I highly recommend the podcast The History Of Rome, which talks about this conflict in some detail. I binged the almost 80 hours of it. I couldn't get enough! Then, I got sucked in to the podcast The Fall Of Rome, which is equally fantastic.
Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dec…
When you find yourself surrounded by enemies, you might ask yourself how it came to be that all your neighbors turned against you. An Anglo-French alliance was not inevitable; as late as 1894 it was possible to publish a novel in which England, invaded by France and Russia, was rescued by Germany [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_18...
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/germanys-superpower-ques...
"In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities.
But unlike the chattering classes, most historians, ever since Fritz Fischer published Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), have tended to agree that the major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Following the Archduke’s assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia’s satellite Serbia as an excuse for a general war that would establish German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939—a government in Berlin wanted a war, though not the war it ultimately got."
Additionally, Austrian historians claim that Austrian military strategists also surely didn't want the big war but just to attack Serbia which they estimated was already weak enough to be an easy target. Both Germans and Austrians simply (stupidly?) expected much less response from other countries.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#93It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history. There were many Greek colonies in Italy but the whole peninsular might have become dominated by Greeks. By the time Rome got around to taking over Greece it wasn't even a contest.…
> It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it.
But why? The East was far more developed. A unified Mediterranean proved to be very profitable for Rome, but it's not clear to me that this future was obvious to anyone.
But it's an interesting thought, much as it's interesting to think of what might have been if Rome had ever fully conquered and incorporated the British Isles and Germania. Perhaps civil wars and power struggles would have torn the empire asunder much sooner, but perhaps Roman urbanism would have taken a stronger hold, preventing rural feudalism from forming. Who knows!
Although it's also interesting to note that Diocletion's reforms are thought to have set the stage for feudalism to begin with, and Roman urbanism was abandoned in many of the places it had taken hold, once the state fell.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a hard pill to swallow that "cowardly" surrender can often be objectively better than "stubborn" bravery One old saying around these parts of the world (Romania) can be translated roughly like this: "The bowed head doesn't get cut by the sword", which explains like at least half of our history, seeing as we've never been a major regional power while being surrounded by 3 empires for at least a couple of centur…
> The Poles were a little bit more courageous than us and that attitude saw their country split into three. This is very simplistic way to describe reasons behind partitioning of Poland, which was by then standards very large multiethnic country with borders from Baltic to Black Sea and ability to raise considerable military power to defend its borders in times of need. Commonwealth's dissolution came from the inside…
I think that your post kind of proves my point, as in you're taking it for granted that you needed an army in order to survive as a country (even as not really independent). That was not always so.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They could be referring to Benin City
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#96Surprised there's no mention of Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was a Greek, fighting Romans and winning (though obviously at heavy cost, hence the term). He was using the Phalanx system as well.
Hannibal rated him as up there with Alexander as one of the greatest generals ever.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#97I highly recommend the podcast The History Of Rome, which talks about this conflict in some detail. I binged the almost 80 hours of it. I couldn't get enough! Then, I got sucked in to the podcast The Fall Of Rome, which is equally fantastic. http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ https://fallofromepodcast.wordpress.com/
There is also "Normans" and "12 Byzantine Emperors".
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#98It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history. There were many Greek colonies in Italy but the whole peninsular might have become dominated by Greeks. By the time Rome got around to taking over Greece it wasn't even a contest.…
> It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. But why? The East was far more developed. A unified Mediterranean proved to be very profitable for Rome, but it's not clear to me that this future was obvious to anyone. But it's an interesting thought, much as it's interesting to think of what might have been if Rome had ever fully conquered…
There were greek colonies all over the Mediterranean, weren't there? I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see that as the next step, it's just that Greece was historically more concerned with Persia.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's likely that Alexander would have taken over Italy had he lived a couple more decades. He definitely could have done it. Italy was a back water in 300 bc. with the great political and cultural centres to the east of Greece. What would attract Alexander to Italy?
Before Rome there was Magna Graecia , the Greek colonies in Southern Italy. Further west: the great trading port of Massilia.
Before his death, Alexander had the Indian subcontinent in his sights. This is in entirely different league than the future city of Marseille.
Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires
#100Irony 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)
> Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (once defeated, Greece conquered its savage captor) A better translation would be "captured Greece has conquered its savage captor", since that better captures (pun intended) the intended parallel between capta and cepit --both are forms of the same verb. (Also cepit is perfect tense, hence "has conquered".)
Thanks! English is not my mother tongue and I thought "captured" would have sounded a bit too archaic.