Do you prefer Romans, or Greeks? To my eyes, the Romans represent a more masculine, vigorous culture; almost juvenile in their zest for life and conquest. The Greeks are the moon to their sun; something stranger, more elegant, and yet less brilliant.
Greek : Quality, refinement
Rome : Quantity, grandness
Gauls.
I don't really care about the Greeks and I don't get the obsession. I like the Romans, I'm learning Latin and so on. All I see the Greeks as are as background the occasionally comes up in Roman literature. They mean nothing to me on their own.
The Romans were very cool and powerful and all that, but they never really seemed to figure out how to actually run their whole... massive fucking system.
Like, they had civil wars so frequently you could set your clock to them, disdained foreign influence even as they went out of their way to incorporate foreign cultures and populations into their domain (you cannot affect the world w/o being affected in turn), seemed to constantly underfund everything maritime, had basically no understanding of the field of medicine to the point of considering physicians as Greek charlatans (sauce: Pliny's Naturalis Historia), and frankly it seems like basically every policy instituted from Augustus onwards just kept digging deeper at an ever-diminishing well of manpower that *would've replenished* if they weren't fucking burning it on constant warfare and taxing shit to hell and back. They didn't really seem to understand currency, very much, either, what with all the debasement. Also, that late Roman shit of locking people into their professions on a generation-to-generation basis and capping prices into place (rather than addressing *why* prices are going nuts in the first fucking place) is the economic policy of complete retards who fundamentally don't understand what an economy is or how it functions.
Also they disdained pants, which makes them fools.
>at an ever-diminishing well of manpower that *would've replenished* if they weren't fucking burning it on constant warfare and taxing shit to hell and back.
Your fatal lack of understanding of massive difference between Central Italian culture in the Republic and Empire is showing. The amount of men from Central Italy mobilised reached something about 30% in the Republic, by the 2nd century it was less than 5%.
>They didn't really seem to understand currency, very much, either, what with all the debasement
They understood it very well, most people on here don't seem to understand that debasement is not a bad thing per se. It increases the amount of coin available to the Emperor to use. The attempt to increase purity in coinage was usually a bad thing for the Emperor, as in the reigns of Valens and Valentinian when they had to sell Imperial estates to make up for the loss in real Imperial revenue.
> locking people into their professions on a generation-to-generation basis
This only actually applied to the Army and the Curial class and was easy enough to circumvent.
>capping prices into place
These have quite literally always existed. Diocletian's price controls were an extreme version of what they already had, and it didn't last and wasn't even implemented in most places.
>Why, yes. I just watched a 10 minute video about Rome on YouTube. How could you tell?
My theory. The Roman Empire was fed by cities. When they could capture new cities every 10 years, the system worked perfectly. When there was no available material left, they tried to expand further. The war with the Germans took more than it brought. A victory over the Parthians might have opened the way to new cities that could be plundered, but the Romans could not wage maneuver warfare on the steppe at all. As a result, they had enough resources for 100 years of rest from 90 to 190 approximately, when they developed themselves somewhat. But then their empire began to cannibalize itself in a new round of civil wars.
Perhaps if the Romans broke into Iran, India, they could extend their empire for another 100-200 years.
>My theory. The Roman Empire was fed by cities. When they could capture new cities every 10 years, the system worked perfectly. When there was no available material left, they tried to expand further
The Romans went to war, for the sake of going to war. It was a deliberate policy. When their wars in Iberia finished (which took decades, against a tribal people without large cities) the Senate decreed that they take to war in Illyria, against a people who were also little urbanised and lacking in material wealth. The Romans did not need an economic incentive to go to war, in fact they were willing to bleed massive amounts for the sake of going to war. It was an imperative to what they believed their society to be, held together by the fact the aristocracies of Central Italy bound themselves to Roman interests, and they own through warfare and winning glory while keeping the majority of men from the ages 18-30 in active military service.
Small towns suited them too. It was a less valuable nourishment than, say, Asia Minor or the Middle East, where a steady stream of gold could be acquired. The Iberians or Illyrians are certainly barbarians, but wealthy enough that the army could profit, at least in slaves. This is an excellent type of war: such barbarians could be found in the field, where the Roman legion rolled them and drove them into towns and forts, which the Roman siege art cracked like nuts.
There was a case when the Celtiberians, during the siege of their town by the Romans, decided to poison their women and children and burn the city so that the Romans would not get anything and go to the last battle. The Romans said that such barbarians were worse than beasts and could hardly be considered human. (instead of going into civilized slavery). Cicero wrote about Britain (not exactly, see his letters): "there is no gold there and such savages live that I don't even know why Caesar invaded there."
I invite you to think about the question: what countries and peoples could the Romans still want to conquer, but didn’t or didn’t succeed? And why.
>what countries and peoples could the Romans still want to conquer
The answer was everybody. Even in the Republic they envisioned their state to be the universal one, it was both ideological and desired that they conquered others.
>but didn’t or didn’t succeed? And why.
Too many to count but mainly the end of Aristocratic competition and the end of the hyper militaristic culture in Central Italy which enabled a near endless stream of ambitious politicians, commanders and constant stream of young soldiers in the hundreds of thousands to participate in these wars. A society and culture which was idealised, but in reality dead by the later part of the 1st century.
>considering physicians as Greek charlatans
Based.
>is the economic policy of complete retards who fundamentally don't understand what an economy is or how it functions.
The only reason we know how to avoid mistakes in the economy is from examples where it went wrong
They didn't have the wealth of knowledge we do currently, get your head out of your ass
The Romans were actually pretty good at running their massive system (the whole known civilized world). It could have collapsed several times but the Romans managed to keep it running. Even then, you could argue that the Roman Empire never collapsed, but simply evolved into the Latin West
Greeks, but mostly because I have a massive boner for the post-Alexander free-for-all
I like the idea of the greeks more, but in reality they seemed like midwits who couldnt ever get their shit together. Romans were cool until the empire started. The corruption of the republic would have been a wonderful time to be a noble or politician.
All in all i prefer the retards from bactria tbqh
Republic era Rome was kino and respectable. Imperial Rome is less respectable but still interesting to learn about.
I like the Greeks but they were small fry compared to Rome. Macedonians came close to greatness but couldn't make it last.
Greeks. The Romans seem to me a cruel and barbarous people, and their assimilation of civilization is rather superficial and incapable of suppressing their wild instincts. With the Romans, I like the way they built bridges, roads, cities, military camps - but this is all the technical side. And Roman law. That is, they were better precisely in the external, instrumental aspects of civilization. Where the Greeks lacked order.
For me, that episode from the life of Pyrrhus of Epirus is an indicator. In negotiations with the Romans (then still wildish), the Greek philosopher from the retinue of Pyrrhus began to tell the Romans about the philosophy of Epicurus and asked how they like this philosophy? The Romans replied that they really liked the philosophy of Epicurus in terms that if the Greeks followed it more, then "they will quickly weaken and we - the Romans will easily capture and enslave them." It seems deep inside the Romans maintained this worldview until the very end in the 5th century AD.
Greeks a million times over. They showed the world What EVROPA is made of when Romans were still in their caves.
My contrarian ranking:
Later Romans > Archaic Greeks > Classical Greeks > Early Romans > Hellenistic Greeks > Archaic Romans
AG: Before Medic Wars
CG: After Medic Wars, before Alexander
HG: Alexander and after
AR: Before Second Punic War
ER: After Second Punic War, before Tetrarchy
LR: Tetrarchy to Heraclius
Not ranking according to greatness, instead about how interesting and entertaining I find them
Italy: has done stuff for the last 1000 years
Greece: has not done stuff for the last 1000 years
ayy pisano Im going with Rome
he said romans, not the gallo-germanic on greco-anatolian mongrels known as italians
Italians are mostly Italic+Celtic+Greek+Anatolian Greek. Germanic ydna in Italy is insignificaly.
I like Romans because they are not gay.
Neither, I find myself admiring the Gauls before the conquests
As I learn more and more, Romans. The Greeks are the springboard every budding person takes before they fall into the pool that is researching classical antiquity. I've seen a relatively new mindset that the Pax Romana is boring to learn about and that the later empire is more interesting, and while I agree that it's cool, I prefer the early part of the empire because it's like seeing a child take it's first steps. He stumbles a bit, and you end up with a Caligula or Nero, but overall, things are pretty good. I'm kind of a contrarian in the sense that I actually think the Flavian dynasty was the best of the four Pax Romana-era dynasties.
My favorite period of Greece is the classical period, and if you expand that into the broader "Hellenistic" period, then the post-Alexander world is extremely interesting, and the wars of the Diadochi and hearing about all the intermingling is really cool, especially hearing about stuff like the Seleucids using war elephants and to a lesser extent the Mithridaitic wars, the Hasmonean kingdom. Middle classical antiquity is like the high school of the big players of the Mediterranean, full of the exploration of identity, struggle and growing pains.
Greeks for me
Greeks because they civilized the East.
Romans because they civilized Europe.
I love Rome a lot. I respect Greece but at the end of the day it's Rome who conquered Greece.
And then Greece conquered Rome from within.
this is the first time i saw someone paint an accurately dressed greek
Brainlet take, the Romans are what they are because of the Greeks. They just had goot timing, many other cultures could have taken their place, and almost did, and hardly anything would have changed.
> Romans represent a more masculine
Probably because the were more primitive than greeks.
You know, greeks thought that persians are too effeminated back then when they were more advanced than greeks themselves.
They thought they were more affectionate because they painted their hair and used make up to hide their aging appearance. That wasn't something the Greeks couldn't do, they simply didn't want to because it was seen as effeminate, which it is
Howeverm, persians were more advanced than greeks and that was the main reason why they were more affectionate.
I prefer the Hellenized Romans