Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Lots of Romans also enjoyed just going down to the Forum and watching the politics. This is a time when oratory is a studied medium, and public speaking is less about information and more akin to performance art. At any given time you've got like 1-3 publicly acknowledged heavyweight orators in the city who are considered "the best". Some of them even earn the agnomen of "Orator", like someone might be named "Marcus Cornelius Scipio Orator". Going down to the Forum to watch the Senators get outraged, or the Pleb Tribunes trolling them with some new law or veto, was relatively highbrow entertainment but lots of people liked it.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 16:53

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 09:44

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Fizzil posted:

I also have a book on the roman legions called, Legions of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins, and i noticed some legions were mixed italian-iberian, and Rome had recruited or focused alot on recruiting iberians into their legions, how latinized was iberia during the imperial period?

We don't have enough data on any particular legio to actually write a cohesive unit history but Dando-Collins often glosses over that to create a decent narrative. His books are a guilty pleasure but not really history, just good entertainment. I confess I've only read his books on X and XIV though so maybe he got better. I'd take him with alot of salt.

To actually answer your question, early Roman Hispania is pretty drastically split between the Carthago-Phoenician settlements in the South and the Celt/Iberian/Basque/Whatever in the rest of it. You've got Massalian Greek sites there as well in the armpit area but those were fairly smalltime. Romans take over the Carthaginian sites during the Punic Wars, which the settlers seemed pretty happy with, given the alternatives. Those Carthaginian colonies were some of the first Romanized areas, and that's where the legions recruited. So the (substantial) Hispanian elements in the late Republican armies were North African/Phoenician by ethnicity, for the most part. Some modern folks get very :spain:

about the Iberian contributions to the legions, at least until you remind them that most of the recruits were vaguely brown people happy to join because they were stranded on the peninsula and surrounded by a bunch of white tribals.

Assimilation of the tribal areas took a very long time and arguably never fully succeeded.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2012 20:14

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:

How did the Romans view skin color? Did it matter to them?

To a Roman, the world outside was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one got from Rome. So that expanding sphere of bastardy begins to bump into lots of black people about the same time it begins to bump into lots of ultra-white people, except the Germans aren't conveniently on the other side of the Middle Sea. To Rome, the world of actual people was places like Italy, Greece, Asian Minor (Turkey), Syria, Egypt, etc. Theirs was a Mediteranean society, not a European society. You get a little taste of this in HBO's Rome when the Second Triumvirate is splitting up the Empire and Augustus gets Western Europe. He's all like, "Aaaaand what am I supposed to do with that?" Even though the Latins probably originated somewhere inside it, they felt no particular cultural connection with Western Europe at all.

Edit: Numidian royalty interbred with Carthaginian nobility so the color of their kings might not be indicative of the population as a whole. But I've always thought Masinissa and Jugurtha just sound like names only black guys should have so I always think of them as black. :downs:

physeter fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Jul 3, 2012

# ¿ Jul 3, 2012 19:36

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Here's a picture of some Tuareg "Berbers"

And their traditional alphabet is Carthaginian. So good luck with that.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2012 22:05

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Alan Smithee posted:

How much do we know about the Carthaginians anyway? Since Rome basically utterly destroyed them anything we would know would have to be documented by the people who hated them most

Well most of what we know was written by Greeks and it isn't much. It's sort of a common misconception that the Romans destroyed them. It's entirely true for the city of Carthage itself, but the whole of North African Punic civilization was just assimilated in the ordinary course. Utica and Hadrumentum were both substantial Punic cities located quite close to Carthage, and both had turns as Roman allies against Carthage in the Punic Wars. Utica becomes the capital of Roman Africa after the wars. There were at least tens of thousands of people in the province that could have told you all about Carthage if you wanted to hear it.

The Romans didn't ethnically cleanse the Punics or deliberately burn their records or anything. It's just that over the slow-griding centuries the knowledge has been lost. It's like Claudius' history of the Etruscans, just not currently in the random grab bag of stuff that survived.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2012 12:56

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Just Another Lurker posted:

A Nero?

Seem to remember some roman author... or was it a greek complaining about the screams from people as their underarm hair was plucked in the baths, plus the green scum left in the baths from people going in still covered in hair removal cream.

That'd likely be olive oil or an emulsion thereof. Both Romans and Greeks liked to slather it all over themselves and then have it scraped off using a special tool. We like to think of them as a fairly clean people but a crowd of Romans under the hot sun probably either smelled disgustingly rancid or absolutely delicious.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2012 13:51

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

NightConqueror posted:

How has Gibbons' Decline and Fall held up over the years. In the 250-odd years since it was written, has anything come to light that has challenged any of his major premises? Do Roman historians look favorably on him?

His major premise, that the empire fell because of Christianity and barbarians and the Romans becoming pussies, is challenged all the time. But modern historians taking a swing at Gibbon is like physics students criticizing Isaac Newton. I mean, seriously. It's not that they're wrong, it's that everyone sensible rolls their eyes because they'd rather talk about something interesting than hear some kid try to score "look at me!" points because he has the benefit of two hundred years of subsequent scholarship and a pocket calculator.

Modern scholarship on Gibbon has reached the meta stage where it's more interesting to examine his influence on the upper class of the British Empire, which was casting about for an identity to contrast with French and Spanish salon culture and found it in the Roman Empire. Anglo interest in Roman history remains fervent to this day. The Romans themselves would probably find this bewildering.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2012 18:30

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

InspectorBloor posted:

I remember reading something about engineering corps attached to a legion in Tacitus, when he writes about the siege of Cremona. How where these men educated, How where architects educated? What's the relation of mental and manual labour in these terms, in a given period, let's say the principate?

We have only guesses really. Hand a hacksaw to a Roman noble and tell him to go make you a siege ladder, he'll look at you like you're insane. Leading and fighting is what he does, not labor. Probably never held a hammer in his life. Hand it to a ranker and you could be handing it to a kid who was harvesting a farm in the Italian foothills three weeks ago. Same problem. That boy has as much chance of building a ballista as he does of winning the Irish Sweepstakes.

It is virtually impossible to imagine that the Roman Empire was militarily so successful for so long without centralizing and deliberately administering some base of knowledge for the centurion corps. But where and how this was done remains a mystery. A collegium is likey. A library? Instructors? Assigned quaestors? An office in the SPQR freedmens bureacracy, increasing in power under Augustus is a good guess but doesn't answer the real questions. Did they just drink together in the off season, maybe draw catapult pictures on the wall for each other? Who orders the transfer of a centurion from one legion to another, and what prompts it? It happened all the time especially in the Imperial period, so someone must have cared enough to say, pick up Primus Pilus of VII and transfer him halfway across the known world to take over as PP of XX. These people are cross-training their officers before most of their contemporaries even HAVE officers.

Earlier in the thread someone asked about Roman special forces units. A reasonable question, considering. But while in today's militaries we identify gifted soldiers and segregate them into separate units, the Romans didn't do that. They identified them, presumably trained them, gave them a big raise and then rewove them into the fabric of conventional units, thereby strengthening the legion as a whole. But the precise mechanisms by which this was done are virtually unknown, which is frustrating, as there is no other more important human factor in Rome's explosive military success.

Good question by the way.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 20:57

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Christoff posted:

Some bits say it's not extinct or that it was just over farmed.

It perfectly plausible that silphium could still be out there somewhere. It's alot of coastline. Every once in awhile it seems like some botanist thinks they've found it and the whole community kind of sucks their teeth and says "hmmm" and then twenty years later no one knows what happened with that. But since like the "Damascus steel" of crusader tales, we dcan't really know with 100% certainty what the sources are referring to, it's probably always going to remain debatable.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 16:33

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

A major problem in Antiquity is that merchant-explorers of all peoples are basically huge liars. This isn't an age where international law exists so a merchant who discovers a route or location has no reason to announce it to anyone. The Roman state emerged into a Med that was an economic battle with the lines roughly split between the Greeks and the Phoenicians. And of course, since both cultures organized around the city-state, there's likely plenty of internal strife between mercantile concerns betwixt cities and even between opposing merchant houses.

TLDR is that few written accounts survive and most could not be trusted anyway because they may have been red herrings meant to get opposing merchants to squander resources. Solid routes and locations of trade outposts were not going to be advertised in general, at least not back home.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2012 16:37

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Oh that's nice. See I stopped reading & participating in this thread because it was too full of well-balanced, educated people having a sane discussion. Now I can start again.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 14:04

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Amused to Death posted:

In regards to the equites and merchant class, wasn't one of the problems there in terms of Senate membership the fact that technically under law Senators weren't allowed to engage in trade? So nominating a man with 20 vessels sailing to India every year might be a bit of a political problem.

Yep. The rules would finagle a bit over the years but that was the baseline. Theoretically you could have sleeping partnership interests, like today's non-voting stocks, but that was fickle and worst of all, shady. Legal, but dubious, so a New Man trying to make his way didn't want them if it could be helped. "Engages in trade" was a smear....mercantile pursuits were for money-grubbing plebs not men of property.

:smug:

The big prizes were war spoils and mining rights. A senator could always profit from being a landlord. So one landlord might get tenant rents, another might sell pine nuts, but if you had a good metal mine, you were rolling. I'm of the opinion that that is precisely why Caesar invaded Britain. His mentor Marius had been funded by mining rights (tin esp.), and here Caesar finds himself sitting across a small body of water from the actual Tin Isles, so of course he made a grab for it. Didn't work out in the end but there you have it (my opinion!). If you subscribe to that theory, it also tells you how far Caesar was willing to go to avoid civil war. If he could have locked them down he'd have become fabulously rich and done it within the rules.

PS Pompey wasn't more aristocratic than Crassus, the opposite actually. Pompey was the son of Pompey Strabo, who was himself a fantastically rich Picentine landowner. Not even Romans! Pompey is just the son of an Italian rustic...a consular Italian rustic but rustic all the same.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 13:29

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Morholt posted:

Moneylending provides an even more abstract benefit, thus pretty much every society ever, including our own, despising bankers.

Julius Caesar actually introduced the first real bankruptcy laws as part of his post-victory reform package. With so many Romans in debt (including Julius), it was quite popular. But unto this day it's not commonly understood that bankruptcy laws don't exist to necessarily protect the people from predatory lending, but to protect lenders from themselves. A population overburdened by debt will eventually take to violence, and bankers are perpetually dependent upon the state to protect them. This becomes increasingly difficult to justify as collective debt mounts. So, bankruptcy serves as a pressure release valve of sorts. In contrast, I've read that the samurai of feudal Japan were big fans of borrowing money for decades, then just wiping out the bankers and starting over. They believed (correctly) that a new crop of vultures would always show up to make money in the margins.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 17:31

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

bean_shadow posted:

2,000 years ago today our dear friend Caligula was born! He went on to prove that you can never love a horse too much*.

*And yes I do realize those were probably baseless rumors.

True to an extent, but in my opinion, misinterpreted. Romans in general and the Julio-Claudians had a wicked appreciation for the absurd. Appointing his horse to public office was probably Caligula's way of saying "this loving horse is more competent than the people surrounding me". My favorite story involves the triumph of Julius Caesar. Cruising around in his chariot, JC passes the Senate, who of course all applaud him, regardless of their personal feelings on the issue. Except for one young tribune, named Pontius Aquila.

Caesar gets irritated and yells out, "Hey Pontius Aquila, what do you want me to do? Restore the Republic? Huh?" Then he drives off. For about a week after that, when anyone asked Caesar to do anything (pass a law, choose a dinner menu, put on his toga, etc), he'd tell them to go check with Pontius Aquila to see if it was okay.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 19:18

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Tewdrig posted:

Why Marius, though? I get that he reformed the legions in such a way that they became loyal to their general instead of the republic. Was he that brilliant, that charismatic, that he could be elected consul seven times and make everyone see the laws were worthless if you had power and an army?

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.

What I can suggest is that it is a huge mistake to perceive Rome as modern in its civility. Earlier in the thread I said it was probably closer to modern day Somalia than it was to modern day America. I'd stand by that. Warlordism, tribalism, gangsters and interpersonal violence on a scale that most people living today do not really comprehend. Whatever identification we do with guys like Pompey and Caesar, we should remember they were barely more than children when they visited a Forum decorated with the severed heads of their friends and neighbors. Their society was always about 5 seconds from Holiday in Cambodia. Some people would say the same about ours, but that's another thread.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 15:38

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Tewdrig posted:

During the Samnite and Punic wars, at least, Rome seemed to be able to get its act together, and the republican apparatus worked reasonably well, with the exception of times when each consul commanded the legion for alternating days, and other quirks. Is this history whitewashed with nostalgia by later historians, or was it that these Roman warlords simply had more to gain for themselves in the earlier period from foreign conquests than civil war, but were always the same sociopaths? You seem to take the latter position.

I think it would be better to enlarge our own perspectives. The English-speaking peoples have not relatively recently suffered unduly from military coups and juntas. Actually our words for those things are not even in English, which is an indicator of how rare they are in our society. Why this should be is a very big question beyond the reach of this thread. But we view all subjects through the prism of our experience. We see the Roman Civil Wars and it's all "I say, something isn't going quite right there!" But we ignore that the majority of human beings in recorded history would regard various contenders for control of the state chopping each other into pieces to be entirely normal. Much of modern day South America would be a little shocked but maybe not so much. Some parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, that's been business as usual even into the modern day. Look at the Soviet system and you'll see plenty of new regimes butchering the old.

Now, we are arguably right to disparage it, but that's beside the point. The Romans were like most human societies, where political power grows from the barrel of the gun, and like most, that threat was immediate, not abstract. In other words, they were the rule, we are the exception. Chaos, violence and banana republic bullshit are still very much a part of us as a species, it's just that most of us reading this thread have the luxury of existing in bubble of relative calm.

With that said, did later Roman historians idealize their more bucolic ancestors? Yes, all the time.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 18:41

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Hazborgufen posted:

I�ve got some more questions on auxiliary pay and retirement. I understand that if you served for 25 years you would get loads of cash, land, and citizenship.

Aux terms went from 25 to 30 years.

Hazborgufen posted:

My questions are more logistical. First, how common was it for someone to survive the 25 years? Military work sounds really hazardous, so I�d imagine it was very difficult.

No figures exist on this as far as I know. Combat casualties would vary wildly depending on location and time period. Then you've got illness and routine injury claiming a presumably good but unknown amount. Against that you have to wager decent food and the presence of presumably highly skilled surgeons. And then against that again, you wager that the best surgeon in the world can't fix a nastily broken leg without antibiotics. So, yeah. I'm aware of no reliable figure. There was a duty roster recovered from a border station on Hadrian's Wall that seemed to reflect about a 20% (?) combat ineffective amount in relative peacetime, meaning that at the time the roster was made 1/5th of the troops were in the infirmary or recovering from same. But of course, that might have just been a bad week, no way to tell.

Hazborgufen posted:

Was there a system in place for wounded auxiliaries who couldn�t make it to 25 years due to injury, or were they out on the streets with a begging cup and no citizenship?

Doubtful. No system has been shown to exist anyway. The primary concern of Rome was that unemployed soldiers would turn to banditry, or worse, politics. Paying them out got them at least somewhat out of everyone's hair. A badly wounded man wasn't going to make a very good bandit. Standard legions kept a part of a soldier's pay for his pension, so it's likely that auxiliaries had similar structures. He'd get something, probably. Fun fact: the signifer was the guy in a cohort that held the legion's signum in battle...basically it's a pole with all the unit's decorations on it. He's also that cohort's banker, and reports directly to the signifer of the entire legion on banking matters. Stories of Roman legionaries going beserk when the standards were attacked probably had more to do with concern that the pensions were going to get hosed up than anything else. :3:

Hazborgufen posted:

Finally, let�s say you were lucky enough to get to 25 years. Who paid for all your sweet benefits and what was stopping them from putting a bunch of 24 year veterans on the front line of some suicide attack in order to save some coin?

First, aux haven't been shown to get a discharge bonus other than citizenship. Second, ordering 24 year veterans of any Roman military unit to do something they thought was bullshit was like, not a good idea. They could be ordered to hold a line until the end of the world, but a high-handed directive to make a Stalin-style human wave attack would either get the commander a polite "gently caress off" or a pugio between the ribs. Aux units weren't slave armies, some of them had military histories stretching back for centuries. The US Marines-style concept of following orders without question didn't really exist in the Roman army.

Hazborgufen posted:

I guess I have the same questions regarding the legions as well. They were already citizens, so that�s one incentive that isn�t needed. Were they paid more than the auxiliaries or require a shorter time in service to get to retirement? Any idea on the rank and pay structure?

Yes, yes, and rank/pay fluctuated over time. Pay was decent and got huge if a soldier progressed into the centuriate.

Hazborgufen posted:

Also, what can you tell me about the evocati?

Evocati commonly refers to both re-enlisted soldiers serving in a standard legion, and settled retirees who signed on as part of a local provincial militia that could be called up in times of defensive need. I'm too rusty to remember which one is technically evocati or if there was a distinguishing Latin phrase appended to the word. As for re-enlisters, they were highly prized and well-paid. Local militia evocati would vary by region of course, you might get anything from a 45-year old hardass to a tubby tavern keeper who couldn't even wear his swordbelt anymore.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 18:02

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

By tradition, fungible loots (coin, specie, gold artifacts easily melted down, etc) were accounted for by the SPQR treasury, shares to be distributed at the end of campaign. Generals got a large cut of that. Pillage rights were what a soldier could carry, tying back into earlier questions about the Roman baggage train. There's every reason to believe that the train functioned, at times, like a way for soldiers to exchange pillaged goods for coin on account. This would be a large "undocumented" "Marian" reform, since early-mid Republican legionaries bring their own wagons and presumably pile them up. You'd see a reduction in take home pay, since they'd be selling to middle men on the spot instead of wagon training loot home and selling in the off season. Slaves to be sold were the right and keep of the commander alone. Some of them would share it out, others kept it all.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2012 17:14

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

To me the most interesting thing about classical navies is the abrupt way you have to change your thinking around if you want to truly comprehend them. Sail power is vastly more efficient, but it is slow and clumsy by comparison. By putting in rowers instead of sails, you drastically improve speed and maneuverability but at the cost that you now have possibly hundreds of men doing heavy labor. They are not only heavier than the sails ever would have been, you've also got to carry food (light) and fresh water (NOT light) to keep them alive and burning calories at an excessive rate. Eventually a point of diminishing returns is reached. Something as simple as a list of reliable coastal watering holes would have constituted a vital state secret in times of naval war. Marines are not thought to have been commonly transported or even used very much.

Triremes (and fivers/sixers) were like the fighter jets of their era, all fuel and speed. Not alot of cargo space and much less range than alot of people often presume.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2012 17:54

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

It's not really debated that the classical world had more conventional sailing ships operating alongside their galleys. Galleys get the most play because they are well-preserved in the historical record. Kids today put posters of F-16s on their bedroom walls, not 747s. Galleys predominate in our thinking of ancient maritime operations for the approximately same reason. But because of the very tight cargo restrictions, any merchant worth his salt was not going to mess with galleys. It would have been like Fedex buying up Warthogs to carry packages. If nothing else, prohibitively expensive.

Now, there will be exceptions to that. For example, Italy-Sicily was so short, traveled and well-known that even slave galleys would have been a good investment there. Local or high profit runs can do it. But bulk stuff farther than a single day will almost certainly be moved by land, or heavier sail ship.

Could one of those more sail-powered, cargo-friendly craft have made it to the New World with a little help from luck and weather? Yeah, sure. I wouldn't bat an eye if reliable news of a find came out this afternoon. Partially because I do know an actual treasure wreck hunter so I have a decent idea of the way that works (there's way more wrecks than dudes with time and money to check them out). But if one had been found already we would definitely know about it. That dude with his 40 years of struggle against the Brazilians is full of it.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2012 14:40

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Grand Fromage posted:

Yeah there's always that. I will say that I've found in general that the Roman history articles are okay. You should obviously be in Wikipedia Mode in your brain when you read but if you go look up a battle or something, it will probably not be a load of bullshit.

In general.

They've gotten much much better over the last 5 years. Some of the old ones were beyond bad. Now I'd say fairly that the bulk rank somewhere in the range of sub-Goldsworthy pop history books, a vast improvement.

I remember the old patrician article in particular listed a couple Valerii, and an Arab from the ~4th century AD, as helpful examples of the subject matter.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 18:33

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

I ask because I've always had a fascination with the collapse of the de jure Western Empire. And yes, I'm keeping the continuities between East and West and between Late Roman and German and so on, though honestly I think the argument for continuity plays down the importance of what happened in the West during the fifth century perhaps just a touch. Although he strawmans pretty hard in places, I think Bryan Ward-Perkins makes a point that there was a marked societal collapse in the West, if his interpretation of the collapse of trading networks and literacy is correct, and God alone knows it might not be.

I'm partial to his concepts. Efforts to rehabilitate the "Dark Ages" have often gone too far. As have efforts to rehabilitate certain barbarian peoples into "different but equal", or the Carthaginians as innocent victims of imperialist aggression, or what have you. These people are very dead, we don't have a social agenda to raise their self-esteem. That's not to say those trends haven't brought useful viewpoints and discoveries...certainly historians need tenure and coming up with new things to say about Rome itself isn't easy. But it's become a classic academic overcorrection at this point. Anyway, most people that spend their time chatting about it are academically capable of distinguishing between say the relatively civil and stabilizing Ostrogoths, and the Vandals, who were really just a bunch of dickheads. So painting the decline in broad strokes is sort of a silly thing to do anyway, and I'm not even sure who the audience is supposed to be.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2012 15:45

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

The thing about Roman emperors, bad or good, is that they had to be really REALLY bad to actually begin having a strong negative effect on the average citizen. They were one guy in the Iron Age "ruling" this vast empire, but really just acting through a large bureaucracy. Consider that even today, with modern media and transportation, the average American really isn't all that affected by their president. How does Obama affect me? Not sure, something about healthcare? Do I have it yet? Dunno, maybe yes? I'm thousands of miles from DC and the most any president has directly altered my life is when he comes to town and fucks up traffic. Usually because he wants something (votes, money) or wants to look at hurricane damage. In the Roman Empire, the emperor usually didn't even do that much.

The two groups of Romans most likely to be affected by the Emperor were the military and the Senate. Non-coincidentally, those were also the two groups most likely to affect the Emperor by assassinating him. For average provincial workaday citizens, the emperor could have been replaced by a parrot for a few years and not much would have changed in their daily lives.

So modern day bad v. good Roman emperor retrospectives are about as relevant as a historian 2,000 years from now commenting on Glenn Beck opinions, is sort of what I'm saying. Nice to see Domitian finally getting an overhaul during the last decade though.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2012 14:16

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

As a crusty 38 year old I admit I still use Byzantine but that's just more force of habit and a general policy of staunch resistance to the fads of academic nomenclature. I also don't use BCE, because suck it Trebeck. But I was always on the side of recognizing continuation of the Empire and hope the term itself is gone with my generation. It really is dumb and ahistorical.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 17:22

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Gladiatorial games were an evolution of Italian funeral games. Romano-Italian funerary customs are a pretty big and interesting topic we haven't addressed much yet. When someone wealthy or powerful died, a professional artist would visit the body to make a wax mask of the face, complete with colored paints and (possibly) real hair from the corpse. The mask would be worn during the funeral profession by a professional actor who would imitate everything about the dead person, from his walk, to his mannerisms, possibly even his speech. After the funeral, the mask would go into a specially made cupboard that contained all the masks of that family's notable ancestors through history. Each mask was accompanied by written instructions to future generations of professional actors about the person. So a big patrician family funeral profession would employ many actors, with all the family's ancestors being brought "back to life" by actors who specialized in imitating the dead. These actors, along with the living members of the famly and their retainers, were the funeral procession. After this, games and drinks!

Fun fact: Of all the many Roman military decorations, only the Grass Crown is believed to have followed it's winner beyond death and onto his funerary mask.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 23:13

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Paxicon posted:

I didnt know that, that's really interesting - are there any theories on why that is?

Well, it could be that it was because dried bloody 300 year old grass is really light and unlikely to gently caress up an old wax mask. But the civica was made of oak leaves so, who knows. No cupboard has ever been recovered so it's possible they slapped whatever crowns they could on there. I should probably call that a fun conjecture instead of a fun fact. :downs:

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 23:24

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

To add to what others have said, Domitian just wasn't big on playing politics and was kind of a poo poo, personally. But he is widely considered to have been one of the most intellectually brilliant of the emperors. His government was smooth, and his reforms set the stage for the 5 Good Emperors period. Much of the peace and prosperity of that period is now being attributed to Domitian. He was an interesting guy. Ruthless, and utterly merciless to his opposition. Despite being born to relative privilege he had no tolerance for corruption or the excesses of senatorial rank, and ran a meritocracy. Even in his own lifetime it was rumored that he'd assassinated his brother Titus to take the throne, but this doesn't seem very likely. The fact is that Domitian probably didn't want to be emperor any more than poor Tiberius did, but once it fell to him his talents were a great service to his people.

And according to Suetonius he died fighting, trying to claw out the eyes of one of his assassins. :clint:

The Praetorians did take them out later, by the way.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 04:22

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Again, a) the slave galley was not common in Greco-Roman culture, if it existed at all, and b) galleys weren't civilian ships anyway. There was no commodity in the ancient world that could justify a crack rowing team of hundreds of men, slaves or otherwise.

Only trips like Sicily-Italy, where the run is short, would you have seen the possibility for commercially successful slave galleys. Even then, it's dubious. When it's not grain harvesting season what are you going to do with your hundreds of rowers that just spent 2 months pushing grain from Sicily to Italy proper? You own them, they need food, housing, etc. You've got to carry them now until next season. But paid rowers? Not your problem, see them next year.

Roman slave galley is 99% Hollywood myth. Their ships and economy just didn't support the model. And that's not to say slaves didn't work in maritime commerce, of course. But the idea of a hundred poor wretches being whipped to a drumbeat is a concept from further along in history, not Greco-Roman Antiquity.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 19:29

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Kaal posted:

It's from the Late Medieval-era. All the major powers did it, though France is particularly notorious for it. And it's mostly just a size thing - as galleys got bigger it became more economical to keep slaves. A Roman trireme might have 180 rowers, whereas one of Richelieu's galleys would have 500. Another major factor was that Roman galleys tended to be beached regularly to keep them dry - this allowed them to move quickly over the water and ram enemy ships. But the advent of gunpowder ended that practice, which meant that galley slaves could easily be kept aboard the ship.

Yes exactly, it was the model for some Islamic powers as well, the Barbary Corsairs and the Turkish Janissaries. Europeans used them as dumping grounds for unwanted minorities....criminals and Protestants typically. But again these are military and para-military ships. Places like Egypt and Turkey never had a problem with a militarized slave class running around. The Mamluks and Janissaries perfected the concept, really. But that was anathema to the Greco-Roman mindset. In fact, the few times in history where the Romans did enlist slaves (at least as infantry), they made a point of manumitting them right before conscription. This happened most often in the case of gladiators, but I know Marcus Aurelius' army had a crapload of former slaves in it.

Economically galleys were never really a sustainable model for commerce. Using one is like using an F-18 for commerce; unless you're moving a sack of diamonds or an hiv cure, it's not going to be a moneymaker.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2012 22:44

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Choadmaster posted:

And for some content: Since mass production of stuff was apparently common, had anyone figured out standardized/interchangeable parts? And/or assembly lines? (If so these concepts were something that were obviously forgotten somewhere along the way.)

Oh yes, they did. This is actually quite a new discovery, where new things in the classics are defined as anything we didn't know a hundred years ago. I've got the dates and specifics somewhere, but in general here's the story:

The First Punic War was a primarily naval war. The Romans, having decided to fight Carthage at sea, needed to build a fleet. Now an ancient source bragged that Rome had assembled a fleet in so short a time, using Carthaginians methods, that historians always assumed it was nonsense. It was assumed that no one could have built a fleet so quickly, especially people with little experience in sailing.

A couple decades ago, someone lucked on to a discovery of two Carthaginian craft off the coast of Sicily (?). The wreckage showed something astonishing: that the keel and ribs of the craft were individually marked with letters and numbers, in places where they were joined together. The conclusion is now that the Carthaginians were running an assembly line. Raw materials were cut and marked, shipped, and assembled elsewhere, all according to written specifics. Mass production using semi-educated labor, the exact system we have used to mass produce our own vehicles of high technical specification, but really needing only a handful of designers to understand how they work.

The Roman boast of having constructed so great a fleet now became plausible.

This is all incredibly general on my part, I'll try to find the exact information if anyone cares. But the general trend now is to acknowledge that Romans grasped the economy of scale and mass production concepts nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution. And that they learned it from Carthage.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2012 13:58

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

DarkCrawler posted:

Am I missing anyone?

I'd add a few:

Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger, a young archconservative who went renegade in an attempted plot to enlist all of Italy into his clientela in return for citizenship. He was assassinated and the Social War began.

Maecenas, Octavian's fruity public relations guy, amply covered in HBO's Rome.

Q Caecilius Metellus Pius, Pompey's co-general in the Sertorian War. Generally underrated.

And of course, the "bad guys". Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Mithradates Eupator, etc.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2012 14:44

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Speaking to the Great Man theory of history and the general disdain it currently attracts, I have no problem with it. The disdain I mean, in that I think it's academically healthy. But that shouldn't lead us to fail to apply simple statistical thinking to human society. In a large enough sample, there will be outliers. No one has a problem looking at England during the mid-1600s and admitting, "Ok, that's an outlier". Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton at the same time? Way to roll snake eyes in the gene pool, England. You've got these two, and other exceptionally gifted people, associating with each other, and in two generations you've laid the foundation of what will be modern science. And...there's not much more to say about that (other than: holy loving poo poo). You can argue that with similar environmental conditions somewhere else the same thing would have happened, but I'd disagree and frankly, it's infeasible to prove or disprove it.

The Roman Civil Wars weren't terrifically different. You've got a handful of military & political leaders over about 4 generations, quite of few of which are actually blood relations to some degree, associating with and mentoring each other. And the level of military and political leadership rises accordingly. To not call it remarkable is silly, as we are remarking on it. But semantics aside I would go further and call it extraordinary, not as a reference to my personal astonishment, but extraordinary in that a statistical outlier was occurring.

To examine any historical period that evidences extraordinary contributions and dismiss it as observer bias ignores probability, reason and mathematics. On a long enough timeline, eventually human talent will express itself in an statistically significant outlier, and may very well do so in a discrete geographic region. In fact, they are more likely to do so, to the extent that genetics and early environmental conditions are the causative agents.

physeter fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Oct 26, 2012

# ¿ Oct 26, 2012 14:11

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Namarrgon posted:

Newton and Hooke would have been absolutely wasted if England at the time was still in the stone age. That's what I meant that a society produces the remarkable individual. Without the framework of society Great Men can't exist. And in turn the great people shape the ideas, technologies and direction of the society.

I'm not taking issue with that, only the idea that all periods are equally great, but we only remember some of them with particular affection. All artistic movements are not the Florentine School, all intellectual exchanges are not Gresham College. And all wars are not the Roman Civil Wars. There's no harm in acknowledging human exceptionalism where it undeniably occurs.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2012 15:39

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Grand Fromage posted:

He probably did charge out with his big red cloak shouting COME ON YOU PUSSIES or whatever the proper Roman equivalent would be.

That'd be "cunni". There was an even more insulting version that translates into "little girls' pussies", because the Romans could keep it classy San Diego, but I can't remember it and I got halfway through typing that into google before I realized how dumb that was.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2012 17:06

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Anne Whateley posted:

I'm curious about socks, too.

There's a letter from a legionary at Hadrian's Wall that is either requesting socks, sandals and some underwear, or thanking someone for sending them.

vvv or it's a letter from his mum, whatever vvv

physeter fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Oct 31, 2012

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 14:24

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Halloween Jack posted:

Here is something that confuses me: Some writings about the retiari gladiators persistently mention that they were seen as weak and effeminate in connection with being clad in a tunic.

It is understood that some retiarii that fought clothed instead of mostly naked, I think that's what you're referring to? Traditionally the retiarii were seen as the lightweights on the sand, the effeminate ones compared to the heavier secutores. Perhaps you're reading a connection between being clothed in a tunic and womanishness, but I'd say it's a false lead. It's the being a retiarius that would offend Roman manliness, not their wearing of a tunic.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2012 21:38

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Pimpmust posted:

Speaking of effeminate gladiators: What about them Gladiatrix?

I've read the wiki, but beyond that I've not found much information.

Rich girls having a jolly good time as a side show to the main deal (fighting dwarves or what have you) or... ?

Rich girls having a jolly time until it was made illegal for them to do it, anyway. Probably on the heels of lower class women doing it more often. Gladiators generally speaking occupied a strange social niche that we don't really have any more in our society. Most of them were slaves, or at best, very low class commoners. But they were also admired, and traded, and celebrated as gently caress, and were their society's version of major sports celebrities. It would be like Lebron James or Peyton Manning being idolized and reviled at the same time, for doing the same actions.

So on top of this strange social niche, you also have history's general habit of not recording the lives of commoners, and especially those of common women, and so there's not a huge amount of info beyond what I can say about gladiators themselves.

Actually this social duality was common in just about every trade that now constitutes our celebrities: actors, artists, dancers, musicians, etc. Artisitic celebrity in the Roman world might get you laid and paid, but middle class was as far as you were going on the social ladder.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2012 19:58

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Wow, that's new for me. What's the sculpture on top? Looks like someone hired HR Giger to design a Beni-Hana restaraunt. Love it.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2012 02:46

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Steriletom posted:

Can someone help me with this? I've never been able to wrap my head around how the maniple system functioned.

I understand how such a formation would intrinsically be more maneuverable and able to adapt to changing conditions on the battlefield, but what I've never been able to grasp is how they were able to plug the "holes" between each maniple.

You've taken it about as far as modern scholarship can get you. The answer is we don't know. If I had to wildly speculate, which I often do...

- Superior maneuverability (a given)

- Harder to break, superior for morale. An army with one line will rout when that one line breaks. But the maniples were many lines. One could break and the rest of the army could stand fast.

- Only the best cavalry will follow through in a head on charge. The gaps would have dissipated the force of most frontal cavalry charges. This definitely happened with the elephants at Zama.

- The manipular deployment LOOKS weaker than a single line. This is so important, and so rarely understood. The reality of classical warfare is that most battles must occur by consent. If the other side doesn't want to fight, they can just not give battle. Fabian strategy is based on this. So if you're looking to conquer without battling a protracted insurrgency or dealing with a siege, the enemy needs to be brought to battle against your superior force, and beaten badly. An enemy might have scoffed at the ragged looking frontliners and swarmed into the gaps, then the second line came up and then they were caught like meat in saw blade. Surrounded on three sides, retreat became difficult. This is a tough one to grasp today, where in simulations we always have a good idea of enemy deployments and numbers. Ancient commanders had some scouts, a hill and maybe a rough idea of how many guys were on the other side. This is highly speculative on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if the manipular deployment was a psychological feint meant to encourage an unsuspecting, numerically superior foe to give battle against a smaller, more highly trained force. Which is what the Romans were, so, it makes sense to me.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2012 03:25

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 09:44

physeter: Jan 24, 2006; high five, more dead than alive

Exactly. The front end of the maniples, seen from a tree top and half obscured by dust or rain looks disorganized and unformed. "I'm weak, attack me here, commit your line." An hour later he can't disengage to rest without heavy casualties, and it's over soon enough. The evolution of the maniples also coincides well with the period before the Romans much good at siegecraft, making the decisive win on the field all the more important.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2012 03:58

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