Recent content by Jan Gronvik

According to Wikipedia, Crassus had the following troops at his disposal at Carrhae: 36,000–43,000 men 28,000–35,000 legionaries 4,000 cavalry 4,000 light infantry "With the aid of Hellenic settlements in Syria and the support of about 6,000 cavalry from Artavasdes, the Armenian king, Crassus...

Could a different outcome of the Battle of Carrhae be a first POD?

Is it possible, with PODs at any preferable time, to have the Romans conquer all land (Parhia/Sassanid Empire) up to the river Indus?

Three-field system: "Crop rotations date back as far as the Roman Empire. European farmers followed a crop rotation system created by the Romans called, “food, feed, fallow.” Farmers using this cropping system divided their farm into three sections, rotating the sections to the next category the...

Distillation: "The Romans apparently produced distilled beverages, although no references concerning them are found in writings before 100 ce. Production of distilled spirits was reported in Britain before the Roman conquest." https://global.britannica.com/topic/distilled-spirit

Heavy plough: "The Romans achieved the heavy wheeled mouldboard plough in the late 3rd and 4th century AD, when archaeological evidence appears, inter alia, in Roman Britain.[14] The first indisputable appearance after the Roman period is from 643, in a northern Italian document.[15]"...

DominusNovus wrote: The Romans, if we by that mean people living in the Roman Empire, had (at least according to some) heavy plows, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough horse collars, http://www.humanist.de/rome/harnessing/collar.html distillation...

I still insist on a POD where the problem of succession is solved. If it takes a POD as early as Augustus, so be it.

So, a very capable Emperor X adopted by Marcus Aurelius might reign for, let's say, 20 years (180 CE - 200 CE), butterflying away the excesses of Commodus, the short reigns of Pertinax and Didius Julianus, and at least the first half of Septimius Severus' reign with the civil war against...

Maybe a POD at the very start of Marcus Aurelius reign along these lines: "Ancient 429 BCE. Though there was no knowledge of antibodies in ancient Greece, physicians at the time were beginning to understand that getting infected with certain viruses could later prevent re-infections. For...

Agricola said: Yes, without the civil wars, the empire would be in much better shape. According to Mental_Wizard, the Antonine Plague can not be butterflied away, but is there a way to make it much less disasterous?

The emperors should try to shorten the Northern border and at the same time get some more manpower. The only way to get a real shortening of the Northern border would be to reach the Vistula - Tyras, something that would take generations, if it is doable.

I think the trick is to avoid civil wars so that the empire can stand united both when it tries to conquer and when it has to defend its assets. To make this possible, you need to solve the question of succession. My preferred solution would be to have adoption institutionalized (difficult) and...

I think one crucial thing would be to develop enough metallurgical skills to build a full-size steam engine. Another would be to find a reliable source of energy (coal). In the mediterranean area there were deposits of lignite (brown coal), but those have a lower heat content than ordinary coal.

Would it be possible to kickstart an industrial revolution in Alexandria in the third century BCE, under the Ptolemaic kingdom?