What's cool about Roman empire?

Oh, oh, or the right to be publicly mutilated? Starved to death? Raped to death by a lion? Raped by a citizen, as a non-citizen, with no legal recourse? Or castrated and kept as a 'deliciae'?

that's my point.
I love rome for that, it's a stark reminder of past savagery
>rome is facist
i guess monarchies are fascist too

Slavery in Roman times wasn't the chattel kind and had more in common with indentured servitude.

Also yeah, if you compare everyone from the past to modern standard you'll be greatly disappointed, but if you just don't be retarded and look at them relative to the others around at the time you'll see that they were pretty damn fair.

Assimilate or die is pretty damn progressive when everyone else is just die.

That's what makes Rome so cool. In certain ways it resembles modern civilized society (western law is based on roman law, hence the latin) but it's also brutal and barbaric in many respects. That's why it's such an interesting setting and period of time.

>Assimilate or die is pretty damn progressive when everyone else is just die.
the Assyrians had something like that too.
Submit or we'll kill everyone and make a tower from the skulls.

>when everyone else is just die.
realistically very few successful empires were "just die" because up until the industrial age exterminating an entire ethnic group is time consuming and really not worth the effort.

Rome (or at least the Etruscans) literally invented the Fasces, the symbol of fascism. And monarchies aren't exactly much better, they just have worse fashion sense.

Well they wouldn't actively go out to kill you, but they'd probably butcher you when they could at a casual rate and take the survivors as slaves.

Compared to that the chance for integration is pretty damn good.

>the right to assimilate or die
The Romans weren't that intense about that kind of thing. They were pretty much content to let local rulers and customs stay where they were as long as they paid their taxes and the locals weren't killing Romans and/or the garrison. Groups like the Jews only really got the short end of the stick because they wouldn't stop trying to win their independence and they were rather good at killing the local garrisons.

Veeky Forums needs a way to subtly encourage anal sex with other men and wearing skirts but not feel gay about it

>Buddhists literally invented the nazi symbol

>realistically very few successful empires were "just die" because up until the industrial age exterminating an entire ethnic group is time consuming and really not worth the effort.
are you stupid?
WHAT IS FUCKING GAUL?
entire peoples of gaul,germany exterminated.
OR CARTHAGE?
OR x group who offended the romans and their allies?
don't talk out of your ass

>they invented a symbol of leadership that the duce used
>this makes them fascist

>And monarchies aren't exactly much better, they just have worse fashion sense.
So the only no fascist form of government is republican then.
good to know burgerlander
what?

Creating the symbol of something bad people used later isn't exactly a good criticism, or did the Indians & Asians who used the Swastika suddenly terrible because the Nazi's used that later?

>german occultists appropriating an asian symbol is exactly the same as italians using an italian symbol of governmental power to represent governmental power

>WHAT IS FUCKING GAUL?
>entire peoples of gaul,germany exterminated.
They weren't exterminated, they were assimilated. Did you think the Saxon people were exterminated and replaced with Normans, or that the Chinese were exterminated and replaced with Mongols?
>OR CARTHAGE?
You do know that Roman Carthage was one of the largest cities in Roman North Africa, up until the fall of Rome and the Vandals, right? The legends of "salting" carthage are just that, legends.
>OR x group who offended the romans and their allies?
name some x groups that were utterly annihilated.

The nazis also had uniforms and badges, clearly the people who invented those things are also suddenly somehow responsible in anyway for their actions too.

>criticizing another form of absolutist authoritarian rule is the same as calling it fascism!

The fasces has always represented submission of the individual to the State

Or more accurately, the power of centralized, absolute, authoritarian rule

>thread about why Rome is cool in the context of traditional games
>some retard has to sperg about how bad they were in real life and call posters fascist
Pure autism.

Mussolini's Italian fascists had about as much in common with Imperial Rome as Hitler had with the ancient indo-european tribes who invented the swastika, i.e. nothing at all. But enough replying to bait.

Like which of Rome's contemporaries? Persia was as multiethnic/multicultural as they come, and the Han would literally pay you in horses and princesses to fuck off rather than deal with you. I don't know what the axumite empire was doing but if they actually exterminated a whole ethnic group I'm sure we would have heard about it from /pol/.

Okay and? Rome leaned more towards the Authoritarian end of the political compass then the Libertarian one.

Look, I like Rome and think it was a good thing for the world, but I also think it wasn't perfect and that there are valid critiques of it. This doesn't mean going "THEY HAD SYMBOLS THAT LOOKED LIKE THE NAZIS AND VAGUE IDEOLOGICAL SIMILARITIES!!!" is exactly a good one.

>They weren't exterminated, they were assimilated.
you are objectively wrong.
1/3 of all different gualic peoples were destoried.
I believe the vernetity, Atuatuci,Ebrurones and quite a lot of arverrni were killed alonge with 3 other german tribes and a couple others i don't have a companion with me.

Not necessarily. It's most commonly used nowadays as a symbol by the United States government, which has, at least in theory, a great deal of checks and balances with limitations of power.

>1/3 of all different gualic peoples were destoried.
The leaders died and they were absorbed into other gallic tribes or under Roman rule. Or did you think the Romans killed literally all the gauls in Roman Gaul and replaced them with Romans like some proto-lebensraum?

Then again, given the rest of the comment, I wouldn't be surprised if you did.

>I believe the vernetity, Atuatuci,Ebrurones and quite a lot of arverrni were killed alonge with 3 other german tribes
Oh wow a whole tribe, what is that, 3000 people? The leaders were killed and the rest of the tribes found new buddies to stick around with.

You know what, you're right. I derailed the thread. I'm hopped up on caffeine and enjoy political debates, and I jumped at this. How about this: I personally think Rome is better as a dystopian setting than the noblebright 'Fantasy America' it's sometimes thought of as.

The continuity during the empire is pretty amazing.

If anyone wants a good recent history, SPQR by Mary Beard is a solid read. It certainly dispelled some of the myths I had understood about the nature of how power was exercised in the Roman empire.

No, it represented justice, i.e. the courts. It was used by the Roman bureaucracy. That is only "submission to the State" if you are full Ron Paul 2012 ancap meme.
Rome had a very large influence on successor states, which is why you see fasces in various heraldry around the world.

I disagree with your assessment but I am willing to admit that there are fairly valid ideological viewpoints that can result in that and I respect your maturity in realizing your previous posts were in the wrong.

>I'm hopped up on caffeine and enjoy political debates
That's fine, but take it to another board. This isn't the place for that sort of discussion.

I personally prefer the more insidious politicking side of Rome as well.

>What's cool about Roman empire?
Nothing, every thing went wrong after the end of the the Republic

I don't think the Romans were evil and all but it's difficult to use an accurate Roman Empire and the Medieval Ages in a realistic way without making them almost dystopian by how much of a relative shithole they are for most people.
It's like trying to do a noblebright historically accurate victorian era, most time periods are pretty bleak and the modern times in first world countries are maybe the only objectively decent societies with most people having decent life and all.

cesear claims them to be i think 50,000, 30,000, 45,000 and with the 3 germans about 700,000 but those who could not be killed scattered.

>they killed whole ethnic groups of people
>wow that's not enough people while europes population was much lower than it is now
no with Ebrurones i know they were completely exterminated, according to the sources.
the others much the same.

there were peoples who had their leaders killed and the rest sold in the slavery

So the Romans did bad things in your opinion. Who fucking cares? This thread is about what makes Rome cool, not "did the Romans do anything wrong".

there was a claim that the romans didn't exterminate people.
I like rome personally but the idea is wrong.
also mithridates did nothing wrong

>wow European populations were so low that they mattered more
>oh but Caesar fought 300,000 of them
Yeah no. Leaders killed and captives sold into slavery, sure, but the destruction of the tribe does not necessarily indicate the complete destruction of its culture or people by any stretch of the imagination. Phoenicia did not end with the razing of tyre, and the defeat of the Celts in the British Isles hardly meant the end of Celtic culture.

He said that Rome preferred to assimilate but was willing wipe out people if they resisted. That's generally true. He never said it didn't happen.

The architecture.

Roman public toilets had no stalls. You had to look right into the eyes of the guy across from you as you both plunked down a load.

Nubile slave boys

>>I personally think Rome is better as a dystopian setting than the noblebright 'Fantasy America' it's sometimes thought of as.

I think the point is that when compared to the standards of the era, Rome was as close to 'Fantasy America' as they ever got.

There is a reason why so much of our civilization is based on the Greco-Roman world.

Nothing is great about the "Roman empire." If any of you are fucking marks for Roman you need to kill yourselves for being fans of the second coming of John Cena and you probably also fucking love that stupid comedy flippy shit too. About the only good thing about you is that you're the kind of wrestling fan that drives Jim Cornette into paroxysms of asshurt rage and maybe it'll give that old hillbilly yelling at clouds a heart attack.

I don't know if I'd call them evil, but they were definitely brutal, xenophobic and bloodthirsty. It doesn't a whole lot to change the Rome analogue into something evil.

Or something good, if you're willing to focus only on the good stuff.

best seiba

begone Tiberius

Look at this fuggen butthurt Allemanian right here. John Cena owns, The Roman Empire owns. Deal.

Ave Imperator Cena, the Unseen Princeps

There's a certain allure to being efficient magnificent bastards, which is what the romans were. They were assholes, but highly effective ones, who at their best embodied industry and adaptiveness and at their worst the glacial hedonistic snobbery of the world's most decadent and stratified empire. We see very compelling, very positive traits next to extremely negative ones, as well as frankly rediculous persistence

IV V

is that lion thing true?

European law, maybe.

English Common Law developed independently.

What's happening in Louisiana there?

The Napoleanic N should be a giveaway.

Any good sources to read up on Roman slavery? Developing !Roman empire for my setting and add some darker shades to it, one of the metaplots should be slavery abolition development.

Thanks, the book seems interesting so far.

How the hell did the US lose that one bit of alberta and saskatchewan? Lack of interest?

#
We traded it to the UK for parts of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montanna.
Also a whole bunch of other shit was agreemed on. Treaty of 1818.

1/10, I replied.

>WHAT IS FUCKING GAUL?
You honestly think Gaul was exterminated? The people who are genetically closest to the French are the English and vice versa. Not because of the Norman invasion (which, though massive in cultural scope, was negligible in demographic scope) but because both the English and the French are overwhelmingly the pre-Roman Celts on a genetic level. They just got SAXON'D and FRANK'D hard.

>English Common Law developed independently.
Correct. Except for the part where you're horrible wrong holy shit nigger. Common Law did base itself on Roman law, to the point where they way Torts are treated in Common Law (various Torts have various corresponding legal actions) is closer to Roman Law than the way Civil Law treats them (there's one overarching "Tort").

The birth of Common Law did have its root in Saxon tribal law, but even before civil law had become a thing it had already been crossfertilized by Roman law. Claiming that Common Law in its modern incarnation developed independently from Roman law is a downright falsehood that evolved from either sheer ignorance or the need to push for an exceptionalist narrative.

I think the sort of harsh punishment people used to mete out comes, in part, from the near total lack of investigative powers. For the vast majority of history, you either caught someone redhanded, or you didn't catch them at all. And criminal investigation was basically the same as rumour. Of course, people did build functioning courts of law on top of that, to guide pure, raw mob justice into some semblance of reason.

But when you look at a place like Africa, and you still have mob justice based on rumours, and police forces that just blanket arrest people near the scene of the crime.

We can afford to be kind because we will get our man. Even the knowledge alone seems to mellow people out on crime and punishment.

I'm glad you realized this, but holy shit your points are retarded and ethnocentric to a fault.

You guys also forget that harsh punishment was the only means available to societies at the time. Let's look at petty theft for example, how do we solve it today? You get a fine or you're forced to do community work or you go to therapy, and at worst you're imprisoned. Let's investigate the problem with all of these in Roman society.

>Fine
Romans already had those for certain situations (though those mostly took the form of damages to be paid to a private party you had injured).

>Community work
Requires a massive administrative body to back all of this up, which the Romans simply did not have despite being brilliant administrators.

>Therapy
Psychology wasn't even in its infancy at the time. Philosophers debated about the human condition and how to create good citizens, but this was psychology in the same way alchemy is chemistry.

>Imprisoned
Again, requires an administrative body and prison complexes that simply did not exist at the time.

That leaves you with very limited options, like public shaming or the cutting off of hands. I'm by no means a moral relativist, and I believe that something that was morally wrong back then is still morally wrong today, but calling the system cruel is anachronistic: the less intrusive alternatives weren't available to them (but there's a small beam of light here: Roman citizens were at least protected from the death penalty).

This is why, when we see cruel practices in historical societies, we must always ask ourselves "what were the alternatives?". [

Sharia law is a problem because it utterly ignores this. It dictates that a thief must have his right hand cut off on the first offense, his left foot on the second, his left hand on the third, his right foot on the fourth, and if he somehow manages to steal a fifth time he's put to death. Reasonable enough for 7th century Arabia [a tribal part of the world where justice was difficult to enforce and had shit for infrastructure], but in modern society it has no place because we have less intrusive means available and can enforce them. The problem is that Sharia is defined mostly in the Qu'ran: the direct, clear, timeless, eternal and indisputable word of God. It is therefore not even comparable to Deuteronomy or any other vaguely contemporary sources of law in the Ancient Near East. The problem with Sharia law is that it keeps promoting these cruel punishments even in times and environments were less intrusive alternatives are easily and readily available.

It existed for a massively long time and has an amazing history. What the fuck do you mean? Every god damn thing is cool about the Roman Empire.

The Romans also practiced slavery as a punishment, and that could be seen as their equivalent of our modern prison system. The people involved were captive and guarded, but they were put to work because leaving a healthy man sitting on his ass in a furnished room would have looked like the opposite of punishment to Romans and other historical people. It even endures to this day, and there are people alive in the Western world who can recall "hard labour" being a legit punishment, just the way it was for the Romans.

Well, that comes down to the naturally conservative bent of organized religion, which in Islam is buoyed on by the literal word of God saying that ultraconservatism is a good thing, because His word is infallible and has already been written down.

For the staunch Muslim effectiveness does not matter. Adherence to doctrine does.

ITT: a guy who doesn't know what fascism is gets a bunch of (you)s

>Empire
It's just a less cool version of the republic.

Sex, Olives, primoridal shitposting, and working toilets.

>Empire
>Republic

This shit annoys me the most. The word "Empire" comes from the Latin "Imperium", which is more or less the concept referring to any kind of holding public authority. Caesar and Augustus were lifelong rulers, but refused to be referred to as king and refused any association with the institution of kingship (IIRC during some festival Marc Anthony even publically offered him a crown, and Caesar made a huge deal out of refusing said crown). Because Caesar and Augustus were neither king nor consul, they were referred to by either their family name (Caesar, which in German evolved into Kaiser and in Russian to Czar) or merely as imperator (person who holds imperium, in French it became empereur and in English emperor). An emperor is effectively a "republican monarch" of sorts.

What fucks my shit up is that there's not only a strict dichotomy in the mind of modern man between the republic and the empire (until Diocletian all emperors had at the very least republican pretenses, and according to some these republican pretenses even persisted in the East Roman Empire after the fall of the West), but also that fucking everything is an empire. The Chinese, the Aztecs, the Arabs... it's like "Emperor" now means "Super-king". Except the term is also applied to pitiful rulers of fuck-all like Japan. And then there are empires without emperors. The Malinese king unites some tribes? Empire! Some Europeans kill those tribes and force the survivors to pay tribute? Empire!

The only non-Roman emperors were the two Napoleons and the only non-Roman empire was France, prove me wrong.

Using your own rationale for Napoleon you can include Charles magne in the equation and his domain as emperor's and empire.
Of course the Russian empire was a thing too and a couple of others.
Dumbass

>Using your own rationale for Napoleon you can include Charles magne in the equation
Explain the republican nature of Charlemagne's rule.
>Of course the Russian empire was a thing too and a couple of others.
Explain the republican nature of the Russian czars.

Napoleon effectively copypasted Augustus, on the other hand, to the point where the French Revolution can be summarized as Roman history on fastforward.

This is largely ahistorical wank that is mostly the result of Renaissance poets trying to come up with justifications for why they hate their dads and the centuries they associated with them (with the real reason being that no dad ever wants their son to grow up to be a poet as their primary occupation).

The Middle Ages saw enormous technological advances that often get overlooked in order to try and maintain a largely debunked image of "The Dark Ages", and while the decentralization did mean that enormous endeavors no longer could be funded, it also meant that the populace that the Empire essentially exploited no longer had to fund those endeavors.

History is a long process, with each step being important, and the Fall of Rome was a necessary part of what lead Europe into the Renaissance and eventually into Modernity.

Don't get me wrong though. Roads are great.

I'd admit yer a good troll, but, tell me of a single people who had a greater impact on Europe (and by extension, Euro colonies as the US). In what alphabet are we writing, my man?

Rome became a stratocracy, but it wasn't only one. "Soldiers are brutal, uncivilized and a sad necessity", as the Romans themselves said: your position reeks of movie history instead of a proper appreciation of a culture alien to yours (their approach to class, death and rights was a tad different, but remember that in Britan it was legal to sell your wife until two centuries ago and that servitude was slavery in all but name).

Plus Rome is cool.

Lol. Venetian nobles routinely went out hunting "peasants" with rifles in the 1700s, Japanese nobility had the right of life and death on the lower classes. Past societies were brutal and direct, whaddaya expect? Rome was almost civilized in that regard.

But you are all bait.

kys

Tower shields.

the romans did have a whole of innovations not seen till the late renaissance

like domes, concrete, aqueducts, roads, large cities, hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, public bathes, the onager, and a senate

the dark ages were advanced and continued to advance, and were nowhere as primitive as they were seen today, they still didnt match the romans in so many technological advancements

>(IIRC during some festival Marc Anthony even publically offered him a crown, and Caesar made a huge deal out of refusing said crown)
And doing that was almost certainly just a massive public relations stunt to smooth over people who thought Caesar was setting himself up as a king, considering Antony and Caesar were allies.

Yeah, the whole "master architects and engineers" seems particularly wanky, given that Medieval Europeans far surpassed the Romans in those areas. Roman technology, though thoroughly practical, was relatively stagnant. That was par for the course during Roman times, but it's not like they really stood out or anything. The things the Romans did were also done by their contemporaries, and the Romans openly acknowledge did, and learned from it. Not that they were stupid, not by any means, but they're generally not known for their mastery of those disciplines.

aqueducts, roads, bridges, and sanitation they had over most of the medieval world

Of note is that Augustus did it too. In the Res Gestae he makes a big deal out of never holding power in any one office that exceeded his fellow officials, but conveniently people liked him enough that they didn't have any problem with him holding half a dozen different offices with different powers, and their combination DID make him functionally an absolute ruler, especially since the legions all answered to him.

About the only office that he had real trouble getting was the Chief Priest of Rome, because Lepidus held that one and he refused to retire. So Augustus had to wait until the guy FINALLY kicked the bucket.

For some reason I just read 'What's cool about Roman vampires?'

>medieval people didn't have catapults

Okey dokey.

I'm pretty sure Medieval people built bridges, user. And the fact that Medieval people didn't build something very often (because they definitely did build aqueducts) doesn't mean they couldn't.

the onager was more powerful than the medieval one

they would rather use the roman ones, which are still in use today, and would not exceed roman design until the enlightenment

>English X developed independently.
The Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Franks and Normans would like to have a word with you.

If you didn't like what was happening in the senate you could just get a and together and murder the fucker proposing it, so that guy would have to have his own gang protecting him and a political street war would ensue that couldn't be stopped because Rome had no police force and soldiers under arms weren't allowed in the city. After you'd killed that fucker his friends could sue you, but you could get out of that if you were really really good at talking.

>domes

In use extensively in both the Eastern Med' and in Spain.

>concrete

That fell out of use not because of technique, but cost and time.

>aqueducts

Those were being made.

>Large Cities

That's because of political and economic reasons, not technology(nor should you consider it an innovation)

>Hot and cold water

Nigga, bathhouses were extremely popular in European cities and bathing was more common among the nobility after the fall of room than before

>indoor plumbing

See above.

>Public bathes

Again, actually really popular.

>onager

Nigga

>Senate

That wasn't even an innovation that the Romans made themselves, nor did Republican governments suddenly vanish.

2/10

Naturally, all rulers have to engage in PR to some degree or another. But that doesn't change that an emperor in the Roman style at the very least had the pretense of being a semi-republican leader. The point is that the term 'emperor' shouldn't be applied as carelessly as it is in the modern English language. It now means nothing.

>That wasn't even an innovation that the Romans made themselves
Who did Senates before the Romans then?

Carthage had a senate before Rome. Something that the Romans were always loathe to admit.

It's not strictly historical, but you could get a lot from the Starz Spartacus series. Especially the first season and the prequel season. The Romans in that were pretty shitty to their slaves most of the time.

...

>The country that shites together, fights together