Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/10/2009 3:13:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
No person and no nation lives forever!
I would like to see this country the way it has been for just a little longer than I am.
The medieval warming may have been even warmer than that of classical Roman times; the cooling may have been even colder.
They did have a lot of slavery, and even more serious was the level of idleness. The bread dole in the city of Rome amounted to feeding as much as 40 per cent of the population at times, and perhaps a couple hundred thousand all the time, for four centuries or more. There’s a classical-era bon mot regarding how the writer had to travel in the provinces to hear Latin spoken, but I’m sure there’s no modern parallel to draw. ;’)
Gaul and Britain took to Romanization very well, as Archie Bunker might say, after the Romans whipped the hell out of them in a war. Estimates of the carnage in Gaul as a consequence of Julius Caesar’s conquest go as high as two million (combat-related death being a small fraction of that). Because it took eight years or whatever, Caesar rounded up large numbers of the population and sold them into slavery in part to defray his campaigning costs and debts (directly through sale of slaves, indirectly by granting slaves to soldiers in lieu of cash), and the groups the Romans called Germans had already crossed the Rhine here and there long before Rome arrived (Caesar remarks on this in the Commentaries).
After the conquest, Gauls and Germans could enter service as auxiliaries (and eventually as regular legionnaries and Praetorian guards) and achieve Roman citizenship, and a good number did. Arminius, leader of the famous revolt against Varus that resulted in the annihilation of three legions east of the Rhine, had served 25 years as an auxiliary and had been granted citizenship. His brother who remained loyal to Rome had done similarly.
Migratory tribes continued to pass westward down the steppes, and arrived in Dacia, and in the various areas of Europe north of the Alps and Danube and east of the Rhine. So much land was available and turning back to forest after the conquest that the Roman presence (which was substantial and went quite deep into areas until recently thought to be strictly barbarian) was a network of roads and towns amid the smallish local settlements by various ethnic groups.
The borders were kept pretty quiet for centuries through trade, bribery to maintain a dependent barbarian ruling class, and cross-border interdictions — all with a relative handful of legions spread across Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea. By the time the centuries-long trickle became a flood, the Roman military was a shell of its old self, having spent much of the 3rd century engaged in intra-Roman warfare. There was a recovery of central government in the 4th century, about the time migrations by violent raiders and whatnot became a serious problem.
Meanwhile, the Romans had used machinery (even though the smiths et al weren’t high on the social scale) which saved a lot of labor; rediscovery of Roman invention — mills and the like — coincided with the medieval disasters of the Plague and the Little Ice Age famines. Labor was expensive, and the happenstance of classical info trickling in from Constantinople as the Moslems advanced in the east and Spain as they were driven out of the west) and/or greater appreciation of what records had survived actually lead, eventually, to our own industrial society. :’)
Somewhere years ago I read words to the effect that, it doesn’t do to dismiss an empire which unified Scotland and Arabia. :’)
"The first mention of the principles behind the pinhole camera, a precursor to the camera obscura, belongs to Mozi (470 BC to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohism.[1] ... The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 BC) understood the optical principle of the pinhole camera. He viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve, and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree."
:’) The Romans weren’t really like us, although we got a great amount of stuff from them in the areas of generally being organized and such. They never had a postal system; their magnificent system of roads were built to support the movement of troops, and coincidentally facilitated the movement of goods, and eventually the invading barbarian hordes (no complaint from me, like many people, I’m descended from most or all of the people of Europe, including those which don’t exist as ethnic groups any longer); they didn’t have public education of any kind; their currency was just flat out anarchic; and except for some short periods or specific faiths (Judaism was particularly subject to persecution, and of course for a good while, as it grew in popularity, Christianity; there’s a house in Herculaneum, buried by Etna in 79 AD, which has the nail holes in the wall where a cross was removed as the family fled), they were wide open regarding the importation of cults from all over the Empire and beyond.
The big problem, right back into what is now called the Republic, was a political system that was filled with odd ad hoc additions and subtractions, as well as interfamily enmities. Later in the Republic there were various major threats to Rome (the Gallic sacking of the city; Hannibal’s invasion of Italy) which led to strong single war leaders.
There were a whole series of intermittent civil wars which had gone on for generations by the time Julius Caesar entered the scene. The aristocracy continually screwed everyone else and a few dozen families in perhaps a couple of hundred households literally owned most of the Italian peninsula, with small farms owned by all the other small landowners interspersed. Soldiers who served patriotically often came home to find their lands had been foreclosed by the aristocratic a-holes who coincidentally also ran the government.
The addition of a chief executive (dictator, imper ator, etc) was one of those ad hoc additions, and for a century or so it came and went. Augustus (and his friend and ally Agrippa) finally defeated all his rivals and enemies, partly by cutting off their financing (kinda like the US tries to do with al qaeda, then hands it to the PLO). The office of emperor had no firm system of succession, because in Roman law it wasn’t permissible per se to name ones successor. The Senate supposedly had the power to do so.
When Caligula (the Emperor Gaius) was assassinated, Claudius was declared emperor (I don’t necessarily buy into that story about his hiding behind a curtain) by the Praetorian Guard and the Senate caved in and accepted it. Claudius was a hardworking, smart, but still sickly and crazed, emperor (and Censor, an office he revived in his reign), but there were a number of plots to assassinate him, and of course, the surviving version of his death is that he was murdered by his wife (who was also his niece). For her part, she was made coruler with her son Nero, and appeared on their joint coins but with a larger likeness than Nero. Eventually he got sick of her and had her executed. He also executed his first wife (daughter of Claudius), Claudius’ son, and a number of others.
Vespasian, a very capable general who had served in Britain during that conquest, had to go into voluntary exile because he fell asleep during one of Nero’s “artistic” performances. Eventually he was back in action.
Not too much later, Nero wussed out and killed himself when he heard of a revolt and a pretender to the emperorship. There were at least three simultaneously claiming to be emperor in what is called the year of four emperors. Nero died, the next three were either murdered or killed in battle, and Vespasian (probably the best general Rome had at the time) allowed his own name to be proclaimed. He was actually one of the better emperors, was first of the Flavian emperors, and his two sons succeeded him, one after the other, and didn’t do as good a job as their father had.
imper ator
s/b
imper iter
the founder of MohismI always liked Moe.
But what happened to Larry and Curly? They were probably on the road founding laryngitis and curling.
Don’t forget the Later Roman (Byzantine) Empire without which Islam would have taken Europe from the southeast around the time of Charlemagne. I have long been a fan of their valor.
:’D
That might be Fine, but Howard that work?
Yeah - true — but I have to admit — my favorite era is the 2nd century AD - the time of Trajan.
As you undoubtedly know, there is further speculation based on tree rings and I am not sure what else that a meteor/comet event around 540ad caused total collapse of some social/governing institutions in europe (e.g. the remaining roman institutions), IIRC there is textual reference to it raining mud or something otherwise exotic in ?france or somewhere western europe.
You Shemply develop a shpiel to shear the sheeple.
Yes, it was a good era. Did you know that Trajan was one of a very small group of Pagans who were admitted into Paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy?
The weather didn’t help the Spanish Armada any.
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