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Thundercakes posted:Was there any Roman or otherwise secular records of Jesus ever having existed? If you take the Bible's word for it, the events surrounding Jesus' crucifixion had a profound impact on Pilate, but I can't see how the crucifixion of a single man who claimed to be the son of God and gathered a following of people would be seen by Pilate as anything other than a threat to Roman rule. Thanks for this thread by the way, I've always been deeply in love with the history of ancient civilizations, so this is like giving a fat kid a giant chocolate chip cookie. No, not of Jesus himself as far as I know (and I think we'd all know if something like that was discovered). There are references to very early Christian beliefs in the Christ or the Logos, but the historical narrative of the Gospels appears to have originated in the 100-200s CE as an allegory for Jesus's metaphysical sacrifice in Heaven rather than purporting to be faithful to physical facts. Early Christianity seems to have believed that the entire sacrifice took place in Heaven, not on Earth. St. Paul in particular never talks about Jesus as though he was ever a physical being, which began to raise eyebrows when we found a dialogue written by Minucius Felix, a Christian, in the late 100s CE between a Christian and a pagan that does the same thing and also specifically denies that the whole crucifixion thing happened at all. Actually, the Christian character treats it as a common slander/misconception and takes offense at the idea of Christians worshipping a criminal. There are several other texts that seem confused on this point one way or another, but it's pretty clear that pre-Gospels Christianity was very, very different in its conception of Jesus compared to post-Gospels Christianity. Why did the post-Gospels point of view win out? Well, I have a few theories. The Crisis of the Third Century was a major turning point in Christian history - that's probably when it became more than a relatively small sort-of-mystery religion. The accounts of the Gospels are more appealing to the poor and hopeless (of which there were a huge number at various points during the Crisis) than the Judeo-Platonist stuff that inspired them, so perhaps the old view fell by the wayside as the large numbers of converts that believed completely in the Gospels began to dominate the churches. There's still plenty of this Judeo-Platonism in the Bible though, such as the Holy Ghost and various concepts in many of St. Paul's letters. It's been a couple of years since I studied the origins of Christianity in any depth so I hope I remembered everything correctly. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 19, 2012 20:24
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Xguard86 posted:one amusing thing: Caesar was kind of a hipster. There was a crowd of young Roman nobles who ran around together and created their own culture to mark their generation/clique. Honestly, the factions from when these guys were teenagers were a big part of what led the Republic to its downfall - Caesar and his "hipsters" largely ended up as populares, while Cato the Younger and his (mostly older) followers championed a uniquely Roman brand of conservatism. Cato the Younger was so called because he behaved and looked exactly like Cato the Elder, his great-grandfather; it'd be as though Abraham Lincoln or someone similar, seen as a moral father of the nation, was returning to life as this young man. Cato the Younger hated Julius Caesar from the beginning for being a LIEBERAL and essentially threatened to prosecute him every time he was about to leave government office; this was one of the factors that led him to march on Rome.
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Jun 23, 2012 00:23
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Twat McTwatterson posted:The Apostate. Tell me about him. From a cursory study he seems extremely important. Julian is an interesting figure who probably would have been a lot more important/controversial if he hadn't gotten himself killed fairly early; he certainly had the education and intelligence to have been another Marcus Aurelius. One of the intriguing things about Julian is his very unorthodox way of thinking about...pretty much everything. Constantius was trying to get him killed fighting across the Rhine when Julian was Caesar and Constantius was Augustus; he frequently reinforced Julian off-schedule, etc. to disrupt his army. Most Roman generals would have gone ahead with the typical Roman tactics despite this; Julian's tactics were very different. He tended to use small-unit raiding tactics, ambushes - pretty modern stuff actually - to turn his low numbers into an advantage instead. Unfortunately, he was outmaneuvered by the Sassanids after an ill-advised attack on their capital and killed, leading to recurring issues on the Eastern border and a province being ceded to get the new emperor Jovian out of Persia alive afterward. I'm probably in a minority here, but I see Julian as a really interesting example of a potentially transformative person in history being cut down before they've actually done much - a sort of "what if Caesar had been killed in the Gallic Wars?" situation visibly played out. He's one of my favorite emperors, and certainly my favorite of the post-Crisis emperors.
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Jun 25, 2012 14:14
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Trump posted:Someone mentioned the Roman dodecahedrons earlier in the thread, but is there other weird mysteries out there regarding roman history? Well, there are a lot of important places from antiquity whose exact site is more or less unknown or disputed - gravesites and the like, the kind of stuff we lose track of fairly frequently in modern times too. Sometimes it's more surprising that we know what we do about gravesites - like Hannibal's. I'm drawing a blank on glaring mysteries other than the dodecahedron, so I'll leave that to Grand Fromage. Actually, I'm curious - has much work been done to try to find legionary mass graves made after battles? I can only imagine that mass graves must have been fairly common practice given the casualty count of a large battle in antiquity, though I've never read about them specifically. I'm not as up to date on the archeology side of Roman history as I should be, but couldn't this possibly produce more Vindolanda tablet-esque artifacts, or at least a lot of armor and weapons/an eagle? I guess the obstacle is that most of these mass graves are probably on developed land at this point, like anything Roman. Edit: Oh! There is the Roman navigational computer, which we only recently figured out the purpose of - it was certainly one of those mysteries from its discovery in ~1900 until about 6 years ago. Actually, the one we still have was probably looted from the Greeks during the conquest, but it was incredibly sophisticated and I have a hard time believing that the Romans didn't adopt it more generally, given that there was no practicality barrier in place like Hero's steam toys would have had to overcome to become proper steam engines. It was an analog computer designed to track the movement of the sun and moon for maritime navigation as far as we can tell. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jun 27, 2012 |
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Jun 26, 2012 23:54
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Boiled Water posted:If anything you'd think that a civilization at the height of it's power would've been much more able to resist mongol invaders. Horse archers, dude. If you think of pre-gunpowder war as rock-paper-scissors between infantry, foot archers, and cavalry, (a massive oversimplification but stay with me) then horse archers are like the "nuclear bomb" fourth option that the dick on the playground makes up to always win. In terms of range, endurance, and speed, nomadic horse archers were the tanks of the pre-gunpowder world. Combine this with Genghis Khan and his generals, who take up probably 3 or 4 spots on the "greatest 20 generals of all time" list and were all working together, and the Mongols become basically unbeatable by sedentary societies - as they really were for the most part. It almost certainly would not have made much of a difference if the Khwarezmids had actually been the great empire they're made out to be. This is straying a little far from Rome though, unless someone wants to talk about the complicated Byzantine-Mongol relationship. Edit: Another way to bring this back around to Rome would be to talk about the Huns! They were pretty similar to the Mongols, as most steppe people were, and they did rip up more or less any legion the Romans opposed them with aside from a very few exceptions. These were late-antiquity legions so they didn't have quite the same strength as the early Empire's, but still; the Huns tore up both the East and West, coming close to both Constantinople and Rome and sacking Sardica and Mediolanum (Sofia and Milan, now) in the process. Attila's ignominious death is one of those historical pivot points that your average person knows about but can't typically explain the importance of - well, imagine the sack of Baghdad happening to Roman-era Constantinople and you've got a good idea of Attila's immediate plans for his post-wedding campaign. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Jun 27, 2012 |
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Jun 27, 2012 03:24
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FizFashizzle posted:Apparently the Mongols could shoot birds out of the air. It is really hard to overstate the sheer skill of the steppe peoples in both riding and archery - modern recreations rarely capture both, even Lajos Kassai (the aforementioned Hungarian). If you want to get an idea of it, combine him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piP54uh_X60&t=55s except at much longer range with even faster rate of fire and ridiculous accuracy, with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJ0LykFAp4&t=56s except 99% less flamboyant and without any free hands. A variant of the "behind the horse" technique that you can see at the linked point in the second video was especially common as a way to take cover from return fire and apparently the Mongols could still shoot quite quickly and accurately from such positions. I have no idea how they maintained that position without their hands free but it's attested enough that it isn't apocryphal either. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Jun 27, 2012 |
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Jun 27, 2012 06:30
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Phobophilia posted:Since this is suddenly the horse archer thread To reply here before we move to military history: the standard for a normal Mongol horse archer seems to have been 5 horses. In theory that's a decent counter but I'm not sure anybody in regular contact with horse archers had bows that could meaningfully outrange them - and the Romans, being intrinsically biased against archery, certainly didn't. I don't know much about the bows of earlier steppe peoples but the Mongol bows had an absolutely ridiculous draw weight - much higher than your average English longbow for example. Outranging them was not an option.
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Jun 27, 2012 07:53
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, does anyone know how many horses the average mongol cavalryman would have owned or been responsible for?
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General Panic posted:They didn't have any that we know of, at least in the usual modern sense of "person who kills a whole series of other people for basically sexual/psychological reasons". I'm not so sure about this. Gilles de Rais is an example of a pre-modern serial killer in the modern sense - and he was only ever caught because he was a major figure in the aristocracy and a dick to the church. Anonymity in a Roman city very much varied on where in the city you were, and a rural serial killer might have been even safer than one on the "wrong side of the tracks" in a city. It's important to remember that so many of our still-extant sources were high-class people living in closely knit communities like you describe - someone at the very bottom of the economy was not necessarily living in such safety. I would not be terribly surprised if a Jack the Ripper-style prostitute killer would have never even been noticed if he had moved between the major cities.
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Jun 27, 2012 19:56
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm not totally up on the transition away from slavery beyond that it wasn't acceptable in the medieval world. The client-patron system probably influenced the vassal-lord system quite extensively. Yes, something much like serfdom showed up as part of Diocletian's tax reforms, though the formal tying to the land happened under Constantine to reduce tax evasion. So it actually did appear very early in late antiquity - it wasn't quite as ubiquitous as it became later, but serfdom was a Roman institution originally. If I recall correctly, various events in the Crisis of the Third Century combined with manumission and lack of conquest led to the following situation: A. Coloni (tenant farmers) are the only viable source of agricultural labor. B. Coloni are mostly dead broke and starving, so they enter into quasi-slavery credit contracts with their employer/patron to weather the crisis. C. The underlying causes of the Crisis are never really resolved so colonus status becomes hereditary, causing the formation of the permanent serf class. Before the system became law rather than informal practice, I believe it was possible to buy your ancestor's contract out and regain mobility; however, eventually farmers who weren't descended from contractually-bound coloni were forced into the status anyway to address taxation and labor shortage problems so that window of opportunity was only a few generations long, if that. When historians say that the average person in the West was likely to not even notice the fall of the Empire, this is a large reason why - some institutions we associate with the Middle Ages are continuous from Late Antiquity. The transition had already happened for most peasants long ago; urban Romans were the main group that experienced institutional change. The transition to serfdom rather than slavery coincided with the Christianization of the Empire, so that may have played into medieval Christian prejudices against slavery and for serfdom - I'm just speculating though, I've never read anything that even attempts to answer this question. The vassal-lord dynamic seems like a mixture of the German "strongman leadership" and Roman patronage culture to me, but it's hard to say which was the greater influence. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jul 2, 2012 |
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Jul 2, 2012 20:30
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quote:II.4.1 (bar; left of the door, near a picture of Mercury); 8475: Palmyra, the thirst-quencher Is this an ad for Palmyran beer? Looks like drink advertising is the same as always too.
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Jul 4, 2012 00:58
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General Panic posted:I think that was Seneca. Many of the later Emperors were half-barbarian, and barbarians were pretty much universally bearded or moustached. Also, barbarians were cool in late antiquity's pop culture - there are accounts of young Romans wearing pants and mustaches to be rebellious.
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Jul 6, 2012 14:02
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Paxicon posted:Opportunistic dipshit really sums up the breadth and width of Cicero's life, doesn't it? A link to the real deal for Skellyscribe. Please note the recurring themes of "I TOLD YOU!" and "I'M GLAD YOU LOVE ME SO MUCH, BECAUSE I SURE DO ALOT TO DESERVE IT NICE OF YOU TO FINALLY NOTICE ALL THE NICE THINGS I DO FOR YOU GUYS!" Cicero's stature has been amplified by the times he lived in and the fact that many of his writings survived - as well as his rather large influence on the Renaissance, which is something he would probably be unbelievably  about. He was a pretty important person during his time even so, just not really for his political career. He disagreed with me, but his creation of Latin's philosophical vocabulary and translation of Greek philosophical works was rather more significant than his contributions to Roman politics. Well, unless Catiline's conspiracy really was a gigantic threat to the Republic, but we'll probably never know either way about that. Cicero was an intellectual who enjoyed politics and bragging about himself way too much.The funny thing about Cicero is that the one time he actually did have a chance to both be an opportunistic dipshit and to benefit tremendously from it, he turned it down. The First Triumvirate was going to be a Quadriumvirate with Cicero as the fourth member; he thought that such a group would undermine the Republic and refused to join.
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Jul 7, 2012 10:58
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Grand Fromage posted:For what it's worth, this is the interpretation I believe too. But, he was also a huge dick--which is part of why I like him. Well, of course. Cicero wasn't unusual in his opportunism - the rest of what would have been the Quadriumvirate was being just as opportunistic in creating a political cabal as Cicero would have been in joining it. I think Cicero's exploitation of circumstances sometimes seems a little more naked and open than that of the rest, probably because we know more of his inner thoughts than we do of just about anybody else; also because it's more similar to the kind of political opportunism people usually find distasteful today, maybe? Caesar and Octavian didn't go out and give fiery calls to action like a modern politician really. I didn't mean to be unfair to him. He was just such an incredible self-promoter that he created a legacy bigger than himself in a lot of ways, so it can be interesting sometimes to examine him from a more critical viewpoint than is typical. Christoff posted:My step-dad, a devout Christian, is convinced Rome fell because of homosexuality. Goths on top, Romans on bottom. Seriously, though, how does this work? What does he think that homosexuality did to the Romans (other than making God angry) to weaken the Empire, and why was the probably more gay early Empire so strong in the first place in this worldview?
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Jul 7, 2012 21:35
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cheerfullydrab posted:Has anyone ever read the Harry Turtledove/Judith Tarr novel Household Gods? It's about a lady from the mid-late 1990's who gets propelled by plot device into 2nd century Pannonia. Not too bad, if you don't take it too seriously. It's a fun book to contrast to Lest Darkness Fall, wherein a 1930's professor goes to 6th century Rome and everything works out just fine for him. It's a pretty decent depiction of lower class frontier life and any book that includes Marcus Aurelius as a character wins points from me. I'd recommend picking it up from a library on those merits. On the other hand, the main character is basically tumblrsocialjustice.txt and I was horribly frustrated by her sheer ignorance of antiquity, even the common sense sanitation stuff like not drinking water that still applies in places with poor sanitation today, so I really couldn't appreciate it as much as Lest Darkness Fall even though it's more plausible. Grand Prize Winner posted:Out of the things that we don't know about Rome, which gap in our knowledge do you think is most important? Grand Fromage covered the huge gaps. While this isn't entirely Roman, one of the things I really wish we had is a better history of Carthage - one that isn't from a hostile perspective, at the very least. We have depressingly little knowledge of what Carthage was up to when it wasn't at war with one of the other great powers of the Mediterranean. Fun fact: Rome and Carthage signed a treaty ending the Third Punic War in 1985 AD. It was the longest war in history (sort of).
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Jul 9, 2012 09:17
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Vigilance posted:How seriously did Romans take their religion? From what I remember from my world civ class the Roman religion was more of a cultural/festive thing that wasn't taken nearly as seriously as people take their religions today. Like people would pay homage to the gods but it was more of a background thing to their daily lives and not a central focus like a lot of today's major religions seem to be. It really depends on the person, the religion, and the time period. Like Kaal said, you had the same range of commitment as today - somebody like Cato the Younger was much more serious about it than your average Roman. Moreover, Roman religion was not one religion in the modern sense. The state cults and household gods and that sort of thing were pretty varied, and that (the typical Roman paganism we think of today) was not even close to the only religion available; there was also a lot of mixing and matching like in, say, Japan. People who joined mystery religions like Mithraism, early Christianity, the Dionysian Mysteries, etc. were usually a lot more dedicated. The Crisis of the Third Century saw a massive rise in people serious about religion and there was a lot of sacrificing in temples by the state cult followers, mystery religion people did whatever it is that they did, and others flocked to Christianity in droves. Some did more than one or all of these things. My favorite story about the revolving door of emperors during that period has to be when the Senate sacrificed frantically to try to keep the current Emperor, Maximinus Thrax, from ever entering Rome. He never did. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 08:42
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R. Mute posted:What Kaal and Jazerus said was spot on, but I'd like to add that it's pretty much impossible to say with certainty how serious they took their religion. Roman views on religion tended to be pretty much focussed on the visible. By which I mean that it didn't really matter if you believed in the gods (though atheism is thought to have been pretty much non-existent) or the rituals and offerings you were performing, as long as you made those offerings and participated in those rituals. This is true for the state cults, which were sort of the minimum effort/faith religions unless you were really into them - there was no stigma against being really into them as your primary religion, but the "just showing up" people usually stuck to just the state cults. The mystery religions...well, we don't know much about most of them, but indications are that they were pretty similar to modern religion in a focus on faith and the intangible; that's part of why early Christianity qualifies as one, for example, though that is a bit controversial in and of itself. Ditto for the philosophical religions, which can sort of be likened to Buddhism in that they're not theistic, but contain a lot of metaphysical ideas that transcend reality - Neoplatonism is the classic example.
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Jul 14, 2012 03:34
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So, this is something I've been wondering for a while and I can't find any sources that even mention it in any detail. Do we have any records from Romans traveling outside the Empire? By that I mean way outside of the Empire, like an exploratory expedition to Scandia or even just into interior Germania. I know missionaries were sent to the Goths - that's why they were mostly Arian - but there is rarely any detail to the accounts. Am I missing something important or do we have absolutely no Roman "travel lit"?
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Jul 17, 2012 04:15
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Nenonen posted:Exploratory expeditions in the way of Columbus etc. are not made without a good reason, and Romans had little incentive to seriously explore the northern lands where sun set for months at a time, or the malaria infested lands beyond the great desert. In the east were Parthians. Nevertheless there was a busy trade going on in the east, both on sea and through the Silk Road, and the reports from Greek sailors allowed Ptolemy to construct a reasonably detailed picture of Asia. Here's Indochina as recorded by Ptolemy. Well, I'm aware they did go outside of the Empire all the time - my question had more to do with whether, as GF mentioned, any kind of Marco Polo type stuff survived. Knowing what I know of the Romans and their taste for exoticity, I would have thought one of the merchants that went to the East might have written semi-accurately about Indochina and then spun some bullshit about the gold paved roads of China to sell a ton of copies of his book. So in response to some of the questions earlier about lost books and their potential importance, something along the lines of Marco Polo's book would be a fantastic find since apparently travelogues didn't interest monks for one reason or another.
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Jul 17, 2012 17:47
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Clodius is a super-interesting part of the whole fall of the Republic story. Actually, it's kind of amazing how much influence Caesar's "hipster" friends like Clodius ended up having in trying to pull the Republic in a more progressive and populist direction - that circle of friends largely remained friendly for life from what I remember, even when Clodius was boning Caesar's wife. An interesting alt-history divergence point might be an early death for Cato the Younger, who was a major figure in exacerbating the Republic's political polarization in later years and absolutely hated Caesar and everyone he associated with. Honestly, I would put Caesar forward as a reformer if not especially progressive in his personal views. He saw pretty clearly what was wrong with the Republic and what structural issues needed to be solved to prevent disaster down the line - the reforms he did manage to get through before he was assassinated prove that much, and we have records of some of his intended future projects too. It's impossible to know for sure, but in a less polarized political climate he could very well have survived his dictatorship long enough to do what he wanted to do and then step down; but in a less polarized political climate he also probably would have just been consul at some point, not dictator.
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Jul 17, 2012 22:08
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karl fungus posted:What resulted in the religious split between both halves of the empire? Why did the two halves of the empire ultimately result in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions? Differences in culture? Primarily a dispute as to whether the Pope was able to control the Patriarch of Constantinople and other Eastern bishops; the Bishop of Rome was traditionally considered a first among equals, and that became increasingly contentious over time as the Pope tried to assert more of a "you guys are equals, I'm above you" status. This was particularly galling to Constantinople because the Pope was controlled by barbarians, or a "barbarian" himself later; the Greek/Latin divide became very pronounced, and a fairly minor doctrinal change (the "filioque clause" in the Nicene Creed) that was only supported by the West was either the last straw or simply a justification for schism, depending on who you ask. These two differences are still the reason why the two churches haven't reconciled since. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Jul 19, 2012 |
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Jul 19, 2012 06:10
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Grand Fromage posted:That and just how far the cultures have diverged. I think they officially made peace with one another a few decades ago. The vast majority of the arcane theological disputes originally arose from the two sides dicking each other over in various ways; the leavened vs. unleavened bread thing was basically just a difference in tradition that nobody really cared about (because the Bible doesn't answer it either way, or says both in different places, or something along those lines) until the Byzantines were tossed out of southern Italy and the Eastern rite churches there forced to convert to Latin rite. Constantinople responded by closing Latin rite churches in the East, so the two main channels that kept the West and the East in contact and at least nominally cooperating were shut down and the schism occurred very shortly afterward through mutual excommunication. It was just the most recent doctrinal difference to become an issue immediately prior to the schism (the actual last straw; filioque was second-to-last, sorry), which is why it's remembered prominently. DerLeo posted:So they won't make up because they've been arguing for a good 1700 years over if the Holy Ghost is just from dad or also from junior? Papal supremacy is the real issue. The other doctrinal disputes were genuine, but more a matter of slightly differing tradition that could be smoothed over if the Pope or Patriarchs wanted to be friendly and emphasized if they didn't than they were anything that inevitably would have led to schism or prevented reconciliation. Actually, all of it, sometimes including papal supremacy, was smoothed over during several failed reconciliation attempts until the Ottomans captured Constantinople; this was viewed by the Orthodox Church as proof that the doctrinal differences shouldn't be ignored for political expediency, which solidified and amplified them. Today, there's no compelling reason to reconcile since both churches are more or less devoid of serious political power and the doctrinal differences are very old rather than relatively new.
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Jul 19, 2012 08:24
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WoodrowSkillson posted:it has been mentioned before, but many cognomen were jokes, Ceasar was balding at a very young age, hence the name. It's pretty funny that the kaisers and the czars were all named after a guy with a George Costanza hairstyle. They were often jokes, but usually about the first guy in the family to have the name - cognomen were literally nicknames in early Roman society and only solidified into hereditary clan names later, though long before Rome became even a regional power. By Caesar's time it was pretty uncommon to have a cognomen based on yourself unless you were essentially new nobility like Pompey - agnomina were used for that purpose instead, though the line between a cognomen and an agnomen is pretty vague sometimes. It's often thought that Roman names were all tri-partite or larger but that's really only true for patricians; they're the ones that gave each other goofy nicknames and thought it would be a good idea to make the system official. Caesar's baldness was in line with his name because of his genetics, but the Caesars were a very old patrician family so Mr. "Hairy" was several hundred years before Gaius Julius Caesar, Dictator. Oberleutnant posted:Might have been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but even the Russian Czar/Tzar are descended from the word Caesar. No, you're not, or at least not much. 600-700 is actually a supremely interesting time period for what you're talking about, because that's approximately when it became clear that Constantinople was not going to be able to retake the West and also when Gothic Italy fell - well, you need to go back to 550 or so for all of that, but in 600 it was very much recent history. The Ostrogoths had preserved most of Italy's Roman social structure and very much viewed themselves as successors to the Western Emperors. The Goths were not really "barbarians" by 476, as they were very Romanized, so I am generally skeptical of the idea that 476 is a relevant date in any way - either the West fell earlier, when Emperors were puppets for Gothic generals, or in the 550s-560s when the Lombards came. In any case, 600-700 was the first century with no Western successors to the Empire aside from Byzantium's tentative hold on Rome and a narrow band of other territory throughout Italy. This was, perhaps, when the true nature of the situation became clear - before ~600 it was still possible that this was just a very extreme version of the late parts of the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Empire split and was reassembled. So yeah, there was a definite shifting point to "we're something other than Roman now" around this time. Geez, I've written a lot and not really addressed your point. Yes, there was a distinct feeling of decline, at least among the educated, which was mostly reflected in the religious sensibilities of the day - an emphasis on the fleeting, corrupted nature of the material world. Generally, until the Renaissance or even a while after, there was more of a sense that Creation (i.e. the world) was fated to grow worse, not better - progress would be lost, man would become sinful and animalistic, etc. There's probably a pretty intimate link between Roman decline and this belief.
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Aug 10, 2012 20:41
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QuoProQuid posted:I was taught that nearly 75% of all Roman Emperors were assassinated or fell to pretenders. Is this true? Why were the Roman Empire's intelligence gathering mechanisms so poor? If you include shitshows like the Year of Four Emperors then the figure is pretty high, but your average emperor was reasonably safe if he managed to survive his succession and didn't piss off a legion he was commanding or his Guard. As the Big Cheese said, it's not really an indictment of Roman intelligence gathering. Roman political assassins were not Lee Harvius Oswaldius - they weren't random dudes in the crowd or anything like that, at least not when you're talking about killing an emperor. Most imperial assassins fell into at least one of a few broad categories: A. Usurper or dude working for one. These possible-usurpers had pretty low life expectancy after the deed most of the time, whether they actually managed to become emperor or not. There were several chains of these guys doing each other in as they sat on the throne in rapid succession during the more unstable periods in Roman history. B. Some assholes in the Praetorian Guard that decide to go for a succession "bonus" (bribe) and aren't too attached to the current guy. Legions did this too but it was less common. C. An advisor or family member close to the emperor that's absolutely tired of their poo poo. As you might imagine, these aren't circumstances where an intelligence service makes too much difference. These weren't typically conspiracies that could be picked up upon, nor were the people involved necessarily people that the Emperor would have had watched anyway. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 16:37
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Amused to Death posted:Well, at least the rich back then had some kind of societal pressure to actually do a few things for people in general, fund the maintenance of some aqueducts, sponsor a day of games, whatever. Our rich have become a bit more Ayn Rand tinted since then. However, from the Gracchi brothers to a millennium later in the eastern empire up till today, legally trying to get the rich to part with a small bit of their holdings or say pay taxes could in fact lead to your downfall. I think you're overgeneralizing when you talk about a broad societal pressure on the rich to do things for society - this was really more of an obligation if you wanted to gain political power, not something you were expected to do as a rich private citizen really. Also, a lot of the donations and funding for public works functioned on a similar basis to how universities fund new construction - you donate because it gets your name plastered on the building, or a statue of you put up or whatever. You can explain a great deal more of wealthy Roman behavior with vanity and desire for power than with noblesse oblige - this is particularly apparent when you look at the Crisis of the Third Century, when towns were sent into serious insolvency sometimes because the wealthy ceased supporting them in one way or another as that path to political power became seriously unreliable during the turmoil. Eventually, if I remember right, Diocletian had to compel service and 'charity' from wealthy city-dwellers to solve this particular facet of the crisis. Things haven't changed that much since Tiberius Gracchus was thrown into the Tiber, you're right. Unfortunately, they've changed even less than you state in a lot of ways because the state of wealthy/society relations didn't have very far to fall to begin with. I try not to read much Ayn Rand if I can help it, but I've always thought of Crassus when I read about John Galt. Edit: Also, many of the wealthiest Romans weren't patricians and so had relatively little incentive to buy into the kind of values you're talking about. I'm not saying that no wealthy Roman ever had a strong sense of noblesse oblige because that's obviously nonsense and we have records otherwise, but it wasn't really the norm either. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Aug 19, 2012 |
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Aug 19, 2012 23:23
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Agesilaus posted:Yes, we can compare the two, as evidenced by this very thread. Why do you think we can't compare the ancients to the moderns? There's nothing in your post that suggests that we cannot; at most, you say that ancient Romans are different from modern people, but I've never heard someone claim that you can't compare different things. Would you mind discussing what those ways are? I'm honestly curious. I can think of relatively few ways that classical societies are markedly more "progressed" than ours, but I can think of reasons that it might appear that way - restricted literacy, emphasis on Athens, and our distance in time from the Ancient Greeks give them the appearance of being generally highly educated and intellectually progressive when the average Greek was, well, anything but. Amused to Death posted:But this is kind of the point actually. As is said above, it is pretty ridiculous to compare Romans to us, or anyone else for that matter, but one thing that was said earlier in the thread is Roman politics could be summed up in what was good for Rome was good for you. Just put this into perspective, the current main contender for the highest elected office of the United States is a man through his whole life basically did things that helped ruin the lives of plenty of Americans. Romney was what I was originally thinking of when I thought of that because the US has reached a point where "gently caress you, got mine", and selling off the nation to the highest bidder can in fact be the platform of the man running for the highest office of the land. I mean Romney and his ilk have never needed to pretend to even have any sense of public duty to America and yet it works to get him elected. Though this isn't even a now vs them comparison, could this man really even really be a serious contender for high office in any other nation. But yeah, it is a bad and over simplified comparison. One thing it is good on though, money shall always be able to acquire someone vast political power. "Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country." I think the decline in national pride and, by extension, serious patriotic acts is both a very recent phenomenon and (opinion!) not a wholly terrible one, though of course not wholly positive either. People like Romney try to make a play for the top during times of economic or political instability - I would point you to Didius Julianus as a Roman who literally was the highest bidder for the Empire, giving the money to people with just as much relevance to the average person as politicians do today (the Praetorian Guard vs. TV/radio stations). Crassus, too, provided Caesar what amounted to an inexhaustible war chest for his political career, and if you've not heard of Crassus's for-profit fire department then I suggest looking it up - about as odious as Bain Capital to me, or more so, and Crassus became unbelievably rich from many, many similar FYGM types of schemes. The idea of Roman politics just being about serving the state and being rewarded for it was already something of a myth by the late Republic. Marius and Sulla saw to that, if nobody else before them did. The early Republic era does seem to have been markedly less corrupt, though someone correct me if that's just Cato the Younger-style "back in the old days" rhetoric. I realize that it's strange for someone who posts as much as I do in this thread to sound so down on the Romans, but they were just as human as we are. Yes, many of the ways that they approached things were very different from how modern Western culture does today, and it's very easy to find "parallels" between Rome and America that are overblown or nonexistent, but the fundamental mechanisms of power and wealth and how they impact human behavior don't vary that much between societies. Edit: And to be fair to Romney, though it's not my first impulse, it's very possible that he sincerely believes that what he does is for the good of America. A lot of voters apparently do. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Aug 20, 2012 |
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Aug 20, 2012 04:38
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Bagheera posted:We should quote this at the start of every history thread anybody makes. It should be the first lesson of any history class. The further back in time you go, the less a group's culture relates to your own. Yeah. I should say that my last post was emphasizing the negative aspects of wealthy Roman behavior since that was also Amused to Death's focus with respect to modern times. It is equally valid to say that upper-class Romans were driven by honor and glory rather than vanity and desire for power; the Romans almost always spin it this way, to the point that my view has perhaps become excessively cynical in response. However, I do think that we can compare the behavior of the elite in ancient and modern times a little more legitimately than almost any other facet of culture since that is something we have way, way more information about than nearly anything else. It is important to realize that money was not really a "score card" for the Romans in the same way it is today. It was a means to an end - political power and glory/fulfillment of vanity. In a lot of ways, money and political power have exchanged roles culturally; now money is the ultimate end, with political power often just a means for attaining it. Octy posted:Quick question: How do you pronounce Pompey? I thought it was pronounced 'Pom-pee' (at least that's how my lecturers say it), but I was watching an episode of Rome today for the first time in years and they were all pronouncing it like 'Pompeii'. Pom-pee in English. Rome shifts a few pronunications closer to Latin for semi-authenticity, if I remember correctly.
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Aug 21, 2012 02:02
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Hmm. I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one - I see being "beholden to lower class interests", to the extent that that's at all true, as much more enlightened than favoring the upper class over the masses, for example; and ancient peoples were equally susceptible to "false religious or moral teachings", though I think that if you can tell falsehood from truth in such matters you should probably tell everyone else in the world the secret. What I mean when I agree with Bagheera, etc. that it's sometimes fallacious to compare the ancient and the modern is that it's very easy to overestimate the degree to which a modern situation/society/whatever parallels an ancient one, failing to account for the different culture and motivations of the people and institutions involved and thus drawing entirely spurious conclusions from the exercise. Knowing history would be relatively pointless if it didn't give insight into the world as it is now, but it's a matter of rigorously checking yourself whenever you enter into such a comparison to make sure it's a worthwhile one. I think this might be a little too close to historical navel-gazing for this thread though. Edit: And to be clear, I almost didn't respond at all because your post was so off-puttingly disconnected from reality. If you hadn't written anything other than the response to my question I likely would not have, since that section of the post screams of backwards reasoning that is just impossible to engage with. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 04:24
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I've always been told what wikipedia says - the Samnites were already using maniples since phalanxes suck in hilly terrain and the Samnites were a coalition of hill tribes. There are a few surviving tombs that show Samnite soldiers equipped (IMO) more like the early hastati than like hoplites from before Rome adopted the system. Certainly not conclusive, though. Also, just as a side note, the early maniples were armed with spears, not swords; they were adopted for wide use from Hispania later. Hastati are named after the spears they used, the hasta. I have no idea why the hastati got stuck with being named after their weapon when the principes and triarii used the same thing at the time, though. One of the really interesting things about the maniple formation is that it's just an inversion of the Roman phalanx with spaces put in; triarii were originally up front, with hastati (of sorts; more like combination hastati/velites) in the back. physeter posted:Many of Marius' consular appointments were in absentia. He was the commander in chief of the army sent to oppose the massive German invasion and so they kept reinstating him. The current state of affairs is that post-Marius/Post-Sulla is so littered with conjecture and propaganda that we'll never really know who was "at fault". Marius evidently has his poo poo totally together for so much of his life and then just takes a left turn into apparent demogoguery, so abruptly that many authors have reasoned that he became suddenly mentally ill. Likewise Sulla is often depicted as some base villain, gifted with a streak of military genius, who will one day rise to betray his master/defend the republic from his insane former mentor. It makes for Star Wars level drama but none of it makes much sense, and much of it is likely bullshit. Even later Roman historians themselves do not know what went "wrong" with Marius. Marius had always had a predilection for allying himself with Rome's radical reformers; he was not very good at politics, and as a new member of the aristocracy the only political alliances he was really good at securing were with people like Saturninus and Cinna. Even in his early career as tribune of the plebs, Marius was a pretty staunch populare, as well, so that was the natural direction he looked for support. Marius was pretty clearly suffering from some sort of dementia by the end of his life, but to characterize his "left-leaning" tendencies as sudden mental illness isn't accurate. His aggressive pursuit of power at the end likely had to do a lot with his dementia, but that didn't last very long. Tewdrig posted:It seems like Rome really goes off the rails with Marius. From Marius, you get Sulla, and then it seems clear that the battle for the top spot will be bloody for the next couple centuries, as the pyramid that was the Roman empire had grown so large, that the desire to sit atop it must have been irresistible to the ambitious men of the day. Marius didn't take on any more power than was typical for a consul until his seventh consulship, which was only seventeen days long - the only thing unusual about his middle five was that they were consecutive, and the first was perfectly normal. I think you might have your timeline a little bit confused - Sulla did not march on Rome while Marius was consul, ever. Sulla marched on Rome the first time because command of the war against Mithridates of Pontus was transferred from him to Marius, who had wanted that command to begin with even though he was officially retired and in poor health. So no, Sulla wasn't really responding to an outright grab of domestic power so much as an usurpation of his personal command. The reason Marius did not "do anything" with his power before the war with Sulla started is that he didn't have any power other than his war hero status and political connections. His sixth consulship was twelve years in the past before the whole chain of events that led directly to war began. It's not like Marius didn't share any of the blame, though - he was convinced that he was fated to be consul seven times and went to any length to attain that, especially later on when he was mentally ill and not at all physically healthy. Plus, he was the guy who essentially transferred soldiers' loyalty to their general rather than the state. However, it is nearly impossible to disentangle Marius and Sulla when you're talking about who really broke the rule of law. Sulla marched on Rome first, but Marius arguably provoked him into doing it. Remember, there was a lifetime of enmity between the two already; it would take a long time to get into it, but suffice it to say that, at least in Sulla's view, Marius was absolutely obsessed with stealing Sulla's glory at every possible opportunity. This latest development of Marius stealing command over the war with Mithridates, one of the most lucrative wars in Roman history to that point, was utterly intolerable and the last straw. Marius doesn't seem to have hated Sulla quite like Sulla hated Marius, but he was well aware that he was constantly dicking Sulla over so he can't have liked him that much. Sulla usually comes off worse in the sources, but that is mostly because he took the bold actions that made the breakdown of order obvious - and Caesar, who was a Marian, went out of his way to attempt to rehabilitate Marius's image later, so that slants things as well. The extremely poor relationship between the two men, more than the actions of either of them individually, led to their violent conflict. Edit: Plus, y'know, economics and social forces and all that poo poo. The underlying factors are really a lot more important in the next generation, though - Marius and Sulla's conflict was a lot more personal than the Caesarian civil wars, though it had a strong element of class conflict to it alongside the personal grudges. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Sep 18, 2012 |
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Sep 17, 2012 23:29
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Agro ver Haus doom posted:No, they didn't. The barter system is a myth. This is not say that they (by "they" I mean people in general) didn't have credit-debt. As a matter of fact, most of the transactions in the Roman world were done through some sort of credit system. Credit was more on a local scale instead of a central institution that could deal it out. Going to the local pub and want a glass of wine? You got it on credit with the bar tender. Wanted a new pot from the potter down the street? You got it on credit. We know this stuff was on credit simply because they never actually made scales to measure such small amounts of species, metals, and coins. Not because they didn't have the technology to make such scales, but because all such transactions were personal. After a certain amount of time, someone would come around the neighborhood and collect on the debts. On a day-to-day "average Publius" basis, you're right. On the other hand, the upper classes essentially served as credit institutions for their clients and each other - not exactly banks, since it was one guy with all the assets, but not terribly different in practice if your social standing was high enough. On the other hand, owing a lot of money to a fellow senator put you under their thumb to an extent, so generosity in lending was obviously a political tool as much as it was a financial system.
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Sep 18, 2012 23:54
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monkeyharness posted:Thanks for the information, folks. Romans did the same thing; while he was governor of Spain, Caesar, in particular, famously lamented his relative lack of accomplishment compared to Alexander at roughly the same age. That being said, it's not a very fair comparison for either yourself or Caesar to make. Alexander was born to power and his father died just as Alexander reached maturity after setting his son up with a very strong kingdom and obvious routes to pursue for more conquest. Comparing him to a Roman, who couldn't even (legally) hold the office of consul until after the age that Alexander died at, is selling the Roman short because there were much greater hurdles to overcome to even have the opportunity for power - the same is basically true in democracies today. Democracy tends to select against youthful greatness through age minimums on offices and that kind of thing; one of the only advantages of monarchy is that it allows for greater, younger leaders, but then again it also allows for Charles II of Spain.
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Sep 26, 2012 21:05
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Kaal posted:I am so checking that out! Make sure you install one of the mods that changes things to be a little more accurate, then. Vanilla RTW would have you believe that Ptolemaic Egypt was exactly like Pharonic Egypt and that's just the tip of the iceberg really. Still a really fun game, and I think my favorite thing about having played it is that it gives you a much better sense (sort of) of how ancient warfare worked. Reading about classical tactics is a lot more fun and makes way more sense when you can think about how that would look and work in RTW, even if it's a very scaled-down and rough approximation of the real thing.
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Sep 27, 2012 23:45
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Mach5 posted:Thank you nonetheless! I figured there was no agreed-upon date and the two sides just kind of drifted apart: like on the West you had Catholicism ascendant but dealing with plagues and whatnot, while in the East you had the Greek Orthodox guys and that pesky Genghis Khan fellow to deal with. I'll hazard a guess that the Mongols kind of inadvertently helped the Eastern Empire remain cohesive a bit longer due to their crazy-rear end tactics, and how it made sense to remain united against those devilish hordes. Well, the Mongols really helped the East survive longer by devastating the Middle East more than anything. Eastern Roman-Mongol relations were complicated, but often friendly - a couple of princesses ended up married to the khans of the Golden Horde and Ilkhanate, even. I made a post about this way back in the thread, but many Mongols were Nestorian Christians, so it wasn't as unlikely of an alliance as it seems now; the Ilkhanate even tried to get in on the Eighth Crusade by writing a letter to the Pope but that failed before it really even started, so crusader Mongols were never officially a thing. The Golden Horde was much more hesitant to be involved with the Eastern Empire and ended up being pretty hostile eventually. The Turks were the main threat to the East, and they weren't under Mongol dominion for very long. Edit: To put this a little more into perspective, the Christian world had been hearing rumors of "Prester John", a great Christian king in Central Asia, who wanted to link up with the western Christians to defeat the Muslim world. This gave Christendom a relatively favorable initial impression of the Mongols, as they thought that Genghis's Christian foster father (yes, this part was probably true; Christianity was more widely spread at the time than people usually think) was the legendary Prester John. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Sep 28, 2012 |
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Sep 28, 2012 19:50
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Beamed posted:You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt? We have what we have due to luck and monks, basically. Anything likely to be either destroyed or offensive/uninteresting to a monk simply was at a huge disadvantage, and post-Roman records fall into both categories for the most part. What we do have from that era was - surprise! - mostly written by bishops and such to begin with. Even major works like Livy's histories didn't make it through the Middle Ages intact, so the Gothic stuff had almost no chance. It's hard to overstate the sheer amount of written material that existed in the classical world and we possess a tiny fraction of it. Studying Roman history gets kind of depressing sometimes because of this, at least for me. One or two guys will be the only primary sources about particular situation or year or whatever and it's obvious that they've left something out or misanalyzed the situation or whatever because their explanation doesn't make much sense, but we simply don't have anything to help us get around that. That being said, as archaeology becomes more technically sophisticated I think it's pretty likely we'll find some libraries with works we had no idea even existed in them, and hopefully some hole-filling historical works too.
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Oct 5, 2012 06:35
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DarkCrawler posted:He left a huge amount of money behind, strengthened the administration, and consolidated the territories. The Empire learned to govern itself pretty well and was generally strengthened. And he killed Sejanus. He was a moody rear end in a top hat who didn't want to be the Emperor in the first place, a possible sexual deviant and a dick to his family in particular, but he was a pretty good Emperor in my books. And a kickass general. Yeah, Tiberius's bad rap has always puzzled me. His pre-emperor career was outstanding, and his only real offense (governing-wise) was reluctance to do the job - something that Romans fifty years previously would have been excited about! He grew up in the (dying, civil war stricken) Republic and it's not at all strange that he expected the bureaucracy to be able to run without him; I don't have any strong evidence, but I've always suspected that Tiberius wanted to set a precedent of aloof emperors as a sort of "partial restoration" of the Republic. The fiction of senatorial power hadn't yet faded entirely, so it wasn't impossible by any means, but of course his successors were not inclined in that direction. I mean, he'd sit down with senators and advisors and do this: Cassius Dio posted:After setting forth his own opinion he not only granted everyone full liberty to speak against it, but even when, as sometimes happened, others voted in opposition to him, he submitted; for he often would cast a vote himself. Feels to me like a guy who's not too enthused about the idea of there even being an emperor instead of elected officials. He didn't allow himself to be voted the title of Augustus, though he used it on really formal occasions anyway, and he didn't allow himself to be called "imperator" of anyone but the legions. To me he seems focused on tearing down the very office of emperor, an office that someone his age might well still consider as being very un-Roman indeed - perhaps an acceptable state of affairs while Augustus was alive, but still un-Roman. Modern historians have long had a bad habit of accepting ancient historians' evaluations of the emperors without much thought, but it's absolutely necessary to remember that historians in the imperial period assumed that monarchy was superior to a republic; many of their value judgments of looser, delegation-heavy leaders like Tiberius are colored by a perception that a delegating monarch that listens to his "lessers" is weaker than a strong and domineering monarch that centralizes power within himself. Unless you're a dedicated monarchist, you probably value democracy over monarchy, so it's worth evaluating emperors on their merits to you instead of what Suetonius or Cassius Dio think of them. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 19:28
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My historian statement was an overgeneralization; but it's worth noting that all of the historians you refer to were pretty early in the empire. Livy, especially, who was born during the Republic, could see what had been lost. I should have specified that the imperial system is generally held in higher regard later in the imperial period. Tiberius was not a nice guy and certainly slipped from any high ideals he might have initially held later on in his reign - I don't mean to glorify him. He's just not a particularly bad emperor as emperors go, and he is one with a fascinating possible motivation for a lot of the actions he takes which have been treated as bizarre in most history that I've read. Edit: Nero, too, was a completely obnoxious teenager but not a bad emperor really. Caligula is the only Julio-Claudian that largely deserves his reputation. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 20:27
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Josef bugman posted:I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? Scandinavia was also seen, especially in late antiquity once the Goths (who originated there, at least in their legends) were Romanized, as a "birthplace of nations" - an area similar to the Urals that produced the Huns, Mongols, etc. This was underlined, from a Roman perspective, by the tribes that Marius defeated migrating from that area as well. Basically, yeah, Scandinavia was an island probably full of monsters and nearly superhuman barbarians just waiting for an opportunity to ruin everyone's day. I assume a few Romans had probably been there and knew better, as with Ethiopia, but we don't have any evidence.
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Nov 10, 2012 01:55
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cheerfullydrab posted:So in historiography, Theodosius is the emperor of Rome. After his death, the empire is divided up into Eastern and Western halves with an Eastern emperor and Western emperor. This had happened before, but the Empire had always been united again under a sole emperor who was just called the emperor of Rome. So why was the next sole Roman emperor called the only the emperor of the East? Very frustrating. Nobody was ever sole emperor of the full Empire ever again - though de facto Constantinople continued to have significant influence on the West. If you mean, "why is it that, once the Western emperor position no longer existed, the Romans didn't go back to just calling the Eastern emperor 'the emperor'?", then the short answer is that they never stopped. East vs. West was not an official distinction - they used the same titles and hypothetically had power over the other's half too, though of course only the East actually could intervene in the West's affairs. If you're asking why historians call guys like Justinian "Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire" instead of "Emperor of the Roman Empire", it's because they fall on the other side of the Roman/Byzantine divide, which is a useful distinction to make, but Byzantine isn't considered to be a very relevant term anymore so "Eastern Roman" is substituted for it, sometimes awkwardly. Phobophilia posted:I'm going to post a thread named "Ask me about being a barbarian" and come in and ruin you all. Sorry, that's scheduled for page 476. You're a bit early.
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Nov 13, 2012 05:08
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Grand Fromage posted:I think wiki's been the victim of Chinese nationalists. Glassmaking was one of the rare technologies that the west invented long before the Chinese. I suppose it's possible they could make some type of glass but the quality was absolutely nothing compared to Roman technology. I think that Carthage invented clear glass, or at least that's what I've always been told. Glassware in general was one of their biggest non-agricultural exports.
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Nov 17, 2012 23:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:Stories like that are so amazing that it's tempting to suspect it as just a folk origin of a piece of geography. Roman (and Macedonian, in the case of Tyre) military engineering was absolutely incredible - I'd suggest looking particularly into Caesar if you like learning about it, as his legions' skill at engineering was mind-boggling. The walls put up to repel the Helvetian migration near Geneva were 16 ft. (~5m) tall and 19 (Roman) miles long - built in about two weeks, at least if you believe Caesar. The fortifications at the battle of Dyrrhachium were maybe more impressive, with Caesar and Pompey frantically competing to build walls for tactical advantage over the course of the battle; eventually this led to something more akin to the French-German lines during World War I than anything resembling "normal" ancient warfare, with a no man's land between the two sets of walls. Also, Tyre is consistently described as an island until after Alexander so it's almost certainly not a myth. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Nov 29, 2012 |
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Nov 29, 2012 21:28
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Koramei posted:Did military technology change for the better over time? How would a Roman army from the 2nd century fare against one from the 8th and 12th? I'm guessing a uniform army like that of high Rome would be impossible to pay for in fractured Medieval Europe, but what about simpler things like rectangular shields versus the silly oval ones they used in late antiquity and the middle ages? (yes I am a hypocrite) I would say that some things certainly changed for the better; stirrups were introduced and bow technology, which was never really a Roman priority, improved (or at least seemed to do so). On the other hand, the early imperial legions likely could have destroyed any European army from the Middle Ages pretty easily. Their numbers and discipline alone would dwarf the levies and mercenaries that dominated medieval warfare, and yeah a lot of it was cost-related. quote:Also, how big would cities be in the Bronze Age? Not necessarily just population wise, but how sprawling would they be too. Is something like this ridiculously oversized? Not for a capitol, no. The end of the Bronze Age essentially resulted in widespread deurbanization in areas that were urbanized - there was a discussion maybe 10 pages back about that. Bronze Age cities were much more sophisticated than anything that would follow for quite a long time, so they seem unrealistic to us. quote:Again a scale thing, how big would walls be? Are things like the epic stone walls in Rome Total War far too massive or could some actually get that big. I feel like it would be completely impossible for them to get anywhere near that big but every depiction of the ancient world seems to have enormous cities with immense fortifications. Is this just a layover from Renaissance prejudices against the middle ages, inflating antiquity; a way of making it all seem more epic for movies and crap; or were there actually huge cities, enormous armies and ridiculously huge walls sometimes. There actually were huge cities, enormous armies, and ridiculously huge walls. RTW makes fortifications like that ubiquitous, though, which isn't really accurate; walls of that size were generally reserved for regional and national capitols, though Roman cities were often unwalled until after the Crisis of the Third Century. I forget which emperor shifted that, but around the time that barbarians from across the Rhine and Danube started regularly penetrating the borders the Romans shifted to walling towns and cities so that smaller mobile forces could be used to defend the frontier, rather than garrisoning the border as had previously been done. It's not at all impossible for Roman walls to be that big - remember that this is long after the Pyramids were built! Stone walls couldn't be thrown up nearly as quickly as earthen walls, of course, but those types of huge stone walls were well within the engineering capabilities of the Romans.  That's one of the Theodosian walls around Constantinople - the shorter, thinner outer wall. These aren't representative, as the Theodosian walls were pretty much the best (or most successful, at least) in history, but other major cities would have walls of significant height as well. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Nov 30, 2012 |
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Nov 30, 2012 00:37
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