Quote from: S'mon;1082177I guess that explains why the Roman Empire was such a disastrous failure - their system just didn't work in foreign lands. :rolleyes:

All you're saying is that the Roman system didn't work for people who didn't have the Roman system. It's a complete tautology. The Roman genius was precisely in turning conquered peoples into loyal subjects and allies. And that certainly includes the peoples of Italy early on, just as much as Germans or Levantines later.

Rome didn't 'just happen' to have more resources than Pyrrhus or Hannibal. They had a fully developed cultural-economic-logistical-military system that could put huge armies in the field - repeatedly.  For a lot of the period the size of the Italian population wasn't even anything special compared to eg Greece, or North Africa - which was very different back then and much more fertile.

No, I'm saying the Romans started out with a benign neighbourhood in which their system could work relatively well - something that wasn't easily repeated outside of Italy. Look what happened to three Roman legions in Germania, or all the Roman and Italian traders in Greece when Mithridates came calling.

When they expanded into Italy, they were moving into an already-prosperous and culturally similar region with a pre-existing large population not automatically disposed to be hostile to them. Contrast that with the Persians, invaders from the steppe who took over pre-existing and ancient kingdoms like Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt, and did little more than install a new elite onto the top of their societies. You need look no further than the performance of their huge, but piecemeal armies and navies during the Greco-Persian Wars to see how that went. In some of the major naval conflicts, various national contingents failed to support each other or even fought amongst themselves.

The Seleukids and Ptolemaioi imitated that same pattern of administration, with the only addendum being that they also took pains to settle Greeks/Makedonians in colonies to provide the backbone of their armies, because they couldn't trust their native subjects. Which no doubt added to the resentment the non-Hellenes felt, since they were locked out of the top jobs. The one time the Ptolemaioi attempted to enlist the natives, training phalanxes of the Machimoi class for the Battle of Raphia, triggered a half-century of revolt in the Thebaid.

Makedonia had a similar issue with their conquest of Greece, they were regarded as barbarous barely-Greeks by the southerners, and their imposition was resented. They could only hold Greece by imposing garrisons on the various conquered cities, and they dealt with regular uprisings as the Greeks tried to throw off their yoke.

Italy's population was huge compared to Greece. The biggest Greek city wasn't even in Greece, but in Sicily, and there were more Greeks in Magna Graecia (ie Sicily and southern Italy) than in Hellas proper, with cities like Taras, Sybaris, Neapolis, Elis and many others being significant. That was one of the many reasons behind the colonisation efforts of Greeks, because their homeland was unable to support a population of any great size. North Africa was only fertile in the coastal plain, and once again the pattern of administration was just like that of the Persians - a Punic (or Punicised) elite over the top of a much larger and subordinate mass of natives.

That large starting base of Italy gave the Romans plenty of people to send out on colonisation efforts as they expanded - not just soldiers but traders as well. That why there were thousands of them in Greece for to be murdered at the instigation of the Pontic king.

You still haven't explained why the Romans were able to turn conquered subjects into Roman soldiers (auxiliary & legionary) all over their empire, when Persians could only raise local levies, and Seleukids had to rely on imported Greeks.

Why couldn't Greeks in Italy turn conquered Latins into hoplites? The vast cultural differences?

To me it's clear that Roman culture itself - the attractive force of the culture, and its assimilatory power - was a key component of their success. Again, a lot like the Americans in recent times.

Quote from: S'mon;1082574You still haven't explained why the Romans were able to turn conquered subjects into Roman soldiers (auxiliary & legionary) all over their empire, when Persians could only raise local levies, and Seleukids had to rely on imported Greeks.

Why couldn't Greeks in Italy turn conquered Latins into hoplites? The vast cultural differences?

To me it's clear that Roman culture itself - the attractive force of the culture, and its assimilatory power - was a key component of their success. Again, a lot like the Americans in recent times.

Benefit of having more dudes again.

The first stage of Roman assimilation was the client kingdom - someone friendly to Rome in charge providing their own security on the understanding that if Rome needed help in the region, they'd send their armies. In this stage, though, they'd also have to allow Roman and Italian traders into their markets, often with preferential treatment. The Romans could send these men in their thousands to lots of places, because they had people to spare at home.

As they were brought closer into the orbit and turned into a province, legions would be stationed there (again if you have hundreds of thousands of men available, you can spare them to lots of places) and the locals required to serve as auxiliaries. Retiring legionaries would also be planted in colonies, in the hopes their sons would serve in the legions later on. Again unless you have a very large starting base, you haven't got the people to do this on the scale that the Romans did. Right there and then, you have tens of thousands of your soldiers in the province, reinforcing your remit. Most other kingdoms didn't have the men to mobilise on that scale in the first place (except the local levies, which wouldn't have tolerated being shipped off elsewhere).

This is my point, the Romans had so large a starting population base that they could go into colonisation on a scale those other kingdoms couldn't. The Seleukids and Ptolemaioi never had enough Makedonians or Greeks to settle them in the volumes the Romans did, not least because they didn't control the source of them. Further east, many of the "Greek" settlers were Hellenised Anatolian and Iranian natives.

The Persians didn't even bother. As long as Persians were in charge, they didn't seem to care what their armies were made up of. Unsurprisingly, various nations had little real allegiance to them, though, which is why their empire folded so quickly.

I definitely agree that exporting Romans and Romanised was a major factor. However I'm not seeing how Roman colonies were fundamentally different from Greek colonies. You are right that Greece always had a problem of too many people, and so exported lots of people. This diaspora never had the same results though, because it was not part of an integrated social-economic-military system.

Quote from: S'mon;1082579I definitely agree that exporting Romans and Romanised was a major factor. However I'm not seeing how Roman colonies were fundamentally different from Greek colonies. You are right that Greece always had a problem of too many people, and so exported lots of people. This diaspora never had the same results though, because it was not part of an integrated social-economic-military system.

There were more Roman colonies in many more places - quantity is it's own quality after all. What's fundamentally different is that it was on an entirely different scale. Excess population bled off from Greece was nothing like the sheer volume of surplus coming from Italy - which even retained a huge urban poor population in Rome while exporting Italians.

Again, the Roman system relied on scale, on having lots of Romans and Italians available to fill all those provincial posts, whether as legionaries, traders or tax-farmers.

Quote from: S'mon;1082579I definitely agree that exporting Romans and Romanised was a major factor. However I'm not seeing how Roman colonies were fundamentally different from Greek colonies. You are right that Greece always had a problem of too many people, and so exported lots of people. This diaspora never had the same results though, because it was not part of an integrated social-economic-military system.

Historically, Greek colonies were independent from their mother city. They weren't intended to be dependents due to the classical Greek view of a polis as an independent, city-state. Roman colonies were never intended to be independent states. They were part of Rome.

Quote from: S'mon;1082574You still haven't explained why the Romans were able to turn conquered subjects into Roman soldiers (auxiliary & legionary) all over their empire, when Persians could only raise local levies, and Seleukids had to rely on imported Greeks.

It was a route to citizenship and some respect. The Roman army was basically like the French Foreign Legion. Armies making everyone more or less the same and having a sense of duty to a wider group is something they've a lot of practice at. From there to assimilating conquered peoples is just language lessons, really.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1082645It was a route to citizenship and some respect. The Roman army was basically like the French Foreign Legion.

That's how the Auxiliaries worked - 25 years Service guarantees Citizenship!
Legionaries had to be Citizens to join. But the army was typically around 50% Auxiliary so you're not really wrong.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1082645It was a route to citizenship and some respect. The Roman army was basically like the French Foreign Legion. Armies making everyone more or less the same and having a sense of duty to a wider group is something they've a lot of practice at. From there to assimilating conquered peoples is just language lessons, really.

On citizenship, Greeks jealously guarded theirs. They didn't give it away as freely as the Romans did, and citizenship was on an individual polis basis. Being an Athenian citizen gave you no rights in Korinthos. There was no pan-Greek status all could appeal to, the way Roman citizenship was universal.

Quote from: Kiero;1082657On citizenship, Greeks jealously guarded theirs. They didn't give it away as freely as the Romans did, and citizenship was on an individual polis basis. Being an Athenian citizen gave you no rights in Korinthos. There was no pan-Greek status all could appeal to, the way Roman citizenship was universal.

This is the kind of cultural factor I've been talking about. Roman Citizenship as a viable aspirational goal for imperial subjects was a powerful tool for creating loyal cadres in conquered/annexed territory.

No-citizenship ('you' can never be 'us') or universal citizenship (cheap, so held in contempt) don't work nearly as well for empire-building IMO. Looking at the recent European empires, neither British no-citizenship nor French universal-citizenship worked well at building loyalty.

Quote from: S'mon;1082659This is the kind of cultural factor I've been talking about. Roman Citizenship as a viable aspirational goal for imperial subjects was a powerful tool for creating loyal cadres in conquered/annexed territory.

No-citizenship ('you' can never be 'us') or universal citizenship (cheap, so held in contempt) don't work nearly as well for empire-building IMO. Looking at the recent European empires, neither British no-citizenship nor French universal-citizenship worked well at building loyalty.

This. I would add that there were two additional important parts of Roman Culture that enabled them to expand. The first was the slave trade. Cheap labor from the conquered lands. This enabled the Roman Government to provide a standard of living for citizens that the individual City-States of Greece were never able to match. Yes, Greek City-States had slaves, but the Romans had slaves for all of Rome, and could leverage that to great effect. Bread and Circuses held the Roman Empire together for four hundred years after it should have collapsed in 117 a.d. When I mention bread, it was an official policy that during the last decades of the Roman Republic and continuing into the Roman dictatorship, the Roman government provided welfare in the form of wheat and other grains to people.

The dictators, starting with Julius Caesar, provided frumentariae (grain) partly to be popular with the poor. Subsequent dictators tried to limit or end the grain give away, but couldn't because of political pressure. The government got the grain by forcing provinces to pay tribute with grain.

After several generations, the Roman people got accustomed to getting their free grain. Events occurred in the Roman Empire more slowly than today because travel and communication was much slower then. Eventually Romans refused to fight to defend the empire when they could stay home and get free food.


The other thing was trade.

Hadrian's Wall, and the Limes were built to keep out British and Germanic Raiders respectively, however the walls had a double purpose... in peacetime (and that was the majority of the time actually, as raids and wars were actually very rare), they were used to control trade. Rome taxed guests entering Roman territories who wanted to trade, and they built great roads right up to the walls so Roman traders could speedily travel right up to the Wall and conduct business. The German Beekeeper could bring his honeycombs to the gate on the Limes and pass through after paying tax or tribute to the Roman Army, and proving he was not carrying weapons to attack Romans with. He would then trade the honeycomb for exotic roman glassware, silverware, utensils, pots, pans, dishes, artworks, and tools which he would then bring back into Germany and then trade again earning much more than the honeycomb would have earned him if he had sold it directly in Germany. This created a division in the German population where part of the Germans simply wanted to do business with the Romans, and others wanted to make war on the Romans. The business usually won out, as wars were very expensive, and the Germans only undertook the path to war on a national level after egregious offenses, or raids conducted by the Roman Army, into German territory.

With the business part, came law and justice, and that was Rome's commitment to provide opportunities for equitable trades, which occurred within the captured provinces, as well as on the frontier.

To provide a modern example which is easily relatable, just think of what just about any woman would say to you, if you told her she couldn't have her cell phone. You know what she would tell you. Same thing centuries ago in Germany and Britannia, only it was the bling, the jewelry, and the exotic glassware. German women inherently understood that fine finished Roman products and goods they acquired didn't come from a society that valued war, but from a society that valued trade. Plus, if there were a business agreement gone bad, in Germany it was mostly settled with a fight, ...with the victor getting to choose how the agreement would go. The Romans actually had a sophisticated legal system...

Roman legal procedure, long evolving system used in the Roman courts, which in its later stages formed the basis for modern procedure in civil-law countries. There were three main, overlapping stages of development: the legis actiones, which dates from the 5th-century bce, law code known as the Twelve Tables until the late 2nd century; the formulary system, from the 2nd century bce until the end of the Classical period (3rd century ce); and the cognitio extraordinaria, in operation during the post-Classical period.

The procedure under the legis actiones was divided into several steps. First, the plaintiff approached the defendant in public and called for him to come to court. If he refused, he could be taken there by force. The trial itself was divided into two parts. The first was a preliminary hearing held before a magistrate who decided whether there was an issue to be contested and, if so, what it was. Each step in this procedure was extremely formal. If the wrong words were used by either party, that party might lose the case. After the issues were delineated and sureties set, both parties agreed upon a judex, who was neither a lawyer nor a magistrate but a prominent layman, to try the case. The proceedings before the judex were more informal: advocates spoke and gave evidence, and witnesses often appeared. The judex made a decision but had no power to execute it. If the defendant refused to pay the fine or make restitution within a certain period of time, he could be brought by force to the magistrate. Then his property could be seized, or he could be made slave to the plaintiff to work off the debt or property claim.

During the later republic, as cases became more complex, it became necessary to write down the issues that had to be presented to the judex, thus leading to the formulary system, under which the defendant was still summoned by the plaintiff to appear in court; there were still two parts to the trial, but the magistrate had greater power to determine whether the case would go to the judex.

Under the cognitio extraordinaria much greater power was placed in the hands of the magistrate and the courts. The summons was issued by the court, the trial was held exclusively before the magistrate, and the court became responsible for the execution of the sentence. Further, there developed a system of appeal. Thus, the state became involved in the administration of justice and the enforcement of its rules of law. Modern European states as well as the United States, Canada, and Australia have adopted the basic framework of the Roman legal system, and still use it today.

In Germany, Your case was heard by a council of elders that may, or may not be predisposed to decide a case in your favor based on your affiliation with the chief, tribe, or clan that was hearing the case. Rome on the other hand appointed magistrates and judex from Rome that were assigned to the conquered provinces to hear cases and provide judgements. This was why the Romans continued to build Fora, or Forums, where people could meet, because this process was open and people for the most part were allowed to witness or watch trials, so that they could see justice as it was dispensed. This was a great strength of the Roman Republic and Empire, as common people could have their grievances addressed and adjudicated instead of simply fighting, although many magistrates and judex's allowed a trial by combat if both parties agreed that was the best way to solve a dispute, and agreed to be bound by the results. The impersonal nature of the National Roman Judicial system was seen as an advantage over corrupt individuals, tribes and clans.

The fora where cases were heard evolved... Your forums where the Romans conducted legal matters became Basilica, and the churches of the Holy Roman Empire took over adjudicating and legal matters as the civil portions of the Roman Empire collapsed. This was on the orders of emperor Constantine. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Although he lived much of his life as a pagan, and later as a catechumen, he joined the Christian faith on his deathbed, being baptised by Eusebius of Nicomedia. He played an influential role in the proclamation of the Edict of Milan in 313, which declared religious tolerance for Christianity in the Roman empire. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325, which produced the statement of Christian belief known as the Nicene Creed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built on his orders at the purported site of Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and became the holiest place in Christendom. The Papal claim to temporal power in the High Middle Ages was based on the forged Donation of Constantine. He has historically been referred to as the "First Christian Emperor", and he did heavily promote the Christian Church.

Quote from: Kiero;1082657On citizenship, Greeks jealously guarded theirs. They didn't give it away as freely as the Romans did, and citizenship was on an individual polis basis. Being an Athenian citizen gave you no rights in Korinthos. There was no pan-Greek status all could appeal to, the way Roman citizenship was universal.

That dependent on the time period. In the early and middle Republic, Rome was just as exclusive as any Greek polis.

What happened is Rome was the most successful of the Italian city states and powers. The changes to the conception of citizenship were a result of the republic winning for itself an empire and the pressures that led to the civil wars of the late republic.

Rome were not successful at winning an empire because they made people into citizens, their subjects (and allies) wanted to be Romans because they were so successful on their own.

And prior to the reforms of Gaius Marius, the Roman military was only open to those who could afford their own arms. The growing citizen underclass of Rome itself was shut out until a series of disastrous  campaign wiped out the landed manpower pool in the last decade of the 2nd century BC.

Gaius Marius dealt with the crisis by allowing unlanded citizens to recruited and equipped at the state's expense. But due to the budget austerity ways of Rome's government this often meant that the general was one responsible for equipping the troops. This was further was compounded by the government of Rome repeatably reneging on distributing land to veterans, which again meant the generals took the lead to make sure their troop had land.

Which lead in the early decades of the 1st century to the troops being more loyal to the generals than to Rome itself. Setting the stage for the civil wars of the late republic.

And one of the factions of the civil war continually pushed for land reform and enfranchisement of Rome's oldest allies. And part of this was the Social War

Afterwards the use of Roman citizenship to cement the empire started to become more and more frequent until Octavian (Augustus) triumphed when it became one of the tools his successor used to bind the empire together. Largely as are result of Octavian being part of Julius Caesars faction who were descended in part from those who wanted land reform and expansion of the citizenship.

As for why Rome won an empire in the first place by 100 BC, they were lucky, smart, ruthless, had enough numbers, had a system of government that had more people invested in it than the usual for the ancient world, and were masters of organization.

My impression of the beginning of Rome is that they were a bunch of outcast and scroungers living on hilltops amid the swamps surrounding the Tiber. That because they happened to be sitting on a strategic crossing dividing the Etruscan to the north from the Greeks in the south, they started to prosper. And the early kings of Rome were Etruscans sent down to impose order on these unruly folks and keep trade going.

But didn't take, the kings were overthrown and republic was born. Rome survived through organization and ruthlessness. Not bloody minded ruthlessness (although there was some that) but just by being more stubborn and determined then their neighbors until they got their way.

My point is that Rome won it's first "empire" without ever leaving Italy. Unifying the peninsular provided them with the template for doing that elsewhere, but more importantly the raw resource in personnel to expand across the Mediterranean.

Quote from: Kiero;1082171You keep puffing up the Romans and claiming it was their wonderful system, while ignoring all the examples I've raised that show it was ancillary to the resources they had at their disposal. For someone sneering at my "education" in ancient history, you've produced nothing more than soundbites and homilies, generalisations which don't show a great deal of depth in the topic.

The Roman system wouldn't have worked for the Makedonians or Seleukids or Carthaginians or Ptolemaioi or any of the other major powers of their age. Because theirs was a population comprising a tiny elite with their own invented/imported class of settler-soldiers (leveraged with the addition of lots of mercenaries), imposed over the top of a large mass of foreign subjects with little genuine allegiance to them.

To attempt to bridge the "argument gap":

The Romans had access to an enormous homogeneous population that their rivals didn't have. They also built an amazing logistical-and-operations system that their rivals didn't have. The former was necessary, but not sufficient, for the latter.

Consider Argentina versus the United States. At the turn of the 19th century to the 20th, the two countries were among the richest in the world. But one nation leveraged its advantages successfully, and the other squandered them. Likewise, one could say "the reason Bosnia didn't develop US industrial capacity is that it didn't have the population and natural resources to do so". But that doesn't explain the countries that did have the population and natural resources and didn't take advantage of them.

Or consider the Soviet Union in 1939-1945. It had the manpower to absorb 30 million casualties because it had 100 million people. But France surrendered long before it had lost 30% of its population. What made the Romans unstoppable was that they had both the strength and the will to use it. Riddle of Steel and all that.

Demographics is destiny but system is free will!