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> Bato promised to surrender if he and his followers would be pardoned. Tiberius agreed and then asked him why his people had rebelled. According to Cassius Dio
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Bato promised to surrender if he and his followers would be pardoned. Tiberius agreed and then asked him why his people had rebelled. According to Cassius Dio, he replied: "You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians of your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves."[37]
This seems to be a common cause of Roman rebellions. For example, Boudica rebelled after the Roman governor tried to seize her kingdom and then raped her daughters. The Jewish rebellion started after a Roman governor seized money from the Temple.
- toyg 4y agoYou're a bright young thing from an aristocratic Roman family, burning with entitlement and ambition. Your cursus honorum means you have to accumulate experience before you can run as senator or other high office of state, so you accept a post as governor of some far province. You get there, and it's all very underwhelming. The place is even filthier than Rome, sometimes little more than a village built with sticks. Food and weather are atrocious. The locals can't understand you, and you can't understand them without going through some local translator you may or may not trust. There is nothing interesting to do except adjudicating the occasional squabble between neighbouring tribes. You are too far from the action in Rome to keep up with the political winds, and you know people are forgetting you with every passing day. Your troops are bored and restless, corruption and moral decay are everywhere in your ranks. You're increasingly paranoid and fearful for your life - if one can be assassinated in Rome, where it's full of people at all times and eventual scrutiny is inevitable, think of what could happen here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is watching... So one day you snap out of it. You will be glorious, peasants be damned. You will be a Caesar, you will conquer and embiggen Rome's glory. What are these idiots going to do anyway, with their little wooden sticks? Let's remind them how we got here in the first place! And off you go into unprovoked conflict.
- xthrown1 4y agoI want to watch this mini-series.
- yareally 4y agoThat summary is sort of the early life of Julius Caesar, but it actually worked out for him[0]. Also the story of this great little game that came out last year[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Julius_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Juliu... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeditions:_Rome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeditions:_Rome
- toyg 4y agoLol, interesting - I'd never heard of this game, I'll check it out. I was just riffing on what was a pretty standard story for governors and similar officials in far-away posts - precisely because Caesar's success in engineering favourable military campaigns established a sort of blueprint.
- GalahiSimtam 4y agoyou don't get to be a governor until you completed cursus honorum tho