Queen hatsepsut
Clubman
posted 08-03-00 03:24 PM
ET (US)
1 / 32
I'd say... um... 'cuse me, but i don't know that much about the history of rome.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-03-00 03:30 PM
ET (US)
2 / 32
My theory is that their history has two parts: the build-up and the downfall. The build-up was when they waged wars while there was a good chance of getting better out of that: forcing defeated enemies to pay tribute, taking plunder and booty and so on. That ended about the end of the first century. After that, all chances of profiting by war were gone. Imagine Scotland. Whisky not yet being discovered, what gain could the Romans expect to get from conquering it?
But they still had to pay that huge army.
MAN_OF_WAR_1
Clubman
posted 08-03-00 09:30 PM
ET (US)
3 / 32
i know alot abou thte roman hisyory and the fact is the roman impire didnt fall when rome fell.. it lasted another thousand years as the byzatine empire...and even then they conquered the lands... most likely we wouldnt be slaves...the only slaves in the roman empire were captured soldiers and rioters that would not alow themselves to become romans...any crime was delt with fast by either killing them or sending them to the lion fights...the main reason rome fell is becuase after so many genertations of emperors the started to become corupt..many were killed by there own men...i dont really understand how the empire went into the hands of such mad men
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-04-00 03:27 AM
ET (US)
5 / 32
man_of_war1:
Better brush up your knowledge on slavery. Actually, I was simplifying things a bit. In the late roman empire, most people were not actually slaves but no one would see the difference. Practically all the land was in the hands of a few extremely rich men and the vast majority of the people were forced to work there as farmhands with hardly any freedom for themselves.
HonoredMule:
If you want to discuss the Romans, then why don't you just do that? Anyway, comparing Rome with the US and Canada (by the way: what is wrong with Canada?) is a bit dangerous.
Anyway (2), most empires fall sooner or later, but they fall inevitably.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-04-00 04:59 PM
ET (US)
7 / 32
HonoredMule:
I'm sure I don't understand what you are talking about, well, not entirely.
The roman citizens followed their leaders, okay. The point is, about the beginning of the principate (with Augustus) about the whole population of the empire had Roman citizenship. Even St. Paul, a Jew, could claim it. At the end of the first century you get the tendency of the armies pushing their generals to become emperor - for instance what's his name in 68, with son Titus who besieged Jerusalem (problaby the last war that really paid, just think of the hoard of gold in the Temple). So: who were the 'united citizens', anyway?
Byzantines: the German emperor called himself emperor of the Holy Roman Empire till about 1800, even longer than the Byzantines lasted.
I'll have to sort out this business too, it's getting a bit involved.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-05-00 05:53 AM
ET (US)
10 / 32
HonoredMule:
Hm, these graet men you mentioned before, are you sure they didn't destroy Rome in a way? Marius, Caesar, Pompey, and the others were honorable men I dare say, but weren't they more loyal to themselves than to Rome? And what was Rome, anyway? We got to discuss that too if we want to get anywhere at all.
Citizenship didn't mean very much after the end of the republic. You couldn't vote anymore, to mention something. It offered some protection, okay. did you know of the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Trajan?
Pliny asked if it was all right to persecute people who had been anonimously accused of being christians. Trajan replied they would earn the eternal comtempt of later generations if they consiered anonimous accusations. Nevertheless, he thought - it's about time that awful spelling gets simplified - that christians who were not ready to offer sacrifice to the emperor deserved death, if only for stubbornness. Just think of that.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-05-00 09:40 AM
ET (US)
12 / 32
HonoredMule:
I'm sure there's a connection. But what?
On the other hand, if you think of Alexander and the Sumerian empires, you'll wonder that if something is kept together only by one man or a few men, then what is it really? Was Alexander's empire an entity at all if it perished with him? Was the roman empire only the chimera of some visionary men with good military and administrative capabilities who could keep it going while they were around, or was it something with a life of itself?
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-05-00 02:52 PM
ET (US)
13 / 32
HonoredMule:
The Romans used the client system to keep things together. Rich & influential men helped less fortunate people get by, and those people voted for them at elections. I believe Marius started the habit of granting his soldiers a plot of land in a colony to build a farm on when they left the army. Of course, this increased loyalty of the soldiers to their generals. Sometimes such an army would almost force their general to usurp the emperorship. The soldiers were perhaps not very interested in the empire, just like I mostly don't feel 'Dutch' and you have probably only a vague sense of being a Canadian (or am I insulting your national pride now?). Emperors, generals, consuls and other magistrates had other views about empires, of course.
The Phoenix:
Are you shocked by the callous behavior of those guards? Perhaps you are too idealistic about it?
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-05-00 06:22 PM
ET (US)
17 / 32
HonoredMule:
Rome was not exactly a democracy, to put it mildly. It never was. Th senate was very powerful. There were elections, that's true, but not everyone could be elected, again: to put it mildly.
The Roman farmers turning into farmers: yea, I knew that. Actually, one of the reasons the Republic failed was that the ever longer campaigns into Spain and so on ruined the soldiers, who till then had fought wars in winter and tilled the land in the summer. The famous quote in the New Testament about the foxes having holes and the birds having nests but man not having a place to lay down his head actually was from Tiberius Gracchus, who said of these very same soldiers that "they were called the lords of the earth but they had not a clod of earth to call their own." It ruined the majority of the farmers who had to sell out.
So their only chance for a future was in the army.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-05-00 06:31 PM
ET (US)
18 / 32
HonoredMule:
I hadn't seen your last. Hm. I do believe I already pointed out what you are saying there; that after the conquest of Jerusalem, they didn't wage any war with a profit, reread (3) if you want. Britain wasn't exactly too strong, conquering simply wasn't worthwhile. It had nothing to offer.
Raising taxes from the populace got invreasingly difficult too, because said populace got poorer and poorer. And you can't pick feathers from a frog, as we say in Holland.
But they did get into trouble with the parthians, the Germanic tribes and they had to keep their army on order, all costing much money and effort without getting a real return.
They didn't go in for innovation because of the predominance of slave labor. If you have slaves, you are not interested in technology research.
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-06-00 03:10 AM
ET (US)
20 / 32
HonoredMule:
I dare say it does. But if a Mr. Gibbon could still write a thick volume on the subject, then we could do better than come up with a summary of two pages, couldn't we?
peter
HG Alumnus
posted 08-07-00 08:44 AM
ET (US)
25 / 32
The Phoenix:
You actually tried Gibbon? I never took the trouble. Writers in that age were rather longwinded. I did read some books on the subject, though. I only meant that if some folks can write hundreds or more of pages about it, we can write more than a miserable two.
You might try Rostovtzeff, if I got the spelling right. He compared the Roman Empire at c. 200 with Russia at the time of the revolution. This was not applauded by other historians, but apart from that he seems to be all right.