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Fight Club Sandwich posted:How gay were the Romans? Can you opine on if they had more or less gay sex than the Greeks (as a cultural thing, not raw #)? Out of respect for OP I won't answer this question. But I will point out that huge numbers of residents in the Republic/Empire were Greek-speaking Greeks in various stages of becoming acculturated into a Romano-Italian empire. Assimilited territories, manumitted slaves, voluntary immigrants, etc etc. Greeks are virtually everywhere throughout Antiquity, and they are literally everywhere in the Roman Med. So there are potentially alot of false positives, just like how a thousand years from now someone excavating in San Antonio or New York's Chinatown might get some very skewed ideas about the American relationship to mariachi music or jellyfish as a food item. But unlike America, you can't pick up stakes and go excavate in Ohio or Montana and realize, oh, most Americans didn't actually listen to mariachi. Because in the Roman world, Greeks are everywhere. So ultimately, the question can only make sense if framed by a strict definition of "Roman", and a specified time period and location. physeter fucked around with this message at 17:43 on May 24, 2012 |
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May 24, 2012 17:40
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Octy posted:I think they even saw the Greeks as inferiors, despite all the culture, religion and learning they took from them.
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May 25, 2012 13:54
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Modus Operandi posted:It's easy for us to look at Rome with a full historical timeline and draw conclusions like this. There's definitely alot of this. I blame it on those animated wikipedia maps that show an empire swallowing all its neighbors in 2 second intervals. The concept of Roman manifest destiny was more after the fact commentary than driving concept. Consider how Rome ends up in Constantinople in the first place. Traders in Italy are complaining that they're getting raided by Illyrian pirates. Illyria is the state between Italy and Greece/Macedonia. So Rome says to the King of Macedon (then in charge of Greece and nominally Illyria), "clean up your rump state". He doesn't, or can't. So they invade because that's bullshit. King of Macedon then says "whoa, think I'll ally with Carthage during the Punic Wars and betray the Romans". Romans destroy Carthage and then send the legions to take out Macedonia because who would want that guy around as a neighbor? Seriously, Phillip was just a huge dick. Macedon turns out to be a paper tiger, suddenly Rome owns all of Greece and Macedon and is sitting in Byzantion wondering what to do next. Guess we'll go home and oh snap, the King of Pergamon just died and left all his lands in Asia Minor to the Roman State. Welcome to Asia, Rome. Then Mithradates shows up and goes apeshit, and the next thing you know you've got boots on the ground in motherfuckin' Armenia just to get some peace and quiet. It took a couple of centuries, but that's how it went down. And it all started because some Italian merchant got rightfully annoyed at some dumbass Adriatic pirate. No individual planned it all. What seemed like good ideas at the time, admittedly supplemented by plunder-happy governors and legions in the border states, built the Empire state by state, and tribe by tribe. Rome wasn't a predator state (w/e that is) as much as it was a happy little porcupine whose own predators kept throwing themselves on top of it.
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May 25, 2012 18:23
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Grand Fromage posted:The crossbow is the first major military innovation made after Rome. The basic concept existed in Rome in large siege weapons, scorpions and ballistae, but the idea of a man-portable weapon using similar principles never came up.
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May 26, 2012 20:24
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The way I always try to explain Roman slavery is they were sort of treated like cars. Just because someone owns a car doesn't mean they wake up every morning and kick it in the grill. It's got resale value if nothing else.
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May 28, 2012 01:19
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Alan Smithee posted:Speaking of Hannibal, was there any particular reasons for Rome's exceptional hatred towards Carthage? The legend has it that Regulus remained a POW for a few years before the Carthaginians decided to send him back to Rome as a peace envoy and to offer ransom terms for Roman captives. Before he was allowed to leave, he was forced to swear on pain of death by torture, that he would beg the Roman Senate for peace terms. He agreed. When he arrived in Rome, he addressed the Senate and told them to fight on and never surrender, never come to terms with Carthage. Afterwards he boarded a ship and returned to Carthage, to keep his word. Let's be clear: he was honor bound to return and offer himself up for torture, and he did it. The gentlemanly thing to do, even by classical standards, was to recognize his courage and let an old man go. So the Carthaginians went ahead and tortured him to death. Sitting alongside the agrarian farmer mindset in the heart of Republican Rome was a taste for revenge that would make the worst gangster in the best Scorcese movie turn pale. poo poo like torturing Regulus to death was the kind of thing that could drive the entire city into an Italian vendetta blood rage that would last a bajillion years. Little things like this, alongside the Hanniballistic (just made it up  ) rear end beatings delivered in PW2, resulted in a legacy of hatred that far exceeded even the normal Roman reaction to opposition. Actually I just wanted to tell the Regulus story because it owns.
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May 29, 2012 17:09
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DarkCrawler posted:Also, can someone tell me how the heck did Romans keep putting armies in the field time after time Hannibal wiped them out? It seemed to me that Hannibal's army was a single one that Carthage wielded in his campaigns while Romans lost what, 100,000 men alltogether and yet were able to invade and completely destroy Carthage not that long afterwards. The Romans also had a property requirement back then. Being in the army was a "privilege" for land-owning citizens. And when all of those were dead or maimed, well, Romans invented modern lawyering. They suspended the property requirements in the Second Punic, so suddenly Hannibal realizes he only just killed the guys with money. Now he's got to deal with all the rest of them, and he's got whole cities full of workaday citizens still out there. DarkCrawler posted:Also, was the Hannibal the only person badass enough to make Romans need to resort into guerilla warfare? Does anyone else come even close to his boogeyman status in the minds of Romans? Editing to add that the Sertorian War in Hispania seemed to degenerate pretty quickly into guerilla tactics on both sides so maybe that qualifies. physeter fucked around with this message at 18:31 on May 29, 2012 |
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May 29, 2012 18:27
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Xguard86 posted:Ya the Romans way of war was much closer to our modern idea than any of their contemporaries. Weird how that worked. It wasn't to be taken for granted in Antiquity, because as silly as it sounds 10,000 man armies could be defeated by 30 foot high walls. Seriously, it happened all the time. Fun fact: more cities were taken by all sides in the First Punic War by internal betrayal, than by siege. Frontal assaults failed ALOT. Say some Gallic warchief gets an extra bit of mead in him and decides to raid the next tribe's town, so he blunders over to this other tribe's wall of solid tree trunks, and gets some rocks thrown at him and he leaves. He definitely leaves when he gets hungry because what's he going to eat when the game is gone, while he sits there trying to starve them out? Assuming he doesn't die from squatting in his own feces for a month, which is likely. Oh he'd LOVE to plunder the place and rape it into oblivion but he can't because he basically sucks. I've just described Pre-Roman Warfare in Antiquity in a nutshell. Not so much rules, as a stalemate in an arm's race between offensive operations and the ability of regular people to pile rocks and logs vertically. It's understandable if you think about. I have a graduate level education and if you gave me an axe and told me to go build you a 45-high ladder that doesn't easily catch on fire, can support ten fully armored men climbing on it at once who are being pelted with stones, AND can remain stable the entire time, I probably cannot do it. The average Classical warrior has to do that working with much shittier tools than I've got, plus a kindergarden education, and that's just a ladder, the very basic entry level piece of siege equipment they need to take a town. So it wasn't rules, really. It was inability. So they'd meet in open fields and pound the poo poo out of each other, take some casualties and either pay tribute or scurry back and eat out of the granary for awhile until the winner got bored and left. See, the "rules" were invented by people who couldn't siege worth a poo poo. Romans were really the first to NOT have that problem, at least not after PW1. Their siege engines became so advanced they probably looked like alien technology to the average barbarian, and even though people like the Greeks could build the same things, the Romans had the training not to squat in their own poo and the logistical ability to make sure food shipments arrived for besieging forces. It's true Romans would never stop coming for you, but the really horror show started when you realized that having found you, they weren't going home like Uncle Jethro the Gallic Warchief. They'd crack your best fortress like a pinata and if they didn't, they'd just sit there and wait, eating fresh bread and smirking at you while you starved or surrendered. So force projection in antiquity meant siegecraft and the ability to get into your enemy's lands long enough to use it well. Only Romans could do that with any reliability.
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May 30, 2012 05:27
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BrainDance posted:I dont know enough about Roman culture, or that anyone does, but how much of that survived to the present? Aside from the technicalities, the Romans left a number of general sea changes in humanity in general. They usually aren't taught or appreciated in textbooks because roads and  is easier, but they can be recognized. Some I've consider:1) Transition from Hellenistic "poleis" city-state identity to early concepts of national identity (very arguable I know, but there), 2) Elimination of cannibalism (?), human sacrifice and ritual child molestation as a moral or morally ambivalent practice (and also, the social differentiation of human sacrifice from state execution), 3) Probably the best promoter of agrarianism over nomadism in Europe & the Near Middle East, this wasn't unique to Rome but they pretty much resolved the issue for all points west of Rhine/Syria and north of the Sahara, 4) All but eliminated tribalism in Western Europe (those charming Scots in their kilts and clans are most of what is left), 5) Introduction of proselytizing religion (not really an improvement but ok). These are "deep" changes that go beyond mere mechanical advances, to the root of mass human conduct. Some of them may look odd to a modern person, but ~2000 years ago there was nothing abnormal about doing business with a human sacrificer in & around the Mediterranean. The same stubborness that won the Romans battles also gave them the ability to pick up the human psyche and scrub out some things they didn't like. It took centuries, but they were ok with that. Also people who say "you can't make war on a religion" should always be asked if they know where to find the nearest Carthaginian restaraunt. 
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May 31, 2012 20:49
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Neophyte posted:Running the carts on rails would speed things up significantly, right?. It's sad that I know this.
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May 31, 2012 21:04
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TildeATH posted:Jared Diamond  Since it seems current, here's a sperg on Roman nobility. This is typically not well understood, because textbooks often summarize it as “patricians were the upper class, plebians were the lower class”. And that’s a gross oversimplification. Patrician: Those direct descendants of a noble house inhabiting Rome at the time of, or shortly after, the founding of the Republic. Most of these houses, or gens, came from Etruscan or Sabine lineages. Some others from workaday folks, and yes perhaps some from freed slaves. There were only about 15-30 of these true patrician gens in the beginning. Plebian: Everyone else that was a citizen. Nobilis: A growing class throughout the Republic. These are plebians whose families have achieved Senatorial status, but are not patricians by blood or law. This is important. Most of the “patrician” characters in HBO’s Rome, for example, are plebian nobles. In fact, among the main characters, I recall that only Julius Casesar, Brutus and Servilia are actual patricians. Mark Antony, Cato, Cicero, Pompey...all plebs by birth. They socialize, marry and work with patricians but legally are not. Actually for awhile they weren't even allowed to intermarry. What: By the time of the Civil Wars, most of the patrician houses are in financial ruin, total obscurity or extinct. Perhaps only 5-6 of them remain relevant. It had been 500 years since the founding, and for reasons that I hope to make clear below, it was financially very challenging to maintain a Senatorial presence for such a period. A patrician that wasn’t in the Senate was still a patrician, but he might also be a pig farmer and totally irrelevant. Why was it challenging?: Because to be in the Senate you needed to own land that generated 1 million sesterces a year, which was typically about 500 iugera of land. You & your immediate family also could not be engaged in trade, where trade was roughly defined as mercantile activity. So as a senator, income is limited to the following: selling proceeds of the land you own (crops, ore, timber), rents, war spoils, inheritance, gifts and bribes. Now, ok you say, surely they started rich and inherited lots of land and money. Yes, they did. But the problem was a senator with two sons (or more!) was stuck. If he divided his lands between them so that they could both become senators, it was going to initiate an eventual watering down process where they would divide to their sons, and so on and so on. This is how most patrician families are gone by the time of the Civil Wars: they just fell beneath the required income and had to go open businesses/get jobs and stop being senators. This is also why adoption was huge in the patrician houses, because an extra son could spell generational disaster for a patrician senatorial gens. Most patricians still in the Senate at the end of Republic are actually fairly poor. Gens Julius & gens Claudius in particular are having some issues. That's foreshadowing because the Julii et Claudii will emerge from the Civil Wars as the emperors of Rome.  Ok but it couldn’t have been that hard: It was. Because advancement in Roman Republican politics required that all aspirants spend a year as a curule aedile. The aedile’s job was to throw festivals and games for everyone. And he had to pay for that himself. If he did a good job, people would vote for him in the next election as a praetor, which meant he could go govern a province and squeeze money out of it (see war spoils, land rights, gifts and bribes, above). And after praetor, he could have a shot at becoming consul. So personal fortunes were thrown at the aedileship, and if you didn’t have money, moneylenders. If you didn’t do a good job as aedile and make people happy, you’re not moving on to praetor unless you’re a war hero or something. It was the only way to make a name for yourself with the voters, except for… Tribunes of the Plebs?: Exactly. TotPs were ten men elected every year by the voters to represent the commoners of the city. Their job was to make laws, veto things and generally harass the Senate for the amusement of the commoners. Many men made their reputations this way, and lots of bribes were to be had to keep the money coming in. Only one problem: you had to be a plebian by blood. No true patrician could take this office. Blooded patricians had to take the crushingly expensive curule aedileship if they wanted to progress. The only way a patrician could take this office was to undergo some bizarre ritual that would legally convert him and his descendants to pleb status forever. Now, some people will say that over time, the distinction between patricians and plebs diminished, and this is somewhat true economically. But I’m aware of only one or two men that ever elected to give up his patrician status to seek a TotP seat. This stuff still mattered to them a very great deal. Many patrician houses chose to fade out rather than become plebs, even though a few turns as Tribunes of Plebs could have reversed their sagging fortunes. Wait that's not fair: True blood patricians had their own positions that only they could fill. The chief of the Senate had to be patrician by blood. So did many of the high priests. And yes, these positions lost much of the authority they once had, so it's wasn't a good trade. What was Julius Caesar?: A Julius that got hosed by the exact system I’ve just described and went to war over it. JC was a real patrician, so he couldn’t be a tribune of the plebs. His gens didn’t have big money, so he had to borrow for the aedileship. He borrowed a metric asston of cash, so he did a great job. As a result he got voted into praetor/governor of Cisalpine Gaul (?), the Swiss gave him an opening and then he conquered everything up to the English Channel (see war spoils). He pissed off too many people in the process and the second civil war began. What’s a knight?: It’s a bad translation of “equites”, meaning horseman. Legally, this is a Roman citizen who owns land which gives him 400k/year in income. He might also get a state subsidized horse. He’s not a senator, and might not want to be because he can engage in trade. Become a pottery baron or a lord of weapons manufacturing, go ahead! Many of the richest citizens in Rome were equites and quite happy to remain so. Many first time senators were either sons of equites whose rich families bought them the necessary land, or retired equites that had accumulated so much cash they could leave commerce forever. Okay so: This is why Rome had such upward mobility and needed fresh blood. Families were constantly tapping out of the game, others were constantly stepping up with enough capital to have a shot at the big time. But hopefully this sheds light on some of the pressures and motivations of key persons in the Mid to Late Republic. Things really change during the reign of Augustus, and only a couple generations into the Imperial period there’s not much of this old system left. But it was their world for nearly half a millenium, and an understanding of it helps to figure out everything from internal politics to foreign conquests. physeter fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 15:44
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Grand Fromage posted:Roman patricians and the Italian mafia are incredibly similar, honestly. This is entirely true. The best guideline I can offer to understanding Roman cognomens like "Caesar" and "Magnus" is to watch the scene from Goodfellas where they pan through the club and name all the gangsters. Roman noble names were literally their equivalent of "Jimmy Two Times" and "Joey Bag o Donuts". Caesar means "hairy" and they were all pre-maturely bald. Pompey Magnus (meaning "The Great") had that name because when he was an obnoxious 16 year old general, Sulla would see him coming and mutter "oh look here comes Pompey Magnus". Cool-sounding names typically translate into something like cross-eyed, clubfooted, big nosed, etc etc.
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Jun 1, 2012 16:00
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:I thought the legion commanders were always senators and the non-legion senators were also governors of the Senatorial Provinces to keep them extravagantly wealthy. Pfirti86 posted:Solid writeup. Were all patricians expected to serve in the military too, or was it possible to go aedileship=>praetor=>consol with no command? And if aediles had to spend their own personal fortunes to maintain their office, does that mean taxes only went to the Senate? How exactly was the Roman tax system set up? With that said, the Romans had an intricate system of military decorations and the electorate had a deep reverence for it. So yes, if you went off to war as a teenager and managed to score a corona muralis or something, you might skip aedileship and move straight on to quaestor (the office between aedile & praetor). Keep in mind that deliberately trying to win high-end decorations in the Roman army was like playing Russian roulette with 4 chambers loaded, so this was not a Good Plan unless you were suicidal. Taxes changed radically over time but generally went direct into the coffers of the SPQR, less a little here or there to whomever managed to get their mitts on it. Most foreign tax collections were handled by private contractors called publicani. The sale of publicani contracts was a governor's perogative so you get the idea. Pfirti86 posted:One thing that fascinated me about the HBO series Rome was how acceptable criminal gangs (and gangs/mobs in general) were to the political establishment (like when Mark Antony pretty much commands Lucius Vorenus to take command of the gangsters on the Aventine Hill). It was like that was a legit job. How close was that to history?
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Jun 1, 2012 19:05
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Benagain posted:When you're saying trying to get high end decorations was most likely suicide, was this because you'd be smacked down for being an ambitious little poo poo risking lives for no reason, probably be killed due to the dangerous acts necessary to get them, or both? The grass crown was the holiest of holies, I think it had less than ten genuine receipients in its entire history, and involved the actual general himself, or field commander who took over, saving an entire legion from certain destruction through personal heroism. Virtually impossible to win deliberately. Spolia optima was so rare it wasn't even included in the "crowns" system because it verifiably happened only once. To win that, you as the commander had to personally track down the general on the other side and kill him in single combat. The rest were minor medals that were just like "oh you killed 5 guys so here's your trinket" and not likely to impress anyone. physeter fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 19:37
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Well there were cognomens and agnomens. They sort of blended together over time. Cognomens were the original "descriptor" 3rd names given to help distinguish individuals in a big gens since Romans only had about twenty first names they used. So Publius Scipio Nasica translates to Big-nosed Publius of the Scipio gens. Cross-eyed people got "Strabo" as a cognomen. So Pompey Magnus' dad was Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, literally Cross-eyed Gnaeus Pompey. His dad was a particularly vicious general and after a brutal sack he got the agnomen, Carnifex. So then he was Cross-eyed Pompey the Butcher. Here are a few more, many were derogatory and/or ironic and pretty funny. Crassus, the "Fatty" Nasica, "Big Nose" Bestia, "Beast" or "the Animal" Strabo, "Cross-eyed" Ahenobarbus, "Red Head" or more literally, "Fire Hair" Ahala, "Armpit" Bibulus, the "Drunk" Mus, "Mouse" or "Rat" Dolabella, "Hatchet" Scaurus, "Lame" Varro, "Big Head" Flaccus, "Elephant Ears" It makes Latin class go faster when you realize that the two consuls you're reading about, leaders of the most powerful nation in Antiquity, were legally named Marcus the Animal and Elephant Ears Sextus, or whatever.
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Jun 1, 2012 23:16
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Eggplant Wizard posted:Probably, they had troops from the middle east at least for sure. Off the top of my head I know there was at least one group of Palmyrans (Syrian), so Sarmatians wouldn't surprise me.
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Jun 4, 2012 03:08
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We only know a fraction of what there is to know about the Roman army, and next to that our knowledge of their navy is negligible. Which is a shame, because they were responsible for some of the most pivotal victories in Roman history. For example it's a good guess that there was a 50/50 split between ocean and river operations, but we know even less about their river activities. One thing that can be said with relative certainty is that the popular image of the slave galley is a myth. Their fleets were free soldiers and paid professionals that enlisted by the tens of thousands. I'm not sure what they wore (probably not much belowdecks).
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Jun 6, 2012 14:35
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PhantomZero posted:So if the early roman soldiers were expected to pay for all their equipment, if you were too poor could you not serve in the military, why would they fight? On slavery, I think it helps to understand that the Roman concept of slavery extended from old school concepts of apprenticeships all the way through indentured servitude, and down to short lives of extreme brutality (mines, quarries & latifundiae). Mere chattel was just the low end. A bunch of low end slaves thrown into the arena to die was like a demolition derby, not something you'd want to drive your Ferrari into. A highly trained gladiator was like the Ferrari. In re Roman noblemen, in modern media we almost always use British accents to distinguish the Roman social classes. The only hitch with that is to most English speakers, upper class Brit speak sounds fairly effete. It's something of a disservice to the Roman upper class, who were pretty far from that.
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Jun 9, 2012 20:32
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:If you could choose any Accents (Speaking English) to portray Roman Nobles, which would you pick? Amused to Death posted:So were the capite censi allowed to vote? I would assume if they did it'd be in the tribal assembly since they're too destitute to be plebians and part of the plebian council. Alan Smithee posted:On the subject of military when a nobleman wanted to join up where would we he get his training? I remember in Rome, Atia hires Titus to train Octavian in combat, though I'm sure that took a bit of liberty in that I imagine a higher ranking officer would be in charge of that.
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Jun 10, 2012 16:43
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Someone asked about Roman magical belief so I thought I'd mention the Sibylline Books. We're not really certain what was in them since no copies survive, but they were apparently a collection of prophecies and rituals that the Romans would turn to in times of chaos or uncertainty. They were consulted all the time in the early days but as years went by it became less popular, in part because some of the prescribed rituals were bizarre even by Greco-Roman standards. For example, it's a solid bet that what little human sacrificing the Romans ever did was after following the instructions in the Books. Another classic from the old days was the act of devotio, where the Roman general, in exchange for victory, would pledge all the souls of the soon-to-be-defeated enemy army to the underworld. Then he'd seal the deal by pledging his own soul, and charge head first into the enemy formation and essentially commit suicide. Probably a good thing for the development of tactics and strategy that this never really caught on beyond the very early Republic.
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Jun 11, 2012 00:31
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Technically the Greeks of Greece are mostly Macedonian subjects at this point. So it was Macedon and Seleucia that the Romans fought for the area. And yeah it was mostly just the superior manueverability and close-in fighting ability of the legions vs. the outdated phalanx. The phalanx was great until flanked and then it was just a bunch of dudes pointed the wrong the way. Edit: fun fact to make my post useful, Carthage and Corinth were both annihilated in the same year. I guess domination is more impressive if you can do it double-fisted. physeter fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jun 12, 2012 |
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Jun 12, 2012 01:24
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The move from Republic to Principate can sometimes be best described as the over-introduction of an executive branch of government. The Republican Romans didn't have a chief executive per se, limited authority was vested in a pair of consuls who held office for only one year. In times of emergency there was the temporary office of Dictator, who was appointed by the Senate and given absolute power. This was not a great way to govern an empire that stretched from modern day Portugal to outer Syria. The Civil War period could be characterized to some degree by saying it was just a succession of guys forcing the Senate to make them Dictator, and then using that power to crush the opposition. The Emperor accomplished the same thing as Dictator, and along with the imperial bureacracy, essentially constituted an effective executive branch for managing such a huge empire. Unfortunately the effect was to overwhelm the legislative function as well. I think there's a good argument that Augustus went much further down that road than Julius Caesar ever intended, but it seems to have worked out ok.
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Jun 12, 2012 16:59
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Logiwonk posted:If you had to boil down the reasons for Rome's amazing success as an empire/military power to a couple of bullet points, what would they be? 1) Inclusion. An inclusive society that has balanced its need for labor and conquest with simple concepts of liberty, justice and social advancement. They were Sparta without the broken economics, insane fascism and widespread misery. 2) The Centuriate. Antiquity wasn't running out of great generals or people to follow them. Knowing what to do when you got to the enemy is what mattered, and very often that meant everything from troop discipline to building 6-story siege towers. Centurions did this and more. Roman opponents gave bounties for killing centurtions for a reason. It was because these men could consistently turn farmers and fishermen into world-class heavy infantry in a matter of weeks. Most cultures did not have men like these, and not in this number. The number of veteran centurions would at all times correlate directly with Rome's ability to make war. They were a fascinating mini social class of their own that really didn't have analogues elsewhere. 3) Exceptionalism. Grand Fromage has mentioned this. They thought they wouldn't lose and if they did lose, they didn't give a gently caress. No, really, they really didn't. They'd just keep getting more and more pissed. After Cannae, Rome is just sitting there totally vulnerable and Hannibal is like "surrender!" and the whole city was like "no, gently caress you, Hannibal." Hannibal probably should have gone home at that point. This would be like Truman calling up Japan after the nukes and asking them if they wanted to surrender, and Japan being all like "No, why?" In the First Punic War, the Romans lost ~100,000 men in a day. A DAY. That was 10% of the male population. This is one medium-sized city and it's allies, remember. They lost those men when 250 ships went to the bottom in a storm. So they built another fleet. Immediately. In Rome, what passed for courage would today be deemed utter psychosis but it brought them victory time and time again. At first because they'd keep gutting it out long after everyone else was done, then later on because most sane people were too terrified to find out if they were bluffing.
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Jun 12, 2012 22:25
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an skeleton posted:Here's one for ya: What did Romans generally look like? Skin color, height, etc? As a bonus, what did Carthaginians look like? My friend told me this has been a big source of debate. Romans were pretty much white guys with an even bigger distribution of blondes and redheads than you'd see in modern day Rome. Offhand I think both Julius Caesar and Pompey were blondes, Augustus and Cato were gingers. Sulla was so ginger he ran around in a floppy woman's bonnet to keep the sun off. The lower classes probably shaded a bit darker because the contributions of outsiders into the genepool would have been more frequent. Carthage is debatable. We know the "ruling class" of Carthage were Semites of Phoenician descent, mostly Tyrian. So they were not "African African" and there's no real debate about that. Probably black hair and dark eyes, but skin ranging from off-white to a firm tan. The subject persons of Carthage were everything from Berber to Numidian to Libyan, so there you'd see everything from vaguely Arab colored to "African from Africa". Edit: it's debatable because one of the major groups in North African Antiquity were the Garamantines, who even today are fairly mysterious but can be linked to the modern day Tuaregs. Tuaregs span the spectrum from Arab-looking Berbers to black Africans. Since it's a good bet that actual ethnic Carthaginians were a minority in Carthaginian territory, it get complicated. Average height for a male around the Med is going to run 5'3" to about 5'5". Germans got up to 6'+ which is why the Romans were always mentioning how big they were. physeter fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jun 14, 2012 |
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Jun 13, 2012 22:13
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:From all I've read about the legions, they consisted of 4500-5500 soldiers on average. Does this include just combat soldiers or did it also include support, such as the baggage train (Did they have baggage trains?), cooks, surgeons, etc. Yes, they had baggage trains. Baggage trains in ancient warfare are really just cumbersomely mobile bases of operations. The ultimate target in an open field battle was your enemy's train. The ill-named Marian reforms actually had their greatest effect on the baggage train situation, though today armchair historians get excited about equipment. One of the interesting things about the Republican army was that legionaries were allowed to bring lots of stuff with them. As a gentleman farmer, there was nothing stopping you from going off to war with your own wagon and a slave to rub your feet and scrub your armor. So their baggage trains were horrific. Marius' "mules" (what they apparently called themselves) reduced that to a more manageable level, with the men now carrying much of what they'd need for a few days at minimum. Today, modern infantrymen still follow this concept. But even post-Marius legions had massive baggage trains which operated as their base of support. The commanders' tents, siege bits that had to be pre-manufactured, tools, anvils, etc etc. The 4500-5500 includes everyone under the colors. Surgeons, cooks, carpenters, smiths, etc. Most of those will also be on the fighting line. The non-legionaries in the train would have included merchants, slave traders, scavengers, harlots and the usual riffraff of camp followers.
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Jun 18, 2012 14:57
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Grand Fromage I've spent the last week looking for something and can't find it. About ten years ago I read a translation of Pompeiian (?) scroll that alleged to be the "resume" of a centurion gunning for a primus pilus spot. Have you ever heard of it?
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Jun 19, 2012 03:08
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DarkCrawler posted:So Rome and Carthage. Had Carthage won the Punic Wars, would it have been in the position for similar expansion as Rome or did they lack some of the means, features and motivations of the Roman society that wouldn't drive them that much? Based on the scant information we have, they had a very similar political system to that of Rome with one notable difference: Carthaginian "senators" ascended through pure wealth rather than land ownership. It appears to be have been a primarily mercantile state as opposed to agrarian. While the Romans themselves became focused on trade, their largest expansion was done as (or as a result of being) an agrarian society. Also, Carthaginian soldiers were mostly mercenaries. There doesn't appear to have been a respectable Carthaginian levy, though some people theorize that the citizen-soldiers went into the navy instead. Didn't do them much good in the end. Rome gets alot of mileage over the centuries just on espirit de corps...Romans kind of invent the modern concept of an army, from medals to latrine duty. Carthage has no conception of this really, their armies appear to have been wealthy adventurers and mercs. I always think of conquistadors. Of course we could be wrong, in truth no one can even describe the relationship between the Barca clan and the Carthaginian "senate" because we have no idea. So without a strong army, or the food to grow more of them, probably not ever going to go beyond a wealthy Phoenician maritime empire.
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Jun 19, 2012 13:24
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Social status between the pleb/equites/senatorial orders was elevated or de-elevated by the censors, which were special appointments that occurred every decade or so. Technically very prestigious and above even the consuls, but in reality just auditors to make sure everyone was properly classified. If you had sufficient land/cash flow to qualify as an equites or senator, you had to wait for a censorship to get promoted. If a censor came around and you were under the necessary qualifications, you'd be demoted (or bribe your way through). Regarding surviving patrician families, it becomes impossible to know once you get too far into the Principate. Nearly every patrician gens had plebian lines that shared the name, plus naming customs relaxed quite a bit. To give you an idea of the watering down process, anyone you know today named Claude/Claudia, Fabio/Fabia, Julio/Julian/Julia, Amelia, or Sergio would have raised eyebrows as possibly being true blood patricians in the Republic. Today they're just random names given to babies, often on the other side of the planet.
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Jun 20, 2012 15:22
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To Chi Ka posted:I was wondering about the ecological transformation of North Africa. From what I've read, the region was a lot greener than it used to be, to the point where North Africa was considered the bread basket of the Empire because of the amount of wheat it produced. The Romans did pursue a lot of irrigation projects in the region. But who was responsible for the desertification of the region? The source I read blamed the Muslim invasions for destroying all of the infrastructure the Romans built up, which led to the region drying out. Another source I read said that the Romans used up too much water. Could this have been attributed more to changes in global climate as opposed to human action? The exact extent of irrigation projects remains debatable, whether they were Carthaginian, Roman or built by the native Numidians/Gaetuli/Garamantes. At least several Garamantine towns have been discovered in the middle of the desert, fed entirely by irrigation. It may have been a net producer of crops. I've heard there are Byzantine records of buying wheat from the Garamantines. Also, Lake Triton (now an all but vanished salt lake in southern Tunisia) may have been freshwater, and possibly artificial. It was not small. But the fact that these people were building irrigation to tap the aquifers suggests that the area was not that green when they found it, and if it ever was, they likely made it so. Or preserved a bit of green before changing climate turned it all to desert. I have to qualify all this with maybe because this is pretty much the frontier of classical archeaology.
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Jun 20, 2012 15:46
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The real treasure in the Sahara is likely to be on the West Coast of Africa, we know the Carthaginians probably had some outposts there. Assuming they weren't literally blown into the Atlantic Ocean, they could still be there and very well preserved. Fun fact: "gorilla" is the only Carthaginian word that survives to modern usage in English.
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Jun 21, 2012 16:52
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm not versed on this really, they probably did. I know the first record of marijuana is in Herodotus, he mentions that the... Scythians or Sarmatians, whichever was around then, as part of their mourning ceremony. 
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Jun 22, 2012 13:00
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Like the Spartans, Romans preferred their frontliners to be alot older than the 18-25 demographic we use today. A guy wasn't useful before 25, dependable before 30, and was about perfect in his late 30s to early 40s. Where perfect is defined as hard as a rock, meaner than a sack of wolverines and has survived exposure to most pathogens and minor injuries. A fresh green legion of 5000 guys going up against a 15+ year veteran legion with only 3500 men would still be in very deep poo poo. None of them were really NFL material though.
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Jun 22, 2012 17:10
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Amused to Death posted:Media question, is the HBO Rome series worth watching? I've only ever seen small clips like the above, and while usually quite good isn't an indication of an entire show. I need a new series to pick up. Also, the battle in Gladiator is like the worst. Their line disintegrates immediately, "Maximus" charges his cavalry directly into a forest and there's like zero reason to even advance the infantry in the first place since the Roman archers/artillery are pounding the poo poo out of the Germans anyway. But this is Ridley Scott, who in Robin Hood made Maximus charge down the highly defensible cliffs of Dover to attack the enemy in the sand.
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Jun 25, 2012 14:34
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euphronius posted:Why would you land an invasion force under the cliffs of Dover. (I didn't see the movie.)
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Jun 25, 2012 14:54
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Tewdrig posted:What was patronage? It was the element that gave Rome its cohesion, without which a full understanding of their society is impossible. The answer to some unexplained social phenomena, like how could the Romans have so many laws and no real prisons, or how could thousands of recently freed slaves enter society every year and not break things, is usually "the patronage system". It's also very rarely mentioned in movies/tv so most "Rome buffs" don't even know it existed. To its credit, the HBO show features it a number of times (Atia's levy, Vorenus' levy, Niobe giving money to the women visiting her socially), but unless the viewer knows what it is, it will just slip past. I've been thinking of doing a write up but since it's such a central question I'll defer to Grand Fromage. physeter fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 17:35
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Amused to Death posted:Alright so I've been watching the first two episodes of Rome this morning, and someone with more toga etiquette please explain why Cato is the only one constantly wearing the dark purple toga. Is it a subtle reference to this from wikipedia, Cato protesting the Republic being in danger? Cato the Younger idolized his deceased ancestor, Cato the Elder. So he liked to dress like him as well, which meant wearing a very old fashioned manner of dress. It would be like the great-great-great-grandson of George Washington running for President while always wearing a tri-cornered hat and powdered wig in public. Yes, he really was that annoying. Edit: overall darker coarser cloth was worn by commoners and Cato the Elder was a notoriously cheap dick who was constantly extolling the virtues of parsimony, so he wore cheap clothes. But Mark Antony's dwarf messenger slave being dressed up the same way, and then named "Cato", made Season 1 for me. "Off with you now, Cato." physeter fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 18:28
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Vigilance posted:How did Romans enforce their laws? Was there a specific division of soldiers kept around in cities/towns for this purpose? Did they just use the Legions? Or was there a separate entity that served as a police force? Anyway, for a Great Man like Pompey, he probably couldn't tell you even a small fraction of the names of any of his tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of clients throughout Italy and beyond. Forget about the clients of his clients. But he has a staff of slaves and freedmen whose job it is to handle his clientela, and if you mess with them, they might decide to mess with you. Chase you down, haul you before the court, or just kill you if you're not dangerous/important enough. It's a massive social network that snakes through just about everything, and plugs alot of holes that would otherwise have made their society unmanageable. Tewdrig posted:Would a young guy with ambition go negotiate with an old, rich man to become a client, or were these family ties?
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Jun 26, 2012 13:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Burials depends on the era. Classical Rome was mostly cremation, so a family tomb would have urns with ashes and statues/inscriptions. Later when full body burial became more popular we get ridiculously intricate coffins. Fun fact: the Cornelii always buried their dead, as far back as anyone could remember. They were the only patricians that did this.
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Jun 27, 2012 12:55
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The serial killer thing is one of those aspects that can bring to light the fact that no matter how familiar the Romans might seem to be to us, they will always be alien. They lived in a time when unwanted babies were left exposed and likely eaten by dogs, and in a place that was literally surrounded with bandits, cannibals, human sacrificers and guys who were quite proud of their skull collection. poo poo like dead hookers just wasn't going to rate very high on the cultural alarm scale. I'm sure they would be noticed and perhaps something done, but weren't likely to create such a sensation that mention of them would survive the centuries. Antiquity looks nice seen through the prism of public baths and sparkly legions, but in reality it was closer to post-apocalyptic Somalia than it ever was to modern Western society.
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Jun 27, 2012 20:21
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 09:51 |
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Don't forget bathing. A man of leisure might go the baths 1-2 times per day. Roman baths were complex multi-hour affairs so if you had half a day off you were going to spend some time there.
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Jun 29, 2012 16:32
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