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> I have absolutely had well-meaning people quite confidently inform me that Roman military strength was a consequence of their cultural and ethnic cohesiveness
by rsynnott 3mo ago
> I have absolutely had well-meaning people quite confidently inform me that Roman military strength was a consequence of their cultural and ethnic cohesiveness.
... Wait, how? I mean, I think popular culture _does_ generally gloss over the Italy-is-not-Roman dynamic, but movies and so on often depict auxiliaries. And certainly anyone who looked at the history would struggle to come to this conclusion.
Maybe those people literally _are_ basing their knowledge of Rome on Age of Empires!
(The Civ games eventually kind of figured this dynamic out; there are independent small nations which you can subjugate, though the subjugation is often fairly... whitewashed, and may consist solely of sending them a bunch of embassies.)
- wasfgwp 3mo agoItaly was Roman though. Or rather by making Italy Roman (to such an extent that other Italians would be willing to fight a war just for the right to be treated as other Romans) was basically what enabled their success by giving them a huge pool of manpower (and most importantly of people who had a vested interest in the success of the Roman state). Other ancient states like Athens were inherently exclusionary which put a hard limit on their power projection capacity since they depended on fickle allied or subjugated states to fight their wars.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]