PittTheElder posted:

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.

Libluini posted:

The last war of the third Assyrian Empire could be considered a genocide: After making too many enemies and finally exhausted from the neverending cycle of uprisings they had to crush at the end, the allied forces lead by Babylon tried their very best to wipe the Assyrians out. Including turning their cities into rubble and trying to suppress all memory of them. I remember reading something about how after the fall of Niniveh the last surviving Assyrians fled into the mountains north of them and that was the end of it.

thrakkorzog posted:

Sweet. I've always thought the Persian Empire was much more interesting than the Romans.

Jerusalem posted:

Apparently Pliny the Elder stated that Roman soldiers were paid a "salarium", either so that they could purchase salt or because they guarded the road that salt was brought into the city by. Forgive the pun, but I imagine that you should take what Pliny had to say on the subject with a grain of salt. His Natural History, while a remarkable achievement, also repeated a lot of nonsense based on 2nd or 3rd hand accounts of things - dog-headed people in India, creatures that lived on scents and could die if they smelt something bad or dudes with a single giant foot growing out of their stomachs for example.

The Entire Universe posted:

I was about to mention it was quite early, Augustus was royally pissed about it, reportedly muttering 'Varus, give me back my legions!' from time to time when considering imperial expansion. Can't blame him for cussing Varus considering it would be something like losing a whole army division and Augustus had a legacy to consider.

E: corrected my attempt at imparting a sense of scale. Rest assured Varus lost a fuckload of dudes.

Dalael posted:

Tunicate posted:

What's that jewish legend about the little rock king Solomon had that needed to be kept in a lead box because it destroyed wahtever was exposed to it.

Kassad posted:

It seems to me that the value given to pieces of art is subjective and can vary a lot depending on the time and place. It's possible nobody cared about Roman statues before the Renaissance, and since it couldn't easily be turned into construction material (since a bunch of ruins got destroyed for this reason), nobody bothered to take it.

HEY GAL posted:

i am aware of the huge impact of greco-indian art and that is not my point, my point is if we're gonna start making comments about "objective beauty" we're going to have to do a lot of philosophical heavy lifting to justify it

Grand Fromage posted:

Yeah okay, I thought you were making two different points.

I don't think the idea is entirely absurd but it'd need a lot of support. I think it'd be hard to support anything more than veerry general ideas like an appreciation of symmetry.