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Post by lighthorseman on Dec 12, 2011 3:12:44 GMT -5
LHM depends whether you are talking about the empire only. There were certainly civil unrest often spurred on by demogogues or reformers such as Saturninus, the brothers Grachi, Clodius Pulcher and his gangs. Not to mention the Italian war Oh, I know there were upsets, they seemed to have a new usurper sieze the throne every other week. But I mean a real grassroots populist revolt, not just the aristocrats changeing places at the tea party. Admittedly imperial Rome isn't really my period.
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Post by brendanrizzo on Dec 12, 2011 10:26:53 GMT -5
LHM depends whether you are talking about the empire only. There were certainly civil unrest often spurred on by demogogues or reformers such as Saturninus, the brothers Grachi, Clodius Pulcher and his gangs. Not to mention the Italian war Oh, I know there were upsets, they seemed to have a new usurper sieze the throne every other week. But I mean a real grassroots populist revolt, not just the aristocrats changeing places at the tea party. Admittedly imperial Rome isn't really my period. I can't think of anything. But then again, I don't know all that much about Rome either. What I do know about Rome is that after its fall, the Catholic Church pretty much made it their mission to prop the Roman Empire up as the pinnacle of civilization and that it was a "tragedy" that it fell (which influenced Western thinking about Rome for 1500 years) and yet, at the same time, the Church said that before Constantine every Roman emperor made it his mission in life to stamp out Christianity and kill every last Christian. Doublethink is nothing new. Interestingly enough, starting with Edward Gibbon and continuing into the nineteenth century, when atheists and freethinkers first started to appear in large numbers (since they couldn't be put to death anymore) these armchair historians (such as Draper and White) pretty much took these pieces of Catholic propaganda and ran with them, but adjusting them to fit their own views. That's how popular culture got the idea that Ancient Greece and Rome were somehow exactly like the (then-)modern world, just transplanted 2000 years in the past, and without the Industrial Revolution. Of course, in real life, the scientific experimental method was actively criticized by Greek philosophers and the Romans had no philosophers whatsoever, so science as we know it did not exist before the 1600s at all, but that didn't stop the Victorian historians of science, who basically said that science was used in the Roman Empire until the Church cruelly and evilly, for no reason except to further their own power (because they somehow KNEW they were going to lose in free debate, even though the people of Rome weren't atheists; they were polytheists) torched the Library of Alexandria, banned all science, and set society back a thousand years. Even if Christianity never existed, I have to wonder whether modern science would have originated any sooner than it actually did. I know that Carl Sagan claimed that the original Ionian philosophers (Thales and his students) had stumbled upon the scientific method, but he blamed the failure of science to take off on Pythagoras and Plato, who didn't like experimentation very much. So by the time of the Roman Empire it could well have been too late for ancient science. I know that kinda got off topic, so I guess what I'm trying to say is that no one knows much of anything about how Roman society really was, because of 2000 years of pro-Roman propaganda.
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Post by davedan on Dec 12, 2011 16:08:20 GMT -5
Well all the stuff I mentioned was republic, end of the republic stuff not imperial. The italian war was a full on war between Rome and her Italian 'allies'.
Also by the time of empire - there was Rome the empire and provinces and Rome the city.
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