Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires • Hacker News Board

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#101

Post by olavk » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #22

It'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.…

I think it is somewhat hindsight bias to think Alexander would even care about Italy. Alexander was concerned about conquering the Persian Empire which was vastly larger and more wealthy than Italy. At the hight of the Roman Empire, the richest areas were always the former Persian areas - Egypt, Syria, Anatolia. This was also the reason the Roman empire ended up moving the capital to Constantinople.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#102

Post by davedx » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:12 AM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #42

beat wrote: post #18

For 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…

The Great Game, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game Honestly i can't shake the idea that said game has continued to the present day, only with various players tag teaming in and out over the years.

Yep. Anglophone nations and Russia up to all their old tricks. Some things never change...

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#103

Post by acjohnson55 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #98

acjohnson55 wrote: post #93

Earlier 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. 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.

But Alexander wasn't just concerned by Persia and the East, he was also impressed with it. I have to imagine Italy was only barely more interesting to him than the Balkans. By contrast, places in the East, like Mesopotamia and Egypt, were as ancient and storied to him as he is to us.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#104

Post by m_mueller » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

beat wrote: post #35

Balero wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

What about Mediterranean bronze age though? There you have a trade based civilisation that AFAIK was far ahead of its Asian counterparts, possibly with the exception of the Indus Valley civilization. Also, I think that Rome was about on the same level as Han dynasty China, whether you look at trade, military, administration, technology etc. - it doesn't seem right to call one the center of civilization and the other a backwater.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#105

Post by djif » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #79

Anyone have any good articles/books on why Greece has never reached greatness or similar status to other EU powers since the middle ages? Especially given their influence on the enlightenment, mathematics, philosophy, and Roman culture itself - which spread throughout the western world. I've always been curious why they have stagnated so much since and been so... mediocre. I guess you could say the same about Macedon…

> I guess you could say the same about Macedonia and maybe some middle eastern areas if we're looking purely at past greatness, but those two seem to be easier to explain. Greece's impact was more wider, longer, and stronger.

Just a correction - Macedonia was (and is) part of Greece: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/6265/was-alexand...

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#106

Post by MLR » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

sorokod wrote: post #99

HarryHirsch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He had given up on India after his army revolted, they were going to return to Greece and he had plans written up to conquer the West/North Africa after that.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#107

Post by simula67 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #22

It'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. Rome was not yet the powerhouse it became and he knew how to lead an army better than literally anyone in history

That's debatable. The greatest military commander in history was most likely Subutai : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subutai

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#108

Post by qiqing » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #43

staunch wrote: post #22

It'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 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…

I'm glad that the "The bowed head doesn't get cut by the sword" strategy worked well for them and led to survival for a lot of people in the region.

Sometimes, though, the bowed head gets cut anyway, and surrendering in response to a promise of mercy leads to genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

I guess I'd say it's a strat that probably works more often than it doesn't, but your own mileage may vary.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#109

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

>After a few weeks of marching and countermarching by Philip and Flamininus in central Thessaly, battle was joined (almost by accident) at Cynoscephalae, hills known as The Dogs’ Heads. Invincible on flat ground as long as its flanks were protected, the phalanx was dangerously exposed on hillsides. Highly manoeuvrable, veterans of the Hannibalic war, the legionaries wreaked a terrible slaughter. One of the big factor…

I just watched a documentary about the franco-prussian war, and they said that 'lower rank initiative' was a factor in the outcome. French weren't really wanting to fight, Prussian were. They would try everything to make a difference, even if it meant disobeying orders somehow.

Re: Rome vs Greece: a clash of empires

#110

Post by erikb » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:29 AM UTC

I feel like the juicy part of that article is in the last two paragraphs. Like how was the deal making done, what where the details that made the other city states submit to the Roman side. If it's really all content there is, then maybe a Tweet would have been enough.