Onasander

That post above was Seutonius, life of augustus. Hard to say how much of that was systematically instituted. I'm sure we will eventually say it, just it's hard.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Augustus*.html He made many changes and innovations in the army, besides reviving some usages of former times. He exacted the strictest discipline. It was with great reluctance that he allowed even his generals to visit their wives, and then only in the winter season. He sold a Roman knight and his property at public auction, because he had cut off the thumbs of two young sons, to make them unfit for military service; but when he saw that some tax-gatherers p157were intent upon buying him, he knocked him down to a freedmanº of his own, with the understanding that he should be banished to the country districts, but allowed to live in freedom. 2 He dismissed the entire tenth legion in disgrace, because they were insubordinate, and others, too, that demanded their discharge in an insolent fashion, he disbanded without the rewards which would have been due for faithful service. If any cohorts gave way in battle, he decimated them,21 and fed the rest on barley.22 When centurions left their posts, he punished them with death, just as he did the rank and file; for faults of other kinds he imposed various ignominious penalties, such as ordering to stand all day long before the general's tent, sometimes in their tunics without their sword-belts, or again holding ten-foot poles or even a clod of earth.23 25 [Legamen ad paginam Latinam] 1 After the civil wars he never called any of the troops "comrades," either in the assembly or in an edict, but always "soldiers";24 and he would not allow them to be addressed otherwise, even by those of his sons or stepsons who held military commands, thinking the former term too flattering for the requirements of discipline, the peaceful state of the times, and his own dignity and that of his household. 2 Except as a fire-brigade in Rome, and when there was fear of riots in times of scarcity, he employed freedmen as soldiers only twice: once as a guard for the colonies in the vicinity of Illyricum, and again to defend the bank of the river Rhine; even these he levied, when they were slaves, from men and women of means, and at once gave them freedom; and he kept them under their original p159standard,25 not mingling them with the soldiers of free birth or arming them in the same fashion. 3 As military prizes he was somewhat more ready to give trappings26 or collars, valuable for their gold and silver, than crowns for scaling ramparts or walls, which conferred high honour; the latter he gave as sparingly as possible and without favouritism, often even to the common soldiers. He presented Marcus Agrippa with a blue banner in Sicily after his naval victory. Those who had celebrated triumphs were the only ones whom he thought ineligible for prizes, even though they had been the companions of his campaigns and shared in his victories, on the ground that they themselves had the privilege of bestowing such honours wherever they wished. 4 He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness, and, accordingly, favourite sayings of his were: "More haste, less speed"; "Better a safe commander than a bold"; and "That is done quickly enough which is done well enough." He used to say that a war or a battle should not be begun under any circumstances, unless the hope of gain was clearly greater than the fear of loss; for he likened such as grasped at slight gains with no slight risk to those who fished with a golden hook, the loss of which, if it were carried off, could not be made good by any catch.

You can breed with fewer males a larger community of females. Males don't give birth after long gestation, we.... um, ejaculate. And can do that, alot. Each female can get a load. Babies born. Now.... if you have a lot of males, and few females, different issue. Yes, you'll have potentially semen by the wheelbarrow, easily enough to go around.... but only so many surviving female horses to receive. Hence why it's much wiser long run, to use male vs female horses in battle. If you use mixed male and female grouping of horses, they may very well "screw you over" in battle, in a way you noted the crusander horses getting frisky with the turks. But if your going to choose just one, seems better males in battle in terms of regulating long term breeding success of your horses. It could be a actual regulation, or a verbal request that was met with common sense by the knights. If only males or female horses were used, and especially in the case of males (genetic bottleneck as just described) then we should see a explosion of traits being bred intothese turkish and western war horses.

Yeah.....um,sorry Caldrail, though your quite correct, this text.... deals with the very opposite conclusion, I'm literally shaking right now having realized the damn implications of what we translated, and I am nervous as hell. It's causing several eureka moments every few minutes now, and I'm starting to make some widespread connections from other texts that just never occurred to me. I'm afraid, if this is correct, we're going to have to adjust our conclusions about a few things. This is scaring me a bit given how much heat for the next twenty years is going to be associated with this translation. I'm going to get you a early copy so you can rip it apart and inform me how stupid I am, and tell me I'm wrong. I'm pin and needles right now.... it fundamentally changes the intellectual discourse of the partisanship of the early empire into factions, and gives a obvious reason why Nero would target Christians, the antagonisms were carried over.... from this political/theological strife. I.... just wasn't expecting this at all. Not at all. It's freaking me out, and I don't want to touch it. It just shouldn't be. Not like this. Your not wrong Caldrail, your just not right. It's like saying the US believed in just Democratic Party ideals, because that's the only coherent political theory future historians have easy access to. I just smacked upon the republican parties existence.... if you could apply that analogy to Rome. Aggggggghhhhh, it's happening again. Shucks.... We want to translate one of Galens works on blood after this. Can't be any surprises there. Why me?

If by recent times, you mean over a hundred years ago, your right... http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/b/bronze_head_of_claudius.aspx I've seen alot of images of statues being toppled in my life, but never.... beheaded. They musta been pissed.

It just seems smarter to keep them employed in some useful construction vs useless. I buy your argument for idle troops, but not that they got dumped for decades plastering a wall, that retarded stuff had to of died off after Hadrian kicked the bucket. Besides, your presumption their discipline was only related to punishment is incorrect. Sullust in the Jugunthine war mentioned rewards and punishments, as well as emulation of heroic actions. Romans at the time of Scipio Africanus (who wrote a now lost art of war, corollary assumed) knew this, and it was remembered till the end of the republic. I doubt just as the Roman Army became more professional they suddenly went cross eyed and forgot it. I remember the other day I translated a word, I think it was Honoro or something close, and on wiktionary it listed one of the sub definitions "to be clothe on honor". Romans practiced triumphs and parades, apparently (annoyingly to me) had a dress uniform.... They also practiced uniform dress of their troops, shared weapons practice. I just don't know the range in full, or exact approaches they used. I'm guessing alot of factors came into play, alot of which is just forgotten. But not your description of this useless as fuck plastering detail. We were made to do similar retarded stuff on occasion. Command usually attributed to discipline, but the roman legions diefied such things, so don't carry over such linguistic assumptions. But the underlining range of psychology of a group of guys performing what they know to be a silly pointless task under a larger hierarchy, I get in full. It's cause such psychology isn't merely introverted and abstract, or culturally that varied, as it's a primarily sociological phenomena where emotional highs and lows will be expressed verbally and by body language by the work detail.... and work details have to accommodate the pissed off views of a variety of personality types. Hence, though some variability, suck is still suck, and stupid is stupid in any era. It's very easy to grasp how they reacted. Aspects elude, such as.... did they sing while working, or grumbled, have work details guarded, or just went out half naked not caring.... hung over or sober.... Likely a bit at different times, but hard to say how positive and disciplined they were within the spirit of their tasking. I just doubt this was done for long. Most retarded thing I've heard of, besides human sacrifice and civil war, that Romes legions ever were involved in.

It is a matter of logic if your a king wanting to insure you have a steady supply of war horses whose breeding isn't interrupted by battlefield losses. I know absolutely nothing about how the british bred their horses, but imagine how many knights they lost charging scottish spear over they years, in some battles quite a few. It be a matter of logic to insure female, breeding horses didn't potentially get massacred in potential loses. Yould have a quicker rebound in fielding a new calvary force, good quality steeds, increasingly lower quality knights, but that can be fixed with training. Horses, hard to get though if you rapidly deplete your stock.

Claudius of the Apocolocyntosis http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocolocyntosis I finally have a translation partner working with me, and we discovered we were translating a significant parallel text that if not ancestral to this text attributed to Seneca the Younger (my gut says it's the original, but were still having issues with someone elses name popping up twice in hard to translate lines claiming to be author).... is very closely related somehow.... but is unexpectedly different too, like it's the original.... that got seriously reworked later to include claudius. I recognized early it had something to do with the text, and made translating easier once we grasped this. I've been looking up anything and everything anything mentioned, from the imperial genius to Di indigetes and sol... and scrutenizing the living daylights out of classical formations of temples. It seems the text of the wikilink I gave you pretty accurately satricizes Post Augustan era mores regarding the upper roman class structure. I'm still searching out alot of variables right now, no rush. The way emperor's were accepted and rejected for becoming gods reveal alot about the roman mindset and class structure, especially how.... rather useless they were once gods. They lacked any superpowers, just sorta hung out. You'll get the text in a few months.

Where at in England (don't just say London, more exact than that) was the Temple of Claudius? He apparently built it during his lifetime.

It sounds remarkably similar to the US military. I was in the airborne infantry up in alaska, very proud of it, but spent half of it as a gimp due to bad doctors and very low deployment rosters, and CSMs who thought they could reduce their injured rosters by informing injured soldiers they were, indeed.... not injured. It sometimes worked, but made it a living hell for those who couldn't knit flesh merely by singing airborne ranger cadences. When I first got to my unit (healthy) they was nearly half a platoon of guys in supply, doing nothing. If you needed a box of something, five guys would limp ocer and get it. Most got medically discharged. As time went, a few got randomly injured, and were sent to supple (just me, after several months of being reinjured by the same untreated injury) or commo, or office work. I hated supply, because I just wanted to be healed and sent back to the line. I found I went from being admired for being damn fast to being loathed and hated.... because in the minds of many sick minded little twirps who hated running, they wished they were me sitting in a office, while I wished they were them, running. After two years of this, most of the guys who remembered who you were left, and your nothing but a broken soldier who never wants to work, and has some fascination in keeping the good supplies to just himself, denying everyone else access to them.... because thats what supply does. I remember many circumstances of guys, often new, approaching me in a panic, asking how they can get into a head quarters platoon.... so and so was broken on them, and no one believed them, they didn't want to go AWOL, or sing Cadences back to health. I had to figure out who their teamleader, squad,leader and platoon sargent was, decide if they were idiots or not, and if so, sneak them pass the Army Troop Medical Center immediately across the street from us, and get over to the airforce base to be seen by an actual doctor. I always told them it was a horrible thing to be in headquarters, and it was much better to just be fixed up or sent home without the years of manipulative mind games played against you. I know we had some guys who had previous specialized MOS, like former coast guard radio guys, who kept their past a secret to their higher ups in fear of being taken off the line and be given a office and radio to carry around. In the infantry, your just infantry. A group esprite de corps. You are that, and that you are, a pure killing machine. You are gratified being a good aspect of a good group of men. Individuality and self worth can be measured by medals and achievements (how the romans did this I don't know), but once you get hurt, panic, anxiety, and fear can grip you. Your suddenly different,and you either want fixed,or in a safe place to heal. Your psychology is still tied to the unit and the esprite. But once this starts with a few, paracites pop up, and the population explodes. A Black Sheep Mentality can pop up. It can eat away at the heart of the larger unit. Certain contraints, like the complication of the unit roster, difficulty in terms of number of steps for discharge, and some cursed thing called a MToe written in Swahili caused extreme inbalances in healthy to sick on the modern infantry rosters vs ancient ones. But I suspect there are massive psychological parallels, given the Romans had more disease, harder manpower replacement issues via far flung units, and that a hard to diagnose disease would sometimes linger for months and then go away without explanation. This being said, troops were likely healthier and better fed, and even a gimp in the rear made a decent reserve or base camp guard over not having anyone. Many could gain unexpected auxiliary skillsets like myself that are useful but hardly expected for anyone to have. I just severely doubt there was a massive rush to have non infantry jobs in a infantry unit. It's rather embarrassing, you want the pride of the front line guys. If your in long enough, and news guys come in, then even if put on a work detail, you get a much nicer aspect of it. And trust me, it's far better to build a useful road than a worthless plaster job, you can a sense of pride and progress in a road or canal. Plastering a f'n frontier wall? That belongs in a Black Adder skit.

If your talking about the imposing of will known to police and psychologists as the "Slave - Master Morality", that doesn't last very long. The obvious evidence for this the extremes many penal facilities have to go..... you have the three big monoamine neural transmitters.... Noradrenaline, Serotonin, and Dopamine running wild, as discern from The Lovheim Cube.... with very few neural inhibitors in play.... we just build a cage and more walls and expect everyone to come out fine. Same for whipping, beating, torturing individuals.... it CAN indeed trigger a Monoamine collapse, but it also favors a pure Dopamine reaction..... fear, instead of just shame and humiliation one would achieve without it. If one is made alternately fearful or angry, you begin to migrate quickly out of the ideal conditions a slave, or prisoner should be in, into the full range of the fight or flight response. You add a few occasions where the slave or prisoner have success or self confidence inspired contra or without the master/ wards, you have genuinely experienced joy, excitement, surprise.... you can't remain under someone elses control with a mere threat of a whip for long. You have some Shawshank Redemption stuff going on. Given how tightly related the monoamine neuraltransmitters are (wiki the lovheim cube) I fail to see just how well and long slavery lasted, in societies so prone to making a distinction of status to literally everyone. They had to inform the lowest slave they indeed were a slave, this it your lot.... this is what you get, and this is ours. Entire systems of mores and etiquette had to be remembered. Makes me reconsider tyrants like Claudius who treated noble relatives as easily disposable slaves, given death.... a new light. Seneca the Younger hit him on this.

http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Forum/reconstructions/VestaAedes_1/history This brings you to the Vesta one, but more listed at the bottom.

Plastered? Okay.... wow. Did they paint colorful themes on it too? I sorta assumed the frontier wall building was a responsive mimicry of the wall building on either side of the Caucasus and the Black and Caspian Sea to keep the huns out. Seems to of worked well, they ended up striking west. But this plastering.... I don't know now. That is remarkably short sighted and stupid. You could of had a few man detail from every outpost digging a canal, or paving yet another road, or building something.... somewhere. Rotate those guts out every week or two. Even making ships for sale, turning a imperial profit.... something better than plastering. I can't even begin to imagine how utterly boring and demoralizing that was. Could you imagine being the inspector charged with the task of inspecting the plaster walls? What exactly are you going to say when you look a supposed frontier soldier in the eye, and demand to know why his wall isn't properly plastered. That soldiers who don't plaster their defensive positions make poor soldiers indeed? I'm just trying to imagine a armored african soldier standing in the morning frost, holding a spear, helmet slightly crooked, trying to keep a straight face hearing this nonsense. I'm guessing the rate of rape and theft by these auxiliary north of the line was quite high. Honestly, if your a soldier, and your group of guys have the day/s off rotation, which side of the wall you think your bored wolf pack is heading out on? Harder to get in trouble if you screw around to the north, rather than Roman lands south where someone could conceivably complain about being tax payers and having to put up with auxiliary hijinks.

Having been a Cynic who walked long distances, as Jesus sorta parallels in pedestrian behavior, I think the beard is a safe given. Especially how kosher he tried to be. It's really not that easy to shave in transit. If I was doing it by foot, I'd skip it when not in a suburb or urban area.... it's about the last thing you want to do on a chilly morning after napping on hard, uneven ground. Robes of some sort make sense.... keeps out dust, keeps off the sun... something to wrap yourself with at night. I just doubt the philosophers robe. Furthermore.... outside of the double cloak Zeno of Citrium introduced over the Cynic single cliak, I don't think we had a standard guild dress code. I recall Crates being lectured for wearing Cloth (an apparent taboo in Athens) and he decided to prove to the judge even the fabulous Aristotelian philosopher Theophrastus was wearing cloth right now.... went to prove the judges skepticism wrong, and brought him to the barber, where Theophrastus was getting a haircut, wrapped in cloth. Others seemed to wear scratchy materials, like burlap or inverted animal hides. Others were high ranking aristocrats. I doubt they went the scratchy route, more likely the silky, nicely dyed route. And this matters, not one damn bit, when your a philosopher, save a Cynic, who thinks about these things compulsively in bad weather (there was a orthodox dress code for Cynics, which alot of evidence suggests though some followed it, many did not.... as it had jack to do with anything regarding Cynicism) I can't say I know of a time when there was a unified dress code for us, as a collective group, ever. Philosophers were always too diverse a crowd. I don't dress the same as Derrida, Zizek doesn't as Ayn Rand.

So.... in both Rome and the ancient world in general, slavery for the most part, seemed to work. It worked really well. Seemed to morph in outlook between the Odyssey to the modern era several times, but usually not that hard to identify. Certain eras seemed to of rejected it though. I'd say were sliding slowly back into a general acceptance of it, as long as it remains de jure illegal, put of sight, and most importantly, doesn't involve whites (don't know how else to put that last elephant in the room, if you exclude russians and ukrainian women as white, but do include the Japanese it seems rather accurate). So our era, the more liberal and enlightened it gets, the more permissive it gets. We like out chocolate, smart phones, and tuna cheap.... don't all that much care how it's made, so long as it's cheap. I don't think, however.... this most enlightened bottom line of commercially driven socialism was what motivated the Romans. Or the Greeks. Or Chinese, Persians.... anyone. So is there a general theory any of you hold to as to why slavery sticks in a era, but not in another? Aspects of the psychology being a slave eludes me. The hardest paradox I've seen spatially between Freedom and Servitude occured here where I live, on Browns Island, West Virginia..... which is in the Ohio River, and in nearly every direction of the compass, if you just wandered off, yould be in free territory in a matter of minutes to a hour.... you can literally throw a rock from the island and hit the free state of ohio to it's east, and west virginia is only three miles thick here to the west, then the free state of Pennsylvania. Directly North the state peters out, and you have northing but free state. It's hard to mess up a escape. Sometimes the river would dry up ankle deep. The cost of keeping slaves put seemed to overstretch the imagination well beyond practicality. Yould have to keep them permanently in chains, never letting your eyes off one, least they take off and be gone over the hills in a minute flat. Yet.... they managed. Unbelievable, they convinced them to stay. I knowof only a handful of suggested methods, like splitting family members up and threatening them with reprisal... might work sometimes.... but not often enough, and families were sold here all the time anyway. I know of the Nietzschean Slave Master Morality, but is a obvious dead end here. Doesn't begin to explain the acceptance as to why the slaves would so willingly stay put, or how a slave owning society could exist in such close proximity to non slave populations. I'm drawn to Sparta and Athens for a parallel, but the freedom loving Athenians had more Slaves, and to me it seems a better life to be a relatively free spartan slave vs a athenian slave. Anyone has any insights?

It would seem then logically, male horses would be a better choice, as you can breed all the female horses in the rear (rear of the theater of war, in safety, not their actual rear which would be counter productive) with the male survivors, be they few or many. You would think the turks, descended from the steppe would of grasped this, but from what you say, they chose female horses. Plus.... it would be a interesting excuse for a knight to wiggle out of battle, purposely knocking up all his female horses, if he only owns female horses, a few months before campaign season..... has a good excuse why he can't go to war, as his every horse has a obvious bun in the oven. Oh well....

Ummm.... I give it better than 50-50 odds. But beyond the plate, you have no real evidence any piece of wood was ship made to horse, or just recycled rubbish from old ships to be burned for fuel. I am also not convinced the plate is dated to the same period. It could of been a roman plate to attract tourists discarded and forgotten. (The other posts loaded up late, I'm going to man up and be left a fool to everyone for even considering this.)

Stanegate Zone on the Caledonian frontier I applaud such knowledge, where did you learn about that? See... I'm understanding it's a silly worthless defensive barrier, I take one look at it and can tell this. It's about as intimidating a obstacle as a chain link fence.... I could ditch over it fast, and getting Calvary or even chariots over it with the simplest of ramps would take mere minutes to set up. I can't say how they manned it, but assume it's similar to how MPs patrol the inner chain link walls on military bases, they constantly patrol on 4 Wheel drive, looking for tracks. A defence in depth approach. But then you keep whipping out the Harians every mile had a gate issue, and the obvious customs issue, and that a very different kind of troop, "Auxiliary" maintained it. I'm guessing these auxiliary were neither coin paid mercenary, and only sometimes local aboriginals.... largely foreign ethnic warriors settled on the frontier, given land, given shared guard time with regular legionary details to ensure they are competent. These datails have me scratching my head. I can't argue with much of your logic, but if they were not turning a coin on it, why insist on so many gates? If it wasn't profitable, why such a massive silly military expenditure? Lastly, it's not silly to assume, given tge number of imperial upsurpers who came from England, a need to curtail the territory they had to draw troops from, it only reinforces such logic. I can't say it was done as such (this thread was creative exploration, not how I feel about such things as good historical fact).... but seems none the less to of operated as such. Imagine the headaches had Scotland been subdued to any Emperor trying to maintain a stable government. Only thing that seems to warrant such a heavy military expenditure is Tin, Taxes (how much, dunno), or that something made England a invasion magnet, and that the Anglo Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions were not a post roman phenomena, but happened often enough to keep the Romans nervous.

This came up just now in conversing with the person helping me translate a old latin text... So you have a group of Calvary, horse with riders mounted ontop.... and your sitting there waiting for your buggle call, doing nothing, and the steed your on.... starts getting randy.... and is very interested in the female horse infront of you.... and it too has a rider mounted on it.... so your horse decides, hey.... why not, and moves forward, and leaps up to mount the horse infront of it.... to both riders get tossed off, with likely injury. Then the other horses see this, and they are bored as hell waiting, and think this is a great time for nookie too, and so start pairing off. Pretty soon, the entire Calvary force is in the mud, trying to stand back up.... horses left and right naying, and just at that point, the enemy Calvary shows up, in complete shock at the sight, and can't help but laugh because this now dismounted Calvary force didn't know the secret of X. So... what is X? I know the Romans always suffered from a shortage of horses.... but the individual Calvary men had to supply their own... so it was likely costly and erratic to breed them consistently till the Byxantine era. That's assuming they castrated. I can't ready think of what else. Stick a painful condom sock on them, weigh it down with a heavy weight so it bounces around like a mace when the horse runs.... Doesn't seem to me any old command to the horse would prevent it from embarking on this biological function.... when it's time, it's time.

I think the idea of a purely nomadic indo european language died after Gobekli Tepe was discovered.... you have a cibilization of stagnant hunter and gathers building temples, cultivating the first domesticated crops.... and their architectual scheme spread througout the world, to Malta and Stonehenge. We may be dealing with several linguistic and technological explisions spread over several thousand years as a result.... same way the world went from fuedal to democratic over the last millennium from a variety of imputus and influences. A future archeologist studying our era might hear of D Day, a people known as Americans, and their link to democracy, and assume Americans were Aryan like invaders who invented democracy and spread it, through their leader Napoleon. But how do you explain fragments from ancient surviving texts suggesting earlier eras existed prior to Americas probable origination? I see Gobekli Tepe ruining a PIE theory in a similar light. Looks good, might even represent a wave of Iranians pushing south and west of the Caucasus away from the Ary Darya, but can't be thought as the origination point, but rather a much later wave in a journey that began and continued with periodic sputs 10000 years earlier at the end of the neolithic. The fact there are regional language blocks shows these spurts didn't last long, and didn't long maintain links to their mother hubs until much more recent migrations encouraged more people in mass to migrate and settle. A relatively open concept of acceptance in europe allowed this last group to blend in, in india, they segregated.... likely having learned that lesson from the mesopotamian states.

I want us her to experiment with the VARIOUS reasons for constructing Englands two northern walls beyond obvious military functions. Not saying any idea is solid fact or good theory.... it's okay to be critical.... but remember this is a creative exercise, meant to seek out a possible range and meanings that the romans could of had for it.... 1) The Walls may of operated as a delineation of who was "Roman Enough" to be defended, and expected to pay taxes, and who was not. It's similar to Chinese economic zones. People had the freedom to be taxed and be Roman on one side, or live as shameful barbarians on the otherside. It could of been at times a nearly open border, in terms of immigration and trade.... but alowed the romans power of the taxable trade.... close to the Austrian Economics School.... and a very clever way on the romans part in taxing a unconquered barbarian population. At othertimes, they could of stemmed the flow one way or both to adjust population increases and decreases. 2) Pure Immigration Control... for whatever reason, England experienced the first large barbarian incursions.... and responded not by adopting the barbarians fuedally into the empire, but building a wall and said, to borrow a phrase from Farscape "My Side, Your Side". Only later would roman theorists come upon the idea of using such people as replacements to roman legions. 3) Keep a buffer to the north. The similarity between the visigoth and viking ships, and their general raiding strategy has always struck me. The Northern British isles may always of been a target, and the Romans.... tired of trying to convert the backwards picts, felt they were a decent enough buffer and good distraction to raiders. If things got bad enough, the Romans could always march north and jointly repel them.... but then again, they could just sit back and relax as the barbarians killed one another. 4) The Walls were the first IT Blach Hole. It's quite possible the grand clever plan of the walls as we now see it started off much more innocently, and just got distorted and expanded as the operation was being built from endless imput from too many clever people. In the end, instead of a few forts, or simple demarcation line... England inherited a marvelous, yet rather useless piece of fortification matching the needs of local burghersand nobles, keen ideas of local garrisons, and next to no common sense of the local governor.... leaving future emperors exasperated yet intrigued with the possibilities underlining the theory of the wall, but not quite knowing at any given time how to make rational, coherent sense of all it's time consuming aspects. Alot of loose ends, that would cost more and more money to develop. Eventually they said screw it, and just built another wall to simplify the process... and then in their triumph, realized they didn't actually need that wall either, and had been going all about the whole business all wrong to begin with. 5) Local Noble was drunk, and started building a wall.... standing over his slaves inebriated... and his property sorta paralleled another nobles north land, and he thought hey, great idea. This sounds silly and ahistorical.... but I've seen just sort of thing happen in Hawaii. Never underestimate alcohol, readily available building material, and readily available labor. 6) The wall funded the military or government. Quite possible, a throwback to the economic zone idea, the wall was much less a defensive fortification, but rather a far and useful location to station otherwise troublesome military units, and get them to pay for themselves, preferably extra on top of that. Just as in the Roman Republic, armies were not allowed in Rome, legions had to largely leave and go to the border, and sit there playing tic tac toe till the next regional conflict erupted. 7) A Imperial Apparatus to curtail the likelihood of rival emperors from popping up on the isles. The whole of Great Britian would be rather easy to unify.... but would also require many more troops, and no matter how cleverly you sub divided it's administration, would always be a large, unified military bloc. Enough to do serious damage on the continent at will, with a secure rear and navy to project force along europes western front. England had a massive tactical advantage, able to invade pretty much anywhere. By making a akward wall, preserving a local opposition, it gave aspiring emperors less troops, an enemy in the rear, and more dependence on the mainland. Likely many, many other possibilities, but it's all I can pul out at this moment.

In either case 1 or 2, is that a tactical mistake. It's a failure in strategy, in case one simple operations and logistics. In case two, intelligence, planning, and battle field coordination capable of respinding to novel tactics. Goths won by tactics. Romans lost because they lacked everything else.

I should ask... prior to Caesar, was there ever a dictatorship during the republic that wasn't military instigated? Closest I can think of would be the writing of the twelve tables.... which isn't quite what were talking about, or the highly localised power or a tribune to straight up f some s up around him. Outside of this, I can't think of any dictators instigated by a agriculture or trade crisis, oe disdane for the local fashion crisis. It was like, all military, every single time. I could be very well wrong.

Ummm, or grapple themselves with the slaves aggressively. I'm merely looking at the obvious class division between the senatorial command class and the plebians.... senatorial class appeared to get ranks and positions while nigh impossibly to get as a common.grunt soldier working up the ranks, and I assume the middle class, like the British until the 19th century, emulated the nibles in trying to get a dignified placement for their petite bourgeois children. I'm guessing the nobles, like many class divided societies, were quite happy to oblige such middlemen. Evidence for this is the purportedly unoriginality of Onasander.... one of many such leadership texts for clueless military leaders.... yet unexplainable in this light is the high expertise of the roman legions, even during civil wars.... it wasn't a top down discipline, but something built in bottom up, that couldn't be ripped out via political defection to the other side. It's because there was a underlining, largely independent command all legions recognized however distant or at odds with each other that maintained the legions. I don't see much evidence of this in the later roman empire. Think rome just looked to ethnic specialization and colonial-feudal duties instead of funding this lower NCO leadership echelon.

Any updates?