7 ms·

Shocks to military support and subsequent assassinations in Ancient Rome

75 points by diodorus 8y ago

zhdc1 8y ago
People seem to forget that the final collapse of the Han Dynasty, the collapse of the Parthian (Iranian) Empire, and the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman Empire all happened within a fifteen year period (220-235CE). Although the Han Dynasty started coming undone in the 180s, there was a cooling period in East Asia and North East Europe that started around 200CE and lasted for most of the century. It isn't difficult to imagine a macro linkage between cooling -> agricultural output -> instability that was exacerbated by a similar reduction in Eurasian trade due to the global transition of power (in 200CE, the land route for the Silk Road was effectively controlled by four powers - the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Kushan Empire, and the Han Dynasty... this fragmented dramatically, particularly in East and Central Asia, by the end of the century).
- wonderbear 8y ago
  It's so easy with all the stories of "discovering" around the 1300s/1400s to not realize that earlier cultures were actually interconnected and had appreciable impact on each other.
  - zhdc1 8y ago
    It's also interesting once you realize that parts of the early modern era were shaped by the efforts of various European kingdoms to reestablish trading routes that were lost after the breakup of the Mongol Empire and, later on, the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    True, but remember that Rome and China could trade without any Roman and Chinese person ever meeting. My understanding of the Silk Road is that the cargo got reloaded many times and each individual leg was relatively short, at least in relation to the whole distance.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Makes a guy wonder what kind of world we have before us...
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  One could argue that the Roman Empire also started coming undone in the 180s.
orf 8y ago
If anyone here is interested in this kind of thing then I highly, highly recommend "The history of Rome" podcast by Mike Duncan[1]. It's a fantastic look at the history of Rome, from before the republic to the fall of the western empire. I haven't read the paper, in the 100s-200s there was a vicious cycle where the Emperor would keep his armies close for fear of a mutiny and because that is how his legitimacy was based. This would weaken the defenses of the empire, somewhere else some general would win a victory due to an attack on the weakened empire and his troops would declare him Emperor. Civil war ensued, rinse and repeat. If I remember correctly Constantine saw an amazingly clever way out of this by basing the legitimacy of the emperor not on the army, but on divine right, so it's not the armies who declare an emperor but God. This set the stage for all that followed in Europe. The Romans where freaking crazy. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > If I remember correctly Constantine saw an amazingly clever way out of this by basing the legitimacy of the emperor not on the army, but on divine right, so it's not the armies who declare an emperor but God. This set the stage for all that followed in Europe. This may have been innovative for Rome, which hated the idea of kings since before it started recording history, but it is totally normal everywhere else beginning many centuries before Rome. China, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia are all quite explicit about the ruler deriving authority from heaven. Constantine was the formal ruler of Egypt and controlled Mesopotamia; it seems vanishingly unlikely that he wasn't aware of this.
  - orf 8y ago
    Of course it was not a novel idea but the application of it to break a centuries long death spiral of civil war was pretty inspired. I didn't mean to imply he had the idea first! He also switched the entire persona of the Emperor from someone of the people to someone inaccessible to the common person. Again, not a unique idea, but the application came at a great time. From what I have read the Romans where pretty dismissive of so-called barbarians (anyone not within the Empire), so I'm sure some people where aware of these ideas but turned their noses up at them, so to speak.
dev_dull 8y ago
> These results suggest that an emperor relied on his military for support. The is obvious to even the laziest Roman history reader. The emperors knew this well, and bankrupted the state to shower donatives on troops. Now you know one of the reasons the army is forbidden from being deployed on US soil. The founders understood the risk of a military dynasty taking over.
- wcoenen 8y ago
  Wasn't the army involved in getting the LA riots under control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    I think the US national guard are deployed on the sourthern border now? https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1487387/national-guard-troops-deploy-to-southern-us-border/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1487387/nationa...
    - adventured 8y ago
      The US National Guard is not the same as the US Military as it's typically thought of. It's a state-based, part-time reserve force. The governor of a state typically orders the deployment of its national guard. For example, a state can (several have) refuse to deploy its guard forces to the border against the wishes of the US President. The guard is directly controlled in each state by the adjutant general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_adjutant_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_adjutant_general If the US Military attacked a state - let's say in a manner of unprovoked aggression of some terrible sort - it would be the responsibility of the the state's national guard to defend the state against the federal aggression. The US Government can attempt to federalize a state's guard forces for its own use, in this hypothetical conflict scenario it's hard to tell what the hell would happen (probably a mixed loyalty outcome, some would refuse, some would go with the Feds).
not_that_noob 8y ago
The parallel to the fall of the Soviet Union is interesting. The state slowly ran out of money, and couldn’t pay the military complex, including the army. The army’s loyalty to the leadership essentially disappeared, and then the empire fell. Also note that the militaries of Burma or Venezuela are always well provided for, even when the people are repressed or starving. I feel successful dictators have an instinctual grasp of this relationship.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  The most 'militarily industrialized' economies are Cuba, North Korea I'd imagine ... where the Army essentially and literally is the bureaucracy.
  - vkou 8y ago
    Finland and South Korea both have more, per capita, military then Cuba. Closely followed by Mongolia, Singapore, Armenia, Taiwan, and Israel. I think this has more to do with being within spitting distance of much larger, potentially belligerent neighbours.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      I don't see how your measure is useful at all in this reference. %GDP spending in those countries are small. In Cuba the military literally runs the economy. Many of the hotels you stay in are operated by the Army. Any of the remaining bits of 'free' economy are all dependent on the military state. This is not even remotely the case in any of the nations you listed.
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        "... In Cuba the military literally runs the economy. Many of the hotels you stay in are operated by the Army..." ??? This is just not true. The hotels are run by the party, usually in partnership with some European nation depending on which one you stay at. And believe you me, the Party ain't talking about "sharing" with ANYBODY. Army or No Army. Now of course this is in the process of changing. Naturally the constitutional reforms will give private citizens some ownership in business, but the Party will still essentially "own" 51% of everything. (And to be perfectly frank, my own bet is that the party isn't going to allow private ownership in the big hotels by anyone else anyway. They don't care if you're the Army, the people, or even the doctors.) Generals, are just as broke as everyone else in Cuba. Now... if you want to talk about where the money is... let's talk about the jinateras. (Sorry if that offends anyone, I'm just being real about what it's like in Cuba.)
idoubtit 8y ago
I've read the draft[^1] of the article, and I'm not convinced. The hypothesis is simple : less rain in Germania caused more Germanic raids on the Empire Empire, which caused political instability, which caused imperators' assassinations. When I look of some of these assassinations, I doubt the Germanic provinces had any impact on them. The Roman Senate got rid of Caligula for internal reasons. Claudius was (probably) poisoned to make place for Nero. The historical drought of 69-70 that Tacitus mentioned did not cause any assassination. The year of the 4 emperors was not following any kind of Germanic instability. Later on, many rebellions came from the East. In the later centuries, the eastern emperors had little to to with rain in western Europe. Reading the article, the correlation doesn't seem very strong. To my untrained eyes, it looks like the years 220-300 are the main factor of correlation. It was a period of drought Gaule and Germania, and political instability in Rome, but I'm not convinced of the causality. It's always seducing to discover a causal logic in historical events. Theories that can explain history have a high power of seduction, so I am even more cautious. [^1]: https://brocku.ca/repec/pdf/1703.pdf https://brocku.ca/repec/pdf/1703.pdf

75 points by diodorus 8y ago

People seem to forget that the final collapse of the Han Dynasty, the collapse of the Parthian (Iranian) Empire, and the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman Empire all happened within a fifteen year period (220-235CE). Although the Han Dynasty started coming undone in the 180s, there was a cooling period in East Asia and North East Europe that started around 200CE and lasted for most of the century. It isn't difficult to imagine a macro linkage between cooling -> agricultural output -> instability that was exacerbated by a similar reduction in Eurasian trade due to the global transition of power (in 200CE, the land route for the Silk Road was effectively controlled by four powers - the Roman Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Kushan Empire, and the Han Dynasty... this fragmented dramatically, particularly in East and Central Asia, by the end of the century).

wonderbear 8y ago
It's so easy with all the stories of "discovering" around the 1300s/1400s to not realize that earlier cultures were actually interconnected and had appreciable impact on each other.
- zhdc1 8y ago
  It's also interesting once you realize that parts of the early modern era were shaped by the efforts of various European kingdoms to reestablish trading routes that were lost after the breakup of the Mongol Empire and, later on, the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  True, but remember that Rome and China could trade without any Roman and Chinese person ever meeting. My understanding of the Silk Road is that the cargo got reloaded many times and each individual leg was relatively short, at least in relation to the whole distance.
digi_owl 8y ago
Makes a guy wonder what kind of world we have before us...
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
One could argue that the Roman Empire also started coming undone in the 180s.

orf 8y ago

If anyone here is interested in this kind of thing then I highly, highly recommend "The history of Rome" podcast by Mike Duncan[1]. It's a fantastic look at the history of Rome, from before the republic to the fall of the western empire. I haven't read the paper, in the 100s-200s there was a vicious cycle where the Emperor would keep his armies close for fear of a mutiny and because that is how his legitimacy was based. This would weaken the defenses of the empire, somewhere else some general would win a victory due to an attack on the weakened empire and his troops would declare him Emperor. Civil war ensued, rinse and repeat. If I remember correctly Constantine saw an amazingly clever way out of this by basing the legitimacy of the emperor not on the army, but on divine right, so it's not the armies who declare an emperor but God. This set the stage for all that followed in Europe. The Romans where freaking crazy. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast...

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> If I remember correctly Constantine saw an amazingly clever way out of this by basing the legitimacy of the emperor not on the army, but on divine right, so it's not the armies who declare an emperor but God. This set the stage for all that followed in Europe. This may have been innovative for Rome, which hated the idea of kings since before it started recording history, but it is totally normal everywhere else beginning many centuries before Rome. China, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia are all quite explicit about the ruler deriving authority from heaven. Constantine was the formal ruler of Egypt and controlled Mesopotamia; it seems vanishingly unlikely that he wasn't aware of this.
- orf 8y ago
  Of course it was not a novel idea but the application of it to break a centuries long death spiral of civil war was pretty inspired. I didn't mean to imply he had the idea first! He also switched the entire persona of the Emperor from someone of the people to someone inaccessible to the common person. Again, not a unique idea, but the application came at a great time. From what I have read the Romans where pretty dismissive of so-called barbarians (anyone not within the Empire), so I'm sure some people where aware of these ideas but turned their noses up at them, so to speak.

dev_dull 8y ago

> These results suggest that an emperor relied on his military for support. The is obvious to even the laziest Roman history reader. The emperors knew this well, and bankrupted the state to shower donatives on troops. Now you know one of the reasons the army is forbidden from being deployed on US soil. The founders understood the risk of a military dynasty taking over.

wcoenen 8y ago
Wasn't the army involved in getting the LA riots under control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
- lostlogin 8y ago
  I think the US national guard are deployed on the sourthern border now? https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1487387/national-guard-troops-deploy-to-southern-us-border/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1487387/nationa...
  - adventured 8y ago
    The US National Guard is not the same as the US Military as it's typically thought of. It's a state-based, part-time reserve force. The governor of a state typically orders the deployment of its national guard. For example, a state can (several have) refuse to deploy its guard forces to the border against the wishes of the US President. The guard is directly controlled in each state by the adjutant general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_adjutant_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_adjutant_general If the US Military attacked a state - let's say in a manner of unprovoked aggression of some terrible sort - it would be the responsibility of the the state's national guard to defend the state against the federal aggression. The US Government can attempt to federalize a state's guard forces for its own use, in this hypothetical conflict scenario it's hard to tell what the hell would happen (probably a mixed loyalty outcome, some would refuse, some would go with the Feds).

not_that_noob 8y ago

The parallel to the fall of the Soviet Union is interesting. The state slowly ran out of money, and couldn’t pay the military complex, including the army. The army’s loyalty to the leadership essentially disappeared, and then the empire fell. Also note that the militaries of Burma or Venezuela are always well provided for, even when the people are repressed or starving. I feel successful dictators have an instinctual grasp of this relationship.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
The most 'militarily industrialized' economies are Cuba, North Korea I'd imagine ... where the Army essentially and literally is the bureaucracy.
- vkou 8y ago
  Finland and South Korea both have more, per capita, military then Cuba. Closely followed by Mongolia, Singapore, Armenia, Taiwan, and Israel. I think this has more to do with being within spitting distance of much larger, potentially belligerent neighbours.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    I don't see how your measure is useful at all in this reference. %GDP spending in those countries are small. In Cuba the military literally runs the economy. Many of the hotels you stay in are operated by the Army. Any of the remaining bits of 'free' economy are all dependent on the military state. This is not even remotely the case in any of the nations you listed.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      "... In Cuba the military literally runs the economy. Many of the hotels you stay in are operated by the Army..." ??? This is just not true. The hotels are run by the party, usually in partnership with some European nation depending on which one you stay at. And believe you me, the Party ain't talking about "sharing" with ANYBODY. Army or No Army. Now of course this is in the process of changing. Naturally the constitutional reforms will give private citizens some ownership in business, but the Party will still essentially "own" 51% of everything. (And to be perfectly frank, my own bet is that the party isn't going to allow private ownership in the big hotels by anyone else anyway. They don't care if you're the Army, the people, or even the doctors.) Generals, are just as broke as everyone else in Cuba. Now... if you want to talk about where the money is... let's talk about the jinateras. (Sorry if that offends anyone, I'm just being real about what it's like in Cuba.)

idoubtit 8y ago

I've read the draft[^1] of the article, and I'm not convinced. The hypothesis is simple : less rain in Germania caused more Germanic raids on the Empire Empire, which caused political instability, which caused imperators' assassinations. When I look of some of these assassinations, I doubt the Germanic provinces had any impact on them. The Roman Senate got rid of Caligula for internal reasons. Claudius was (probably) poisoned to make place for Nero. The historical drought of 69-70 that Tacitus mentioned did not cause any assassination. The year of the 4 emperors was not following any kind of Germanic instability. Later on, many rebellions came from the East. In the later centuries, the eastern emperors had little to to with rain in western Europe. Reading the article, the correlation doesn't seem very strong. To my untrained eyes, it looks like the years 220-300 are the main factor of correlation. It was a period of drought Gaule and Germania, and political instability in Rome, but I'm not convinced of the causality. It's always seducing to discover a causal logic in historical events. Theories that can explain history have a high power of seduction, so I am even more cautious. [^1]: https://brocku.ca/repec/pdf/1703.pdf https://brocku.ca/repec/pdf/1703.pdf