>ITT: We worship the Roman Empire.
Give reasons why the Roman Empire was the greatest ancient civilization
From 800 BC to 1 AD the western world experienced massive geographical expansion. In the 8th century BC italy was just a bunch of villages around the mediterranean sea with a population of a few hundred thousands, by the 1st century the Western World covered 5 million square kilometers, had thousands of cities, including some of several hundred thousand inhabitants and massive social and economic change. Living standards improved for a population that reached at least 60 million upwards to 100 million people. In terms of population and territory the western world expanded by a factor of 100 times over these 800 years.
Rome 1 AD had 1 million inhabitants, in 1500 AD, it had 200,000 inhabitants.
>>1377245
>Give reasons why the Roman Empire was the greatest ancient civilization
>Massive slave empire with the worst political culture ever.
>Republic collapses due to selfish elites.
>Empire deteriorates because politicians and generals valued their ambition more than stability.
>Gets fucked hard by Huns, Germans, and Arabs.
>Cute boys
>Not enough Terracotta soldiers
>9/10
>>1377245
It was slightly inferior to china in every way
Roman Roads
In addition to allowing rapid movement of the Legions, roads allowed the spread of language, religion, culture, trade and the contributions of every society that Rome borrowed from to be expanded upon and spread throughout Europe, Africa and the Near East.
>>1377245
Do we have any surviving maps made by Romans?
![450px-Part_of_Tabula_Peutingeriana[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/YsijP3C.jpg "450px-Part_of_Tabula_Peutingeriana[1].jpg")
>>1377468
Tabula Peutingeriana
>>1377245
No, thanks. I'm loyal to the old republic.
>>1377434
Nah, not really. Chinaboos are just extremely delusional. Also it is the western perspective where we often overfocus on the decline on the Rome, whilst China is overglorified
>>1377434
>chinkaboos really think this
quite literally the founders of the West
nearly all future great powers in Europe claimed to be derived from the Roman Reich
think about how many use the title Kaiser which is the correct pronunciation of Cæsar
think about how many realms claim to be the inheritors of Rome
think about the political system, the roads (they are better than what we make today), the culture, religion, etc etc
>>1378049
The roads where better? Didn't the roads evovle and get better technologycally? Can't imagine that infrastructural technilogy deteriotating.
>>1378074
*technologically
>>1377427
Chang detected
Just because the western world btfo doesn't mean you gotta keep whining about it
>>1377427
Had gun powder hundreds of years before the western world and never developed firearms
It was a nordic empire.
http://www.theapricity.com/earlson/history/emperors.htm
>>1377449
>Philadelphia
Wait a minute what?
>>1378137
>he thinks american city names are original
Lemme guess, you think Venice beach is where the gondolas are too.
>>1377434
It was slightly inferior to medieval china, surely not to the contemporary Han.
>>1378074
From a certain pov, roman roads are better than ours. They drain better and they last much longer than asphalt.
Of course, they're totally unsuitable for motor vehicles going faster than 50-60kph.
>>1378157
No I just think it's weird m8
>>1378214
If you examine it it's clear that it's a greek name.
>>1377245
Because it was built entirely on slavery and oppression and slavery and oppression are really great according to some people.
>>1378214
It's a greek name, not so weird finding it in the hellenic sphere. The diadochi founded like half a dozen philadelphias around their domains (just to remark how fraternal they felt about each other, kek).
>>1377245
Great use of modern standards.
>>1377449
Vienna!?
>>1377976
Those numbers are astounding.
>>1377976
And then people say the dark ages are a meme.
>tfw playing Attila Total War as the Emperor of Constantinople and restoring the lost glory of Rome
I'm going to live out my historical fantasy of seeing Christian Rome reuniting the lost peoples of the spiritual nation of Israel, who were scattered across the world from Scythia to Aethiopia. My restored Roman Empire will be comprised of all of the Mediterranean once again, of Europe, North Africa, and Mesopotamia. If I can, I will drive back the Huns and restore civilization to Scythia as well.
>>1377976
The funny thing is Rome fell because many of its leaders had lead poisoning. They literally used it to sweeten their wine. This chart also forgets that China was a net importer of precious metals, and Rome was a net exporter of precious metals. China's wealth was in textiles and ceramics, and if you know anything about the industrial revolution, textiles are incredibly fucking important. Textiles can be produced forever, since they are biological products. Metal ores once depleted are gone forever.
Rome attempted to ban silk to prevent the export of currency. The wealthy classes balked. Rome went to war with Persia over the Silk trade. Rome tried to rebuild the Nile canal simply to undercut the Persian middle man. By the time the two sides were done fighting, they were overrun by desert barbarians.
If two great powers literally fight over your scraps of linen, does that not make you the greatest of all?
>>1377449
>this triggers libertarians
>>1377449
I never realized Caesarausgusta was Saragossa
>>1377449
what happened to all the roman speaking people in north africa? they became berbers and arabs?
>>1381017
vandalized
Late Rome Best Rome
>pants
>Christianity
>beards
>horsefuckers getting BTFO
What more do you want
>>1381122
I want Stilicho to be the emperor instead of that fucker Honorious
>>1381130
You and me both, anon.
>>1381101
Und nun wieder liegt das Blei seiner Schuld auf ihm, und wieder ist seine arme Vernunft so steif, so gelähmt, so schwer.
>>1381154
i will forever recognize you, butthurt copy+paste prc man
>>1380973
The lead poisoning thing is interesting. Everyone always mocks the Romans for doing this, but I can see why it would be appealing to them. Lead poisoning is said to unearth extreme, irrationally aggressive behavior in people effected by it.
Now to most people, this sounds like something to be avoided, but from the perspective of the Romans, reaching this state of primal, Dionysian fury made them closer to the divine. Transcendent rage beyond all rationality was the nature of the Gods.
In those drunken moments consumed with delusional lead induced poisoning in their estates, watching his family and his servants revere him with such uncertain fear, a Roman patrician likely felt like Apollo himself lording over mortals
>>1381193
I happened to see a reenactment of the Bacchae last week and the person I saw it with wondered how it was possible ancient people had so much dyonisiac fun with simple wine. Perhaps the wine was not so simple after all. Sugar of lead could explain it.
For comparison, the Han used rice wine, which uses a different fermentation process. Rice starch converts into sugar during fermentation, producing a sweet clear liquor, with no need for further additives. As we all should know from experience, clear liquor produces less hangovers and has less toxins overall.
>>1381257
There have been some people that have suggested that certain ingredients in certain mixes of the Greek drink the Kykeon, this ingredient most often conceived as being the ergot fungus but sometimes also thought to be DMT, produced a psychoactive effect that was a key aspect of their Mystery religions.
I've always wanted to spend some time and money in an attempt to recreate various theoretical mixes of the Kykeon with ingredients known to be in the Mediterranean world at the time for myself.
>>1381285
Now I do too.
>>1381312
I would of course also have to attempt to recreate the ceremonies of the ancient Greek Mystery religions if I attempted this, which would likely take years of study and preparation.
>>1381338
This, also true. The trouble is finding a mystery cult that isn't bogus.
I think of all the generations of artists, writers and intellectuals who were forced to go to faraway tribes to recreate an experience that civil society once provided. What travesty. What injustice. What a marvelous cultural desert we wander, so splendid that its best and brightest do absolutely anything to escape it.
When those unwashed ascetics burnt the temples of Dionysus and persecuted the ancient traditions, that was the great tragedy of the western world. The Dark Ages began not when Rome fell, but when Greece. Sure civilization persisted in form and function, but not substance. When Rome burned it was not a murder but a funeral.
>>1381390
I agree with you whole heartedly, but it's understandable that people would fear the horrific sexual violence, orgiastic lust, and ritual blood sacrifice that was taking place in the temples of Dionysus. While the ritual initiations of the Dionysian Mysteries brought primordial exuberance and spiritual alignment to those who contemplated upon it's symbols and archetypes of Mystery.
The Mysteries were meant to bring about a series of inner psychological transformations and guide initiates into achieving heightened, altered states of consciousness that allowed them to perceive the transcendent metaphysical reality of existence. They're temples and the compounds surrounding them were designed in a way that was meant for the initiates to be guided through the grounds by the Priests and Priestesses acting as a sort of psychopomp, who revealed to them an expansive awareness of an open ended contemplative mystery in regards to the nature of reality through various rituals.
>>1377245
50% of the world still writes using their Alphabet
>>1381285
The Romans not only brewed wine so strong it stained polished marble, they also smoked cannabis and opium, and in Roman Egypt they drank the hallucinogenic tea of the blue lotus. They ate a kind of hallucinogenic fish called a salema porgy for fun. Priestesses and oracles would often be installed near gaseous vents in the earth, whose vapor got them high.
>>1378164
They also take way longer to build
Modern roads are built cheaply to a satisfactory level and deteriorate quickly but are just as cheap and easy to patch up
>>1380973
No, because the Chinese were literally lucky that silk worms are only found in their region of the world, and were smart enough to exploit that. It isn't from any kind of cultural superiority.
>>1381502
Make that ~100%, even people who don't use it for their language learn it.
>the most populous country on Earth, China, teaches it ahead of their native script because it's more didactic to use Pinyin to teach Hanzi later.
>the second most populous country, India, uses English as a lingua franca and as such everybody learns to read/write in the Latin alphabet.
>people all around the world learn English and/or other European languages, regardless of their first language
>it's the script used in technology, so even people who don't learn English usually learn to transcribe their language into Latin script
>>1381122
but horsefuckers eventually win
>>1381454
Mysticism was just a shitty influence. The enduring legacy of Greece has been in its early rationalist philosophers rather than the confused babble of the oracles and priesthood.
>>1381562
>culture
Answer me then, which classical culture died out except in academic settings, and which classical culture persisted to the modern era? In what region can you still worship at the temples of the god of travel, the god of the sea, the god of thunder, or the god of the sun? Gone are the days when man can travel from sea to sea and always find a shrine analogous to his calling. There will never again be such a brotherhood of man.
Your ancestors destroyed their heritage with fire and the sword. By no rights do you lay claim to it now. By no rights do you make claims of it now. You celebrate what? The bare scraps hand-me-downed through the ages. Chipped paint and mottled plaster. Noseless deities, silent oracles.
For you, sons of the destroyers, to celebrate civilization is to mock it.
>>1381773
Shut up Chang, your people destroyed their culture a mere two generations ago, while Greco-Roman culture became one of the pillars of the now world-dominant culture.
>>1381800
Is it really? Can people on the street cite even a single word of Plato or Aristotle? No. They can however quote Jesus or Mohammed. That is what you are now. You can pretend. You can imitate the style of your betters. Faux Roman pillars everywhere, in a cage of glass and steel. The neo-classical grotesque. The perversity. We wallow in it waist deep. Breath the foul air. Hallelujah.
>>1381814
The Greek and Roman history is deeply ingrained in western society's collective conscious. Most people may not know the details anymore unless they seek to study them themselves/received good education, but everyone has a vague idea of how it went.
Quoting Jesus is easy because there's a story about him and he's a character, while Plato and Aristotle are book writers, and rather than the quotes, it is the ideas what are preserved.
A better example would be quoting people from the epics.
Not to mention that Christianity itself became intrinsically Greek was it was processed through the Hellenic lens.
>>1380935
That's cool and all but don't forget the fact that the Empire rightfully belongs to the people Rome, the Senate, the Patricians and the Plebs who literally created the damn thing, Mr. "Constantinople is my capitol".
Rome excelled in architecture as shown in the theaters, large churches and made the first utilization of concrete, arches and the maximization of internal space that the Egyptians and the Greeks fail to achieve.
>>1377245
egypt my nigga
>>1382007
It's unreal that something like this was constructed two millennia ago.
Why did it have to fall, /his/.
>>1380935
Steam Mr_drell, I'll head to head cooperatively on legendary if you game. Eternal battle against Sassanids, prepare to get rekt fgt.
Rome is highly overrated.
That's mostly because Western civilisation was born in the shadow of its ruins, which seemed very impressive to our barbarian eyes at the time, and we've kept from that an innate admiration for Rome, which sometimes takes such insane proportions that we pretend to be them.
There is no Roman civilisation. Rome is a product of Hellenic civilisation. Rome did produce some impressive work in civil engineering for infrastructure, and was efficient at expansion. But it produced no art, no science, no mathematics, no philosophy, not even inventions, almost no culture worthy of note. It was completely stale. It was also violently unstable, wrought with civil wars and assassinations, and built on a doomed economic system, and it allowed its civilisation to collapse faster than almost any other.
hahahahah
HAHAHA HAHAHA
Republic or Empire /his/?
Yeah whatever faggot, go invade Africa or something
>>1377434
>using Latin alphabet
>and a language that got heavy infulenced by Latin
>instead of Chink Chong writing system
Roman is superior to chink in every way
>>1382509
Republic in every aspect my friend.
Yourself?
>>1377966
intersting thanks
>>1382043
funny, the pyramids were as old to Romans like they were to us.
>>1380973
Qin Shi Huang, an emperor of China during the Qin dysnasty, took pure mercury pills in the belief that it would make him immortal.
>>1382747
The doctors wanted to kill him. He also executed many doctors, like Alexander times a million.
>>1382007
GERMANY WILL PAY
>>1381814
holy shit the pretentiousness just drips off your posts
>>1383044
WUZ
>>1377976
>Using statistics derived from two separate methodologies.
The Han estimate is based on the assumption that there was no more than 49 iron offices,that each iron office had no subsidiary sites and that an iron office was limited to one blast furnace with an output of 100 tons.
Archaeology has shown that the the number of iron offices recorded in the Book of Han is untenable and that larger iron offices have multiple furnaces with an output of several hundred tons.
The Roman estimate is deriving a random number(1.5 kg per capita) and extrapolating that number on the entire Roman population.
>>1384572
And that kids, is why we don't cite wikipedia in this class.
Swag is for boys
Imperium is for men
Virtú is for philosophers
>>1381814
>breathe the foul air
Wait, are we talking about China now?
>>1377427
You must be one of those ChiComs
>>1378157
Kek
