzINreshqC92PQ Not ancient but pretty cool anyway
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Aug 12, 2022 09:41
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Syncopated posted:https://twitter.com/Citizen09372364/status/1557665431888056320?s=20&t=1G8s4bhPXzINreshqC92PQ Yeah. "Cool" 
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Aug 12, 2022 14:02
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Yeah that's pretty ominous
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Aug 12, 2022 15:32
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What the post decided to leave out is the Elbe was dammed decades ago and now that stone is visible for about a third of the year, every year.
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