What does Holla Forums think of Ancient Rome?

What does Holla Forums think of Ancient Rome?

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soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast
marxist.com/class-struggles-roman-republic-one.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
therealtalk.org
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Unless you were insanely rich it was generally p. shitty

Imperialist slavers. Frankish pride worldwide.

they made cool swords

I remember someone here made a very good post explaining the fall of the Roman Empire in historical materialist terms, once. Does anyone have it, by any chance?

I'd like to see this

In the last Rome thread?

No, it was in a thread on some shit that Sargon of Akkad said about America being like Rome.

Fuck, I can't remember if I posted that one or not. I remember writing a long post about the fall of Rome and someone replied to it pointing out some mistakes and I didn't get the chance to reply before it got pushed off the board.

Is it possible to care about roman history without being a massive white supremacist?

yes

Yeah dude, it's really interesting. There's lots of cool stuff there and classical literature has some really great stuff like Cicero and Marcus Aurelius.

Pretty cool. Had some great
A E S T H E T I C S

Stormniggers will claim "WE WUZ EMPERORS N SHEIT" yet forget how Itallians and Greeks were discriminated against in Western countries when they immigrated to them.

yes
basically remember them this

t. white supremecists

I think the American Empire can learn a lot from its inevitable collapse.

One of the last dominant slave societies, whose collapse created the conditions for the rise of feudal society in Europe

The Ottoman Empire stuck around until 1922.

...

Shit
t. Hellaboo

Yes, half of it was brown anyway (by population as Western Europe was relatively sparsely populated at the time), the bits that did survive ie Byzantium were mostly Assyrian, Arab and Coptic. Are Armenians brown or white?

There was even one Arab emperor of the united Roman Empire ie Phillip, white supremacists should leave Rome the fuck alone given how Germanic raiders supplanted it in the West.

rookie mistake


shouldn't you be more salty about the macedonians?

besides Macedon was pretty Hellenistic

Ancient Rome had a police force, so stfu about police being a socialist institution.

who the fuck said that

Been following a pretty good podcast about the fall of the Roman Empire.
soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast

Did they fall because of fun and immigrants like Holla Forums told me?

No and he actually addresses that meme.

Liberals. The guy you just replied to is probably a newfag, or just trolling/shitposting.

Rome fell because of the the class contradictions that drove its expansion eventually lead to such extreme political instability that it became unable to respond to any external threat while simultaneously becoming incapable of internal reform.

So the fall of the Roman empire just happens to support your worldview? Well that sure was lucky, wasn't it? It's not like trying to manage an empire that spans across an entire continent with nothing but guys on horseback would be difficult or anything, would it?

No, it's obviously just the class struggle, like you said.

Romans were Multiculturalists, so yes.

Why does most ideology resolve itself into fairytale tier understandings of the world?

Anyway ,
marxist.com/class-struggles-roman-republic-one.htm

Fantastic aesthetics and culture but corrupt politics and failure to genocide the Alemanni.
A good inspiration, an awful model.

destroyed my culture by imposing their shit Christian bullshit

And Barbarian Paganism was the shit

Caring about history doesn't make you a white supremacist. Actually caring about Roman history would likely produce the opposite attitude.

tfw you get called a Nazi for having an interest in the history of WW2

When the empire was at its zenith it did not have a cavalry. It was not until AD 260 when Emperor Galienus commissioned the first mounted Roman soldiers. Guys walked on those roads.

And yes, class was a huge factor–the factor even–in the fall of the empire. In particular the rise of the highly productive peasantry and the aristocratic class that formed within the massive bureaucracy that grew out of the reforms of Caracalla were the driving force that led to the fragmentation of the Western Empire. The aristocrats had little use for the centralized empire which was increasingly incapable of protecting their interests, and there were never enough peasants to work the empire no matter how many barbarian tribes the Romans invited across the Danube and the Rhein.

It's even more fun when they find out that you are more interested in the Soviets than the Nazis.

That's not true. There were mounted roman soldiers but they were an extreme minority – most of their mounted forces came from client cities and cultures with a tradition of horse-riding and husbandry, as well as mercenaries. Still shit compared to just about everyone else though.

Romans were my ancestors, Ottoman Empire was the Third Rome
t. Turk

Those were auxillaries. They were not Romans but rather provincials who were organized to support the Roman legions. Provincials did not become Roman citizens until Caracalla issued the Antonine Constitution in AD 212, and until Galienus created a full-time cavalry forty-eight or so years later cavalry was still raised locally and in response to an immediate threat. In contrast, the cavalry, cataphract, and dragoon units that Galienus added to his comitatenses were permanent units that could move between provinces to respond quickly to threats that arose along the frontier.

Nothing has changed

I saved it, my dudes

"You want to know why the fall Roman Empire came about? Economics. Particularly, Romans "fixing" the contradictions of their political/economic system by expanding their borders.
During its Republican faze, Rome keeps expanding outward, and as it does it naturally takes the prime agricultural land from its former enemies. Theoretically, all that land is supposed to go into the Ager Publicus and be administered by the state for the benefit of all Romans. In reality, since the patricians are the ones that administer the AP, more frequently than not they sell the majority of it to their rich friends for sesterces on the dinarius. To make matters worse, instead of employing the plebeans on these latifundia, they import cheap slaves to work and administer the land for them.
The constant warfare takes its toll on the Republican-era legions. Essentially, you had to be independently wealthy enough to buy your own armor and weapons and equipment. You also had to stay on campaign until the war was over. These independent farmers would be bankrupted, their farms seized, and their families turned out into the streets. This happens to such a degree that Rome experiences a recruitment crisis, as they no longer have a sufficient population of these citizens to draw from to sustain their legions. Rebellions start popping off in Sicily and Southern Italy due to the unrelenting exploitation.
To put things into perspective, the average Roman laborer made a handful of sesterces a day and spent over half of it on food. Pliny comments on the real estate inflation in Southern Italy, with the price of a farm rising from 4000ses to 600,000ses.
So what's a patrician to do? You can't make more land, but you can steal it. Rome expands ever outward. Thanks to Marius's military innovations, the poor, jobless plebs can now join the army, all expenses paid. If they live to the end of their enlistment they get 40 acres and a mule out in the provinces, taken from the ager publicus–or at least, whatever is left once the patricians take their share :^). It works for a while. Rome becomes more powerful. The rich become richer. The poor have an avenue out of poverty. Everyone wins!
Except it does nothing to resolve the class/economic contradictions that are leading to the instability in the first place. Things will get so bad that Rome experiences over a century of almost constant civil war as the state completely loses the ability to keep its wealthier citizens in check. Proscriptions and tyranny become the rule of the day, and the whole thing nearly comes crashing down around their heads.
Then Julius comes along, and then his nephew Octavian. They too "fix" the situation, with their primary innovation being the consolidation of the majority of state power within their persons. Along with their monopoly on state authority, they also have the loyalty of the legions to back them up. By putting the resources of the empire into the hands of one person, the instability caused by the unruly aristocracy is ameliorated for a time since no one else could compete with the emperor.
Unfortunately, this doesn't unravel the societal contradictions, either, and the same forces that created the situation in the first place continue. Land and wealth become consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. Subsequent waves of crises diminish the power of the emperor. Eventually, local landowners become powerful enough to ignore compulsion by the state, and the Emperor(s) is too busy trying to keep things from flying apart to bring them into line. The Germans invade (among others), everyone is left to fend for themself, and over a thousand years of Roman power goes down the drain as the supports necessary to maintain the empire abandon it.
tl;dr, tyranny in Rome comes about as the wealthy grow beyond the ability for the state to control, and if anything Trump is Catiline rather than Caesar, and if he thinks Trump is going to save him from the barbarians at the gates he's going to be in for a very rude awakening."

going to start listening to it user. This guy isn't going to analys it from a neoliberal presepective is he?

>it was my post

Are you a vampire?

It wasn't, I literally saved it to .txt because I wanted to share it on diaspora*

That's brilliant.

The OP should submit this to bunker mag

Germanic people were literally the niggers of the Roman age.

It literally was. That was what I wrote.


Thank you. I think I will expand it a bit and do just that.

Wow. What a relief we live in a modern civilized democratic country with freedoms. Right guys?

Oh, no shit. Misinterpreted. I took your post to be making fun of me saving my own shit.
You are a good writer of words, sir

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh tumblr, leave.

And as the other guy said, germans were Forrest dwelling barbarians who wore fur suits and btfo the roman empire

Hey, don't worry about it. It's easy to misinterpret things online.

lol, right after I replied even panic struck me that I'd actually misunderstood you. For a few tense seconds I worried I made myself look like a jackass on the internet.

Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed my post.

You got a lot of reshares on diaspora* fwiw

Forgive my ignorance, but what's diaspora*?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

The caveat to this is that Podmins can be just as intense as they want to be, but you can always set up your own pod if you don't like it.
I've used a couple different pods because some podmins can be lazier than others about fixing bugs, but I've never had any problems besides forgetting to use the #nsfw tag to auto-spoiler porn.

Thanks! I think I'll seriously look into this. I've been wanting to dump facebook for a long time now.

Yep. My pod is therealtalk.org
But there's a lot of them. See if you can guess which one of those weirdos is me!

Trying to point to one particular thing as the reason for the fall of the Roman empire just shows how simplistically you view the world, it's absolutely ridiculous.

You then proceed to tell me that it was only to do with the class struggle. You know there were other factors at play, right? External factors like barbarian invasions played a pivotal role, including Rome being sacked twice. Not to mention the religious conflict going on throughout the empire and you could even argue that the failing health contributed to its fall.

I'm not really going to trust Marxist.com to lecture me about the Roman Empire; even a cursory glance at that article shows that there's so much they're overlooking that it's practically pointless, not to mention all the fucking buzzword in that article; no, thank you.

Oh I agree, but I was taking issue with the implication that Rome managed to conquer much of the "known" world without cavalry.

You're literally retarded.

Tell me something I don't already know, faggot.

what's the point? you just stick dicks in your ears whenever you hear something you don't like

I would liken them more to rapefugees.

Rome had been inviting tribes across the Danube and Rhine for centuries prior to cover a desperate manpower shortage created by plagues and wars. By the time that the tribes were able to do any actual invading, the empire was already hopelessly fractured.


Rome was practically a ruin by then with most of the population having left. The birth of feudalism had already either forced or lured Romans onto rural estates.


That was a big nothing. Toward then end of the empire, the old religion was limited to aristocratic senators in Rome itself, and the Senate of the late empire was nothing but a book club. Julien the Apostate, being one such senator, tried to repopularize it, but it was too far gone. For the army's part Mithrism never went out of style, even after the ranks became mostly non-Italians.


Do you mean the plagues? That is obviously the case, as they were the prime cause of the labor shortage that stretched the economy of the late empire.

bump

To add to that: a big factor in the collapse of the empire was also the collapse of slavery. The empire was subject of near-constant food shortages, since their urbanized population was far larger than their agricultural technology could support (they simply didn't have enough men in the fields to work all their land). Like all the other city-states did, they used slaves to alleviate this problem. By filling the countryside with slaves, the empire could support the lifestyles of its citizens, at least for a while (this is not dissimilar to how western economies are in a large part driven by third-world exploitation - though for us it's not because we lack the technology).
However, most of those slaves were won through military conquest, which mostly stopped in the last few centuries of the empire. With the influx of slaves severely limited, it became more and more impractical to have so many slaves working the fields, and since the population issue had only grown worse since then, well…