(May 20, 2014 at 6:02 pm)Chuck Wrote:(May 20, 2014 at 3:51 pm)Minimalist Wrote: All ancient stats are suspect. Some are flat out fucking ridiculous as when the OT claims that 'god' killed 70,000 people to punish David for fucking up a census. The entire population of Judah at the time would have been something under 20,000.
Yeah, there probably wasn't 1.1 million jews to kill in the whole Roman world at the time when Jospehus indicted the Romans had killed that many in Judea alone during the first jewish revolt.
One tends to forget in 1st century AD, a country with a population of 1 million in the scheme of Roman demographics would have been analogous to a German or Japan to the modern world.
(May 20, 2014 at 3:51 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Neither did Gaul but that did not stop them.
When Caesar get to it Gual already had 400 years of sometimes intimate contact with the Greco Roman world and was already well past the cusp of initial urbanization. The Romans probably could have made Gual revenue positive fairly quickly, in 10 years or so.
If the rate of osmotic penetration of civilizing influence into Germany was similar after Caesar's conquest of Gual as it had been into Gual during the 400 years before, then it would take until 350 AD before Germany would become as ready for profitable Roman conquest as Gual had been in 50BC.
But by 350 AD all sorts of things had happened in the steppes east of Germania and Rome was in no mood, and no position, to conquer Germania.
Excellent points. By 350 CE, Rome was already at the beginning of the end. With diminishing legion size, eroding leadership, the constant devaluation of the currency and some other factors, there was really nothing Rome could do in the face of the Migration Period, except to delay the inevitable.
(and not to pick a nit, but - 'Gaul').
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax