Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Mustang posted:

drat Europeans, particularly Italians, are so drat lucky they have poo poo like this everywhere. It's one of the things that sucks about being an American, no cool Ancient ruins. Yes I know (and have been to) ancient Native American sites but they didn't leave anything behind like the Colosseum.

Well, the North Americans didn't. :v:

# ¿ Jul 1, 2013 11:32

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 18:55

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Yeah, Bronze Age Collapse is one of the creepiest things ever.

This series of paintings always reminds me of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire

# ¿ Jul 4, 2013 17:46

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

karl fungus posted:

Did anyone make comparisons between the early Roman kings and the emperors during the early Empire? I thought it would be really obvious for anyone critical of the emperors.

Mostly everyone with the balls to call them out on something like that had been massacred by the various generals and dictators where the case was also just as obvious.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 16:29

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Phobophilia posted:

Some quick research tells me China was in one of its regular clusterfucks at the moment in time.

I've always thought that China is more impressive then the Roman Empire when you consider the fact that it's gone through roughly two dozen totally horrific civil wars that each make the Crisis of the Third Century look like a polite disagreement between three best buddies and has couple of invasions sprinkled in between that pretty much equal Huns and the German tribes combined, yet it still stands as (mostly) unified political entity that exercises great power throughout the modern world. Even the separated part that's thinks it's the real China and is tiny compared to rest is still one of the most powerful economies and advanced countries in the world.

Then again, People's Republic of China probably has less common with whatever dynasty first ruled China then Italy has with the Roman Republic.

Then again, maybe not! I don't admittedly know that much about China and how Chinese people view their own historical continuity as a state.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 15:04

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Also as far as I've understood, any tribe who invades China and succeeds in it (I know that the Mongols and Manchu at the least managed to do that) just ends up thinking that being cultured, cosmopolitan Chinese is way more awesome then eating horses and sleeping under the night sky in yurts and after couple of centuries is basically indistinguishable from the rest of the people. No doubt aided by the fact that the domination of Han Chinese is just so overwhelming that you get absorbed by the horde whether you like it or not. Basically like the German tribes who admired Rome's culture and wanted to be Roman. Except that there weren't like 500 million conquered Latin Romans to outbreed and absorb their conquerors with passive ease in the case of Western Rome.

I mean, the PRC today is what, 90% Han? You just can't fight that kind of numbers. And it's more fun just to go with the overwhelming flow anyway.

EDIT: Not meaning this linguistically, but in general cultural sense. All the various Chinese dialects have more speakers then most separate languages after all.

DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Sep 5, 2013

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 17:00

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

PittTheElder posted:

I think it would be less that it was easier to reconquer, but harder to exist as just a portion of the core area. Sooner or later your next door neighbour is going to try and swallow your rear end up if you don't do it to him first.

Pretty much.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 18:41

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Walliard posted:

Yeah, travelling over water is easy, but invading over water is really drat difficult. Hence why Britain has only been successfully invaded twice and why Alexander had to build a huge land bridge out to Tyre.

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, that's four successful invasions, isn't it? The two middle weren't exactly direct invasions as much as gradual settlements but they came with boats and conquered. And I'd say it's only really difficult if your enemy has a bigger and better navy then you. In all invasions of Britain there pretty much wasn't much of a navy to contest with. Tyre was a bit of a special case because the island was small enough to have walls right up to the sea, which meant that no matter how big your navy was it was going to be near-impossible. Constantinople was kind of a similar case (without being an island).

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 20:52

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Which is really weird because seeing a Classical sculpture live is like one of the most amazing things you can ever experience. I was in the Vatican Museums and there was this room with incredibly detailed, twice-the-size-of-human statues of the major Roman deities just surrounding you and I have to admit that for couple of seconds I was totally a believer.

A year later, Mona Lisa was kind of 'meh' after that.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2013 15:57

DarkCrawler: Apr 6, 2009; by vyelkin

Arglebargle III posted:

I want to clarify something I posted above about the legions. They weren't reorganized into a bunch of tiny units so much as they already were fragmented into a bunch of smaller units by the end of the 3rd century. If you think about the chaos of the 3rd century it's not surprising that the legions were split and posted every which-way around the country putting out fires. So you would have a Danube Frontier legion with three detachments suppressing slave revolts in Hispania, a couple building fortifications in Palmyra, a few in North Africa and less than half the total force spread across their nominal deployment area. By Diocletian's time the legions were no longer coherent units in anything but name. The local general would instead have an ad-hoc collection of elements from many different nominal legions.

Diocletian wasn't really reorganizing the legions into smaller units, he simply rationalized what was already in place. He organized these smaller elements into their own Legions, which effectively ended what we know as the Roman Legions. A legion in the early Empire might have been from 8000 to 12000 men, while in the late Empire it was more like 1000 to 2000. Either that or the late emperors presided over a ridiculous expansion of the army, because we know Diocletian through Constantine founded hundreds of new legions.

By Constantine's time the legions were outnumbered by the Limitanii, the immobile garrison militias that protected walled cities. Since the legions were now more of a reaction force than a field army (new conquest was unthinkable in the midst of the Germanic Migration) mounted auxiliaries and mercenaries became more and more attractive.

Here again you can see Dark Age Europe begin to emerge from the late Empire. The basic unit of civilization is a walled city or town running on a barter economy, defended by a seasonal militia levy and a smaller but professional cavalry-heavy force, and ruled by a Duke with a sacred duty to protect the area that pays him taxes through goods-in-kind. The Duke is called a Dux, the sacred duty descends from a divine Emperor instead of God, and the Duke's army is still called a Roman Legion, but the underlying mechanics are all in place. And this is only like 320 AD!

So that' what happened to the legions. They suffered the same fate as every other Imperial institution in the Crisis of the 3rd Century: they survived but came out the other end much diminished and changed.

That's actually really fascinating, I've never actually understood where the classic type of Roman Legion, seemingly so effective, disappeared. Turns out they didn't, they just changed! Thanks!

# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 14:12