You must introduce a character based on the Greatest Roman who ever lived in your setting. Who is he...

>smashed all his rivals underfoot
>made a nation stronger and more secure than any before, lasts 5 centuries
Yeah a real "philistine"

Cato Uticensis. Middling-high tier GM NPC who's schtick is the ability to marshal other GM NPCs against those parvenu setting-breaking PCs, and being obstinately in-their-face about it. They'd swear he was an autist.

Dies offscreen so the PCs never get the satisfaction of dealing with him during a session.

Every other campaign in the setting has NPCs openly admiring and lauding him to the PC's faces.

>or to their backs after stabbings

He has a very good friend named Biggus Dickus.

Piece of background setting information, only important if players seek him out or enter regions under his influence.

>the Greatest Roman who ever lived in your setting
No Romans lived in my setting.

...

t. butthurt Cicero

>character based on the Greatest Roma who ever lived

>using modern morals to judge ancient people's
Caesar should have just politely asked the blood crazed invaders to stop raping and pillaging.

>Being THIS much of a moral relativist

He was called the Father of Rome DURING HIS TIME

In the empire today, there is a Philiospher-Emperor whose wisdom proceeds and blesses the land with his efficient policies. His reign has been a time of prosperity.

but user we got him already

How would you deal with pillaging rapists?

Probably in a way that doesn't involve burning entire villages of non-combatants just to send a message.

That's not Cincinatus.

Also Cicero was part of the same rot as the old republic.

That's a strange likeness to depict Belisarius.

>Cicero
>Not Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Sic Semper Tyrannis

Good thread this

>Belisarius
>his siege literally kills off most of Rome's population
>gets murdered like a bitch by the emperor for political ambitions he lacks
>great

Real Best Roman coming through. Make way for the savior off the Republic!

There were no great Romans

you wouldnt last two minutes in the senate

But the romans were pillaging rapists

everyone was pillaging rapists. gotta fight fire with fire

> you will never watch Rome for the first time, again

t. Greek

...

You're a monster.

Oh fucking please.

The romans were a people of warmongering inbreds who pushed warfare to a level that was nigh unheard of in the region, staying in wars after losses that would destroy most classical polities, and effectively fighting total war against people to who war was borderline a ritual show of force.

The romans didn't do measured show of equivalent force, they invented themselves mythical grievances based on Iliad fanfic and then used them as justifications for genocidal level warfare.

When they weren't at war as a state it was the patricians going on private conquering sprees, or internal civil wars by the time they went full orc and started to figure out how easy it was to abuse the dictatorship system.

Conquers everything he's told to, usually with an inferior army, scheming sub-commanders and precious little support from the emperor. Belisarius was a goddamn miracle worker.

Probably why people are so fascinated with him. "Last of the Romans" and all that.

It's an interesting question. Suppose when Caesar is rushing the lines at Alesia he catches a stray projectile, and goes down like Richard, some septic wound that takes him out a week or two later.

Caesar's gone, Antony doesn't have the power base to take control, the Popularaes are going to kill each other without him. How does Cicero move?

He must have rolled deep if Caesar wanted to keep him on side. If he pushes for reforms, reasoning that it's only a matter of time before another Caesar sows up, does the republic find a way to bring itself back together? Or does it just make the wars until someone becomes a dictator bloodier and less decisive?

no great greeks either

t. China

and 1500 years later we still talk about how great their empire was. How much does the average person know about the nobodies of that era?

I don't think he would be able to push reform that would keep the roman republic's conquests together.

They might keep immediate neighborhood stuff, but a lot of the provinces were more or less the personal domain of the Caesars for a reason.

This might actually be a good thing in some ways. More Carthage and less Roman Empire.

We talk about how great their empire was because every fucking wannabe conquere from the Ummayads and the Carolingians to the Bonapartes and the Romanovs liked to style themselves as Rome reborn. Ideology is a hell of a drug and they provided an amazing ideology for western empires.

>Iliad fanfic
said Illiad fanfic wasn't a thing until Rome had most of it's Empire

I'm not gonna dispute the part about Rome shitting out armies when it should have hit it's manpower limit, but at least the GM got wise.
Pro tip: if you abuse the manpower rules and the GM calls you on it, don't play the "Foederati" card. Never ends well

Based general

Illinois Pious

His reign was a period of civil strife and weakening borders. It was the writing on the wall.

That's not Epictetus. He'll that's not even Lucretius.

desu Trajan's insane push to conquer Dacia and Mesopotamia really mangled the empire.

The number of legions that disappear from the historical record altogether after the dacian wars is fucking ridiculous, he basically bled the empire to take over territory barely half the size of Romania AND then Hadrian gets bogged down in a massive rebellion in Judea that probably killed nearly a million people across the eastern provinces.

Statesman, orator and semi-philosopher with goofy ideas about natural law? That doesn't sound so hard to incorporate.

Do you have any characters in your setting who are TRULY rich?

>Cicero
Are you fucking kidding me?

Hey there Carl the Cuck, can you explain your issues with a man generally deemed to be of noble character who saw the problems within the Republic but tried to save it from populist tyranny à la Caesar, Pompey, Marc Anthony and Octavian?

"Last of the Romans" refers to Flavius Aetius though, not to Belisarius. But yes he was amazing.

>Nearly cracks the nation into pieces with his petty politics
>Dooms 'Republic' to centuries of living in a constant state of emergency that requires continuous patch-jobs by increasingly-inbred idiots to keep it running
Yeah a real "genius"

You know... despite the whole "WALPOLE XDDD" meme being incredibly forced, Extra History isn't all that bad.

>make Cicero a mouthpiece for edgy political opinions
This is the guy who said that "the gods showed how little they cared for this people [the jews], suffering it to be conquered and made tributary", stated they were a "nation born to slavery", the most barbaric people of the time and associated them with corruption borne of greed for gold and support of caesarism.

Some of his speeches honestly make /pol/-shitters look mild.

To be fair to them, that whole meme is largely irrelevant unless you follow the segment that follows the main segments and even then is usually at the end of such things. They keep their dumb jokes in a proper place for them.

>Cato Uticensis
Tell me more about him, user

>implying the republic wasn't on borrowed time since the third punic war

Cato the Younger, Marcus Porcius Cato.

Late Republic-era statesman, contemporary of Caesar, Cicero, et al. Remembered for his stoicism, his utter, almost maniacal personal integrity and his utter, probably maniacal devotion to the traditional Roman Republic. That set him and Julius Caesar on a collision course and even though he was never the most powerful of Caesar's enemies he was the beating heart of damn near every combination against him- and the most well-thought of. Regarded as the last republican Roman. After the defeat of the last Pompeian army committed suicide rather than accept Caesar's clemency, which pissed Caesar off to no end. Venerated throughout history as an icon of civic courage- they staged a play about him while wintering in Valley Forge.

A tragic hero, as his governorship of Cyprus and his personal conduct while in charge around Utica formed a textbook pattern of how a Roman Empire could *work* for the world- and he was the one guy trying reverse that trend on sheer principle. Cicero eulogized him as a man that was even greater than his reputation.

Even the "Uticensis" cognomen was a posthumous "fuck you" to the line of Caesars by the bystanders on his behalf. Technically speaking, he never officially earned it and he spent the first generation or so of the imperial era as a bad an to have known. People just spontaneously started calling him that after he died.

He is the cousin of one of the Party Members, preferably the character who causes the most mayhem.

He just wants to have a good time and get a better life than he had in the old country. It does not end well, regardless of the party's actions.

A republic on a collission course can usually still be saved. The Roman Republic could still have been reformed from the inside, so I doubt I would've been in favor of Caesar's betrayal just because 'muh land reforms'. This is also why I generally view Napoleon more favorably than Caesar: the parallels between the two are so obvious they don't even need to be named, but Napoleon actually overtook/transformed a republic that was in a constant state of war simply because Europe could not tolerate a regime based on popular sovereignity in its midst. They did the same thing, but I'd say Napoopan was more legitimized in what he did. He also had less of a chance of permanently ruining the republic for everyone forever. In 1812 there was a minor crisis due to rumors that Napoleon had died in Russia. When he returned he was surprised, and only asked why nobody had considered crowning his son Napoleon II. The answer was obvious: even the French saw Napoleon as a temporary hero rather than the founder of a lasting dynasty (as Napoleon most likely saw himself).

>his governorship of Cyprus and his personal conduct while in charge around Utica formed a textbook pattern of how a Roman Empire could *work* for the world
Please, go on.

A late-republic era provincial governorship was awarded by the senate and regarded to be a financial sinecure, a component in a tax-farming scheme. Much sought after. I don't know if anyone sold their soul for one but they did sell their daughters. They made people rich.

Cato was awarded one pretty much to get him out Rome and possibly politically destroy him as for the rest of his career he could be freely accused of hypocrisy, him supposed to be "Mr. Stop Doing This Shit". They ended up having to passing a law to make him go, upon which he did.

He then proceeded to *not* enrich himself, kept scrupulous accounting books for the entire province, and an era of nofun! and good governance was to be had by all. Or at least by Cypriots. Roman would-be official looters and embezzlers were only grudgingly impressed, but impressed they were.

You are such a pussy lmao.

"Oh please let's all be faggots and not brutally annihilate our enemies" just fucking kill yourself seriously.

I see. Funny, how Caesar is so celebrated yet the most principled men of his time were his greatest enemies. Between Cato's rule of Cyprus and Cicero's quaestorship in Sicily, you'd think Caesar had a tendency to drive principled men away from him or something.

You're right, the romans should have annihilated the germans when they had the chance so the world would have been spared your anglo nonsense

>This thread

Also, Sulla was best Roman.

>The Romans didn't annihilate the G*rmans
>Charlemagne didn't go far enough with his Verdict of Verden
>Jeanne d'Arc didn't survive England's surrender, only to turn her attention East and subjugate the G*rmanic Empire
>Roughly 50% of G*rmans survived the 30 Years War
>Napoleon I didn't genocide, forcibily assimilate or both the G*rmans
>Napoleon III lost the Franco-Pr*ssian war
>G*rmany was allowed to remain united after WW1
>Bomber Harris didn't do it again
>G*rmany was allowed to remain united after WW2
>Replacement migration takes place all over Europe and isn't contained to G*rmany alone
Truly the G*rmans are like cockroaches: good for nothing, yet they manage to survive everything.

GERMANIA DELENDA EST

>tfw the marriage between Charlemagne and Irene of Athens never happened
>tfw we could have had a reunited Roman Empire

>G*rmany was allowed to remain united after WW2
Wait, what?

>Implying Cicero
Cicero a shit, my boi Marcus Aurelius a best.

The english and franks count as germans

>Greatest roman who ever lived
>not Cato Major

>tfw Emperor Jean Reno

>French
Gallo-Romans

>English
FRENCH'D Celts

Only one piece broke off.
Clearly, it should have been shattered into four - one for each Allied Power.

Based on the greatest Roman, this entrepreneur manages an extremely successful business operating all sorts of cabs and bowling alleys.

The French zone should've been annexed by France, the Soviet zone by the Poles and the other two zones turned into independent nations, each of their constitutions explicitly forbidding unification with the other.

I dream of a Europe with a Franco-Polish border along the elbe.

A lot of people thought Roman was annoying. So did I, but I think he's annoying in a charming way. He really comes across as that cousin who really doesn't know when to shut the fuck up, but you hang out with him because he's chill anyway.

The poles already did annex a big chunk of Germany

>and a genocide at worst

what's this "at worst" business? Even if you love Caeser the fact that he was genocidal is beyond dispute, he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. Gaul didn't return to pre-gallic wars population levels until well into the dark ages IIRC.

It would've been pretty hard to justify that while at the same time making wars of conquest illegal in the UN

>t. eternal anglosaxon
Also I said Frank, not french. The french aristocracy is 99.9% german.

Pic related.

One of the greatest warriors who ever lived.

The Greatest Roman, you say?

UMU!

Should just have lit a few candles and made a #oraproroma engraving

They're also 99.9% dead

>Whore of Babylon

These anons get it.

Posting the thing
youtube.com/watch?v=4ztOV2wrrkY

Last of the Romans refers to a number of people over several centuries. Everyone gets to choose his favourite.

>no great greeks
Alexander
Socrates
Aristotle

Spoken like someone who will never fight another person in their life

That quote's fake. It never appears in the meditations and it's a mistranslation of a quote with a very different meaning.

"Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But Gods there are, undoubtedly, and they regard human affairs; and have put it wholly in our power, that we should not fall into what is truly evil. "

That said anyone who wants to play a paladin would do well to read Meditations.

The greeks literally only stopped claiming Macedonians were barbarians on the level of thracians so they could lay claim on Alexander

>Aristotle
lol no, Aristotle's hardon for the four elements contributed to retarding science for millenia

>hating on Aristotle
>on a computer the basis of which relies heavily on Aristotlean logic

This is 200 years old revolutionary bullshit created to split french society with the good, nice and natural gaulish peasants on one side and the evil germanic aliens oppressing them on the other side.

Everyone was probably a mess of 90% celts and 10% franks.

Personally I think you could call Belisarius and even Justinian the “last of the romans” on the virtue that their mother tongues were Latin and not Greek or some other langaguge.