|
Grand Fromage posted:There's something of a current of "oh man everything has gone to hell since the days of Cicero" in western thought from the end of the 200s on to the Renaissance. It's not hard to imagine why, especially later when you and 30,000 other people are living in the vine-covered ruins of the million+ person city of Rome. Weren't a number of Romans also pretty worried that finally stamping out the Carthaginians would somehow make them decadent and useless? In that, without being able to struggle against what they saw as a foil to their valued fides, they'd never be the good old Rome they loved? I can't remember if that was contemporary with the destruction of Carthage, or reconstructed after the fact.
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2013 01:10
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 11:56 |
|
|
Contingency Plan posted:Two questions: Everything GF said is pretty on the money, I just wanted to chime in and say that the West wasn't exactly poor. There was less trade to be had, but there was an enormous amount of mineral wealth that was previously untapped. The amount of gold and silver the Romans pulled out of Hispania is pretty staggering, while saying nothing about the iron, tin, and copper that was also being extracted.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2013 18:48
|
|
|
Mans posted:That can make you understand one of the main reasons why the Spanish Imperial economy collapsed after the conquest of the new world. Kicking out all the bankers and financiers while also receiving record amount of gold and silver (and pissing most of your navy away in Scotland) was one of those hilarious blunders that turned Spain into a massive, but stagnant, empire. I don't think the influx of gold was really that important to the Spanish decline. The massive inflation it triggered hit just about everywhere in Europe, rather than Spain in particular. General mismanagement, emigration from the core Spanish areas, and overcommitment to foreign conflict is what brought them down. The influx of metals likely made that more tolerable for a time, but in the end it caught up to them.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2013 21:39
|
|
|
Pinball posted:I'm sorry if this is a horribly stupid question, but I was wondering, what did Roman women do all day? I imagine some probably worked as cooks and washerwomen, but what about the high class ones, such as empresses? If they had slaves for manual labor, how did they fill their hours? Do we have any Roman women's writings? Probably managing the household, occasionally tending to children, and hanging out and relaxing with their friends, and taking in local entertainment? I don't know if there's any authoritative answer.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2013 22:00
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:The notes of the online copy of De Agri Cultura I read said that by Cato's time, grain farming had become unprofitable. I'm curious as to why Rome gradually became more and more dependent on Egypt for grain. Not just Egyptian mind you. Western North Africa (Carthage and environs) were also big grain suppliers for Rome.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2013 20:51
|
|
|
physeter posted:...where I live there's a middle class housing development called Tamerlane. Holy poo poo, where is that? I would love to know how that managed to happen.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2013 20:35
|
|
|
FishFood posted:There's loot from conquests, tribute from Macedonia's new subject states, such as the poleis in Thessaloniki and parts of Anatolia, and that new mine that was mentioned. I think I remember my professor saying that Macedonia also had more mineral wealth than the rest of Greece overall. I know that much much later, a big plus for the Romans conquering Dacia, which is in the same general area as Macedonia and Thrace, was all the mining there. If you're making the comparison to say that Dacia and Macedonia had similar resources geologically, then I can't argue with that, but Dacia is geographically pretty damned far from anything Phillip would have controlled.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2013 20:50
|
|
|
FishFood posted:Dacia, Macedonia, and Thrace are all in the Balkans. He never controlled Dacia, but it's just over the mountains north of his territory in Thrace. Here's a 2nd Century CE map from wikipedia. Philip's control of Thrace extended all the way to the Danube in the east. Yeah, I know, but the The Balkans are a pretty big area. The place where that gold was mined is well north of the Danube, and even further from the parts of the Danube Philip might have exercised nominal control over. It's some 600km from Pella to the Dacian gold mines, about twice the distance from Pella to Athens. While the tribes south of the Danube might have been in possession of gold that would have been mined there, it would be wrong to say that gold could have plausibly funded Philip's adventures.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2013 23:29
|
|
|
Anti-Hero posted:I prefer the mental image of Caesar having really bad temper tantrums, like a 4 year old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmeCru4n0yg
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2013 23:46
|
|
|
physeter posted:There's a tendency for any given regime or political cause to try and tie itself to Ancient Rome for validation. Sifting through the detritus of this behavior becomes a sort of mental archaeology in and of itself. You can watch it happen (live!) with the growing acceptance/hot button issue of homosexuality in modern society, and the constant inquiries as to just how "gay" were the Romans. I usually just answer "they were flamingly loving gay" because it's easier than trying to explain the vagaries of archaeological evidence, Greek immigration trends, cultural norms shifting over centuries, and the huge dose of Roman upper class irony in the historical record, to an individual who is just looking to identify with the rest of humanity. I don't know, I think there are some decent parallels between homosexuality in ancient Rome and modern America. In both societies, anyone who wants to get anywhere is politics is supposed to be a man, married to a woman. In Rome's case, it's because patronage and alliance networks being what they are means you have to publicly adhere to gender roles, rather than Family Values. But in either case, the folks in power often have action going on on the side, homosexual or otherwise. The homosexuality in America just tends to skew Republican because of all the messed up psychological baggage that makes people Family Values Crusaders.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2013 23:50
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:Come on now, it's only gay sex scandals that are a republican thing. No one cares if anyone else gets it on. Pretty much the only gay people amongst the republicans are so repressed and deep in the closet that it blooms into something beautiful. Yeah, I definitely meant to include the word scandal in there. Would make zero sense to imply most homosexuals weren't democrats. quote:But this is a bit of a side thing. I think it was just a thing people did, it wasn't a part of people's core identities. It was more important to be a dignified hypermasculine badass. This is one of those things I've really loved about watching the new Spartacus series. I mean, it's about as historical as Gibbon's reasons for why Rome fell in the west, but it certainly does this point well. Just about everyone is a hyper masculine badass, and nobody says a drat thing. But you will get called a girl for fighting with a net, even if you get to throw that net on someone while it's fire. MrNemo posted:Although I like that guy looking to Rome for guidance on the sanctity of marriage. Should we go back to making sacrifices to Aphrodite as part of marriage ceremonies and adopting political rivals as well? Only if the birds fly the wrong way. Otherwise you'd be sacrificing for nothing. Gotta have a good Augur. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Apr 16, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2013 17:27
|
|
|
I see that there. posted:I believe that I've heard that power was so ingrained in the Roman psyche and ego that this is what drove so many men to what was, in hindsight, purely suicidal. It was more important than money or eternal prosperity for their families or whatever, it was driven into generation after generation to grab the brass ring no matter what the cost, and drat the consequences. Certainly there are times when they're mowing through emporers where that's pretty much the only reason I can come up with. "Sure the last 4 guys got killed within months of doing this, but MAN, look at dat purple silk!" There was also the very real threat that if you didn't seize power yourself, then someone else would try. If they succeeded, you would now have a massive target on your back as both a supporter of the deposed guy, and a potential threat. The new Emperor might well use his waning time of popularity to have you killed off. I've seen that sort of question posed a few times; where with the benefit of hindsight we can see that so-and-so did A Dumb Thing, if you stop to examine his motivations in the moment, you can see how that really was his best choice. Caesar before crossing the Rubicon is certainly an interesting example. He's a reasonably successful statesmen, and he's got control of a powerful army, but his imperium is running down, and Pompey is sitting as sole consul back in Rome and accusing him of treason. If Caesar respects the pretty flimsy rules of the Republic and goes back to Rome without his army, there's a decent chance Pompey will have him strung up. If he goes back with the army, he's the guy that started a civil war, but at least he might win. If he doesn't go back, he's another Sertorius, and Pompey is sure to come after him with all the power of Rome behind him. And at the risk of a WWII derail, I think pre-Barbarossa Hitler is another great example. Germany has overrun western Europe, which is great and all, but the German economy is still a shambles. Britain clearly isn't about to surrender, and there's basically no possible way to defeat her before the economy collapses. Even if Britain can be defeated in North Africa, it's questionable what that really buys Hitler; Britain still likely wouldn't give up, and he'd still have the Soviet juggernaut to contend with eventually. Even though a land war in Russia tends to be a bad choice, perhaps it really is better to attack them now while Britain is still reeling and the U.S. remains out of the war?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2013 19:23
|
|
|
I see that there. posted:4. People were supposedly freaked the gently caress out. I wouldn't say it was convenient, more than they couldn't afford to pull back legions from other fronts. Using a terrible analogy, it'd be like if the Nazi's had landed in the UK during WWII while the allies were still holding down other fronts. poo poo was crazy, but they just couldn't pull more people off the lines in other areas. That said, it was a "big deal", but there's some question of if Rome would have fallen even if Hannibal had assaulted it when given the chance. There's a reason he didn't, after all. Yeah, they didn't really have a whole lot of ability to recall those guys. It would have taken weeks to get any sort of message out to them, by which point the threat could have passed/war could have been over. Since Rome just kept raising army after army anyway (Cannae wasn't really their last defeat in Italy), seemingly without too much trouble, there would be no point in recalling them anyway. Then there's the part where Hannibal probably could never have taken the city in the first place. He definitely wasn't confident in his ability to do it (apparently he didn't have much in the way of siege engines; he kept asking Carthage to send some), nor were Roman generals. Hannibal marched on Rome in 211, hoping to draw the Romans off from their siege of Capua and then engage them in pitched battle, but the Roman generals called his bluff and just sat where they were. Hannibal then just marched away from Rome again. quote:5. Logistics are the key to all armies, all the time throughout history. They foraged and looted the poo poo out of everything, and their organized camps allowed them to process and store it better than 'roving band of bandits'. Indeed, 'foraging' (read: looting, from what I can tell) has been a the key to almost every army ever. You buy supplies from the locals, and if they won't sell, or won't sell at the price you want, you send out soldiers and take it. The home country would supply you with weapons, armor, ships, siege equipment, and things of this nature.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2013 21:05
|
|
|
JaggyJagJag posted:What I don't really understand is why Western European nations believe they are the "descendants" of Greco-Roman civlization/culture more than, say, Turkey or Tunisia or, hell, modern Greece itself. It's a hallmark of Western European nations historically to claim this, when maybe asides from France and Italy, the Roman connection to the other nations is superfluous at best. What is up with that? Like GF said, it's because they were. The states that formed in the wake of the western Roman empire were still extremely Roman, claimed legitimacy through Rome, spoke Latin, exercised power in the Roman way, appealed to the Emperor to recognize them as Roman authorities, etc. The popular culture image of a bunch of Germanic warriors that overran Roman territory and set up their own polities is pretty damned incorrect. To grossly oversimplify the evolution of polities in Western Europe, the Frankish state that eventually becomes France and the Holy Roman Empire began as the last 'Roman' army on the Loire that wound up carving out a state after Roman authority evaporated in the fifth century.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2013 20:12
|
|
|
I see that there. posted:I always wondered what looks passed when Theodoric cut Odoacer in half at a dinner party. I like that Theodoric might have been the first one to make a joke; standing over his foe and announcing "not a bone in him!" 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2013 18:00
|
|
|
Yep. The world where the CSA could actually have won is one quite different from our own. Turtledove's work took a huge artistic license there. The Spring Offensive had better odds, but still wasn't anywhere near a sure thing sans America.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2013 19:11
|
|
|
Yeah, I've seen the story about a circumnavigation attempt funded by Necho, but it's struck me as somewhat implausible too. I've read that it's really tough to sail much further south than say the Canaries; there's some land/sea current pattern that basically forces you to sail well out of sight of land to get around it, which the ancients weren't super keen on doing. Of course, the Phoenicians were basically Sea Gods, so maybe that didn't phase them. But it seems that most people who study such things believe they made it at least as far south as the Guineau-Bissua-Sierra Leone region.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2013 18:36
|
|
|
Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:This might have been answered before, but how did the Romans salt the land? That seems like a prohibitively expensive task. Indeed, there's no reason to think that they actually did that. Nor would you want to anyway; the land around Carthage (the part that would be worth salting I guess) was super useful for growing grain that Rome always needed. No reason to throw that away, and I'm sure plenty of adventurous folks wanted to set up farms there.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2013 21:33
|
|
|
Slantedfloors posted:words. Quite so. Have you read Carthage Must Be Destroyed as well, out of curiousity?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2013 00:26
|
|
|
JaggyJagJag posted:This was a great, great book. It's fantastic. Though the book I turned around and read right after that was Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, which is an order of magnitude better, although it's essentially a textbook.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2013 22:49
|
|
|
General Panic posted:You then get the transistion from Roman provinces to "barbarian" kingdoms whose rulers either didn't have the money to keep up towns of the same kind because they weren't running a huge and wealthy empire any more or just didn't share the Roman cultural tradition as to what a town should be like, or both. Some of the later "barbarian" rulers also let certain towns deteriorate on purpose. The Frankish move from Trier to Metz has been theorized to have been to emphasize the shift from a Roman past to a Frankish present. Trier still would have been a pretty Roman place at it's core, and it's possible that Metz would have been easier to highlight as a "Frankish" city.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2013 00:01
|
|
|
Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:I'm currently reading The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather. He's apparently a professor at Oxford and teaches about Romans/Barbarians. Have any of yall read it / would recommend I continue reading it? In the first 10 pages or so he has referenced a few events, events which yall have said aren't real (e.g. salting of Carthage), keeps mislabeling events/places/names and seems to have a poor grasp on English. If you've read that, you absolutely need to read Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West afterwards. Written by Guy Halsall, another British professor of history. I haven't actually read Heather's work, but there's a lot of places where Halsall points out (what he sees as) flaws and shortcomings in Heather's work. The chapter towards the end about ethnogenesis is among the driest, most terrible things I've ever read, but the vast majority is fantastic. Tons of insights into how Rome-in-the-West was governed, how the local elites demonstrated their status, exactly how a bunch of barbarians wound up running the show, how those barbarians adopted very Roman identities in order to demonstrate their legitimacy, and then later moved away from those identities as they became more established in their locales. Halsall also runs a blog called Historian on the Edge.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 18:17
|
|
|
Yeah, fighting seems to have been just about the only sport the Romans really respected. That and chariot racing I guess, which isn't that far removed from fighting.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2013 01:03
|
|
|
I see that there. posted:Jesus christ is this guy insufferable. Holy poo poo. Quite possibly. Despite knowing it exists, I've never actually read said blog. I never noticed anything like that in Barbarian Migrations though; it's style is really academic.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2013 19:26
|
|
|
Namarrgon posted:Did the Romans ever get passed Parthia? If not; horse archers. Horse archers really weren't everything they are cracked up to be now due to video games, especially since they usually have a finite supply of arrows anyway. Roman armies beat them plenty of times.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2013 19:49
|
|
|
Namarrgon posted:Of course, but they are also the only type of army if memory serves me that beat the Roman army plenty of times. I suppose, but like AdjectiveNoun said, the Sassanians were pretty much the only large, established, centralized polity the Romans ever had to fight against by late antiquity.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2013 21:23
|
|
|
Koramei posted:Finite supply of arrows? How'd that work out for Crassus? Uncommonly immense logistical effort for that exact purpose actually. And what would appear to this armchair general as pretty gross negligence on Crassus' part for not camping at water before the battle. Really he should have had enough cavalry to run off the Parthians, I'm not sure where they wound up.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2013 23:08
|
|
|
Koramei posted:Yeah uh Well, missed that entirely. My bad. quote:..not sure why you modified what I wrote. I just thought it was ironic for you to say that. I'm guessing you don't mean me in particular? Oh god my junior high social paranoia is kicking in again. quote:And there were quite a lot of Roman cavalry, actually, they notably got wiped out by the Parthian cataphracts. Yeah, it just stuck me as strange that the rather small force of cataphracts managed to defeat the much larger Roman auxilia cavalry. Although I guess they probably found themselves alone against both the cataphracts and the horse archers, which I suppose would do it. My head is stuck in medieval mode, with stories of knights coming back peppered with arrows but mostly unharmed, which doesn't really apply to some battle some thousand years earlier. Also, we English speakers should really switch to using the Greek 'kataphraktoi', just because that looks so much cooler to me as a word.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2013 05:23
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Isn't the Roman approach to cavalry also related to their doctrine? I read somewhere that while other/most cultures used cavalry as shock-force, most famously as the hammer to the phalanx's anvil, the Romans tended to use cavalry as more of a screen, just something to prevent their own lines from being flanked. That's certainly my impression of every Republican era battle I've read about on wiki. The infantry was the main event, and cavalry were employed mostly to avoid getting hosed over by the enemy cavalry. And they were perhaps right in doing so; in just about every big Republican Roman loss, it seems to have been that the enemy cavalry ruined the day for them.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 03:37
|
|
|
They should have marched through highland Armenia, where the local king had promised them support and reinforcements, including more cavalry. If they take the same route, it would have been wise to stop and make camp at the creek they crossed. That would give them easy access to water and a nights rest. This strongpoint would then give them the option of scouting around and giving battle at a time of their choosing.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 23:54
|
|
|
Keep in mind that the opponents Rome was fighting in Western Europe, with the possible exception of the Carthaginians, don't really compare at all to the Parthians or Sassanians that they sparred with in the East. There's a huge difference in fighting divided tribes, and fighting another centralized state. The Alexandrian successor states don't really count, since they all but wiped each other out until Rome coincidentally showed up and mopped them up. It really is true that the barbarian tribes on the Western frontier never really posed a military threat to the Roman empire, right up until Rome-in-the-West no longer existed.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2013 18:33
|
|
|
Bitter Mushroom posted:??? They posed a helluva threat to the Republic, and shut down the western half of the empire in the end... No, not really. What killed Rome in the west was factional infighting within Roman politics and the gradual erosion of Roman claim to sole authority. The majority of the barbarian tribes we think about in the post-Roman west were invited in to fight other Romans in the first place, and then largely just consolidated power amongst themselves. It would be absolutely incorrect to say that invading tribes from across the Rhine conquered Rome-in-the-West. Even after they were starting to get established, a relatively small Roman army with mediocre leadership managed to completely destroy both the Vandal state in North Africa and the Ostrogothic state in Italy. The subsequent loss of these areas happened when Roman forces were withdrawn to fight The Real Wars in the east. euphronius posted:Yeah the germanic tribes, gauls, britons, and Iberian tribes all kicked the poo poo out of Roman forces at various times. DarkCrawler posted:...Teutoburg Forest? Occasionally they did. Tuetoburg and Carrhae are pretty similar affairs really. But none of these tribes would have ever been able to put up a sustained resistance as did Rome's opponents in the East. They could perhaps destroy an army, but they never posed a systematic threat to Roman territory. I also very deliberately included the word 'empire' in there. Certainly Teutoburg counts, but most of the losses to barbarians occurred before the reform of the Roman army into what we imagine today, towards the close of the Republican period.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2013 22:49
|
|
|
Which particular 'barbarians' do you mean? Because it's certainly not as clear cut as that.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2013 01:05
|
|
|
Azathoth posted:I'm not an expert, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the tribes that decisively defeated the Romans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest were not the same tribes that marched down out of the Alps and sacked Rome. The Goths, at the time of the battle, were much further to the east and not involved as far as I'm aware (if they were even across from Sweden). I was under the impression that the tribes that fought at Teutoburg Forest mostly migrated west in the decades after the battle and eventually wound up settling in what is now France and Spain, not marching to Italy with the Goths. Yeah, GF already covered it, but it's worth stating that the Romans also had something of a terrible record when it comes to identifying peoples. The names they used were recycled, and applied to groups who could have been absolutely different from the people who were there before, just because they occupied the same general area a hundred or more years earlier. We can't really say for sure whether that's accurate since all the evidence is long gone, but it seems, implausible.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2013 05:45
|
|
|
karl fungus posted:Do we have contemporary Byzantine writings from between the fall of the west up to the early spread of Islam? I'm very curious as to what the Byzantines thought of what was going on around them at the time, and how they viewed the loss of the western empire, or perhaps the new Islamic expansion providing a potent threat. I would also love to know the answer to this.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2013 07:41
|
|
|
Koramei posted:You should watch I, Claudius. Sure it's fictional but it's not like we can know her true motivations and I felt pretty sorry for her in that. Also, read I, Claudius. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jun 8, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 03:55
|
|
|
Seoinin posted:Just to reinforce how awesome and bizarre late antiquity is, Khosrau I almost ended up being Justinian's adopted brother. Care to explain? I can't find the connection anywhere on wiki.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2013 21:40
|
|
|
The other notable thing about the loss was that I think Yarmouk was the only major battle in the Arab Conquests (at least in the part that involved Rome). It's an occasion where both sides raised huge armies, and wound up throwing them against each other; reading accounts of the lead up to the battle suggests that neither of them really wanted to fight that battle either, but the concentration of one forced the other to do the same. As it happened, the Arabs won the day, smashed the army, and it took the Romans a long, long time to recover, by which time Egypt and Syria had been lost to them, and then they never managed to win it back. Large pitched battles like that were super risky, and people avoided them if they could. That's why there are so few of them in the medieval time frame, and the ones we know are usually pretty famous. Much safer to play a conservative game of seigecraft and maneuver.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2013 21:33
|
|
|
Seoinin posted:Someone really should have pulled him aside and pointed out that the Persians had never successfully held even Antioch, much less loving Egypt.  Actually, the Achaemenids did, for a little more than a century. But it had certainly been a while.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2013 23:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 11:56 |
|
|
canuckanese posted:The Romans consulted omens before every battle. One famous example is Claudius Pulcher at the naval battle of Drepana during the first Punic War. Hey now, don't quote that and not quote the next part: quote:However, it is not entirely clear if this actually occurred. The contemporary historian Polybius fails to mention it, instead crediting the victory to the superior maneuverability of the Carthaginian warships, making this incident at least dubious. The Romans took their omens seriously, but they were also just super pissed at people who lost battles in general.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2013 19:46
|
|