A Roman emperor of the 3rd century writes:
Bryan Johnson@bryan_johnson
been thinking things over and wonder if i’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far
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Passienus
2.4K posts
Passienus
@passienus
Strange tales from Ancient Rome. 'These things never happened, but always are.' Sallust
Londinium Katılım Kasım 2023
1.1K Takip Edilen1.1K Takipçiler
There’s a rather significant design flaw in this AI image of Trajan’s harbour.
Ancient Origins@ancientorigins
Imagine keeping a city of one million people fed using only wooden ships, brick warehouses, and sheer political willpower. The Roman grain supply, the annona, was an engineering and logistical marvel that kept the empire from collapsing into famine and riots. From the massive artificial harbor of Portus to the ingenious anti-vermin warehouses, this is the story of how Rome pulled off the impossible. And when the system failed? Emperors were pelted with stale bread, governors were lynched and houses were burned. Read on Premium: ancient-origins.net/how-rome-fed-m… Read on Unleashed: open.substack.com/pub/ancientori…
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@bikeanddogtrips They had them in Rome! You can still see the remains in Ostia.
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@passienus Not sure how far back in time brick warehouses go, but the world's largest is in Liverpool, UK. 5 mins walk from the Liver building. It used to be a tobacco warehouse at Stanley dock
GIF
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@passienus Trajan: “Fantastic! That’s the most defensible harbour I’ve ever seen! But, um, explain this to me like I’m five. If one of the ships wants to leave…”
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@manas_2205 @GriffonLancer Quite fond of the version by Cecil Day-Lewis (Daniel’s dad). He was a poet so pays attention to things like line breaks and doesn’t always choose the most obvious word. Feels fresh and dynamic.
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@GriffonLancer @passienus any translation recommendations? i picked up the fitzgerald version, but ive heard fagles is great as well
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Rereading Aeneid, enjoying how Virgil spends the early books pedantically ‘fixing the plot holes’ in Homer, e.g. trying to make the wooden horse more plausible, Serious Political motivations for gods, advice on avoiding the Scylla & Charybdis route. A true world-builder.
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A noted sceptic of the practice was one M. Cicero who observed that at larger sacrifices involving multiple animals the entrails often produced contradictory readings.
Brendanus@hibernicusexul
Struck by how often in Xenophon’s Anabasis they sacrifice an animal for divination purposes and leave real world important decisions up to whatever the entrails of a goat or cow reveals that day. Why was communication between man and the divine/fates mediated by a sheep’s liver?
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@Imperatrixsocia @Kaiserfish1 The early Principate had a better doctrine for dealing with Parthia vs late Republic. No Crassus and Antony style adventures, keeping the Euphrates well defended, diplomacy backed with force. Generally effective, e.g. Parthia doesn’t interfere in Year of 4 Emperors.
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@Kaiserfish1 The late republic had the benefit of a fuckton of integrated allies like the Greek tributaries, allied Gauls, Germanics etc, smth the Princepate did lose sadly
They began adapting by the late principate but it wasn’t till Diocletians reforms you see a real full army again
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Frankly, even the Late Republic were more institutionally resilient than the first century Principate Empire.
Not to mention, the latter didn't even have a proper mobile reserve force.
Once broke through to Upper Mesopotamia, the entire Syria and Levant would be swept away.
Imperatrix Andrea Otiosus Laenas 🏳️⚧️🏛☀️@Imperatrixsocia
@Kaiserfish1 God bless the late Roman military I LOVE MY CATAPHRACTS I LOBE MY HORSE ARCHERS RAHHHHH
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An analogue for Nolan’s @odysseymovie:
A $100 million big-screen adaptation of “Moby-Dick” in which Ahab is a jovial, hail-fellow-well-met type, adored by his crew, suddenly tormented by moral reservations about the whaling industry. Sure, it’s an “adaptation”: who cd complain?
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Passienus retweetledi
@dyingempires There’s a particularly annoying bit in Suetonius where he says ‘I’ve seen Nero’s poetry notebook including the lines he scribbled out’ and then doesn’t bother to quote from it.
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@passienus Reminders of the loss of documentary evidence like this makes me want to cry. It's how I know I'm a historian.
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‘Tiberius…ordered a document to be produced and read. This contained a description of the resources of the State, of the number of citizens and allies under arms, of the fleets, subject kingdoms, provinces, taxes, direct and indirect, necessary expenses and customary bounties.’
sean mcguire@seanw_m
this is WRONG. they LOVED bureaucracy. romans invented the concept of a building inspector!!! augustus capped apartment blocks at 70 ft because they kept pancaking on tenants, nero wrote an entire building code after rome burned in 64 ad, including mandating wider streets…
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@smokek2forever Yes, Year of the Four Emperors is the one example alluded to in the tweet. That occurred because Nero died without an heir rather than a fundamental weakness in the Roman military system.
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@passienus What about the civil wars that led to Vespasian’s reign in the 1st century?
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It was Augustus who extended the legionary service term. Caused the occasional mutiny but between him and Septimius Severus there was only 1 all-out civil war in 200 years.
Fugitive Caesar@ThomBrady5
One of the things I've never seen anyone comment on is that contracts for Roman legions lasted for 25 years. Soldiers joined up at 18-22, retired at 43-47. This was a core source of instability for the Roman Empire; it explains why they had so many civil wars.
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@dyingempires He had a complicated marital life! Claudius the God is good but not as fun as the original as C is no longer the outsider looking in.
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Ah, I really enjoyed I, Claudius but never got around to Claudius the God.
Count Belisarius was fun, but I thought lacked depth. Think this was as much because of the limitations of a single major source (Procopius, albeit almost two opposed sources in effect) as anything else.
Worth noting the repeated background theme of male diffidence/submission towards dominant women.
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I’m a huge fan of Graves but I’m afraid this one’s a dud. In his reading all your favourite myths are really submerged memories of a prehistoric matriarchal goddess religion. It’s like Dan Brown with scholarship. Stick with Ovid.
Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙♀️@SketchesbyBoze
This is the book you want.
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@dyingempires Yep, he even inserts a scene of his imagined primitive religion into the second I, Claudius book (during the invasion of Britain).
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@passienus I've not read The White Goddess, but I understand he was pretty fixated on this idea.
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