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I'm wary of 'turning points' analysis in history. Roman society was exceedingly violent by modern standards. For a long while that violence could be channeled t

I'm wary of 'turning points' analysis in history. Roman society was exceedingly violent by modern standards. For a long while that violence could be channeled towards conquest. The power military leaders derived from this process and the diminishing returns after most prosperous neighboring polities had been absorbed contributed to erode the internal social order of the Republic. But those are centuries long processes, and it didn't 'turn' on this or that remarkable event we have records of. We shouldn't prognosticate American politics based on the History of Ancient Rome, that is folly. One thing is to observe parallels and patterns in behavior. But entirely different systems and contexts cannot be used to analyze one another by cherry picking.

nescioquid 4y ago
My main purpose was to point out that even with a facile comparison, we are missing a very salient element (normalization of violence as a political tool). For the rest, I really should have just said "signal event". I wasn't suggesting anything along the lines of "but for that event things would have gone the other way". Here, I merely meant a threshold was passed. Personally, I'm more interested in cultural comparisons, mainly because they were so different from us in many ways. And, if I may add to your concern about cherry-picking, we should also have a great deal of humility about how much we really know. What's the metaphor? The ancient world is Versailles, and everything we know about it is what we can see through the keyhole on the front door.