Roman/ancient history: Checkmate, Atenists

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

Theodoric was a pretty amazing dude. Educated at Constantinople, he took control of his tribe and later "invaded" Italy, which meant just kicking out the other barbarian shitbags that had been loving the place up. He made truce with Head Barbarian Shitbag Odoacer, invited him to a banquet and then killed him after the toast. Having taken control of Rome, he spent the rest of his life trying desperately to kickstart the stuttering engine of the dying Empire. He made good progress, but upon his death the whole thing fell apart again. Strange days that the last hero of the Roman Empire was a German Goth, but there you pretty much have it.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 17:31

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:12

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

Grand Fromage posted:

If you want a deep dive read Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter and compare the political environments. No emperor ever had the sort of control over his subjects as a modern cult of personality dictator can pull off. If Elagabalus or whatever sent a letter to Hispania Inferior telling them to stop farming and start making steel instead the governor would've just said "lol sure" and ignored it. It's not like Roman emperors were running secret police and concentration camps for political prisoners and poo poo. They could kill political enemies but it was far more limited.

YES. This is a thing that people can forget when it comes to the Principate. The number one obstacle for every would-be Roman god emperor was the Romano-Italians. It's hard to overstate the level of "go gently caress yourself" operating in the heart of the average Roman citizen (or soldier) on any given day. Their social psychology never had a problem with separating love of the fatherland from feelings about the rear end in a top hat that happened to be in charge of it at the moment.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2019 21:59

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

Dalael posted:

I hope you guys appreciate how hard it was for me to stfu about Atlantis during this whole conversation

I'll see myself out

*runs full speed at thread with Gigantopithecus/Bigfoot argument*

# ¿ Oct 18, 2019 20:34

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

Romans were highly risk-adverse and really, REALLY did not like to move fast if they could help it. Fast in uncontrolled territory meant good chance to lose the initiative and/or get ambushed. Roman doctrine was essentially structured to avoid being ambushed at all costs. After a certain point, legionaries marched in full kit, armor on. That was unusual if not unheard of in the ancient world. Then you've got the fort construction, also done in full kit. A legionary was never supposed to be more than X number of paces from his sword. They had formal squads for advance reconnaissance that took their jobs seriously. All of these evidence a military institution that was obsessed with maintaining control and avoiding ambush. A military institution by the way which revolved around the centurions, who would almost certainly start dragging rear end if they thought the commander was being too impetuous.

This fundamental approach worked so well for them not only because it paired well with the psychological dispositions of so many of the men likely to be in command, but also because there were few "mission objectives" in the ancient world that could justify losing an entire legion. What happens if you get there late? A town gets razed? Some cows get eaten? Some hayseed friend and ally of the SPQR is annoyed? All of these are preferable to training up and equipping 5,000 dudes all over again.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2019 14:55

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

Dalael posted:

For those of you interested in ancient trading, I highly recommend following Dr Caitlin Green on Twitter.

"The name Britain may be Punic and mean 'tin land'"

:vince:

(Anyone not playing A Legionary's Life available on Steam needs to GTFO)

# ¿ Oct 23, 2019 14:40

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

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

What if my bank balance is currently less than eight dollars, but I want to know more?

Unlike every other sad dead legionary in my roster, Gaius Scaevola reached retirement on his farm last night. He wasn't the most decorated of my boys, at least until he won the corona civica for saving the life of a velite in Hispania. Even so, his tendency to avoid suicidal activities on the battlefield saw him twice passed over for promotion out of optio, until his superior tried to lie about his claim to winning a corona muralis, and Scaevola testified against him. In gratitude, Scipio promoted him and transferred him to another maniple to avoid reprisal. Years later, Scaevola held the center position against the Macedonian pike push until the consul could flank their position and break a centuries-old empire like a twig over his knee.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2019 15:12

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

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

don't duel the thracian giant

All the duels I've found are unlimited time endurance matches, which means just abuse respite and wait for openings, while the opponent exhausts his stamina. Which is kind of cool since that is exactly how a Roman legionary was supposed to fight.

Most dangerous fight I've found so far: the guy at the villa in chainmail who challenges you for village supplies. Even with me on total defense he killed my centurion-level guy in like 15 rounds.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2019 14:45

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

What Jamwad said, especially in regards to survival versus killing. More random tips:

1) Mouseover the enemy to see his weaknesses, esp armor. No groin or arm coverage makes those a priority target, even if your chance to hit is less. Against a fully armored enemy, sometimes arm strikes are the best.
2) Train javelin, seriously.
3) You can spend char gen points not just on stats, but better starting gear as well.
4) Don't feint unless your success chance is high or you have stamina to burn. The enemy will give you an opening on his own.
5) I don't bother with shield strikes or soft spots until much later in the game, even then I haven't found soft spots worth a drat honestly.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2019 17:08

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

Jack2142 posted:

Okay my last guy was a complete badass, he dunked on the Bulwark and managed to kill the Agema Chillarch of Phillip's Army (this fight was harder as you can't really out fatigue him) and was a master swordsman badass who broke the Phalanx in each encounter and won over twenty duels and three civic crowns. (Never a mural crown because lol no one would help him take cities). Funniest duel was a Carthaginian Officer who I cut his throat in the first round.

Grats on bagging Agema Chillarch. My centurion prior had a mural crown, a civica, enough decorations to sink a trireme, AND the Seric iron sword. Died with a score of 4426 to that bastard.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2019 17:12

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

cheetah7071 posted:

Being a client to a senator sounds like a huge hassle

Was the benefit they could provide really worth the time spent fluffing him instead of taking care of your own business?

The morning levy would have varied from patron to patron. It might be once a week for one guy, or whatever. Patrons traveled, commanded armies, took vacations. But the key here is that this is how everything works.

Your kid is sick? Tell your patron, a doctor will be around to your house in the next day or two. Need a loan? Help with local thugs? A job? A scribe to do your will? Getting hassled by publicani? Want to start a business? Need a specific type of slave? Some food for a wedding? A tutor? A business contact in Sicily? Dowry help? Whatever it is, you are expected to ask for help with it, and a good patron will look to his own resources and other clients and see who can help you out for a discount or even for free.

In return, you vote how he says and you might even fight when he says. And when it is your turn to supply goods or services or information at the patron's request, you're expected to comply. A baker might send fresh bread to the patron's house every other day. A doctor will make a few free housecalls that week. A builder will patch a roof or two. Even a guy without a trade could at least swing his fists or a club, or see or hear something useful to someone else.

The patronage system wasn't something they did on the side. It was the very core of how their society functioned, it WAS the business. Managing this network was the patron's primary concern on a daily basis. It was the base of his power in the city. And was the basis of your security and comfort as a client in a city of nearly a million people with effectively zero law enforcement and no social services to speak of. Beyond your immediate circle of family and neighbors, this was it. The only other people on the planet who would give a drat about your welfare were these people.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 16:23

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

SlothfulCobra posted:

I've actually been wondering lately just how much our current economy is derived from the specific needs of medieval trading companies working across disunited and unreliable states, and whether Romans could've maybe done something like transferring a favor from one side of the continent to the other.

As the empire expands, there are clear historical records of foreign nobles becoming clients of prominent Romans. Not only did foreign potentates participate in the system, the system itself was likely one of the major reasons the empire was so stable for so long. There's a moment in HBO's Rome where Pompey snarls something about only having to stamp his foot and legions will spring up all over Italy. I don't know if he ever said that, but if he had, it would have been an accurate statement. At that point in his life, there are at least tens of thousands of fighting men in Italy alone who are connected one way or another to the Pompeii. They might be clients of clients of clients, but they are subject to Pompey's call one way or another.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 19:33

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

Ask/Tell > Roman/ancient history: nobody's trying to stick the empire into a vagina

# ¿ Dec 5, 2019 13:59

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

Grand Fromage posted:

Regular debt forgiveness would be good for everybody.

Especially the lenders, at least in the longterm. I think it's a pretty consistent historical pattern to see (a) consumer debt mounting, (b) the populace wondering why they don't just kill the lenders, (c) the government starting to wonder the same thing since it costs them money to stop the populace from doing that. So enter various debt relief initiatives throughout history, including one attributed to Julius Caesar, who probably did it to keep the lenders alive so he could borrow more. Without a release valve at the bottom of the stack, it's a time bomb and the first ones to die in the explosion are usually the bankers.

And because I'll never get a chance to say it anywhere else, there's a school of thought that dueling, particularly the pistol dueling of the rural American South, was much more about being able to prove credit worthiness in the future rather than actually killing anyone. Lenders figured someone might be a dumbshit hick, but if they were reliable enough to show up and get shot at, good enough.

# ¿ May 29, 2020 14:04

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

Dante posted:

Extrapolating the consquences of debt relief in ancient egypt into modern economies is nonsensical for a wide variety of reasons. Every modern economy has some function whereby a productive enterprise otherwise saddled by debt can retain it's productive capacity without dissolution through bankruptcy, and similarly there's some mechanic for individuals whereby debt doesn't starve you (personal bankrupcty, abolishment of debtors prison, minimum guaranteed income etc).

That modern economies have a more legislated, organized process to avoid catastrophe does not mean that catastrophe is not a threat, quite the opposite. Why wouldn't we analyze societies that didn't have this process so as to develop a more perfect system...?

# ¿ May 29, 2020 15:53

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

Dunno what's gonna happen but it's been a pleasure posting & reading with you goons. Grand Fromage you moderated a great thread, and you'll always be a Simcity 4 god to me bro

# ¿ Jun 25, 2020 20:33

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

Weka posted:

Has anybody read Gimbutas' work on the neolithic Danube culture? I had been lead to believe she proposed a matriarchal society but today read that "based on the roughly egalitarian graves and other material evidence, she concluded that Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had �a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.� "
I don't particularly trust the source though, it's explicitly an attempt to push back against Gimbutas' detractors.

http://www.archaeomythology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Spretnak-Journal-7.pdf

It's been decades for me, and I pretty much read into her Minoan stuff, but my nutshell is that she was mildly 1970s-woke, and her political inclinations permeated her work and conclusions, but not hopelessly so. A lot of her actual recoveries were really, really good. Her politicized conclusions were often nonsense (personal favorite from memory: they had a huge navy and lived on an island, but did not build walls, and therefore were pacifists!), but they are a good test of acuity, to parse the genuinely fantastic work from her personal opinions. So of course she attracted a coterie of "feminist archaeologist" adherents in the 80s and 90s, they went on to publish and get academic positions, and teach warmed-over Gimbutas and Kurgan theory in women's studies departments. Not surprised there was a huge backlash, but she is definitely worth learning about.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2020 00:48

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

Weka posted:

Which did she suggest existed is my question.

I believe she proposed that men and women were equal in her Old Europe, or more nearly so than they were perceived as being in the mid-late 20th century.

And no, evolutionary biology wasn't heavily interdisciplinary with ancient world studies at this time. So in retrospect, it is a bizarre conclusion. A fertility cult makes sense in her Old Europe since increased numbers of people is what agrarianism is all about. But it does not suggest that women are valued, only that wombs are valued. For all we know, statues of ancient fertility goddesses were straight up porn and dudes jacked off in front of them, which I consider much more likely than those statues reflecting a 4,000 year old spiritual and political commitment to gender equality which happens to mirror the anti-war/-patriarchy positions of her time.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2020 17:29

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

galagazombie posted:

The habit some circles have of declaring every newly discovered ancient culture egalitarian/pacifist/matriarchal has always seemed to me like some kind of weird outgrowth of the "Noble Savage" fallacy. Such claims seem to almost always be paired with some kind of romanticist rejection of modern life.

That's interesting, I'd not thought of it in that context. I think obviously there's a tendency in modern society to try and tie progressive viewpoints (in whichever political direction they are swinging) to ancient history as a way of validating those viewpoints, and it is annoying. This was common in the gay rights movement with Greco-Roman acceptance of homosexuality. Yes, at times they were fine with being gay, they were also fine with slavery and tossing unwanted newborns into the refuse heaps in case anyone wanted a free baby. We can look to the Romans for many things, how to treat other human beings isn't really one of them. In general, holding up ancient societies as moral exemplars to the modern world is intellectually indefensible. But we keep doing it.

And who knows, maybe Gimbutas was right. I look at something like Gobekle Tepe and my brain just melts, and I'm open to just about anything from that period.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 16:46

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

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Kinda get the feeling that early industrial periods tended to cause patriarchy to double and triple down on oppressing women when they previously couldn't afford to, while retroactively rewriting history to make that the expected default.

Maybe one of the reasons patriarchy is so widespread across cultures is because those early cultures that didn't employ patriarchal organization are gone. They got outbred and bottlenecked by their patriarchal neighbors, now they're extinct. That is exactly the story of the Kurgan hypothesis, absent the biology. No need for historical redactions or social theories when biology will see you through. Patriarchy as politically defined is a system of oppression, but it is also a reproductive strategy which worked so well that humans either covered the planet using it ab initio, or replaced all the other people that weren't using it, and then covered the planet. If anyone is looking to draw a lesson from Gimbutas' hypotheses, it's that if someone favors some sort of gender equality they'd best have a breeding strategy that can keep up, or it's the extinction pile for them.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2020 14:52

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

Archimedes of Syracuse posted:

They're great at ruling the roost in a lovely local town, but can they design a giant gantry crane that can (one day, we can dream) wipe out dozens of triremes in a single swoop...for the love of Athena, who is that at the door? Get out this instant, you're stepping on my equations, do you know who I am...? Do you?

Edit: just bringing it full circle. Bam!

# ¿ Dec 4, 2020 17:51

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

I really question how much say any given emperor had in selection of his successor. It was obviously an incredibly important, heavily political decision. Sure, you could pick your favorite but if the Senate, military and everyone else didn't like him, all you were accomplishing was marking him for death. So I imagine this was was a very collaborative, consent-driven process most of the time.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2020 19:55

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

Kanine posted:

what historical misconceptions bother you the most?

"That the Huns were the first to introduce the stirrup, and this advantage was what gave them the edge over Roman forces." - Every dad with a book collection, ever

- No, just no,
- the Avars were the first iirc,
- the Romans had extensive contact with the Huns, were not idiots and would have seen stirrups many times had they been around,
- the actual Roman general who will fight the Huns, F. Aetius, spends time as a noble hostage of the Huns as a young man, at the court of the actual Hun king, and probably would have noticed stirrups had they been there.

People were doing incredible poo poo with horses for centuries upon centuries without stirrups. They (and the horses) had a lot of loving free time is all I can say about that.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2020 18:30

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

# ¿ Dec 14, 2020 15:33

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

It is likely that the entire Roman order of battle operated on the recognition that no plan survived contact with the enemy, the solution to that being flexibility and adaptability. This was not just about equipment or the application of one particular formation over others. Rather, it was the centurions themselves, and the level of autonomy they enjoyed on the battlefield. The centurions of any particular cohort or maniple likely knew what the overall objective was, but once they were cut off from their command structure by smoke, dust, blood and chaos, they could (and would) execute on those objectives as their circumstances dictated. Generally speaking, centurions were praised for audacity and initiative. Conversely, I'm aware of no centurion who was executed for making a risky call and messing up. Demoted or chastised, likely. But this wasn't Egypt where the god king would cut his head off for impiety and bad battle field timing (or for that matter, cut his head off because his men loved him and he was a threat to the god king's position). In other words, Italo-Roman culture itself supported a level of independent thinking, action and improvisation that would probably have alarmed most contemporary kings and generals. Roman commanders weren't threatened by successful centurions, they were glad for them. Caesar's own Gallic Wars is filled with honorable mentions for centurions and legates who, when faced with unexpected developments, did something brave and totally off the cuff, and either prevailed or went down in a blaze of glory. And Caesar himself was not diminished by this, rather his gravitas was only enhanced by the deeds of his subordinates. He didn't need to steal the limelight, his society would reward them both.

So if circumstances justified a condensed formation (say to repel a charge, protect the wounded, or turtle up if flanked), the centurions could order it. Or they could spread out to flush skirmishers and reduce missile fire casualties. They could order a charge to relieve a beleaguered neighboring unit, find an exposed flank and lock it down, or do what they thought needed to get done. The gladius/pila/shield combo they were using worked so well because while not optimal at any one role, it was a kit flexible enough to succeed at any role in the hands of disciplined soldiers under competent local leadership. Well, nearly any role. Turned out horse archers were a problem.

But jazz quintet, rather than orchestra. This doesn't mean that there was never a Roman commander who didn't run his army a different or more restrictive way. But I think it's the right conclusion that a good cohort was going to be whatever it needed to be in the moment, thanks to the way their chain of command worked and what their equipment allowed them to do.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2020 15:43

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

Terrible Opinions posted:

Egypt covers a huge period of times and cultures, but at least from the Seventeenth Dynasty we have records from soldiers tombs of battlefield accomplishments being consistently rewarded with seemingly standardized awards, promotions, and accompanying compensation.

There will be exceptions to any given statement I made, and I was randomly and perhaps incorrectly picking Egypt on that one. It's all a very large period of time encompassing millions of individuals. But Roman centurions being a distinct group that co-existed and operated alongside the legate-class officers may have been unique in its persistence and extent of autonomy. The point of what I'm saying is there's no set metric to how far the legionaries are standing apart, or for that matter virtually anything else they are doing. A centurion will just tell them to change it up and they can do that.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2020 17:13

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

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

No, because centurions arent commanding automatons via hivemind.

Nor were the generals commanding the centurions via hivemind, so who exactly do you propose is making tactical decisions? You don't honestly think the centurions sent a message to the commander asking if they could assume a bracing formation for a cavalry charge that was mere moments from impact, do you? Of course the legates and centurions are making those decisions, there's no one else to do it.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

The legionaries need to be trained for some kind of formation, and the default was a bunch of guys 3-6 feet apart in ranks. You coupdnt expect centurions to be constantly coming up for formations off-the-cuff, nor the soldiers to be able to adjust to these formations on the fly, for every single engagement.

I cannot expect them to manage invasion fleets, assemble complicated siege weaponry or throw bridges across the Rhine in less than a fortnight, yet they will do all that and more. Adjusting formations in response to a changing battlefield situation is exactly what I would expect from a professional whose entire career is war. The idea of default settings and perfect formations is a product of video games & television, where battlefields have the benefit of being scenic, flat and remarkably uncovered by brambles, trees, boulders, streams, dead bodies, kicking horses and large numbers of people actively trying to kill you. Polybius is an extraordinary source but not so much that I abandon common sense.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 01:15

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

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

My issue is that physeter, as far as I can tell, is rejecting the idea that the Romans had a routine standing formation.

No, I'm not.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 05:51

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

ChubbyChecker posted:

You did though:

I think by default they stood in an approximate row/column structure. I think that was generally expected. I also think that when inconvenient things like timespace made that difficult, they didn't worry about it very much, because they were grown men who had been navigating timespace for awhile by that point. The idea that absent any other orders that the ~480 men of a Roman cohort are going to be pinwheeling around to make sure they've got a required 3-6 feet of space between each man is loving stupid. At max range that put a single cohort at what, spread out over almost half a mile? Ten cohorts in a legion, assume full strength, now we've got 5,000 men spread over 4+ miles, all pacing around and yelling at each other to move over 2 feet to the left because the optio forgot to specify anything else? That's moronic. It gets even dumber when the idea is that the centurions couldn't do something, you know, completely fuckin' crazy like tell the soldiers to just stand in another way. Because it's just much more historically correct to imagine that an entire cohort is going to be flopping around endlessly on a battlefield trying to get the spacing right, instead of some guy saying "spread out", and they just sort of spread out and get back to doing things that matter. Christ forbid some legionary trip over a rock and take awhile getting up, gonna have to stop the whole maneuver lest the guy behind him cross the 3 foot Polybian barrier. Good luck mustering a cohort in a courtyard or anything, not gonna happen. I mean it could fit 800 people in it easy, but we've got Polybius to worry about so I guess they just killed the guys that couldn't fit, or tore the building down. Dunno what to tell you guys, that's the rules, Caesar said to show up here, we've got our default settings, so I guess we're screwed. Bummer if you're the guy on the battlefield that has to stand in a burning campfire or on a dead horse, got to maintain that 3-6 feet or poo poo's gonna go sideways on us out here.

People who read history and watch history tv, and maybe do some re-enactments on perfectly manicured football fields, sometimes get some very weird ideas about how actual human beings did things in the real world. The answer is, obviously, that a cohort would stand how it needed to stand given the realities of our shared physical universe, that if they had a "default formation" it would be adapted or ignored as soon as it wasn't practical to use it, and if their officers didn't like it they'd just tell them to stand in some other way because that's what officers do. It's really not a complicated concept but some people have trouble with it.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 15:55

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

I'm good man, it's the internet

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 16:18

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

The first time Marcus and Sextus locked eyes across the unbridgeable gap of the Polybian 3-6 foot minimum, it was love at first sight. A forbidden love! No one could cross that barrier, not until that dipshit from Cohort IIX decided he didn't want to stand in a thorny bush for an hour, resulting in the entire legion having to take three steps to the right, and in that instant, a fleeting touch between them. Oh, such heavenly release. Theirs was a love that broke all the default settings, baby

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 16:27

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

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Yeah poo poo like re-enactment and marching band can�t actually recreate the conditions of an ancient battlefield, but you seem like you have no idea how difficult it is to have a mass of people just �stand how they need to stand.� You can just yell �spread out� at a dozen people sure, but not so much when it�s 500.

Ok, so there was a centurion at the forward corner of the cohort whose actual job it was to yell things at the first couple ranks. What is he yelling if not things like "turn left" or "spread out"? I mean it would be awesome if he was yelling things like "I miss my favorite soup!" or "Which of you cunni put olives in my socks!?", but I'm pretty sure he's is not. Or maybe he is.

I'm not disputing that they drilled, or that they had multiple formations. I am disputing that unless someone told them otherwise, hundreds of Italian men would have no choice but to spread evenly out over a couple football fields worth of open space, regardless of terrain, weather, or other battlefield conditions, just because this was their default formation and for no other reason. That is a dumb idea. I dispute that.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2020 22:35

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

Koramei posted:

I�m half asking the thread at large, but a couple of things I�ve stumbled on:

This old AskHistorians post talks about a few things. Geography makes a lot of sense to me here especially; China would in later centuries be linked by a grandly extensive system of canals, but in Han times this was mostly still in the future, so Rome�s easy access to the Mediterranean is a marked difference. The person in that thread talks about cost differences of 1 to 4.7 to 22.6 for transport via sea, river, and overland respectively; with China still much more overland than Rome, iron being that much more expensive to transport definitely sounds like it would make a difference.

There�s also this really interesting journal article about Han ironworking, which seems to put a lot down to the state putting a monopoly on iron and then being extremely inefficient about actually producing it, now it had total control:

This makes it much easier for the state to keep control, which I guess is what mattered to them, but obviously seems to have had deleterious effects on productivity.

I�d basically always imagined everyone everywhere having iron during the Roman Empire, so going deeper into East Asian history I was pretty surprised about how not-universal it seems to have often been in ancient times. I�d assumed this meant that was also the case in Rome; I just hadn�t learned about it in as much detail, but it�s interesting if it turns out Rome really did just have way more iron.

Good work. Iron production in this period depends on marrying large quantities of ore with much larger quantities of wood/charcoal. The exact ratio of course would depend on the smelter itself, but I've seen estimates as low as 5:1 and as high as 30:1, the fuel tonnage being the higher number. Way easier to transport the ore than the wood. Easiest by far to transport the workers to both, as they have legs. This is all happening when the overwhelming majority of human beings alive absolutely depend on that very same fuel for all of their daily heating and cooking needs, not to mention all the other things they use wood for, like furniture and building. Putting anything other more than a blacksmithing operation near a large population center is going to lead to such a crushing need for fuel that it might very well outweigh all other imports to the city just by itself. Shortages will occur, which results in the added inefficiency of the forge fires needing to be restarted over and over again. It's not a death spiral, but it will never be good production compared to an isolated forge town near an iron mine and surrounded by dense forest.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 16:51

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:12

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

There's nothing glamorous about it. The shield is there to absorb big calorie-burning hits for as long as it takes the other guy to get tired, at which point the legionary will go for his crotch, belly or inner thighs with a quick thrusting sword that doesn't take many calories to use at all. If he hits, likely a mortal wound. If he misses he can try again, and if not there's another dude behind him with the exact same kit ready to try the exact same thing. They aren't even doing anything particularly difficult, right? I mean it's not like they're doing a triple lindy here. (A) Use shield until other guy is tired, (b) stab tired guy in his dick, (c) use shield and wait, (d) repeat. This is not performative war, they are butchers looking to drain some pigs. The evolution of the flared tip Mainz-style gladius indicates even further enthusiasm for the piggy-draining business, because it delivers more soft tissue damage on either a thrust to the belly, or a quick slice across the femoral aorta. It's a horrifyingly efficient way to fight.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 18:26

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