08-25-2014, 11:26 PM
Gaveston Wrote:Roman Empire had no worthy concurrents except Karfagen. RE easy defeated other countries.
That idea is overblown. People tend to look back on history and assign the winning of wars to things like military tech or quality of weaponry. Rome had stolen most of its tactics from the Iberian tribes, including their shields and pila. It had stolen the ability to build any combatworthy ships of any sort whatsoever from a wrecked Carthaginian bireme. The only thing that contemporary writers particularly ascribed as being "special" about Roman forces whatsoever was their level of discipline. They were physically small and dwarfed in terms of physical strength by enemies like the Gauls and Germans. Only modern writers write in terms suggesting that Rome was so heads and shoulders above its opponents in every aspect that it was virtually guaranteed that they would prevail. Roman culture, religion and society borrowed almost entirely from the influence of Greece, which was in a very long period of decline by the time of the rise of Rome. Their cavalry remained an afterthought or, in less kind words, a joke for much of its history as a power.
I think people are far too quick to write the sudden successes of various powers in human history as being something special, unique, and superior about the way those people did things, and far too slow to think about it in terms of someone being in the right place at the right time when the state of the world around them was a perfect time for them to be lucky and their enemies to be unlucky. When Rome declined in almost precisely the same way the formerly magnificent Greek civilization had done, and like them was overrun with "barbarians" and largely faded from history, suddenly no one is talking about superior tactics or superior technology or superior practices anymore. It's an interesting disconnect.
The rise of western civilization can similarly be "qualified" by the fact that the world around them had largely been catastrophically devastated (to a degree that is consistently underrepresented in a typical western education of world history) by the Mongols who had set back the stability and the population of many parts of the areas they conquered by as much as a thousand years (many areas in the Middle East literally did not recover to their pre-Mongol population levels for about that long) and who had bypassed Europe because it was considered crap land for horses and too poor and backwards to be worth the effort to pillage. Europe's rise even in rationalism and the sciences borrowed heavily from Arab and Moorish learning and education, who had been working on curing people with surgery and pharmaceuticals at a point in time when Europe was using knives to cut markings into the foreheads of sick people to release demons. Chemistry, Algebra, these words come from Arabic. But in our standard education at least here in America... the rise of the west was entirely about superior learning and superior culture and concepts of liberty and enlightened governance, with little contribution from anyone at all except maybe a slight nod towards ancient Greece.
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