Quintus Artemis Sertorius

heh, Big freakin sand fort.

yeah, at one time gladiatorial games were put on in order to celebrate a funeral, but at least in the late republican times they weren't being killed. i just wanted to know when the practice of having gladiators, or prisoners acting like gladiators were forced to fight to the death.

What makes a Legion strong (or weak for that matter)? I want to discuss what made the legions effective. this is really a two part question.. 1) what in general most greatly contributed to the success of the legion? i.e. tactics, logistics, leadership, etc... 2) Who took the strongest role in making the legions successful? is it a specific person (marius, Ceasar, etc.) or a position within the legion (legate, centurion, praefectus fabrum,etc.) ? my vote goes to logistics making the legions so effective, and the praefectus fabrum (guy who coordinates the logistics for the army) since they go hand in hand. however, the centurion had to have been the most important person when it comes to overall success of the legion. ceasar himself knew that to lose all your legates and tribunes is bad, but to lose a few centurions is absolutely horrible. besides, all of us viri militaris know that the backbone of the army is the NCO.

Augustus tried to influence the morals of the Empire though. he passed into law various rules about the proper moral attitudes and practices. he attempted to strengthen marriage and discourage adultery, extravagence, and luxury. granted, these laws didn't neccesarily apply to the emperor, thats why it's good to be king. and we all know that later these laws were not even paid lip service to. augustus also started the trend of building massive public buildings in rome. i think he set the standard for the later construction of the colloseum, the pantheon, and all the other great basillicas. other emperors could look at the works of augustus and they have something to compete against. didn't he say something along the lines of "I came to a city made of brick and wood, and left it a city shethed in marble and stone"? besides that, the romans liked to give truly great ment he title of founder of rome. the first was romulus who actually founded the origional 7 hill city. the second is marcus furius camillus who captured veii, defeated the volsci, and annexed tarentum, which greatly expanded the territory of eraly rome, and subdued rome's closest enemies. he also is given credit for forcing the patricians to give some concessions to the plebians, thereby defusing the class struggle for a time. finally you have gaius marius who defeated the invading german army, which was a huge looming threat to romans that still could remember, and see in some places easily see, the effects of the gaulish invasion and sack of rome. i think Augustus deserves the title, since for the first time in many many years there was no civil wars raging in the roman world.

from what i've read, the numen were scrupulously attended to. to break a "contract" with the imported pantheon was one thing, but to do the same to the numen was tantamount to an invitation for destruction. once read something about if a roman shouted the secret name of roma out loud, then the numen called Quirinus would actually destroy the city and every citizen in it. of course there were probably those who didn't really put a whole lot of stock in this, but even the unbelievers were careful about making the numen mad. the numen are supposed to be much older than the pantheonic gods.

oh yeah, anyone know about when they started making the gladiatores kill eachother in the ring? i know that during the republic they rarely actually died in the ring. most of them took on the noteriety of modern day sports idols, and they were owned by private gladiator schools that would rent them out for important occasions, but when did the shift from good sport to butchery happen?

Thracians of the Republic are my favorite. they had to be smarter than their Gaul opponents because they were a little more encumbered with the big greaves they wore. Those little rat like Gauls could run and dodge anywhere they wanted to.

Ouch, i know the feeling about almost flooding. Good luck getting out, and best wishes.

I think the Romans did practice a limited kind of genocide in Gaul. Genocide is any kind of killing due to the victims membership in a group. There have been a couple of genocides in history with the object not of killing off a group, but eliminating that groups ability to resist the new power. initially, the spaniards weren't intent on killing off all the Amerindians they found. they wanted to break the power of the Aztecs and Incas, but they wanted to save the population to use as a labor base. the same goes for the Khemer Rouge in the late 70's. they didn't want to kill everyone in their country, just those that would not bow down. i think the romans had much the same idea.

I think a big reason may have been the general attitude fo the late romans. they got a little too sure of themselves, they got too greedy, and they got too fat. i mean this in the loose metaphorical sense. when your priorities shift too much from the good of the state/empire/religion/family/whatever to the good of yourself, your particular class and your bank account you lose sight of what is important. i honestly think many romans lost touch with the real world because life got too easy for them. compare some of the prevaling attitudes of the early republic to the late empire. you can see an obvious shift from hard work and pragmatism to gluttony in every sense of the word. this isn't to say that the early days of the republic didn't have their share of gluttony and greed, but i think it hit a much grander level later on. in the end, the biggest baddest lion on the block got fat from eating too much, and everyone knows that there are no fat wild lions out there.

What is a nummi? I've never heard of that before. Most of what i have studied and concentrated on is the period from Gracchus to Ceasar and i'v never heard of a nummi.

I think a big part of it also had to do with the very high number of non roman soldiers in the later empire. when a big chunk of your army is spanish and german and sarmatians who are fighting to protect something that is not theirs, they will probably lose faith. i think all the guys with the big guns that knew how to use them kinda got fed up with it and decided to basically quit.

There's a couple of big feminine forces you could look up. Magna Mater being one, also the Cybelline cults, and the strictly female Bona Dea rite of the Romans. Also the pagan/Celtic Gaia spirit. The Catholic church did alot of capitalizing on these "heretic" beliefs and might be a major reason that many modern latins hold the Madonna to such high regard.

Actually the sesterces was what was mostly talked about and used. the denarius was used, but most amounts were often described in terms of sesterces. And the ownership of land was most definitely the largest chunk of wealth. There were many instances during the Civil Wars (take your pick of which one, the same is true for them all) where there really wasn't any cash money available, so the deeds to various pieces of land, or houses, or buisnesses were traded for food and other products.

When you are talking about roman religion and gods, i think you have to clarify which gods you mean. are we speaking of the imported gods most people are familiar with? for instance jupiter apollo, saturn, venus..magna mater, etc. these are all gods that the romans adopted from outside. or are you talking about the real roman spirits like the lares and the numen. the gods without a face or body or even a name. from what i have seen, the romans may take an almost flippant attitude towards the imported gods, but when it came to the numen, the romans were dead serious, as these were the gods responsible for the proper functioning of all objects, the health and wealth of the family, and the very essence of Rome.

I'm not quite sure if this is part of what you are looking for, but there have been some who feel that the very strong belief in the Virgin Mary may be due in part to the old Eastern Magna Mater cult. The idea of a feminine god or spirit in the world was always a very big idea in the ancient european world. witht he rise of christianity, the advent of the Virgin Mary may have been a way for the very young Catholic church to reach out to a part of the population which worshipped the old ways.

during the republic the control of the armies, and the running of the state was in the hands of the elected magistrates. first, unless they were needed, the legions weren't a standing army. it was almost like the modern day reserves, except that the leggionaries owned their own armor and weapons. the romans had something calle the cursus honorum, which is the progression of political offices you hold on your way to the top. each year, the elected officials from the last year would be given a province to govern. the provinces weren't all totally pacified yet, so sometimes a governor would also be given a war chest and the authority to raise a legion. they would go out and recruit anyone that wanted to do some military duty, and then they would go off to the province. the main idea though is that the legions were led by elected magistrates during peace and war untill the imperial age.

I'm not sure about the imperial times, but during the mid to late republican times, most currency was of silver. there was the occasional minting of a gold coin, but this was rare. a silver talent was around 6,250 denarii. the denarii had about 3.5 grams of pure silver, and was about the size of a dime. next smallest is the sesterces. this was worth a fourth of a denarius, and was the most common denomination in buisness. the smallest coin was the as, which was usually made of bronze. ten of these made up a denarius. rich roman,s did alot of moving money in the form of talents. when ceasar captured one of the pirate strongholds near rhodes, he found nearly 2000 talents of silver and gold. the romans made extensive use of banks throughout the med. region. large amounts of money were often moved with the use of a bank draft.

I thought I once read somewhere that there was a great deal of cajoling and persuading, and almost outright threatening involved in getting Brutus to do his part in killing Ceasar. If I'm not mistaken, Brutus wasn't so keen on doing any actual blood spilling. I'm still not convinced that Brutus was anything more than a mediocre kind of man with a hunger for gold and a questionable spine.

Unfortunatly, Sulla had to cut short his war in the East because he had to return to Rome in order to deal with internal problems. If Marius and his Popular pary hadn't started all the trouble in Rome, I would think that someone as ruthless and effective as Sulla would have finished off Mithridates before leaving. Sulla doesn't strike me as one that leaves tasks unfinished.

Well, looks like I came a little late to this thread but what the heck. With all due respect to PP, I don't think mass-murder can be justified by the name put on it. One person's "ethnic-cleansing" is another person's "killing of resistance". Whatever you call it, the outcome is the same: massive amounts of people being killed. Was Ceasar right in his actions? I personaly don't know, it is hard to judge with 2000 years of changing morals, cultures, and societies. What I do know, however, is that the act of sparing the enemy out of moral reasons is a very new phenomenon to the human race. Since the very first days of humanity, we as a species have been the most destructive to walk on the earth. There is a very good pile of evidence that we may have hunted our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals to extinction. We as Americans are the progeny of a mass murder here on our own continent. What can you define the killing of Indians as? Not really sure, in that some where killed to stop ressitance, while some were killed in order to just get rid of them. In almost every instance that a more modern, more advanced society suddenly met a more primitive culture, the former quickly replaced the later, usually through force and some method of mass murder. If such an action is so common in history, one might wonder if it is in fact human nature. Perhaps it is the natural conclusion to survival of the fitest. Was Ceasar truly wrong, or was he just carrying out the goal which evolution led him to? one man's "ethnic cleansing" is another man's "killing of resistance", but are both just nature's "natural selection"?

From what I have read on the subject of Brutus, he wasn't all that much of a fighter. I don't seem to remember him playing a major part in any battle or winning any kind of fame as an athelete. In fact, I think I once read that he tended to lean more towards the academic end of the spectrum. Besides, would a true "great fighter" would probably have done it a little differently. Perhaps stabbing his victim in the front while looking him in the eyes? Ceasar being the person he was deserved at least that much, whether you agree with his policies and actions or not. Great men deserve that degree of dignity. (Not that I agree with his killing. Sometimes the world needs a Ceasar. Democracy is all good and well, but it doesn't always work as fast as it needs to, and survival is more important than rights and laws.)

I have been watching CNN almost constantly for the past couple of days as the disaster in the Gulf area gets worse and worse. Seeing how hard it has been for a modern state to relieve problems in New Orleans, I was wondering if anyone knew about the Roman respone to ancient disasters like Pompeii and the burning of Rome during Nero's time. Are there accounts of the same kind of thing happening now in any of the ancient texts? Was there some kind of government driven attempt to help the people, or was it allowed to fix itself? Also, does anyone know of any other large scale disasters of the Roman era?

In regards to whether the army stopped in cities along the way i would think they stopped nearby them at least. Usually Roman armies would construct a marching camp every night when they stopped. i'm guessing that crassus would stop nearby any city on the way in order to gather supplies and more money as crassus loved money. i'm sure many cities lost their food reserves because its usually easier and cheaper to buy the food off a city than it is to carry enough to feed a legion for months at a time. i'm not sure where you can find this info though.

I'm not real sure where you can find such info on the internet. one site i like is at www.ancienthistory.about.com. it gives some good general information, and gives lots of links to places with more detailed stuff.