Roman Empire Timeline Cliches To Avoid

[SlyDessertFox]

I was reading the Byzantine Empire Timeline Cliches To Avoid thread, and I figured it might be fruitful to create a similar thread for Roman Imperial timelines. I am not presently planning on writing any timeline (though I'm always toying with ideas), but nevertheless there are a lot of cliches that are bandied about. What are some that you think happen way too often or are too unrealistic? Here's a couple I came up with-they aren't exclusive to timelines, but also more generally are some "bad history" tropes about understanding the empire and how it fell.

The " One Bad Emperor" Theory of Change: The timelines where you remove an emperor like Nero or Commodus or whatever emperor you personally blame for a lot of Rome's troubles, and Rome is in a significantly better position. Particularly popular to halt the Third Century Crisis, the favorite emperor for these What Ifs is always Commodus, who create a convenient break between the last "good" emperor Marcus Aurelius and the start of all Rome's troubles heading into the Third Century. Ignoring that Commodus's "Level of Badness" for lack of a better term is often over exaggerated (he kept in place many of Marucs Aurelius's own men and his foreign policy was pretty sound, at least early on), it ignores or downplays the many structural factors that were causing the crisis-namely climate change, plague, increased and more intense threats along all of Rome's frontiers, monetary supply issues and all the imperial management issues this in turn created.

The Inevitable Principate: Even if Octavian Augustus is not the one who creates the principate, the transition from Republic to empire follows the same logic using the same terms (I am also guilty of this). It creates a sense of inevitability, that either the Caesar model or the Augustus model had to win out, even though much of Augustus's own consolidation of authority and imperial ideology was created haphazardly and on an ad hoc basis as dictated by the needs of his circumstances.

 

[Elfwine]

"Rome taking all of Germania totally makes sense." is at least a cliche.

I'm not an expert on the early empire as opposed to the part covered by the Byzantine Empire thread, but it keeps coming up like it would make sense for the Romans with what they knew and cared about to see ruling central Europe as worth the investment.

 

[Sarthak]

If its not Christianity - its Sol Invictus in terms of religion, or else, nothing changes in the Greco-Roman Pantheon if Rome sticks with it. The Britons who persisted with their traditional Pantheon, the ever-changing nature of the Olympian Pantheon over the course of Greek and Roman history was something that affected almost every facet of Roman societal life. The fact that it gets glossed over is sad.

 

[SlyDessertFox]

"Rome taking all of Germania totally makes sense." is at least a cliche.

I'm not an expert on the early empire as opposed to the part covered by the Byzantine Empire thread, but it keeps coming up like it would make sense for the Romans with what they knew and cared about to see ruling central Europe as worth the investment.

"What if Rome went up to insert river in northern/eastern Europe here".

If its not Christianity - its Sol Invictus in terms of religion, or else, nothing changes in the Greco-Roman Pantheon if Rome sticks with it. The Britons who persisted with their traditional Pantheon, the ever-changing nature of the Olympian Pantheon over the course of Greek and Roman history was something that affected almost every facet of Roman societal life. The fact that it gets glossed over is sad.

Yeah, there's an endless amount of possibilities with what you can do with Roman religion with a POD in the third century or earlier...perhaps too many, there's so much complexity there that it's tempting to just find a Christianity analogue and simplify things immensely.

 

[Elfwine]

"What if Rome went up to insert river in northern/eastern Europe here".

Yeah. It comes up more than any other "What if Rome conquered more?" than I can think of.

 

[Nuraghe]

"Rome taking all of Germania totally makes sense." is at least a cliche.

I'm not an expert on the early empire as opposed to the part covered by the Byzantine Empire thread, but it keeps coming up like it would make sense for the Romans with what they knew and cared about to see ruling central Europe as worth the investment.

very true, just as the exact opposite is also true, i.e. that Rome had to leave Germany and Britain alone to concentrate on the defeat and conquest of Persia (for this line of thought there are two problems, the first is that Augustus and Tiberius ( when he decided it was still worth it, and it was thought that the whole province could be saved )
was not a stupid, he had spent huge sums of men and money in Germany (see Agrippa's campaigns that consolidated the territory and linked the various Germanic leaders with Rome, see Arminius's father who was a friend of Agrippa) and thought that it lacked little to consider it a semi-official province instead of an area of militarized border (so much to trust to send Varo as governor) according to the numerous expeditions that the Romans made several times during the 3/4th century in the heart of Germany are not considered, in addition to this I wonder how they think Rome can assimilate and pacify as well as manage the heart of Persia (without necessarily shifting its attention and capital to a place closer to it, and we do not begin to consider the administrative changes that must be made for the success of the plan, furthermore shift the center of gravity makes control of Europe superfluous, so what to do? is the empire divided prematurely? )

even the relationship between Rome and the barbarians is glossed over and underestimated seeing that it was due to their interaction that the German confederation of peoples ( Franks, Goths, Vandals and co ) they formed

how false it is that the Germanic migrations destroyed the Western empire (it was already weak on its own, due to an embryonic problem of the empire: the innumerable civil wars) as well as the fact that the two courts did not see each other well watch out (it was Constantinople who paid Attila to go and plunder ( somewhere else ) in the West) moreover the "barbarians" did not want to destroy the empire but to live in it (it is obviously not as guests or low-class citizens but as Romans in all respects)

 

[SlyDessertFox]

how false it is that the Germanic migrations destroyed the Western empire (it was already weak on its own, due to an embryonic problem of the empire: the innumerable civil wars)

I think it's false to say categorically "The German migrations are what destroyed the Western Empire" but I also think the reaction to this has gone too far, downplaying their importance way too much (though this was sort of rectified a bit by Peter Heather's work). Speaking of cliches that's another-the idea that Rome had this uninterrupted period of "decline and fall" starting from the time of Aurelius onwards, is a cliche based around some massive hindsight bias. The Roman Empire was in dire straits in the third century, but was fairly prosperous in the 4th, and while they were not in the days of Pax Romana, certainly things did not appear like the western half of the empire would not last through the 5th century. A lot of the reasons for why they didn't survive that century do have to do with foreign threats.

 

[Elfwine]

(Western) Rome as in this period seems to have been relatively fragile as far as the balance between "doing well enough to hold the line" and "wait what do you mean that half of the west is basically independent?" was easily broken and hard to fix, which feels like a thing that cliche on "uninterrupted decline and fall" misses for the sake of just saying it was all just consistently downhill.

 

[Nuraghe]

I think it's false to say categorically "The German migrations are what destroyed the Western Empire" but I also think the reaction to this has gone too far, downplaying their importance way too much (though this was sort of rectified a bit by Peter Heather's work). Speaking of cliches that's another-the idea that Rome had this uninterrupted period of "decline and fall" starting from the time of Aurelius onwards, is a cliche based around some massive hindsight bias. The Roman Empire was in dire straits in the third century, but was fairly prosperous in the 4th, and while they were not in the days of Pax Romana, certainly things did not appear like the western half of the empire would not last through the 5th century. A lot of the reasons for why they didn't survive that century do have to do with foreign threats.

I agree, from the crisis of the 3th century until the 5th century there were many missed opportunities to get the Western empire back on track ( see Majoran or Valentinian III (with Aethios after the defeat of the Huns, or Aurelian himself a century and a half earlier) not to mention that Rome continued until the Renaissance with ups and downs and that in the 6th it had embarked on a semi-successful imperial reunification (failed with hindsight poison only because of the plague and the wars with the Sassanids)

 

[SlyDessertFox]

(Western) Rome as in this period seems to have been relatively fragile as far as the balance between "doing well enough to hold the line" and "wait what do you mean that half of the west is basically independent?" was easily broken and hard to fix, which feels like a thing that cliche on "uninterrupted decline and fall" misses for the sake of just saying it was all just consistently downhill.

I do think the three lost civil wars in quick succession during Theodosius's reign (combined with the tenuous political situation re: Stilicho and Honorius) meant that the west's capacity for response was weakened at the very moment when a series of crises flared in the first two decades of the 5th century, allowing them to snowball. Arguably during the 4th century the west was the more stable half of the empire-any stirring on the Rhine was pretty efficiently dealt with, and with the exception of the Great Conspiracy during Valentinian's reign, the major foreign policy emergencies of that century were almost entirely located in the eastern half of the Empire, either along the Danube or with the Sassanians.

But at the turn of the 4th century you now have a west that has:

1. Lost 3 Civil Wars in quick succession.
2. A child emperor controlled by a military general who is feuding with the eastern half of the empire and has a tenuous grip on power
3. Because of 1 and 2, the weakening of the borders to consolidate a central field army in Stilicho's person that could maintain his own power and respond to threats in a way that eliminates the threat of "local commander successfully protects frontier, gets proclaimed emperor" similar to what the Roman emperors resorted to towards the end of the third century crisis.

So when you combine 3 crises that under normal 4th century circumstances could, on their own, be handled relatively simply (renewed stirrings on the Rhine, a usurper in Britain, and rampaging Goths in the Balkans) you instead get chaos. The feud between the eastern and western courts means Stilicho has to deal with Alaric himself, the weakened field armies from the Theodosian civil wars means he doesn't have the forces on hand to actually defeat Alaric in the field, and his tenuous political situation means that the moment a revolt happens, he's on the outs and Rome is plunged into a political power vacuum. And all of this means they can't calm down the Rhine frontier before things get out of control.

So I think it's a fragility but it's a concentrated fragility-it required a lot of things to happen in a rapid 20 year period for the west to be knocked off its feet. And I think it all goes back to those three civil wars and the political situation they ended up creating-there was a leadership vacuum in the west right at the time when they could least afford it.

 

[Elfwine]

So I think it's a fragility but it's a concentrated fragility-it required a lot of things to happen in a rapid 20 year period for the west to be knocked off its feet. And I think it all goes back to those three civil wars and the political situation they ended up creating-there was a leadership vacuum in the west right at the time when they could least afford it.

No argument here, although I am not sure if it would be entirely realistic to say things are "fine" other than that. But this is the difference between "potentially still shaky, but not necessarily hopeless" and "absolutely in the worst possible position to deal with what came next".

Relevant to your One Bad Emperor Goes, Everything is Fine - I'm going to say that there's obviously a lot of the opposite. One Good Emperor would need a lot going his way to respond to some of the empire's really dark periods, not just "personally being both virtuous and able".

 

[SlyDessertFox]

Relevant to your One Bad Emperor Goes, Everything is Fine - I'm going to say that there's obviously a lot of the opposite. One Good Emperor would need a lot going his way to respond to some of the empire's really dark periods, not just "personally being both virtuous and able".

Agreed-one look at the third century alone and you see the corpses of a lot of "virtuous and able" emperors who were powerless to do more than hastily plug a hole and then die. Diocletian is a notable exception here (though even he had notable failures, from the collapse of the tetrarchy to the his fialed attempts at curbing inflation and the failed persecutions), but even the "successful" emperors of the period like Septimius Severus largely failed to actually significantly alter whatever trajectory the empire was on at the time.

 

[TickTock The Witch's Dead]

"Rome taking all of Germania totally makes sense." is at least a cliche.

I'm not an expert on the early empire as opposed to the part covered by the Byzantine Empire thread, but it keeps coming up like it would make sense for the Romans with what they knew and cared about to see ruling central Europe as worth the investment.

Could preventing threats on its border and making it smaller and thus more defensible convince the Romans to conquer it? I'll admit I am not knowledgeable on the subject, but I wonder if the Romans ever seriously still wanted to conquer it post-Teutoburg for security reasons.

 

[Elfwine]

Could preventing threats on its border and making it smaller and thus more defensible convince the Romans to conquer it? I'll admit I am not knowledgeable on the subject, but I wonder if the Romans ever seriously still wanted to conquer it post-Teutoburg for security reasons.

You'd have to establish how it makes it more defensible first. To quote someone more familiar with the era than I am:

The reason I'm always sceptical about Germania/Persia conquests is the simple fact that Rome was an Empire based first and foremost around the Mediterranean Sea, not the European continent. All of Rome's conquests down to about 80BC were of areas immediately bordering the Mediterranean, and, Gaul aside, the conquests of Illyria, Pannonia and the eastern Balkans were chiefly a search for a more defensible frontier. Roman expansion stopped at the Rhine because the Rhine can be supplied from the Mediterranean- similarly, it stopped in northern Iraq and the Armenian highlands because these were about as far away from the Mediterranean and Black Seas as Roman logistics could manage.

(my bold)

That's a pretty significant issue on what is "more defensible".

 

[TickTock The Witch's Dead]

You'd have to establish how it makes it more defensible first. To quote someone more familiar with the era than I am:


(my bold)

That's a pretty significant issue on what is "more defensible".

That's fair. But maybe issues on the Germanic frontier and possible arguments about the need to at least create a shorter northern border convince the Romans to get into it? I wonder if any Roman emperor has seriously considered going there for that reason.

 

[Aluma]

I think the existence of the byzantines at all is somewhat a cliche even though I actually like it
(see my parody thread where Carthage wins and there's still a Byzie state)

Like come on the Empire being divided exactly in two with one half being christian & greek dominant and with an Emperor remaking Byzantium into New Rome is hardly a given

Remove Constantine, Diocletian or even Christianity itself(which likely also butterflies those two) and there wouldnt be a ERE in any recognizable shape or form

 

[Avrorrange]

I think the stories that start in the Augustan period typically tends to forget the strong dynastic dynamics in early Roman Empire and thinks that random commanders could just usurp the throne with shit loads of Julio-Claudians around.That type of development only happened due to Julio-Claudians purging each other. Even then they took a lot of shit before deciding to get rid of the last Julio-Claudian. I also suspect the dynasty would be far stabler if Augustus were to be succeeded by his own grandsons.Somehow all the stories are the same, with Augustus’ grandsons going full Caligula and purging everyone else.

 

[Nuraghe]

You'd have to establish how it makes it more defensible first. To quote someone more familiar with the era than I am:


(my bold)

That's a pretty significant issue on what is "more defensible".

true, the Mediterranean was the Romans' highway and also their trump card to easily move their logistical advance (but this has never been an impediment for them, on the contrary, from recent archaeological discoveries we know that the Romans went with reconnaissance teams and armies when the situation required it even beyond Bohemia) however it is true that the mare nostrum facilitated their control over the provinces (but it should be remembered that Augustus wanted to invade Denmark with a lot of preparations already begun after having made peace with northern Germany between 10 and 16 AD also to defend the territory in Frisia from incursions by the Cimbri
(complete with a punitive expedition after Teutoburg in which the Romans massacred 15,000 soldiers Cit. Alberto Angela book the Empire)
in addition to the fact that it allowed him to eliminate the intermediaries for the amber trade on the Baltic (Nero was also interested in this so much as to send an exploratory expedition with the precise order to return with the precious goods or information, the expedition tells us Pliny the old step for Carnuntum (today in Austria) and I come back with a lot of amber including a single huge block of 6 kilos. cit Alberto Angela book 3 of Trilogy of emperor Nero pag 410)

 

[Elfwine]

It's a good reason why the border on the Rhine makes sense. The Romans were able to go past northern Iraq or the Armenian highlands, but that doesn't make having the border on the Zagros Mountains a good eastern border.

 

[Avrorrange]

It's a good reason why the border on the Rhine makes sense. The Romans were able to go past northern Iraq or the Armenian highlands, but that doesn't make having the border on the Zagros Mountains a good eastern border.

I think the silver-lining of Zagros Mountains is denial of Mesopotamia to Persia. Even if the province doesn’t become profitable, you can be sure that the Persians ain’t getting it’s population and wealth to use it against you either.People tend to forget that.