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Jack of Hearts posted:If a Vestal Virgin was raped, would she get buried alive for it? The Roman foundation myth has Rhea Silvia, a vestal, getting raped by Mars to produce Romulus and Remus, and she just gets imprisoned for it. But on the other hand imprisonment was a really serious punishment in Rome, they basically only did it if they were holding you for execution. Or it could mean something more like they immured her. Most likely when such a situation did arise, they just figured they were guilty of getting it on and walled them up.
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Jul 18, 2016 12:48
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Strategic Tea posted:Ultimately the whole west was a sideshow in a lot of respects. The east had the real population centres and cultural powerhouses, based in cities that were old and powerful when Rome was still a hill fort. While it's true that the east had the majority of the population and major cultural centers, I don't think it's true that the west was a sideshow. The mere fact that the empire was eventually divided in half implies that the Romans themselves thought of the East and West as being in some way equivalent. It contained Rome itself, after all, and also economically important regions like the African farmlands, Iberian and Britannic mines, and Italian and Gallic wine country.
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Jul 27, 2016 22:47
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Blue Star posted:Wasn't the senior emperor in the East, though? There were two halves but the east was more important. Sometimes, but not always. Valentinian and his family usually had the senior in the west and the junior in the east. "Senior" and "junior" emperors aren't really a very meaningful concept after Theodosius anyway, it's really just under the tetrarchy that the concept was binding and from Constantine to Theodosius it lost force more or less entirely.
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Jul 28, 2016 03:31
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Ynglaur posted:If the East had all the big cities, then why do some people reference "the manpower of the West"? Perhaps a better question: why in the late Republic do the Western province-holders almost always defeat the Eastern province-holders? Who's referencing the manpower of the west? Arguments about the relative manpowers of the various provinces of the late empire seem really unlikely to be well founded to me, given that we have no reliable sources whatsoever which even tell us how big the whole Roman army was at that time. The closest we have is the Notitia Dignitatum but that's full of all kinds of problems and can't possibly be used to justify claims about how many men were fighting for whoever -- at best it can tell us how many military units in theory existed. The second is a better question but not really related, there's a gigantic difference between the Roman Empire of the civil wars and the Roman Empire of the dominate. The victors in the republican civil wars were those who took and held control of Rome, because that was the source of legitimacy for their government and the basis for the Italian hegemony which supplied most of their manpower. It's not until a much later date that political and military power become decentralized and Rome itself loses its relevance as a source of power.
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Jul 28, 2016 03:48
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While I'm not going to argue for the strict historical accuracy of an HBO show, Rome does tell a story about a series of events that actually happened, putting them in more or less the right order and context and involving most of the people who were actually involved in them. It's about as grounded in history as the Liz Taylor Cleopatra, rather than being whole cloth fiction like Gladiator.
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Aug 3, 2016 19:55
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Also GMOs and wi-fi. Meanwhile, consuming far more poisonous things such as alcohol continues to be a major pastime the world over. People are dumb.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:51
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Chariot fighting was prestige symbol in Bronze Age Mediterranean because it takes a lot of wherewithal to build a chariot, get the horses to drive it and the guy to drive you around in it. If you had chariots that meant you were a big man. But there is basically no evidence that chariots were used for actual fighting in Greece in historical times. Even Homer's champions don't fight from their chariots by and large, they tend to ride to the battle in them, dismount, and fight on foot, only getting back in their chariots if they need to get away, and some famous historian though I forget who has suggested that this is because Homeric Greeks didn't have any idea how chariot fighting actually worked (basically by disrupting formations and launching arrows/javelins).
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Aug 20, 2016 20:31
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Deltasquid posted:I thought this was one of those "haha aren't our ancestors so stupid" stories that aren't really true for most part. A lot of the problems between Christians and Romans can be boiled down to the Emperors saying "The emperor is at the top of the social pyramid" and the Christians saying "no, our God (one amongst hundreds in the Empire at that time fyi) is" and the Emperors executing these traitors. I mean this reading is kind of true, but under Augustus and his successors, again under the Flavians, and in various degrees of power all the way up to Christianization there was a very strong imperial cult institution dedicated to the literal worship of various imperial figures in temples constructed for that very purpose, some of which still exist. People worshiped the emperor because that was a way of showing their participation in the Roman society and acclaiming the legitimacy of Roman rule. Cities competed for the privilege of building temples to dead emperors. Even after Christian emperors became the norm, the emperor was still seen as God's right-hand man on earth. Subsequently people in western civilization have become a decent amount more skeptical about claims to divinity, but the kind of participation in public life that the imperial cult implied still exists, it's just not put in the context of religion since most societies that exist today don't think it's proper to explicitly say that their leadership is derived from God and should be associated with worship.
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Aug 27, 2016 22:40
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^^^don't forget my boy GeisericFuligin posted:Ye the Roman Senate was really its own worst enemy and pretty reliably picked the worst possible course of action when it came to dealing with the Germanic peoples, whose aristocratic classes were invariably pro-Roman culture and continuity. The senate or even the senatorial class really had very little to do with the decisions to settle Germanics inside the empire, and some of them seem to have made a pretty laudable effort to coexist with the Germans once the empire was no more, in France and pre-Justinian Italy as well. The biggest mistake that emperors repeatedly made with barbarian groups was letting them stay in the empire as coherent armed groups under leaders not strongly bound by Roman law or bureaucracy. It's understandable why they did this (a ready made army for the emperor's own purposes, not loyal to another Roman who might be tempted to use their power to usurp the throne? Sounds great) and why they didn't take a more aggressive tone with the barbarians as historically had been the Roman practice (because of the lack of stability, few emperors could risk a serious military campaign which wouldn't solve an extremely pressing problem like killing a usurper), but ultimately it was the failure of emperors to take the long view of where giving away land to basically independent warlords would lead them that created the worst problems.
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Sep 10, 2016 02:49
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Alan comes from Aryan, as has been said, whereas Alemanni is exactly what it sounds like: the "all men", or some scholars understand it as "united men". Hungary actually isn't named for the Huns. It comes from the Byzantine Greek "Oungroi", and this name predates their occupation of modern Hungary. The H-sound at the start was added in Medieval Latin to justify the notion that there was some ancestral connection between them and the Huns (there wasn't).
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Sep 22, 2016 01:06
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That story broke earlier this year. They've only excavated about 100 bodies so far though no one is sure how many more there might be, since these were all found within 500 square meters. It's still a lot of dead guys, but I do think it's stretching to take it to imply that big tribal confederations were a thing on the Baltic coast of Germany 3000 years ago or not, particularly without an accurate impression of just how many people died there.
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Sep 23, 2016 20:58
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Short version: We actually don't have that many sources on Commodus, and the sources we do have are contemporaries who were biased against him. He was probably a little nuts, but maybe not as crazy as he's portrayed in the sources and in popular culture today. His reign was actually very peaceful, and he was popular with the people and the army, but hated by political elites. A lot of his reign was spent putting down coups and conspiracies, which he may have opened himself up to because he was a pretty simple dude and relied heavily on advisers. This is sort of true, but the big takeaway from what we do know about him is that he wasn't especially personally active or competent in the administration of the empire. Like Claudius, he seems to have ruled through a succession of non-aristocratic favorites to whom our sources are more or less hostile. However Claudius at least made some effort to travel within the empire in order to keep up the appearance of being a strong active military leader as an emperor should be. Commodus didn't do this. He was made emperor on the Danube but after returning to Rome he stayed there and, so far as we know, didn't go on any campaigns for the remainder of his life. This allowed provincial military leaders to distinguish themselves on campaign, getting a reputation and loyal soldiers as well as riches, which set the stage for the free-for-all upon his death. As a result of his staying in Rome he was in constant contact with the political class, but his relationships with them seem to have been poorer than normal. He taxed them to a degree they felt was unjust while enjoying relatively strong support from the lower classes, and seems to have attempted to set up a cult of personality. Statuary frequently depicts him as Hercules and he is said to have participated in gladiatorial shows in this persona. There is some reason to believe he grew less sane towards the end of his life, but he almost certainly was not as bizarre in his behavior as, say, Caligula was reputed to be. The most obvious comparison in previous emperors is Nero. He had a good public image among the lower classes, which kept him in power for a time, and a poisonous relationship with the elite, which kept him in the history books as a villain, but what he didn't have was the ability or inclination to oversee the running of the empire or indeed his own household, and that's why he got murdered and why such a serious civil war broke out upon his death.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:21
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Elyv posted:You mentioned Nero, but how do you think Commodus compares to Domitian? Unfavorably. Domitian was nearly as old when he came to supreme power as Commodus was when he died and was a more mature and respectable figure. He also had a prolonged period of learning the ropes of empire under his father and brother, which Commodus, being a teenager at his accession, simply couldn't. Domitian actually served in the senate, which probably colored his later disdain for it, and unlike Commodus he was extremely active in public administration, provincial governance, and military campaigns. His behavior as emperor was in fact pretty similar to that of the Antonines, they were all industrious autocratic types who ruled from wherever they happened to be and spent only as much time in Rome as they needed to. That said, they were mostly better at it than Domitian was, as you can see from the fact that they didn't get stabbed to death. Domitian is a pretty pivotal figure because he was the first emperor to pretty much dismiss even the pretense of being primus inter pares and actually make it work, he considered himself dominus over his slaves and everyone was his slaves. Which was tactless way of framing the situation, to say the least. Domitian was by all accounts not a likable individual and while he doesn't seem to have had the loopy/megalomaniacal streak of guys like Caligula/Nero/Commodus, he sure didn't make many friends and had a strong totalitarian bent, complete with purges of the elite and cult of personality. He wasn't a great emperor but I don't get the vibe of utter incompetence from him that I get from Commodus.
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Nov 2, 2016 22:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:Depends on who you are. If you're some guy trying to move out of Germania and into some abandoned corner of Gaul due to a combination of population pressure and your rear end in a top hat neighbors, your world is expanding and getting more complex. This doesn't so much move the goalposts as erect a completely new set of goalposts and triumphantly kick the ball through them. Nobody asked about spooky scary barbarians going völkerwanderung, they're talking about the Roman Empire, conceived of as a state with a government. One can make the case that the western empire was doing okay in 400, but to make the same claim about 450 is to my mind fatuous. In 400 the Roman government controlled Italy, Britain, Africa, Spain, and Gaul. In 450 the only one of these areas that the government firmly controlled the entirety of was Italy. They had no effective control in Africa or Britain, while Spain and Gaul were both nominally under their power but increasingly dominated by regional interests that the central government did not have the bureaucratic, military, or political force to effectively manage. The fact that there was a considerable degree of continuity between Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul (Britain a bit less so) and sub-Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul, doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the state at one point controlled those territories and it then ceased to do so. Fact is, the extent of the territories the western Roman government controlled declined, and this coincided with a decline in its ability to deploy armies, a decline in its ability to collect and spend tax, and a decline in its perceived legitimacy and importance. The fact that this decline would turn out to be terminal wasn't a fait accompli but that doesn't mean it was any less of a decline.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:05
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Hogge Wild posted:history isn't a civ game bizarre response frankly. It's not like I'm saying they had 1000 less military points in AD 450 or someshit, it's a matter of historical record that the Roman government ceased to control territories and reserve powers that it formerly controlled and reserved, and this process continued until it came around to controlling nothing at all and other, more or less related powers replaced their government. If you don't consider this a decline in the power of a state then I don't know what you would consider a decline.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:25
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Roman Italy got reorganized into the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy (early to mid 6th century), which then got the absolute poo poo kicked out of it by the Byzantine wars under Justinian. Completely apocalyptic economic disruption/infrastructural failure to say nothing of a whole bunch of people getting killed by violence and plague. Byzantines more or less won but the relative power vacuum led to invasions by the Franks, which failed, and the Lombards, which didn't. Byzantines retained some territory in the peninsula but most of it was reorganized into duchies under the Lombard kingdom (mid 6th to late 8th century). The northern half of Lombard kingdom eventually fell under the rule of Charlemagne and was passed down among the Carolingians (except for some bits which Charlemagne gave to the popes), while the southern half had a few Byzantine enclaves and a Lombard successor state. When the Carolingians petered out (late 9th century) there was no firm leadership of the whole peninsula and power struggle between local feudal leaders, popes, and holy Roman emperors began. The cities also had recovered from the devastation of past centuries and grew to dominate a lot of Mediterranean trade. That wealth & accompanying political organization led the city-states to become the primary political unit for a bit although power struggle with the emperors continued all through the High Middle Ages. This is a really short version of 500+ years of pretty complex and not super well attested history that mostly ignores the influence of the emirs of Sicily/later Norman conquest which was a big deal but I don't know poo poo all about it. The really really short version is that Italy got seriously hosed up post Roman rule, nobody could ever be bothered to completely conquer the whole peninsula, and for quite a while it was ruled from France/Germany which encouraged development of a lot of small local powers rather than a central state.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:32
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10 Beers posted:Noticed a Netflix Original called Roman Empire. Anyone checked it out yet? We were chatting about it a page or two back, I got about fifteen minutes into the first episode last night and then fell asleep. Not because it was bad or anything, I was just tired. It looks ok, definitely takes an aesthetic cue from Rome, Sean Bean is a very listenable narrator, Commodus is an excellent story to focus on just because it's such a clusterfuck and such an obvious "turning point" in the empire's fortunes. I'll watch some more tonight.
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Nov 15, 2016 23:24
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PittTheElder posted:I don't know that Commodus' reign is such a "turning point" though. I mean it clearly is to the extent that "turning points" truly exist, but the empire has seen a lot of low points prior, and will see many high points after. I put it in scare quotes because there's obviously not the case that Rome was all good before he showed up and all poo poo afterwards, but Cassius Dio, who wrote in Commodus' day and those of the Severans, definitely conceived of Commodus' reign as having been the end of the good old days when autocratic emperors ruled well for the good of all, fought and won victories over the barbarians, enriched the empire, wisely appointed their successors and were generally awesome and widely beloved. Obviously his point of view was historically contingent and god knows how accurate our concept of his writings is, let alone how accurate his portrait of events was; but in hindsight it's hard to disagree with the point that Roman power ran more smoothly under the so-called "good emperors" than it did under the Severans or those who came after them.
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Nov 16, 2016 00:51
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Roman legionaries got a pretty balanced and healthy diet at least, don't know about how much effort they put into their general physique but they certainly weren't underfed runts even if Gauls/Germans mocked them about it.
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Nov 17, 2016 01:09
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Rollersnake posted:I desperately wish Volusius's Annals weren't lost to history. The only record of their existence is an amusing Catullus poem in which he absolutely trashes them, and that just fills me with burning curiosity. The Augustan History? We don't have any examples of its being criticized in the ancient world, but it is awfully written and contains a great deal of complete bullshit: false attributions, forged documents, made up emperors, lies, an invented revival of the censorship in 251 (by a guy who was dead at the time), and a mythical emperor called Firmus who ate an ostrich everyday. It's also the only coherent source we have for a substantial part of the third century AD.
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Dec 1, 2016 13:56
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sullat posted:Caesar was Marius's nephew, right? How did he escape the poo poo list? He was doubly on the poo poo list, being Marius' nephew and also son-in-law of Marius' colleague Cinna. Sulla was inclined to spare him as long as he paid up and divorced Cinna's daughter, but Caesar refused to divorce. His maternal uncle, however was the orator Aurelius Cotta. Cotta had gone into exile, used Sulla's dictatorship as an opportunity to return, and argued persuasively for clemency. Suetonius says that Sulla's son-in-law Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus and the Vestal Virgins also spoke on Caesar's behalf. Sulla eventually gave in with the line about "in this Caesar I see many a Marius".
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Dec 5, 2016 17:28
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Angry Lobster posted:Ironically, the one Caesar ressembled the most was Sulla himself, both were extremely loyal to their friends, believed they were protected by a powerful goddess, and were extremely confident in their own luck. True. You might also add that he was a patrician from a relatively unsuccessful branch of an old family, and that he was declared an enemy of the state while out in the provinces and returned with his army to fight for what he felt were his rights. But Suetonius presents the anecdote in a way that suggests what Sulla meant was that Caesar was like Marius opposed to the domination of the "good men", that his politics were dangerously populist and would prove the ruin of constitutional rule. Which is pretty rich coming from Sulla. Of course, in other ways Caesar was nothing like either Sulla or Marius -- not slaughtering his political opposition once he won the civil war, for example, was a choice he made deliberately because he didn't wish to emulate Sulla and Marius' purges.
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Dec 6, 2016 00:58
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Kassad posted:It was more likely a raid rather than an actual attempt at conquest. I'm just saying because the importance of this battle tends to get played up by islamophobes here in France. While it's unfortunate that modern events cause the history here to be so political, and there's a much longer and prouder tradition of exaggerating a poorly-attested battle into A Great Decisive Moment of the World Without Which We'd Be Speaking Mohammedanese Now, there's plenty of reason to suspect that the Umayyad forces had every intention of remaining in France if they felt it was possible and gainful, given that they were pretty much the most conquest-happy empire in the Mediterranean region since Rome itself. They had in that very century subdued the Gothic kingdom in Hispania as a consequence of a raid that exposed its extreme military weakness, and remained in charge of the majority of the peninsula until the Fitna three hundred years later. In the event the Umayyad push into Gaul looks more like a raid than a conquest, but I think that is largely because they suffered the reverse at Tours. By the time of the Battle of Tours, Umayyad armies had been based in Narbonne for more than a decade, raiding in Aquitaine, Septimania, and even Burgundy without facing strong resistance. The Franks didn't actually conquer southern Gaul from Andalusian rule until 759, when Narbonne surrendered to Pepin the Short. The Andalusian rulers never made another serious concerted attempt to assert power beyond the Pyrenees, but I don't think we can say it was likely that they had no plans to conquer northern Gaul - they had no problem staying in southern Gaul for 40+ years after all. Whatever the battle's world-historical importance, it was definitely watershed in the rise of Carolingian dynasty to hegemony over old Gaul.
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Dec 19, 2016 15:41
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Comparison between the Greuthungi/Tervingi incursion over the Danube and modern European refugee crisis is absolutely colossally misplaced, whether the political point you're trying to make is "migrants are filthy subhuman scum, shut your ears to their piteous cries" or "truly Rome would still exist today if only they had realized the inestimable value of multicultural peace love and understanding" or whatever other dumb poo poo. There are desperate people trying to cross borders and that's where the resemblance terminates. You might as well say Trump is comparable to Julius Caesar because they're both self-obsessed rich debtors with a nice head of hair.
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Dec 23, 2016 06:12
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Pontius Pilate posted:Can't make this comparison yet! Maybe he'll want Trump wines to take over Bordeaux. It's not clear that there was any but the usual xenophobia at fault caused the Gothic crisis. Guy Halsall's "Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West" has an excellent section on Roman attitudes to barbarians. The short way of putting it is that Romans did not like barbarians and looked down on them, but sometimes could be induced to think of them as what we would call "noble savages", contrasting their natural, uncivilized living with a dishonest, citified society like Rome. In time this led to some military units identifying themselves with the barbarians more than earlier Roman military leaders or soldiers would have felt was appropriate. At first this identification was in concert with its Roman identity, so that a Roman cohort in the Notitia Dignitatum could be referred to as the "Celtiberi" though all the Celtiberian peoples had been under Roman rule for centuries and were as Roman as anyone in the empire; but eventually it was taken to the extent that some parts of Roman military retained their identity as "barbarians" while increasingly discarding their identity as Romans. Or anyway that's Halsall's theory, as I understand it. His book is definitely worth a read. But I don't think that this sort of shift in opinion on the barbarians was at fault for the Gothic crisis. The sheer scale of the Gothic crossing was more important than any change in Roman attitudes. The Roman authorities didn't have, or did not devote, enough resources to manage the receptio of the Tervingi and Greuthungi. They were starving and desperate and people took advantage of them. Such Roman authorities as were present tried to handle the situation by killing the barbarian ringleaders, which was a pretty standard tactic. Whoops they didn't like that and now there's a whole poo poo ton of angry starving people, some of them armed and perhaps with Roman military experience, wandering up and down the Balkans year on year trying to find some means of survival. And they're called Goths so if, as a Balkan Roman, you didn't have any strong opinions on Goths before, you sure don't like them now. There wasn't any especial malice towards the Greuthungi and Tervingi for being Goths or whatever, they were only barbarians from outside the empire and that meant there was nothing wrong with screwing them over (and plenty of Roman administrators saw nothing wrong with screwing over people in their charge regardless of whether they were Romans or not). It's just that in this case the scale of the problem wasn't appreciated until it turned into a proper catastrophe.
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Dec 23, 2016 16:09
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Doctor Malaver posted:But what made Visigoths leave their own land? Why did they need Rome to feed them? quote:Yet when the report spread widely among the other Gothic peoples, that a race of men hitherto unknown had now arisen from a hidden nook of the earth, like a tempest of snows from the high mountains, and was seizing or destroying everything in its way, the greater part of the people, who, worn out by lack of the necessities of life, had deserted Athanaricus, looked for a home removed from all knowledge of the savages; and after long deliberation what abode to choose they thought that Thrace offered them a convenient refuge, for two reasons: both because it has a very fertile soil, and because it is separated by the mighty flood of the Hister from the fields that were already exposed to the thunderbolts of a foreign war; and the rest of the nation as if with one mind agreed to this plan. Some Huns made trouble for the Tervingi and their leader Athanaric, so they basically abandoned him and attempted to cross into the Empire to get away from the Huns under the leadership of Alavivus and Fritigern. If there was more to the situation than that, we don't know it. Marcellinus gives us zero insight into why the Huns were fighting the Goths, he describes the Huns as these super-barbarians who don't have buildings or farms and are basically unreasoning beasts in human form who gently caress people over for the hell of it. So they just were fighting the Goths and beat them quite hard. So the Tervingi basically begged to be let into the empire. Marcellinus tells us that the Emperor Valens' court told him he should be pleased when he heard of the Tervingi massing on the Danube, because he could invite them in and enlist them in the army for his war against Persia. I can post more about how Marcellinus says the situation developed from there and why it turned into such a clusterfuck if anyone cares.
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Dec 24, 2016 13:45
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This post is really long So okay, there's a bunch of desperate refugees massed on the northern side of the Danube and the emperor decides they should be let in. Roman officials on site ferried the Tervingi across the river, but the effort wasn't well-coordinated. Many drowned and no serious attempt was made to assess how many people were crossing. The Roman general Lupicinus, who had the command of Thrace, went to take charge, but Marcellinus says he were more concerned with making money off the situation than actually making sure that everything worked, and drove the Tervingi to starvation and desperation by selling them food in exchange for their children as slaves. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that there were an absolute poo poo ton of people. We don't really know how many because the Romans couldn't be bothered to count them all. Peter Heather estimates about 60000 people with maybe 10000 fighters, but ultimately we have no basis for even guessing a number other than that it was really large. The general attempted to relocate the Tervingi so as to find some land for them to farm, but while their forces were occupied with that, the Greuthungi under Alatheus and Saphrax, another Gothic group beyond the Danube who were also having trouble with Huns, decided to take advantage of this opportunity to cross the border and seek Roman protection, even though their request that Valens shelter them had specifically been refused (probably because the Tervingi were so numerous that the Romans knew they couldn't deal with both groups at once). So they crossed the Danube and camped out on the Roman side of it. Possibly because he heard about this and was worried things were going to get out of hand, Lupicinus invited Alavivus and Fritigern to a party at Marcianople with the intention of murdering them. The Tervingi remained outside the town, but began to riot against the soldiers escorting them because there was a town right there and they wanted to go in and get food. Lupicinus ordered the execution of the Tervingi leaders at the party, but Fritigern convinced him that he had to go out to calm the rioters and talked his way right out of the city. Once there he promptly formed up his fighting men and began to pillage the surroundings of Marcianople. When Lupicinus mustered his own army to put a stop to that, the Tervingi fighters killed them and equipped themselves with their weapons and armor. Lupicinus ran away to hide in the city, and a bunch of pissed off but now heavily armed Tervingi were moving around Thrace plundering without any opposition. The basic problem facing the Tervingi hadn't changed. They did not have any sustainable means of support. They didn't have any lands to farm or any subjects to tax. They couldn't take fortified towns because they lacked the logistical capacity to stay in one place. So they essentially took to wandering around the Balkans killing and looting whatever they could just to survive. Some people in the region decided to join them -- Marcellinus tells of two Gothic leaders who were already loyal Roman commanders stationed at Adrianople, but received such abuse from the local Romans in the wake of the Tervingi revolt that they fought their way out of the city and went to ally their forces to Fritigern. Gothic slaves and the poor and desperate from Roman society flocked to the rebels, who continued to pillage the countryside, probably by splitting up into smaller bands since they were now more numerous than ever. And the Greuthungi seem to have joined in this raiding too. So the situation was a huge mess. The people that Rome had originally admitted into the empire were in open revolt, Roman subjects were throwing in with them, uninvited foreigners had crossed the borders on their own initiative, and the Roman army assigned to defend the region had been butchered. Emperor Valens finally heard of this and realized how serious the situation had become. He immediately began to negotiate with the Persians, relocated his court from Antioch to Constantinople, and contacted the Western Roman Emperor, his nephew Gratian, to ask him to help out. A joint western and eastern Roman army fought a bloody battle against a large Gothic group without any major change to the status quo: the Goths continued to raid throughout Thrace and the eastern Romans continued to struggle to defend their territory. They got limited support from the west because the western armies and Gratian himself were distracted by an invasion of the Alamanni on the Rhine which, however, he successfully quelled. He then began to move east to take on the Goths in person. Valens had only just arrived at Constantinople, where he struggled to get his army into fighting shape, and Marcellinus alleges that he was very jealous of this success. When Valens heard that one of his own generals had won a skirmish against a Gothic raiding party, he was still more jealous (although there was plenty of reason for a militarily unsuccessful emperor to worry about a more successful subordinate) and made up his mind to fight against the Goths and win on his own. Valens and his army marched to Adrianople, where they had heard around ten thousand Goths were headed. Fritigern himself was present with these Goths, and sent a Christian elder to negotiate with Valens (himself a Christian, as all emperors were by this time), saying that if Valens made an appropriate show of force he could convince his Goths to surrender and be received into the empire properly. Valens didn't believe Fritigern was sincere, though it's at least possible that he was -- he had nothing to gain by continuing to fight, since he could not seize permanent control of territory -- and he sent the elder away without agreeing. Fritigern then sent a message to Alatheus, Saphrax, and the Greuthungi, asking them to join forces with him right away. Fritigern still didn't want to fight, and made further overtures to Valens, but both armies seem to have been more aggressive. A Roman detachment charged in, were repulsed, and as they retreated were struck by Alatheus and Saphrax with a large body of cavalry. From there the battle developed into a total debacle. There were a lot more Goths than Valens had anticipated, even before the Greuthungi arrived, and he seems to have had a hard time controlling his army. The left wing got drawn into a charge and collapsed, then pretty much the whole army got encircled and slaughtered. Valens' body was never found and probably the majority of the entire military of the eastern empire was destroyed. This was a huge disaster for the eastern empire, but ironically it did nothing at all to improve the Goths' position because what they ultimately needed was land to settle on, and only a living emperor could give them that. The Goths attempted to besiege Adrianople, and then Constantinople, but failed to do either. Marcellinus chose to end his history here so we actually know very little about how the war concluded. Gratian arrived on the scene not long after, and gave the Spanish general Theodosius command of the armies in the region, which de facto elevated him to the position of eastern emperor. Theodosius also suffered a couple of defeats at Gothic hands before finally coming to a settlement with the Goths' leaders: something to the effect that they'd remain in the empire and supply troops for the imperial armies, but by and large would live as a united, semi-autonomous community rather than being divided up in the existing provinces of the empire. The details of this agreement are not clear, some historians figure there was never a formal treaty and the war just kind of petered out due to lack of anything to actually be gained by fighting. So that's the Gothic War right there. Six years of fighting, a Roman emperor killed in battle, three Roman armies wiped out, the entirety of the Balkans plundered repeatedly, cities besieged without ever being actually sacked, poor Romans and slaves gladly abandoning their society to join a mob of the angry and dispossessed in ravaging the countryside, and in the end nothing positive accomplished beyond what the Romans had originally planned to do, had their officials not been too greedy to properly carry it out.
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Dec 24, 2016 16:14
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Fuligin posted:The presence of Gothic peoples within the Empire is also part of what gave Attila his casus belli, so there were reasons for the Romans to try to avoid entangling themselves in nomad politics. Of course, it's true that they probably couldn't really have stopped them in the first place. Romans didn't try to avoid entangling themselves in barbarian politics at all, just to dominate them by empowering some (hopefully friendly) leaders to obtain power over others. The tradition of barbarian detachments in the Roman army was older than the principate. If anything the Gothic war increased the prominence of such groups since it simultaneously depleted Roman manpower and showed the potential that decently equipped and led "barbarians" had as a military and political force. This couldn't have happened if Romans didn't have a long history of bringing in foreigners to fight with the promise of money, power, and security within the empire. There was very little unusual about Valens' choice to bring in the Tervingi, apart from the sheer number of people involved.
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Dec 26, 2016 22:21
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Squalid posted:I think I remember after the famous band of refugees crossed over a second group appeared along the Danube threatening to cross into Roman territory by force if necessary. Valens at first agreed to move them and even sent a contingent of the Roman navy to assist, but once they were in the middle of the river they turned around and sunk the entire transport fleet exterminating the entire tribe while they were helpless in the water. Ring any bells? It came to mind because if European nationalists are using the Gothic migration as a metaphor for their current problems I'd be concerned they might get a few ideas This doesn't sound quite right to me. A lot of the Tervingi did drown during the initial crossing, but not because of Roman malice so much as because they were trying to shift thousands of people as quickly as possible across a rain-swollen river in rudimentary boats and rafts. When the Greuthungi crossed the river they did so completely without permission, but also didn't face any significant opposition because troops had been pulled back from the Danube to manage the relocation of the Tervingi. It's not impossible that something like this happened at some other time since Romans (and barbarians) rarely had much compunction about massacring large numbers of people (Roman or barbarian) if they felt it was in their interests, but it doesn't ring a bell for me, definitely not in context of the Gothic War.
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Dec 27, 2016 14:45
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Jerusalem posted:I don't know what that is, but like ancient history I'm gonna go ahead and assume it involves butts Plutarch politely suggests that she wasn't very physically attractive, but charming, intelligent, and well-spoken. Cassius Dio is the only surviving ancient historian who explicitly claims she was a great beauty, but he was writing about a century further after the fact than Plutarch. However Plutarch himself was writing at least a century after Cleopatra's death. Her life is not very well attested and in general her importance is exaggerated. The image of Cleopatra as seductress is probably older than Actium-era propaganda, though it certainly made use of that image. It's hard to imagine that people in Rome didn't resent her relationship with Caesar or his erecting a statue in her honor in Venus Genetrix, for example. Cicero met her when she came to visit Caesar in Rome and hated her, though he doesn't speak of her in terms of having seduced Caesar -- I guess with Caesar right there and holding unmatched power it was neither likely that he would be subverted by a foreigner, nor politic to say that he had been. For all that, her relationship with Antony was pretty much the same thing as with Caesar: since Romans would decide whether she was able to maintain her status as client monarch or not, she found the most powerful Roman available and got in bed with him. It's just that in Antony's case, there was a major Roman opponent who had an interest in making him look bad, and he being absent from Rome did not possess the power to threaten that narrative. However the prevailing Roman attitudes to Cleopatra didn't portray her as a dumbass who slept her way to the top or anything. Indeed one rather gets the (dubiously accurate, since Imperator Caesar had an obvious interest in portraying Antony as not a Roman political rival but as in the thrall of a foreigner) sense that she, rather than Antony, was the brains of the operation. She's just ensnaring him with her feminine wiles to suit her decadent oriental monarch's ambitions of conquering Roman civilization, as those oriental monarchs all want to. Good thing we have Imperator Caesar Divi Filius and M. Vipsanius Agrippa to defend us, and Livia Drusilla to show us what a proper noblewoman should be 
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Dec 31, 2016 17:09
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lol
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Dec 31, 2016 19:29
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Fish of hemp posted:Did Romans or other ancient people celebrate new years as we do? What i mean is huge party through every srata of society, special party customs such as fireworks and the like. Not Romans, no. The Calends of January was a festival for Janus, and the day on which the year's consuls assumed office, at least in the late republic. The Calends of March, on which the Roman year originally began, were a somewhat more important holiday involving the relighting of the sacred fire and a festival for Mars (as the month name implies). But every Calends was a holiday and sacred to something or other, and Romans had rather a lot of holidays. Saturnalia, in late December, is probably the closest to being a full-on carnival like you're thinking, and had plenty of weird special customs like role-reversal between masters and slaves and stuff. No fireworks though. Fireworks need explosives.
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Jan 1, 2017 21:57
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PittTheElder posted:It seems to be a pretty common thing that our societies (particularly in North America) have way fewer holidays than most places have in the past. What I'm saying is I want more holidays. Bear in mind that Romans didn't have weekends off. They didn't have weeks or weekends at all, for that matter. Some professions seem to have taken every eighth day off, following the market-day cycle, but I seriously doubt that it was legally required to give your workers any time off at all except on ferial days.
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Jan 1, 2017 23:23
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Samuel Clemens posted:I would assume the Romans also didn't have vacations in the same way we do nowadays. Well, not unless you were rich, anyway. There definitely was a concept of tourism and taking time away from the city, it wasn't considered particularly unusual for Romans to visit Egypt or Greece for pleasure, or a "grand tour" type thing where you'd see the sights of the ancient world, or study in the academies of the Hellenic world. And it was known that the city of Rome wasn't necessarily a great place to be if you weren't in good health, so you have people moving out to their estate in the countryside for a while and so on. Obviously both things limited to those who could afford it but poo poo, it's not like poor people can afford to take overseas vacations today either.
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Jan 2, 2017 00:21
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fishmech posted:Probably kinda like how a lot of people are scared to fly nowadays. Most of the time, a vast majority of the time really, it goes perfectly smoothly. But if something goes bad it can go really bad really quickly with little way to fix it. To a certain viewpoint, nothing's going to convince you it's fine. Probably the danger was a lot more severe. Flight is regulated as gently caress and there's a high degree of standardization and control over how planes are built, how they're manned, how they communicate, how they're supplied, how they're scheduled, how they're protected from adverse conditions and human threat, etc that vastly exceeds what was even remotely possible in the ancient world. And Romans were generally less inclined as a society to worry about a bunch of people dying every now and again than moderns are.
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Jan 2, 2017 04:32
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homullus posted:Also, pirates. That's one problem the Romans actually did solve, probably because their political systems were a lot more geared towards getting politicians to kill people than they were towards enforcing regulations for seaworthiness or whatever.
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Jan 2, 2017 06:56
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homullus posted:Could you say more about how you feel the Romans solved piracy? My understanding was that it was a serious threat until the end of the Republic, at which point they more regularly took it on themselves to wipe out pirate bases. They continued to need to do this because piracy never went away. It was a serious problem for the republic, much less so under the principate. For a while Roman governors of Cilicia were tasked with getting rid of pirate bases there: Mark Antony's grandfather had fought a campaign against piracy there with some success. Mark Antony's father later got a special commission to fight piracy in Crete, but did a pretty terrible job and by the sound of things just ripped off the provincials instead of actually fighting the pirates. The provincials promptly enlisted the pirates to defend them, Antony senior's fleet was sunk and he returned to Rome in some disgrace. A couple years after that Pompey received a special commission to stamp out piracy across the Mediterranean and conducted a large naval campaign where he pretty much swept across the whole sea from west to east. He did a good deal of killing pirates but he also made an effort to spare those who surrendered and resettle them, which suggests that he at least understood the pirate problem to be connected to poverty and the lack of a livelihood. After that point we don't really hear of much piracy in the empire until Goths began to conduct raids on the Black Sea coast, and Saxons on the coasts of Britannia and northern Gaul, in the third century. It's possible that piracy continued to occur before these things, but it seems to have been much less of a problem than before Pompey's campaign. It could definitely be argued that these later barbarian pirates were a pretty similar case to the republic-era epidemic of piracy: people not economically prospering on the fringes of Roman rule, but prosperous enough to build ports, launch boats, and arm themselves just decided to take advantage of endless civil wars over Roman power to cut themselves a bigger slice of the pie. e: Noctis Horrendae posted:Why was Rome "a bad place to be if you weren't in good health"? My initial thought was "varying terrain", but Rome is a flat, coastal area, right? As others have said it's a blazing hot, mosquito ridden pesthole, and was certainly a lot worse in times when the Cloaca Maxima was what passed for modern sanitation. It's not especially flat though. City of seven hills and all that skasion fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 07:56
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Can't go into a whole lot of detail on Geoffrey now because I don't have a copy of him anymore, but there's definitely cases where actual Romano-British figures passed into later legend. Geoffrey's British king/Roman senator Maximianus is the same figure as the Welsh legendary Roman emperor Macsen Wledig, and both are the same guy as the real historical figure Magnus Maximus, the commander of Britain who fought a civil war against Gratian and was briefly recognized as western emperor before being deposed by Theodosius. He was particularly remembered by the British because he was basically the last Roman commander to lead a significant number of troops in Britannia or exercise any imperial sovereignty over the island.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:51
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They picked the right time to kill Caesar imo. Parthian/Persian campaigns were invariably a massively expensive boondoggle, Crassus and Antony both had enormous failed campaigns that didn't yield a scrap of land or gold at the cost of thousands of lives and all the baggage (and a number of eagles) just a few years on other side of Caesar's death. Even ignoring the problems of actually conquering the place, since if anyone could accomplish that Caesar probably had a good shot at it, Persian heartland was just too far away to effectively rule from Rome. Trajan and Septimius Severus both managed to conquer Ctesiphon but neither was able to hold it for very long. It cost money to hold it but didn't give money back because it couldn't be developed as a tax-paying province. I don't see how Caesar could have solved this problem.
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Jan 7, 2017 15:19
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the JJ posted:Basically any broad statement about "the Romans did X" or ""the Romans felt Y" is too broad to be useful. You've got a tremendous time period to cover, and even contemporaneous Romans bitched at each other about what proper behavior was. This wasn't just a Caesar thing either though, the Roman Republic had a long tradition of honorary crowns for being the first over the wall or saving a legion single-handed, often accompanied by other decorations and bonuses. In this context it's important to remember that the Roman army originally wasn't professional at all, and only formally became a professional standing army in Caesar Augustus' time. Codes of conduct were very much at the discretion of whatever individual nobleman happened to be in command. Apparently Caesar had a bit of a reputation for being lax on discipline in the ranks, at one point he's supposed to have said he didn't care if his soldiers were wearing perfume as long as they fought well.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:49
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