Here’s a view on the ever popular Legion vs Phalanx debate, written from the Greek side by someone alive during the war:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
31–40 of 146 posts
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#32For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/We…
Franz Ferdinand was a fall guy.
Germany had good reason to be paranoid. They were surrounded by a powerful alliance between Britain, Russia, and France, all of whom were scapegoating German ambition to help with their own political problems. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination was just a crystal falling into a supersaturated solution. When Russia demanded action from its allies in support of their ally, war was inevitable. At that point, Germany declared war on Russia only to get the first strike in, before Russia could fully mobilize France and Britain against Germany as well.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#33For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/We…
Northern Europe wasn’t the impoverished, uninteresting backwater though. It had a rich culture that interacted with the Orient through Russian rivers. Central Africa did as well, and is another forgotten story, but at the time the Greeks invented democracy, the largest city of the time was thriving in central Africa, a city that wouldn’t be out done population until after Augustus was long dead.
History is full of stuff like that. The key difference is that these regions didn’t keep written track and have left only archeology, but in Europe most of that didn’t keep because other people lived on it after wards.
The earliest written accounts about Northern Europe are Christian accounts that were written almost 400 years after the Vikings discovered America. While it’s not incorrect to theorize that there is nothing because there was nothing, it’s important to keep in mind that we still don’t know how Stonehenge was build.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#34I live in Northern Greece/Macedonia and I can confirm that we were never taught history with this level of detail.
It seems so fascinating to me that if you focus hard enough to a simple sentence of a modern history book you can uncover battles and kings and strategies and winters and politics.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#35For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/We…
I think the idea of a single "centre of civilisation" is less than helpful. There were certainly a number of centre's of different civilisations, but if you try to plot the centre of these, there's a good chance you would end up in the middle of nowhere, or open ocean. I think it's much more useful to think of a net with connections, with different levels of "zoom out". For example, you could look at 0CE Rome, and ge…
The course of the book is to focus on whatever team was winning at any given time, and how the actions of that winning team set up the game for the next winning team. As such, though... before the New World, northern/western Europe didn't have any winning teams, except for the Vikings (whose slave trade with Persia and the Arab world led to the formation of Russia as a nation and a power), and the brief victory of the Crusades. And China was never very ambitious beyond its own borders.
The book is also very focused on trade, not just war. And the brilliant goods of the East were the source of great trade.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#36For an interesting coarse overview of this stuff, I've been reading The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , by Peter Frankopan. It's a sprawling world history, from earliest recorded history to the present (I'm currently between WWI and WWII), based on the idea that the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization. Northern/We…
Northern Europe wasn’t the impoverished, uninteresting backwater though. It had a rich culture that interacted with the Orient through Russian rivers. Central Africa did as well, and is another forgotten story, but at the time the Greeks invented democracy, the largest city of the time was thriving in central Africa, a city that wouldn’t be out done population until after Augustus was long dead. History is full of st…
Which city in Central Africa?
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.
That's the sad part for me, there was 0 "Framework" learning. It was 100% rote memorization, usually for a standardized test. (As I've said in other threads, it wasn't until college that I really "Learned how to learn.") A bare-bones framework, to my older eyes, would teach you to ask about incentives, to look at the zeitgeist of the times, to ask "what's the precedent," and might establish a motivation for this in s…
That would be a framework for thinking about history, which isn't what I meant. I'm not sure I was ready for that in tenth grade. (I suppose it might have opened the door to some new thoughts, but I don't think I would really have gotten it.)
By "framework" I meant just the bare outlines of history: Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, then Greece, then Rome, then the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution... Having that "outline" put me in a position, later, as I learned more, of seeing how the details fit into the (very coarse) outline, and thereby learning more outline.
What you're asking for is also totally necessary if one wants to understand history as more than just a collection of facts. And I suppose that even in grade school, history would make more sense if you told them that things happened for reasons, they didn't just happen. You'd have to really simplify the reasons, though...
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#38What's also interesting is how the Romans initially resisted incorporating Greece and the other Hellenistic kingdoms until they felt that they had to by the 140's BCE. Also, note that the Romans had no such compunctions on adding Spain to their holdings after the 2nd Punic War. (the massive amounts of silver in Iberia probably had a bit to do with it)
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#39How is this little known? If anything, this is too known . What I wish, but is impossible, is that there were more documented stories of the conflicts of e.g. Native Americans or Native South Americans, before European Settlers; early wars in Africa; or wars in the extremes of the Artic between early tribes. I have listened to all of Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" ( which any student of history will fall in love wit…
The College Board is cancelling all that stuff. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/11/ap-world-history-g...
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#40Irony was a double-edged sword in this case. Sure, the Greek city-states were now subject to Rome. On the other hand, Roman civilization was deeply affected by Greek culture, which was arguably far superior. Horace said it best: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor)
One of my favorite tidbits was that it was considered very fashionable to have a well-educated Greek slave -- they were often more well-versed in literature and philosophy than their masters.