Tag: Rome

Ancient European History – Part 1

photog photog's Corner , , , , ,

Ancient History is fascinating.  Specifically reading about Europe from 600 B.C to 200 A.D. is fascinating.  The Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Macedonians, the Germans, the Goths, the Scythians even the Persians all interacting (meaning warring against each other) while trying to figure out how to pass from a barbaric tribal social structure into a larger more sophisticated society.  And all this while competing against the more established states like Egypt, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia.

Now some never achieved this.  The Gauls and the Scythians ceased to exist as nations while still in the plundering raider stage.  The Germans and the Goths had to wait for the downfall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. before they could advance.  The Persians, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans all had their day.  The Hellenistic civilization and its several kingdoms and empires had its heyday after Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the late fourth century B.C.  Stretching from western India to Egypt this civilization lasted in various areas until the Parthians and Romans overtook it.  The last piece to survive was Egypt which Augustus took charge of after the death of Marc Antony and Cleopatra VII in 30 B.C.  Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies whose progenitor was one of Alexander the Great’s generals.  So, all together the Hellenistic civilization Alexander founded lasted three hundred years.  Of course, you could easily make the case that the Byzantine Empire was the extension of this Hellenistic civilization with a thin patina of Roman influence on its surface.  And that shrinking “empire” managed to hang on in the city of Constantinople until 1453 A.D.

The Romans had their run from about 600 B.C. to 476 A.D.  And they did manage to leave their mark on Europe in a big way.  The Romance languages are spoken by a big chunk of the world population and the influence of Roman concepts in law and politics is immense.  So, these tribes from the dawn of real civilization in Europe had a great influence on us in the West.

But in a real way their political institutions were all resounding failures at providing their people with good governance, stability or a satisfying life.  Both the Greeks and the Romans attempted to create republics that provided the citizens with some say in their government.  Athens was a democracy.  Rome had popular elections (in a limited fashion) of their leaders.  But in both cases these civilizations eventually regressed to some form of monarchy.  The Hellenistic states had dynastic kings.  Rome had its emperors that were sometimes dynastic but during the most successful eras successors were selected by the reigning Emperor based on merit.  And in fact, since essentially the emperor was a military dictator, the legions were the ultimate arbiter of who was a successful emperor.  So, Julius Caesar or a Trajan would be beloved by his conquering legions because they would be showered with the spoils of conquest.  Whereas, an emperor without any military ability like Caligula or Commodus would end up assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in favor of someone more competent.  Perhaps military competency was the basis for picking their head of state.  A case could be made for that.

So, the question has to be asked, have we progressed since the ancients?  Is our government superior to the Greek and Roman states.  Let’s see what I think in Part 2.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2

photog photog's Corner , , , , , ,

There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.  After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?  Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don’t even need to feed them much.  Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.

Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that’s what the legions are for anyway.  And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who’s boss.

But even slavery is not the whole story.  When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.  They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.

But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn’t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.  These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn’t match the efficiency of the large plantations.  And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.  The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.

So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.  And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.  So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.  And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.  And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.  So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.

When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.  But at this point, the jig was up.  The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.  Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take up arms to defend their “nation.”  Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic “king” was a matter of complete indifference to them.  In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.

So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.  If a nation doesn’t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.

And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.  Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.  Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.  Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.  Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer/soldiers.  Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.  It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.

As a footnote I think it’s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.  What a brilliant plan.  But not very original.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1

photog photog's Corner , , , , ,

I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History.”  And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.  His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.  And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.  And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.  Far from it.  He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.  And I can see his point of view.  I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.

Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.  He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.

He further produces as evidence the Romans’ complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.  For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.

As for this last claim I have my doubts.  This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.  In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.  Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.  But let’s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.  What then?

Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?  Well, that’s the question.  It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.  This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.

What is the truth?  I’ll give my opinion in the second part.  But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.

Fun Times to Witness Firsthand

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.  Within 150 years these seedlings had spread to become the basis of the most powerful, most productive nation ever to exist.  By 1900 it had become a continental power that had harnessed great scientific and technological innovations to become a world power.  By 2000 it was the global hegemon, with no other nation even daring to pretend parity with the United States of America.

Twenty-five years later this country is much diminished.  And almost none of the change has to do with military might or technological capability.  We still have wonder weapons and a nuclear arsenal.  We have the most advanced information technology systems including the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and data acquisition.

What we have lost is our identity.  The Left has been on a campaign to destroy the myth of America for the last seventy years and I think they’ve been almost wholly successful.  Because it is this myth that provided us with the power that allowed us to perform all the miracles we have seen over the last century and more of our civilizational highpoint.  I’ll arbitrarily assign 1900 as the zenith of American civilization.  This convenient date, more or less, starts the “American Century” and the first decade was Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.  I would say this was when American morale was at its highest point.  We were respected and envied around the world and our self-regard was very high.  And at the same time, we were still a very self-reliant place.  People were expected to support themselves and government had no place in micro-managing our lives and finances.  From our point of view there was no government safety net and poverty was only one economic panic away.  But Americans depended on themselves to survive.

And this was doable.  America truly was the land of opportunity.  Everywhere you looked there were great ventures building bridges, railroads, telephone systems, electrical infrastructure; all the systems needed for a modern civilization.  There was work to do for anyone willing to do it.  And we considered ourselves a moral people.  We had police and courts that made sure that everyone lived according to the laws that each state enforced.  And every man could be judged by a jury of his peers.  It wasn’t perfect but it seemed like a reasonably fair system.  And we had representative government.  We got to vote for our presidents and congressional representatives.  Well, not women.  We were still sane back then and kept them in the home.  That madness was still twenty years in the future.  Funny how that innovation seems to track with the end of American greatness.  Oh well.

And most importantly, we hadn’t gotten involved in a European War at all up to that point.  Sure we slapped their hands if they interfered in the Western Hemisphere; Monroe Doctrine and all that.  But we were smart enough not to stick our noses into European quagmires.  We left that to the British.

But now?  Well, we’re mired in conflicts all over the Middle East and even Ukraine.  We rattle our sabers at China, Russia and Iran constantly.  We meddle in the elections of half the planet, spending clandestine money to rig elections and decide what cultural values we will permit “democracies” to have.

And we’ve allowed the education of our children to undermine the belief in the fairness and morality of American laws and institutions that have stood us in good stead for over two hundred years.  These educators and politicians have labeled our society racist, sexist, bigoted and immoral.  And worse still, a whole generation has been brainwashed into believing it’s true.

They’ve also empowered the leading corporations to outsource almost all the manufacturing jobs that formerly supported a thriving middle class to foreign shores where labor prices are impossibly low.  This has single-handedly dropped the United States into the second tier of nations economically.  And it has devastated the morale of the whole country.  And now the Left has tried to finish off the middle class by flooding the country with tens of millions of third-world refugees to compete for the few jobs that are left at the lowest wage imaginable.

So where do we go from here?  If we looked for examples we have Rome.  A great and proud people expanded under the leadership of wise rulers but then allowed foreign wars to turn their Republic into an Empire.  And that Empire turned its back on the small farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic and turned to slave labor to enrich the senatorial class and changed the army into a profession with  no pretense of an end to the forever wars.

That looks very much like what we are seeing planned by the Left, only on a global scale.  Now Trump is trying to reverse the picture.  He is taking steps to deal with each of the problems; wars, outsourced manufacturing, global corporations, hordes of illegal immigrants and culture war.  And we’re even seeing some small progress from his efforts.

But can he turn it around?  When the Gracchi Brothers or Julius Caesar took the side of the plebians in Rome they were assassinated and the Empire rolled on.  So we’ve never seen this trend from Republic to Empire reversed.  Of course I’d like it to be so.  The ends of Republics aren’t fun times to witness firsthand.

A Pocket Full of Miracles

photog Current Events , ,

For a thousand years from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD the most dynamic civilization on the planet was the Greco-Roman world.  This consisted of a number of Indo-European speaking pastoral tribes who had earlier invaded southeastern Europe and disrupting the existing Mediterranean civilization there, borrowed heavily from their predecessors and founded city states in Italy, Asia Minor and the Balkans while competing with the more civilized Phoenicians and struggling to resist even less civilized Indo-European tribes like the Celts who periodically invaded from the north.  Two of these cities; first Athens in Hellas and then Rome in Italy, stumbled upon the dynamism that comes when some measure of freedom from oppression is codified into a government.

In both cases the limited form of democracy unleashed a power that dominated its neighbors for an appreciable time.  Eventually in both cases this freedom decayed and was replaced by autocracy.

A little more than a thousand years after the remnants of the Greco-Roman civilization collapsed the English resurrected a different but similar form of government.  And the English colonies around the world have continued and adapted this form of government including the former colonies that became the United States of America.  A case can be made that the last four hundred years have represented the practical extent of this experiment in democracy.  And like the Athenians before them the American and the British have tried to force their vassal states to emulate their form of government, so that today the number of democracies in the world is impressive, unless you look too closely.

But four hundred years is a long time.  Athens maintained democracy for most of one hundred and eighty years and theoretically the Roman republic hadn’t devolved into a dictatorship for almost five hundred years.  But truly the last century of the Roman republic was a series of dictators vying to stay in power and unleashing endless wars on the state.

So, four hundred years is a pretty good run.  But the current Anglo-American project is showing many of the warning signs of an exhausted civilization.  And probably the most damning is the plutocrats trying to eliminate the middle-class and replace them with serfs.  Even back in 4th century Athens, Aristotle knew that only with a numerous middle-class can a free state maintain itself.  Well, we are quickly devolving into the condition that the Roman plebians found themselves in the first century BC.  Their farms were bought up by the rich who used slave labor to outcompete the small farmers and left them forced to enlist in the army just to keep from starving.

Our predicament is even worse.  The plutocrats don’t need us at all, not even as cannon fodder.  All they want us to do is disappear.  So that leaves us with Donald Trump.  He says he wants to make us great again.  He’ll have to answer two questions:

  1. Is it too late to get an honest election?
  2. Is it too late to restore the middle class?

Of course, if the first answer is no then the second answer is no by default.  I am hoping he can pull it off.  Getting a fair election is a long shot.  But there’s no reason to hope against it.  Restoring prosperity is a larger and more complicated story.  And finally, if he manages to get some things done, the next question is can he recruit honest men to succeed him and keep the effort going.  Because, let’s face it, there is a generation of work to even begin to fix our problems.  It’ll take a whole pocket full of miracles.

One thing that the Athenians had over us is honest comic poets.  Aristophanes openly mocked the failures and foibles of the leaders of his country.  All we have is Saturday Night Live and the late-night show hosts.  And they’re all in the bag for the Democrats.  And on top of everything else they’re not even funny.  Well, we have this guy.

He Isn’t the Plucky Hero, the Alliance Isn’t Some Evil Empire

photog Current Events, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , ,

Joss Whedon is a Leftist.  Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause.  All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts.  So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly.  Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.

In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.

During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.

He is portrayed as a true believer.  He is making a better world, a world free of sin.  And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there.  The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing.  In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right.  The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled.  And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat.  Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates.  As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.

Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality.  Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars.  It’s more like Firefly.  We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star.  We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America.  The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.

And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours.  But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment.  If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies.  But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge.  Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.

But what is the right answer?  Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect?  It doesn’t appear to be the case.  And what about children?  What do you tell them?  Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z.  They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.

So, there’s my thought.  The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do.  And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries.  I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.

But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar?  And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic.  Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power?  I think the answer is that it is impossible.  And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up.  All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.

So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time.  It’s in their nature.  Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.

Something Will Have to Give

photog Current Events , , ,

The New York Times, a former newspaper, published the results of a series of polls that they held in the six most hotly contested “swing” states, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  Trump won five out of six.  The only one Biden picked up was Wisconsin which was within the 4% margin of error for the poll.  Of the five Trump won, all but one (Pennsylvania) was outside of the margin of error.

State   Trump   Biden
    %   %
Nevada   52   41
Georgia   49   43
Arizona   49   44
Michigan   48   43
Pennsylvania   48   44
Wisconsin   44   47

 

So, what does this mean?  Well, if I were to guess, I think it means that independents in these states think Biden is doing a lousy job running the country.  And since the independents are the least ideological voters, their opinion is probably the most objective.  Two thirds of independents are saying they’d rather vote for the guy who is being indicted in four different criminal proceedings in four different jurisdictions around the country.  They’d prefer a man who has been demonized by every news outlet, the FBI and the Justice Department.  And impeached twice by the House of Representatives.  Essentially what they’re saying is, they want to vote for this guy precisely because all of these people say they shouldn’t.

Now imagine if these poll numbers remain where they are or increase right up to Election Day 2024.  And then suppose that we have a rerun of 2020 where the people go to bed on election night with Donald Trump up by insurmountable leads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan but the polls get shut down without a completed tally and then after a few days or weeks of “finding” absentee ballots Joe Biden miraculously pulls ahead by a few thousand votes.

Well, I think that would be the end of people believing in the electoral system in this country.  After all, the label “banana republic” has already gotten fairly wide currency after the partisan prosecutions that the Justice Department has been indulging in for the last four years.  I’m guessing that comparisons of our electoral system to Sadaam Hussein’s will become quite common after that.

But the important question is, what practical difference will people’s perception of voter fraud make?  I mean, the fraud will still allow Democrats to control the White House and maybe the Congress.  And that will eventually allow the Supreme Court to be packed with progressives.  Will it matter if no one believes in the elections?

I think it will.  It won’t immediately topple the government.  The United States still possess formidable resources and many of its institutions are somewhat functional.  But history has shown that a republic that loses the trust of its citizens in the fairness of its institutions eventually radicalizes the common people and leads to recourse to a revolutionary alternative.

Rome succumbed to revolt once the republican government became corrupt and tyrannical.  And it’s not necessary to go back two thousand years ago to see what happens to a tyrannical government, even a powerful one once the people have lost faith in its legitimacy.  We only have to look at the Soviet Union.  When people discover that elections are fake their relationship to the state is no longer one of ownership.  It becomes purely transactional.  And so, if the government that presides over these fake elections also fails to provide prosperity, then the only thing that can keep it in power is brute force.  Slaves don’t work any harder than they have to.  In the Soviet Union there was a saying, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”  Well, we’re headed there.  Inflation means that people are working two jobs and still aren’t able to save up to buy a house.  But they see illegal aliens given free housing and welfare.  I don’t think Americans are ready to live that way.

Something will have to give.

I’ll Wait for the Movie Version

photog Current Events , , , , ,

“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians as they warred against each other, beginning to write as soon as the war was on foot, with expectation it should prove a great one and most worthy the relation of all that had been before it; conjecturing so much both from this, that they flourished on both sides in all manner of provision, and also because he saw the rest of Greece siding with the one or the other faction, some then presently and some intending so to do. For this was certainly the greatest commotion that ever happened among the Grecians, reaching also to part of the barbarians and, as a man may say, to most nations. For the actions that preceded this and those again that are yet more ancient, though the truth of them through length of time cannot by any means clearly be discovered, yet for any argument that, looking into times far past, I have yet light on to persuade me, I do not think they have been very great, either for matter of war or otherwise.”

In 1629 Thomas Hobbes the philosopher (or we should say the social scientist) translated into English, Thucydides “Peloponnesian War.”  Above is Thucydides’ introduction.  He believed that this was the greatest war that had ever been fought among the Greeks.  And in this belief, he was probably right.  And in a sense every major war that was fought afterward in which European peoples fought amongst themselves became the greatest war.  After the Peloponnesian war, Sparta fought with the other Hellenic city states such as Thebes until they wore each other down.  That allowed the related Macedonian nation to conquer the Greeks and that led to Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.  And the squabbling of the successor kingdoms of Alexander’s generals was the incubator for the Roman empire.

But when the rotted corpse of the Caesars’ world disintegrated sometime during the 5th century A.D. it formed the fertile soil that nurtured our Western civilization.  And now the United States of America is approaching the point where it will need a new name.  Calling it a democratic republic is sort of a bad joke.  The form of the government is some kind of self-perpetuating bureaucracy.  And its extent is no longer defined by the outline of the fifty states.  Much like Rome it has many vassal states that while technically not American territory nevertheless are almost completely controlled by America.

And like Rome the American Empire has an enormous amount of momentum.  Even in the midst of precipitous decline in many aspects of its existence the shear mass of this human organization is staggering to behold.  And because of this scope it will take a long time for the creature to die.  Unfortunately, we will be the witnesses to the early stages of this downfall.  And it is already on display.  Just as the Roman republic died with the destruction of the small Roman farmers so our society will degenerate into a feudal existence with the dominance of the corporate oligarchs over small independent businesses.  And in fact, the last few years has greatly accelerated this process.

And our age’s equivalent to the Roman “bread and circuses” is the vision of welfare and the metaverse where everyone commits slow suicide to make room for the depopulated Gaia model.  It almost makes 5th century Rome sound humanistic.

I was recently skimming through Macchiavelli’s “History of Florence.”  It begins with the Fall of Rome and after the Carolingian period quickly devolves into endless petty wars between a long series of German Holy Roman Emperors named Frederic, French Kings named Louis and Neapolitan Dukes named Rodrigo battling the Popes for control of Tuscany and Lombardy.  And it occurred to me that someday that will be North America.  Idiotic descendants of the Pilgrims will be warring endlessly with some Asiatic warlords and Neo-Aztecs for possession of Lake Winnipesaukee.  And if that’s the case then my ancestors might as well have remained in Southern Italy and at least have had the comfort of snow free March weather.

If I were a Stoic, I’d look at the whole thing as the way of the world and just make the best of it without whining about it.  But my ancestors made a tradition of bitterly complaining about just about everything that was outside of their control and just about everything was outside of their control.  At the same time, it meant trying to make the most of the things we could control; family, food and friends.

But just as Thucydides did with Athens and Tacitus did with Republican Rome, we will get a chance to see up close and personal how a once free people get turned into serfs.  It won’t be pretty but it will be momentous.  I hope the movie version has good CGI effects.

Guest Contributor – Jason M – 10JAN2023 – Ancient Roman Concrete – Continued

photog Guest Contributors, Jason M , , ,

Ancient Roman Concrete’s Durability Finally Explained

 

I actually work for a cement and concrete manufacturer. I was thinking more along the lines of roads and large buildings in my comments above.

For individuals, I completely agree with you that stronger foundations and floors in homes would be a good thing. The problems of energy to generate heat and cost of transporting the materials are still there. But because it is on a much smaller scale it MIGHT be easier to overcome.

Availability of quick lime might be an issue, as well. At least in some locations.

For pouring a driveway or a garage floor though…I’m still not sold on it.

“Strength” for concrete is a measure of compressive force. It’s measured in PSI. Unfortunately, even a very high PSI concrete can break if its support is somehow undermined. The biggest thing for homeowners is making sure that the foundation is done properly with the correct support around the concrete and diverting water away so that it is not washing or damaging the support in some way.

That being said, there are several methods to avoid the kind of cracks you’re talking about. For anyone reading this… make sure your builders include rebar in your foundations. This goes for driveways, too, although it doesn’t have to be rebar in this case… a simple wire mesh or wire fence laid in the concrete (especially if you’re DYIing it) is probably enough. There is also a fiber that can be added to decrease the likelihood of cracks in driveways, etc. but that’s more for if you’re paying someone to do it. I don’t know that you can buy that kind of concrete unless you’re dealing directly with a seller with the mixer trucks and stuff.

You can also increase the thickness of the concrete. This adds significant cost, but a 9 inch thick driveway would be better than a 6 inch thick driveway. There is a diminishing return here though. Once you get to a certain point, the additional cost is not worth the additional “protection.”

For a foundation, especially, make sure they dig deeply enough to get good ground underneath the concrete. This is one thing I had to be careful of when we built our home. We have horrible dirt. I know it sounds funny, but the kind of dirt we have in this area is really bad for settling. It simply compresses too easily so the weight of a house is going to cause it to settle quickly. I had to make sure that the contractor building my foundation dug deeply enough to get past more of the bad stuff before putting in gravel and pouring concrete. I was fortunate in that the contractor was already doing this which made me feel good about using him for some other projects I had associated with the house.

Finally, do anything you can to ensure proper drainage. Water will erode soil even under your home or driveway or cause the soil to settle.

One thing I learned when I joined my current company is that there are hundreds of “recipes” for cement and that many more “recipes” for concrete. (Cement is essentially the “binder” that holds everything together in concrete.) I don’t know that anyone realized exactly how the Romans did it, but I do know that the manufacturers have MANY “levers” they can pull in order to achieve varying strengths and curing times. They are also constantly testing and experimenting with different additives and other cementitious (It’s a real word… honestly) materials in an effort to lower costs without sacrificing strength, etc.

It was more interesting than I thought it would be, honestly.