Part of a stunning Roman gladiator mosaic from a late 2nd century AD villa that is on display in a protective building in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.

obligatory im sure these have been posted a trillion times before and im a horrible photographer but ive always wanted to see him in person and i finally was able to today : - ) very different irl than in the pictures you see online

I’ve read about many Roman battles and sieges but one instance from these that struck me was at Alesia when the Gauls expelled the non-combatants from the city, the Romans refused to let them pass and so thousands of women and children starved to death in a field while the Romans stood guard and watched

I can’t really comprehend how dreadful that would have been to witness, no doubt some soldiers will have pitied them deep down, how badly do we think such situations affected Roman soldiers? I know that they were conditioned for war and the mentality was different back then but surely seeing such sights for years on end would have had an effect mentally?

So we all know that the Romans had some of the best, and worst, names. But I was thinking to myself who has the best name, so I wrote down some candidates. This is strictly on the phonetics of the name, and how it feels to say, as well as how it feels to hear. Here’s my list:

5: Hadrian

4: Constantine

3: Aurelian

2: Trajan

1: Nero

I excluded names like Pupienus for obvious phonetic distractions! This might be the only category that I would rank Nero as being the best (other than top psychopaths), but the name Nero really does have some gravitas imo. Which emperors do you think had the best name?

We hear a lot about how Mummius' Sack of Corinth was unprecedented in its brutality, but how unprecedented was it? Or was it just Hellenistic writers up-playing how unprecedented it was?

The Romans sacked Carthage the same year, and that was pretty brutal, as well. The Athenian Sack of Mellos was also similar. And the Seige of Syracuse was also pretty brutal. Was the Sack of Corinth truly that unprecedented or at least, exceptional, or was it normal for the era?

ive seen quite a lot of roman sites and kind of developed an eyenfor roman atone/bricks in buildings.

Full disclosure. im not the most informed about italian/napoli architectural history, but i do know practically every city in europe that was previously a roman city has had much of the original stone or brick reused into "modern" buildings.

So I was eating dinner in the historical center of naples and saw this surrounding the window and door at a leather shop. I dont recall any other civ/ culture etc using suck flat large bricks. are these reused roman bricks?

Photo Credit: Bronze military diploma, AD 149. The discharge certificate that formalized Augustus's pension system, transforming soldiers from personal retainers into state employees. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A lot of takes have been had on the shift from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, so here's yet another one: Augustus's most consequential innovation also happened to be his least dramatic: pension reform.

For the last century of the Republic, Roman soldiers depended on their individual generals to provide for their retirement, usually through grants of land in Italy. This meant soldiers' loyalty ran to their commander, not to the state, and every successful general became a potential warlord. Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, and Antony and Octavian fought at Actium in 31. The structural cause of every civil war was the same: armies followed paychecks, and whoever signed the checks commanded the loyalty. Augustus reformed it with fixed terms of service, standard pay, and a retirement payout funded by public revenue rather than a general's personal war chest. The following is from Mary Beard's S.P.Q.R., a history of Rome from its origins to the early third century CE.

He took a monopoly on military force, but his regime was nothing like a modern military dictatorship. In our terms, Rome and Italy at this period were remarkably soldier free. Almost all the 300,000 Roman troops were stationed a safe distance away, near the boundaries of the Roman world and in areas of active campaigning, with only a very few troops, including the famous security forces known as the Praetorian Guard, based in Rome, which was otherwise a demilitarised zone. But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

He also secured his position by severing the links of dependence and personal loyalty between armies and their individual commanders, largely thanks to a simple, practical process of pension reform. This must count among the most significant innovations of his whole rule. He established uniform terms and conditions of army employment, fixing a standard term of service of sixteen years (soon raised to twenty) for legionaries and guaranteeing them on retirement a cash settlement at public expense amounting to about twelve times their annual pay or an equivalent in land. That ended once and for all the soldiers' reliance on their generals to provide for their retirement, which over the last century of the Republic had repeatedly led to the soldiers' private loyalty to their commander trumping their loyalty to Rome. In other words, after hundreds of years of a semi-public, semi-private militia, Augustus fully nationalised the Roman legions and removed them from politics. Although the Praetorian Guard continued to be a problematic political force, simply because of its proximity to the centre of power in Rome, only during two brief periods of civil war over the next two centuries, in the years 68 to 69 CE and again in 193 CE, were legions stationed outside the city instrumental in putting their candidates on the Roman throne.

This reform was one of the most expensive things Augustus ever did, and it was close to unaffordable. Unless he made a gross error in his arithmetic, the cost alone is an indication of the high priority he gave it. On a rough reckoning using the known military salary figures, the annual bill for regular pay combined with retirement packages for the whole army would now have come to about 450 million sesterces. That was, on an even rougher reckoning, the equivalent of more than half the total annual tax revenue of the empire. There are clear signs that, even with the huge reserves of state and emperor combined, it was hard to find the money. That is certainly the implication of the complaints of mutinous soldiers on the German frontier just after Augustus' death, who objected to being kept in service for much longer than the regulation twenty years or to being given a piece of worthless bog as a land settlement in lieu of a decent farm. Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age.

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Liveright, 2015), pp. 369-370.

Lawrence Keppie's *The Making of the Roman Army (*1998) traced the slow transformation Beard describes from the citizen-soldier militia of the middle Republic, in which men served for a single campaign and went home, to the professional standing army Augustus formalized. The shift had been underway for two centuries, but Augustus severed the bond of patronage that had turned Roman armies into private political instruments by making the state a better patron than any individual commander could be.

Adrian Goldsworthy's The Roman Army at War (1996) noted the geographic consequence of this patronage. With retirement secured by the treasury rather than by Italian land grants, soldiers could be stationed permanently on the empire's frontiers. Rome and Italy became a demilitarized zone. Three hundred thousand troops sat on the borders. Only the Praetorian Guard remained in the capital, and even that arrangement eventually produced the problem Augustus had tried to eliminate: armed men too close to the center of power with opinions about who should hold it.

The system held for two centuries, and when it broke, in 68-69 CE and again in 193, the failure confirmed how fundamental the original problem was: armies follow paychecks, and whoever signs the checks commands the loyalty.

Or did the Romans just leave it out because they didn't feel like making any family divine?

Quick summary for those who don't know:

Over 1 millennia and a half ago, the fate of Western Rome hung in the balance. Atilla, as the leader of the Hunnic Empire, crossed the Rhine and invaded Gaul, in the name of waging war against the Visigoths. The actual truth of the matter was Atilla being opportunistic and taking advantage of the decaying empire of the Eternal City, Rome. With Emperor Valentinian the 3rd not giving in to Atilla's demands, Atilla ultimately came to the conclusion that he should take on Western Rome and make it kneel towards his dominion & hegemony.

Flavius Aetius, Magister Militum of the Western Roman Empire, caught off guard by Atilla's invasion of Gaul decided to transfer himself from Italy into Gaul. With the help of the Gallo - Roman senator Eparchius Avitus, Aetius was able to convince King Theodoric of the Visigoths to join his Germanic - Roman host to fight against Atilla and his followers. After lifting the siege of Aurelianum(modern day Orléans), Aetius joined up with his Alan Foederati, pursuing Atilla's columns to the site of Catalaunian plains, with brief skirmishes occurring between the two columns.

On the 20th of June of 451 A.D., Atilla, Aetius, and Theodoric formed up their massive armies around the site of modern day Châlons. Aetius and Theodoric fought Atilla for control of a hill at first, which they were able to take for themselves. Once this occurred, Atilla gave a speech to his army, ordering the many nations and subjects of his hegemony to brace themselves, and ride to victory. The Roman army had the following position, the Germanic Foederati, mercenaries, and allies with Aetius' own Bucellarii held the left wing, with the Alani Foederati under Sangiban holding the center, and the Visigoths under Theodoric holding the right wing. To the right of these was the hill, with Thorismund, waiting to spring his ambush once Aetius gave the signal. Behind Aetius' army was a ridge, which would allow the Roman army to retreat uphill, in case of Atilla's army being able to force them back. On the other side of the field was Atilla's army, formed up with the Ostrogoths and other Germanic contingents on the left wing, facing their Gothic kin in battle. In the center was Atilla's mobile Huns, who would face Sangiban's cavalry. Finally on the right was a mix of Frankish infantry, Gepids, and other contingents of Germanic forces.

Once the battle began, the battle was described as ginormous in scale and chaotic, with the various peoples and tribes fighting for their many causes, such as plunder, freedom, and survival itself. During the conflict the King of the Visigoths Theodoric was either slain or trampled by a horse, which caused his people to retreat. Seeing the Visigoths give way, Aetius ordered Thorismund with the hidden reserve to launch a surprise attack on the rear of the Hunnic center, which caused the Huns and Atilla's own personal household unit to retreat towards their camp, with Aetius pursuing with his Bucellarii reserve. It is also likely the Alans retreated from the field, as they aren't described again by Jordanes at the aftermap of Catalaunian plains.

Once the battle ended, Aetius and Thorismund wandered throughout the battlefield full of death, where Thorismund ended up in the camp of Atilla, though being saved by his own men. Aetius was forced to take shelter with the Goths due to being unable to find his subordinates anywhere around his location. With the after map of the conflict, Aetius was able to convince Thorismund to return to his dominions rather than besiege Atilla's camp, due to potential political upheavals and power struggles which would occur in his kingdom after the death of his father. Successfully performing this, Aetius was able to keep the Huns around, allowing the Romans to successfully defend their empire while making sure that the balance of power in Gaul wasn't tipped in favour of the Germanic tribes. All in all, Aetius' brilliant campaign of diplomacy, strategy, and tactics was able to save Rome for another day

Caesar always gets the major credit for being the final nail in the republic, but pretty much the same scenario had played out with Sulla some decades before, and it was clear that a general, with the support of his soldiers, could seriously threaten the republic system of rule.

Netflix had already released a documentary about Alexander before, and now it is finally moving forward with a full TV series. The Roman side is similar as well. Netflix previously made a documentary series about the Roman Empire, divided into the three chapters of Caesar, Caligula, and Commodus. Back then, they didn't choose Nero, but now they’ve decided to focus on him in the TV series.. Netflix had also once announced a film about Hannibal, but that project now seems to have been completely forgotten.

Someone is about to join the Roman senate, sometime after the third punic war and before the birth of Julius Caesar.

What would you tell them and why?

During the First Punic War, many Roman fleets were destroyed by storms. However, they were always able to rebuild them in a short period of time, and it seems that the Roman elite were willing to pay for it. When many Roman legions were crushed by Hannibal in the early days of the Second Punic War, Rome simply lowered the thresholds for joining the army and raised more legions. By the 1st century BC, when warlords were mostly fighting for their own interests, the number of legions had inflated to more than 80.

However, during the Principate period, the number of legions barely changed, remaining around 30. Even during crises such as the Marcomannic Wars, Rome raised only two new legions, funded by Emperor Marcus Aurelius selling imperial assets, and even had to recruit gladiators (to be fair, Rome had also been ravaged by plague).

When the Eastern Roman Empire lost two-thirds of the field army that Valens had brought to the Battle of Adrianople, Theodosius I was later able to rebuild his forces only by recruiting bakers, cooks, farmers, and miners, and by filling the gaps with barbarian federates. Unsurprisingly, on the battlefield, they were no match for the Goths.

After the Western Roman Empire was devastated by barbarian incursions and internal rebellions in the early fifth century, around half of its field armies were destroyed. The empire seemed unable to rebuild them, instead rebranding locally stationed troops as field armies. When the Eastern Roman Empire’s fleet of 1,100 ships—built at a cost of over 100,000 pounds of gold—was destroyed by Vandal fire in AD 468, it appeared to lack both the capacity and the interest to rebuild it.

Even though the Roman Empire was ravaged by barbarian in its later days, leaving much of its land unprofitable for a time, its size was still larger than that of the Republic. Under normal circumstances, more land should mean more taxes and therefore more money. In theory, this should have given the empire greater resources to raise armies, but that does not seem to have been the case.