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The Romans were also up against some adversaries who fought desperately to not be Roman. Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been bett

The Romans were also up against some adversaries who fought desperately to not be Roman. Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman ~citizen~ person if they were willing to die than submit. I’m sure honor had something to do with it, but the general trend seen in the archaeological record in the Middle East and North America is that people got shorter and had more teeth problems as they settle down into civilization than when they were hunter/gatherers or lived in settled communities for no more than a few years before hitting the proverbial road again. I’m sure the same thing applies in Europe during the Roman age.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman citizen if they were willing to die than submit. Peoples conquered by Rome did not become Roman citizens with the rights and privileges associated with that, generally. In the graded levels of rights in Roman law, depending on whether they were just conquered or had treaty status, they were two or three steps below citizens of Rome.
- starwind 4y ago
  Good call. I mean "citizen" in the general sense like "person who lives under Rome" but wasn't thinking that "citizen" had a very specific meaning in the Roman context. I edited my answer
  - gotorazor 4y ago
    The reason these tribes usually resist isn't because the Roman lifestyle is bad, it's because the Romans ran the biggest slaving empire in the world. Those slaves that does everything in Rome, they get them from waging war. So strictly-speaking, there is a change that they won't even get to be a "person" if they submit to Rome, they would become a slave. So would their wives and children. If anything, a lot of people want to be Roman citizens after they have tried it. There is a whole war in Italy called the "Social War" over extending formal, normal citizenship to Roman allies.
cheriot 4y ago
Where Gallic, Germanic, and Iberian tribes actually hunter/gatherers? By that time I thought Europe and the Mediterranean were dominated by farming cultures.
- starwind 4y ago
  They were farming some crops but wouldn't have been as dependent on them as Romans would have been and would have had a lot more variety including meat in their diets
  - gotorazor 4y ago
    Caesar in his Bellum Gallicum -- the gauls had cities (that Caesar's army had to build siege engines to take) and kings. The regions had millions of people living there. In one tribe alone (Atuatici), Caesar, to punish them sold 53,000 people from a single tribe into slavery. This isn't the entire population, just what he could round up in a single town. I don't think small tribes of wandering hunters with small farming plots can sustain that many people. Caesar ran around and laid sieges to these things regularly during the Gaullic Wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum
- usrusr 4y ago
  The take-home impression I got from reading through those two Cesar wars is that the legions were almost as dependent on local grain available to steal (ready to take in granary, or just ready to harvest, doesn't really matter) as trains are dependent on rails. I assume that except for bumping into an adequate rival in the east, they just gobbled up the entire "wheatosphere", quickly running out of steam (and, with a few notable exceptions, out of motivation) whatever they ran into hunter/gatherer economies.
  - Someone 4y ago
    But if there’s lots of grain to steal, doesn’t that indicate they’re not in hunter/gatherer territory?

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman citizen if they were willing to die than submit. Peoples conquered by Rome did not become Roman citizens with the rights and privileges associated with that, generally. In the graded levels of rights in Roman law, depending on whether they were just conquered or had treaty status, they were two or three steps below citizens of Rome.

starwind 4y ago
Good call. I mean "citizen" in the general sense like "person who lives under Rome" but wasn't thinking that "citizen" had a very specific meaning in the Roman context. I edited my answer
- gotorazor 4y ago
  The reason these tribes usually resist isn't because the Roman lifestyle is bad, it's because the Romans ran the biggest slaving empire in the world. Those slaves that does everything in Rome, they get them from waging war. So strictly-speaking, there is a change that they won't even get to be a "person" if they submit to Rome, they would become a slave. So would their wives and children. If anything, a lot of people want to be Roman citizens after they have tried it. There is a whole war in Italy called the "Social War" over extending formal, normal citizenship to Roman allies.

cheriot 4y ago

Where Gallic, Germanic, and Iberian tribes actually hunter/gatherers? By that time I thought Europe and the Mediterranean were dominated by farming cultures.

starwind 4y ago
They were farming some crops but wouldn't have been as dependent on them as Romans would have been and would have had a lot more variety including meat in their diets
- gotorazor 4y ago
  Caesar in his Bellum Gallicum -- the gauls had cities (that Caesar's army had to build siege engines to take) and kings. The regions had millions of people living there. In one tribe alone (Atuatici), Caesar, to punish them sold 53,000 people from a single tribe into slavery. This isn't the entire population, just what he could round up in a single town. I don't think small tribes of wandering hunters with small farming plots can sustain that many people. Caesar ran around and laid sieges to these things regularly during the Gaullic Wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum
usrusr 4y ago
The take-home impression I got from reading through those two Cesar wars is that the legions were almost as dependent on local grain available to steal (ready to take in granary, or just ready to harvest, doesn't really matter) as trains are dependent on rails. I assume that except for bumping into an adequate rival in the east, they just gobbled up the entire "wheatosphere", quickly running out of steam (and, with a few notable exceptions, out of motivation) whatever they ran into hunter/gatherer economies.
- Someone 4y ago
  But if there’s lots of grain to steal, doesn’t that indicate they’re not in hunter/gatherer territory?