How dangerous would a zombie apocalypse be for the Roman Empire?

How dangerous would a zombie apocalypse be for the Roman Empire?

Can we have more context please

Already happened, the Romans were able to handle it.

the zombie virus is a city spread disease.
if population groups don't spread very far, human societies outside large cities are less vulnerable to zombies and tribal groups are often much better at fighting in aggregate then rome,
the black plague likely will be the best equivalent to what your looking for, the first one that hit the east empire just before the rise of Islam.
Some villages will become full zombie realms
the cities will be necropolis.
they would be more willing to put entire populations to the torch so there would be a good number of imperial hold outs.
roman camps will be generally solid.
Roman Africa will likely be okay
Arabs would be fine.
China is likely fucked FUCKED
Any island that is not under roman control is fine, see Irish.
mongols, Germans, brits, scots, likely uneffected.
Sumeria is likely fucked, India is going to be some what fucked and not fucked depending on the terrain, zombies suck at climbing mountains.
north American natives don't even give a shit.
Most Africans don't give a shit.

If it's a night of the living dead, all the dead rise without a virus then everyone is sort of fucked, but there are ways around it, until food rises

>Roman Africa will likely be okay
What? Roman Africa was full of densely populated cities with strong trade connections. Alexandria, Carthage, Cyrene and most of the coastal cities (i.e. most of Roman Africa) are all going to be fucked.

Also, you're assuming this disease would spread beyond the near-east. All depictions of zombies as a virus or otherwise have an incubation period of a few days at best, almost instantaneous at worst. Nor do zombies wander meaningfully otuside of immediate prey. This isn't like the black death, where you had a week or two of incubation and rats/fleas could be carried innocously; nobody's going to "accidentally" bring a zombie on a trade caravan all the way from Neapolis to Chang'an. Even if the entirety of Europe and Persia fell prey, the odds of a zombie making it all the way through Central Asia to the Deccan or East Asia is unlikely unless there are nonhuman vectors, or the virus itself is airborne (which goes against the conventional idea of zombies).

You just burn the bodies instead of bury them.

The initial waves of Zombies get cut down by the experiences legionaries and then they institutionalize body burning.

Populations were way to small and spread out for the zombie hordes to really get the momentum going to actually be a threat.

Literally any civilization in history would curbstomp a zombie 'apocalypse'.

>Look out, that melee combatant significantly less dangerous than a gaul woman is shambling towards us at half walking speed

>Could the Romans defeat an army of retarded lepers?

Hmm...tough call OP.

user, i did mention that
Bit the big one with roman Africa though not sure what ass i was speaking out of.
>incubation of a period of a few days
it doesn't necessarily have to, the op was asking about it likely for a setting and one can take liberties for story telling
Regardless if you do want a rough approximation black death is the best one you could get for a setting's draft. entire villages of zombies.
mortality rate in cities being up to 90% even more with the losses creating more.

>nonhuman vectors
i did mention that in passing, it's a shame we don't discuss it often. zombie animals, that's the apocalypse. zombie humans not so much.

1. that's conventional warfare, what makes it a threat it it happens before people could communicate or really understand what is happening, like a zombie rebellion or riot.
2. zombies also don't die as easily as Gallic women. Chest wounds, arm wounds shit like that more likely to infect you if it's a blood borne virus and people aren't going to know how to deal with it right out the bat

DEPENDS ON THE RULES!

A Roman CHILD could take out a dozen zombies with a fucking sling.

All zombie fiction rests undeniably on the premise that it somehow manages to reach 90% infection rate despite the objective fact that zombies are pathetically less dangerous than things like wolves.

Alright...for humors sake, walk us through your ideal Zombie Apocalypse in Roman times. Who's patient zero, and what occurs afterwards to give rise to a horde?

>A Roman CHILD could take out a dozen zombies with a fucking sling.
Iseriouslydoubtthatplebbian
I'm not an expert in latin civilizations but at the height of it's reign it was headed by professional armies and not citizen ones.
how skilled could the average plebeian be at war in an age of specialization?
>90% infection rate.
not wrong, i agree it's much more prevalent when the dead just rose without infection

Surprisingly not very. The Romans were used to fighting enemies that got up close, personal, and physical. Fighting an enemy that doesn't break would be difficult, but the Romans were masters of siegecraft and fortification on the move and could be expected to create terrain favorable to them slowly whittling down a massive, ambling horde through sheer dedication.

Depends how long it takes them to figure out that you need to remove the head or destroy the brain.

Its going to be an uphill battle until that information is discovered and proliferated.

>it doesn't necessarily have to, the op was asking about it likely for a setting and one can take liberties for story telling
Fair enough, but outside of month long incubation periods it's still very difficult, if not impossible, for a disease completely transmitted by humans to cross the silk road to a major populated city.
>Regardless if you do want a rough approximation black death is the best one you could get for a setting's draft. entire villages of zombies.
But the black death is a terrible choice for a "rough approximation," because it operates on completely different principles. The whole reason it spread so wildly was because there were nonhuman vectors that could be transported unintentionally and innocuously well before they were ever discovered. The whole point of zombies is that it's spread solely from human to human, because pest control to stop zombies doesn't make for such a fun narrative. Yes, you can make artistic liberties as the storyteller, but at a certain point it's questionable whether they qualify as Zombies.

Slings were actually very common across much of the Ancient world, since they were pretty much *the* weapon of choice for defending flocks from wolves and other predators.

Then you get to the Balearic islands, where people got so batshit crazy about slings that they didn't feed their kids until they could consistently hit targets. The Romans recruited from them for centuries.

Romans and their contemporaries didn't learn the sling in the army m8, it was a cultural touchstone you were taught as a child. There are recorded sayings along the line of "a child didn't eat until he caught his dinner".

And a bullet from a sling is entirely capable of cracking a skull like a rotting pumpkin.

>gotta destroy the brain

Or, y'know, chop off all their limbs, or snap their spine, or pin them to the ground with a spear, or just light them on fire.

Theres plenty of ways to render a zombie effectively harmless without having the knowledge that they die to headshots.

A better question is how long until the huns start launching zombified heads over the walls.

At what point did the assumption for zombies go from spread by bites to spread by blood.

I get the feeling there was a slow transition, probably around whenever someone came up with spitter zombies or more scientific explanations rather than voodoo.

Either way, bodily fluids aren't the greatest disease vector.

yeah but that would be a pagan thing not necessarily a city dweller's zombies are and will only really be successful relative to the level of urbanization.

>Fair enough, but outside of month long incubation periods it's still very difficult, if not impossible, for a disease completely transmitted by humans to cross the silk road to a major populated city.
i wouldn't disagree though I could see it from Alexandria to Alexandria and getting lost in India somewhere.
the point was during roman era place heavily urbanized places are fucked, relatively compared to others.
>The whole reason it spread so wildly was because there were nonhuman vectors that could be transported unintentionally and innocuously well before they were ever discovered.
yeah i can dig zombie fleas but it would just be a bitch to actually deal with.
>Yes, you can make artistic liberties as the storyteller, but at a certain point it's questionable whether they qualify as Zombies.
honestly i think for the sake of story telling it's the most compelling thing one could produce if you go through the zombie plague rout.
and when i think about it
it's fucking lame.

undead Gallic druids raising the dead following a pact with some darker power.
or Inanna shatters the gates to the underworld and raises the dead to kill the living.
those sound groovy

even then

>At what point did the assumption for zombies go from spread by bites to spread by blood.
wasn't it that the dead just rose and that was it,
no one was sure how?
then bites had a hand which means there's something viral which leads itself intuitively to it being in the bodily fluids

Cities did have guards you know. It isn't as if all the Roman citizens are just going to look at the shambling sick people trying to bite them and just hang around to let them.

Worst case scenario I can see is that you get a zombie in the baths at a crowded hour, but even that might only get you a couple dozen zombies that are all completely bare.

I think the guards can handle a dozen naked men limping down the street.

Modern zombie power creep.

Classic zombies have too many weaknesses, chiefly their vulnerability to being plot devices to tell a story about racism and consumerism.

Nu zombies have to run, soak machine gun fire, have infectious blood, spread through rats and birds, walk on the bottom of riverbeds, learn how to use machine guns, vomit infectious liquids, automatically zombify any corpse anywhere, be fooled and/or see through zombie gore camouflage, get back up as crimsonheads, and have nightvision in order to entertain audiences.

>automatically zombify any corpse anywhere
no that's an original power.

Probably about as well as any given civilization handled rabies.

>All zombie fiction rests undeniably on the premise that it somehow manages to reach 90% infection rate despite the objective fact that zombies are pathetically less dangerous than things like wolves.
I remember seeing some video about how, due to hygiene practices, ebola would never catch on in the West. It was some number about its "dying" rate being higher than the infection rate because it spreads based on contact with bodily fluids (as opposed to more dangerous, airborne diseases). If these bodily fluid contact diseases barely spread if hygiene practices are up to standard, imagine a disease that literally turns the carrier into a shambling corpse, basically sending everyone a "DON'T TOUCH ME I'M INFECTED OH YEAH PLS KILL ME WHILE YOU'RE AT IT" signal?

You're right. A child with a sling could kill dozens of them and as long as he avoids bodily contact (the zombies are slow, the kid isn't a fucking retard) he'll be fine.

This is the flaw with zombie apocalypse movies where the zombies aren't incredibly fast and/or incredibly intelligent.

What's a crimsonhead?

It's when you are hard as dimonds and the head of your penis becomes red from all the blood rushing in.