MarkA said:
carlton, interesting point about Judaism being the predominant, if not necessarily the state religion, of the empire. Why do you think the spiritual crisis will still occur as in OTL? Why would the christian sect not supplant mainstream Judaism? The latter would surely still be seen as an ancesteral religion and therefore less accessable than the new Paulician sect.
Because Christianity does not come into being in the form we know it ATL. A form of rabbinic Judaism develops, emancipating itself from the Temple, and Jesus is one of its founders (he gets to live longer and his followers regard him as a prophet, not the Messiah). The 'spiritual crisis' - a questionable term for something we know very little about - will occur because rabbinic Judaism has the 'conversion' meme, though not as strongly as did Christianity or Islam. Unlike a pagan mystery or collegium, Jewish communities may grow, but (short of physical attrition) not shrink. Also, the practice of seeking out teachers in remote areas and sharing a unified body of learning makes them more effective in the more refgined urban spaces of the Empire, where local ties mean less and mobility is common. Your recruitment pool is just so much wider.
The latifundae were slave estates. Serfs are not slaves even though their economic status is similar. Manpower shortages were acute not because of civil or foreign wars but because of plagues and diseases. Why would this be any different from OTL?
/latifundium/ means 'big landholding' and was used quite commonly throughout the Empire, but the pure slae estates, mostly an Italian phenomenon to start with, developed only under very specific historical conditions in the Later Republic and ended when developments rendered them unprofitable. The typical Imperial estate comprised a commercial, highly specialised operation run by slaves under a 'vilicus' overseer on behalf of the owner, supplemented by seasonal day laborers as needed, and raable land rented out to free (or, occasionally, slave) coloni. This model, with variations in the proportion depending on the availability of slaves and pressure on land, was successful enough to remain basically the norm for almost a millennium.
As to the manpower crisis, the population developments would still be roughly the same (for what little we know of it), but they would not constitute the same degree of crisis. Bear in mind that a population drop can be restored over the course of several generations with the survivors paying the same level of taxes and consuming the same amount of state services per capita. The crisis becomes acute once the sum total of taxes and services remains the same, or even needs increasing. An epidemic itself is not automatically an economic crisis.
