I want to see the evolution of the Empire of Britannia through the years. It's in a good position given that the one successful invasion won't be happening in this timeline.
To Ourselves, To New Paganism
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
- Status
Just to update as quickly as possible! 
Seriously though, I'm finding this to be a fascinating resource on how paganism might evolve without Christianity - useful not just for alternate history but also conworlding in general - that I've been inspired.
Keep it up!
Seriously though, I'm finding this to be a fascinating resource on how paganism might evolve without Christianity - useful not just for alternate history but also conworlding in general - that I've been inspired.
Keep it up!
I don't intend to go much further into the future with this timeline. I will however, go back and fill in details about things that have happened. The best I could do, accordingly, is briefly outline the early Emperors in Roman Britain. I don't think that would be terribly interesting, but I will consider it.
Unlike White Huns, I'm not trying to make this one go on forever. I've got a definite end in mind.
Just to update as quickly as possible!
Seriously though, I'm finding this to be a fascinating resource on how paganism might evolve without Christianity - useful not just for alternate history but also conworlding in general - that I've been inspired.
Keep it up!
Thank you very much! I will. Can I ask what conworlding is?
When the Sunset Invasion happens how successful it will be?
...What? You wanted outrageous.
When the Sunset Invasion happens how successful it will be?
...What? You wanted outrageous.
The newest paganism!
Fascinating stuff, I've always been intrigued by timelines that places emphasis on religion and philosophy. Out of curiosity, is there any hope for a map circa the fall of the WRE ITTL to appear?
http://i.imgur.com/XF1WcAa.jpg?1
The Eastern Roman Empire (Nicomedian Empire) at it's zenith, during the reign of Kyriakos the Arab at the dawn of the sixth century.
Much of the eastern conquests would prove short-lived, although the Empire would retain control over the Iranian plateau for almost a century and Mesopotamia and certain portions of the region for even longer, despite the rise of the latter Kushanshah under Kritavirya son of Vasiska.
To the Greek Emperors in Nicomedia, these new conquerors and their successors alike were "Sakas" and indeed the dynastic changes are difficult to place on a historical chronology. However, ultimately, Mesopotamia would fall to the "Saka" Satrap Hiranyakula, a devout Mazdayasnan whose sons would convert to Aletheism.
The "barbarian" states would only rise in power in the short term and their rise can be compared in many ways to the dominion of northern China by steppe nomads, although even by 500 it was clear that western Europe would never be ruled from Nicomedia - the political will for a total reconquest simply did not exist, especially with rising threats both from the Iranian and Pannonian steppe.
[There will be a few more updates, don't fear. It's not over yet. However these updates will not necessarily be chronological, I can say that much. I want to go back and focus on specific moments and things that I've only touched on lightly so far.]
The Eastern Roman Empire (Nicomedian Empire) at it's zenith, during the reign of Kyriakos the Arab at the dawn of the sixth century.
Much of the eastern conquests would prove short-lived, although the Empire would retain control over the Iranian plateau for almost a century and Mesopotamia and certain portions of the region for even longer, despite the rise of the latter Kushanshah under Kritavirya son of Vasiska.
To the Greek Emperors in Nicomedia, these new conquerors and their successors alike were "Sakas" and indeed the dynastic changes are difficult to place on a historical chronology. However, ultimately, Mesopotamia would fall to the "Saka" Satrap Hiranyakula, a devout Mazdayasnan whose sons would convert to Aletheism.
The "barbarian" states would only rise in power in the short term and their rise can be compared in many ways to the dominion of northern China by steppe nomads, although even by 500 it was clear that western Europe would never be ruled from Nicomedia - the political will for a total reconquest simply did not exist, especially with rising threats both from the Iranian and Pannonian steppe.
[There will be a few more updates, don't fear. It's not over yet. However these updates will not necessarily be chronological, I can say that much. I want to go back and focus on specific moments and things that I've only touched on lightly so far.]
The Least of Cities, the Greatest of Trials
Before the death of the Prophet Yamliku, few knew of Zoara. It had a mention in the earliest pages of the Holy Miqra, of course, and thus was known to learn and literate Jews as the “insignificant” and the “least of cities” – notable mostly for being the only “city of the plain” to survive God’s annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. For those in the Roman administration for whom the name Lot meant nothing, it was a small trading post on the fringes of their world. It had sweet dates and some limited agriculture, but in general it was a waystation for itinerant pastoralists and overland merchant convoys.
Beyond Zoara lay the Malkuta Nabata, a Hellenized client monarchy of Arabs which survived by a combination of clever politics and the vast impracticality of sending legions into the desert to take her fortresses. By the second century CE they were an almost entirely settled people, thriving based on their hydraulic control of vast underground cisterns. Called by the Greek historians “those who dig for water,” that simple epitaph understates their achievements - they were the people who turned the red rock deserts of Edom into a garden. They even produced small quantities of fine wine which were shipped to Europe and sold at incredible prices.
If the Nabatu had ascended to perilous heights during the early Roman era (holding Damaskos and much of Palestine), even repulsing a full-scale invasion by Gnaeus Pompey, they had since become a critical part of the Roman frontier, and as a vassal kingdom they provided an indispensable buffer and a key trade partner. Unlike many of the other clients of Rome, they were never incorporated into the administration, and indeed their large military had proved indispensable at putting down several Jewish rebellions. The Nabatu were considered by the Romans and Greeks to be coreligionists of a sort, worshippers of “Theos Ares” and “Magna Mater” (Dushara and Illatu, respectively) and accordingly were a useful counterbalance against the zealots of Palestine.
When Yamliku died in the city of Emesa, murdered by a mob of Heliogabalian cultists, the remaining followers of his faith believed that his spirit came into them in a miraculous transformative moment known as the Feast of Heartbeats. Thereafter a man named Aprem, a Syrian wine-merchant and a Hellenized Jew, took over de facto leadership and determined that all members of their cult should sell their possessions and follow him.
While many of the “Yamlikians” dispersed and ultimately would not follow Aprem, perhaps a hundred or so did, and these men travelled to Zoara and there found safe haven at the fringes of the Roman world. Zoara itself was a polyglot city, spared annihilation in the Jewish rebellions by dint of its insignificance and large Arab population who refused to rebel. There, Aprem’s new disciples made many converts, and many of them became merchants, spreading their religion within several decades as far afield as Egypt and Gaza. Zoara itself, along with Emesa, became the holy cities of this new faith, and starting in the fourth century it seems that the Yamlikians made regular pilgrimages to Emesa, despite tensions with the indigenous locals who were largely Sun-worshippers.
Ultimately, the Yamlikians never made more than a small dent in the patchwork of religious faiths across the Mediterranean. Their numbers at best would be counted in the tens of thousands. Despite this, however, their philosophy endured. The egalitarian notion that anyone could through ritual or meditation take the divine impulse into themselves proved deeply popular to a segment of the Roman world. Like a traditional mystery cult, they had a tightly-bound community, but admission was open to all and brought with it a sense of spiritual strength.
Other “anointing” movements began to spring up, frequently embracing traditional deities such as Cybele (for women) and ironically Heliogabalos or Sol Invictus as well. Joining an anointing movement was a simple as making a commitment of faith, and then usually undergoing an ordeal of ritual abuse for a period of weeks with other initiates before having sacred oil placed on your forehead and being inducted into the group. Among the Yamlikians, the ordeal was a beating in emulation of their Prophet’s martyrdom, but other groups took varied inspiration, including sexual humiliation or extended fasting. Eventually, the Sol Invictus ritual became popular among a distinct subset of upper-middle class Romans, a sort of fraternal bond of shared degradation which helped to cultivate future friendships and business relationships.
Much like the more traditional mystery cults, there was a sense of community provided by the rituals, but they also posed a political threat. The Roman Emperors, and especially their Nicomedian successors, disliked the notion that the common man could achieve even partial Godhood through such a simple ritual. It threatened the importance of their own postmortem divinity, and accordingly certain compromises had to be made: most notably, the Emperor was frequently anointed “in absentia” – an acknowledgement by the cults of the divine blessing on the Imperial system. Those cults which refused to take part could expect a degree of persecution by local Roman administrators, and accordingly in 365, the Yamlikian priesthood finally conceded and accepted the divinity of the Emperor, becoming with a single drop of oil an accepted cult rather than an underground movement.
As for the Nabatu, they would gain ground and political importance after the collapse of the Osrhoene Empire, reclaiming parts of the Negev and exacting concessions from the Emperor Aurelian in exchange for the thirty-thousand some soldiers from Nabataea whose contribution to the Osrhoenean campaign should not be undervalued. They would continue to enjoy vassal status until the fifth century, when migrating tribes from South Arabia defeated them in battle and forced the Roman Empire to annex them outright during the ensuing chaos.
Before the death of the Prophet Yamliku, few knew of Zoara. It had a mention in the earliest pages of the Holy Miqra, of course, and thus was known to learn and literate Jews as the “insignificant” and the “least of cities” – notable mostly for being the only “city of the plain” to survive God’s annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. For those in the Roman administration for whom the name Lot meant nothing, it was a small trading post on the fringes of their world. It had sweet dates and some limited agriculture, but in general it was a waystation for itinerant pastoralists and overland merchant convoys.
Beyond Zoara lay the Malkuta Nabata, a Hellenized client monarchy of Arabs which survived by a combination of clever politics and the vast impracticality of sending legions into the desert to take her fortresses. By the second century CE they were an almost entirely settled people, thriving based on their hydraulic control of vast underground cisterns. Called by the Greek historians “those who dig for water,” that simple epitaph understates their achievements - they were the people who turned the red rock deserts of Edom into a garden. They even produced small quantities of fine wine which were shipped to Europe and sold at incredible prices.
If the Nabatu had ascended to perilous heights during the early Roman era (holding Damaskos and much of Palestine), even repulsing a full-scale invasion by Gnaeus Pompey, they had since become a critical part of the Roman frontier, and as a vassal kingdom they provided an indispensable buffer and a key trade partner. Unlike many of the other clients of Rome, they were never incorporated into the administration, and indeed their large military had proved indispensable at putting down several Jewish rebellions. The Nabatu were considered by the Romans and Greeks to be coreligionists of a sort, worshippers of “Theos Ares” and “Magna Mater” (Dushara and Illatu, respectively) and accordingly were a useful counterbalance against the zealots of Palestine.
When Yamliku died in the city of Emesa, murdered by a mob of Heliogabalian cultists, the remaining followers of his faith believed that his spirit came into them in a miraculous transformative moment known as the Feast of Heartbeats. Thereafter a man named Aprem, a Syrian wine-merchant and a Hellenized Jew, took over de facto leadership and determined that all members of their cult should sell their possessions and follow him.
While many of the “Yamlikians” dispersed and ultimately would not follow Aprem, perhaps a hundred or so did, and these men travelled to Zoara and there found safe haven at the fringes of the Roman world. Zoara itself was a polyglot city, spared annihilation in the Jewish rebellions by dint of its insignificance and large Arab population who refused to rebel. There, Aprem’s new disciples made many converts, and many of them became merchants, spreading their religion within several decades as far afield as Egypt and Gaza. Zoara itself, along with Emesa, became the holy cities of this new faith, and starting in the fourth century it seems that the Yamlikians made regular pilgrimages to Emesa, despite tensions with the indigenous locals who were largely Sun-worshippers.
Ultimately, the Yamlikians never made more than a small dent in the patchwork of religious faiths across the Mediterranean. Their numbers at best would be counted in the tens of thousands. Despite this, however, their philosophy endured. The egalitarian notion that anyone could through ritual or meditation take the divine impulse into themselves proved deeply popular to a segment of the Roman world. Like a traditional mystery cult, they had a tightly-bound community, but admission was open to all and brought with it a sense of spiritual strength.
Other “anointing” movements began to spring up, frequently embracing traditional deities such as Cybele (for women) and ironically Heliogabalos or Sol Invictus as well. Joining an anointing movement was a simple as making a commitment of faith, and then usually undergoing an ordeal of ritual abuse for a period of weeks with other initiates before having sacred oil placed on your forehead and being inducted into the group. Among the Yamlikians, the ordeal was a beating in emulation of their Prophet’s martyrdom, but other groups took varied inspiration, including sexual humiliation or extended fasting. Eventually, the Sol Invictus ritual became popular among a distinct subset of upper-middle class Romans, a sort of fraternal bond of shared degradation which helped to cultivate future friendships and business relationships.
Much like the more traditional mystery cults, there was a sense of community provided by the rituals, but they also posed a political threat. The Roman Emperors, and especially their Nicomedian successors, disliked the notion that the common man could achieve even partial Godhood through such a simple ritual. It threatened the importance of their own postmortem divinity, and accordingly certain compromises had to be made: most notably, the Emperor was frequently anointed “in absentia” – an acknowledgement by the cults of the divine blessing on the Imperial system. Those cults which refused to take part could expect a degree of persecution by local Roman administrators, and accordingly in 365, the Yamlikian priesthood finally conceded and accepted the divinity of the Emperor, becoming with a single drop of oil an accepted cult rather than an underground movement.
As for the Nabatu, they would gain ground and political importance after the collapse of the Osrhoene Empire, reclaiming parts of the Negev and exacting concessions from the Emperor Aurelian in exchange for the thirty-thousand some soldiers from Nabataea whose contribution to the Osrhoenean campaign should not be undervalued. They would continue to enjoy vassal status until the fifth century, when migrating tribes from South Arabia defeated them in battle and forced the Roman Empire to annex them outright during the ensuing chaos.
North Africa
To the average citizen of North Africa during the long centuries of military anarchy, despotism and disorder the presaged the fall of Rome, little changed. Under Aurelian, the whole province had been made into the Diocese of Africa, and it would remain so until 466, when it was reformed into a Prefecture and later, during the Hellenization of the Nicomedian Empire, an Exarchate. However, there was no great barbarian invasion of North Africa. The Mediterranean was a strong shield against would-be plunderers, as was the Roman fleet. Where in the rest of the West, barbarian disruptions and civil war disrupted the social fabric of Latin society, in Africa the tensions and struggles of Roman civilization were allowed to play out as if in a vacuum, generally divorced from the chaos of the fifth century and the fall of Rome.
Since the establishment of Africa as a collection of Roman provinces, a large and cosmopolitan Latin speaking urban class had come to settle the coasts. As in most of the West, these new transplants regarded themselves as distinct from the surrounding population – more civilized and more educated. It was them who maintained Africa’s contact with the broader world. They were a small percentage of the overall population, but they were not truly Africa’s elite. In a pattern that should be familiar to those aware of the social stratification of the Latin West, the aristocracy and landholders were also Latin-speaking, but these men saw themselves as true Romans, keepers of the calcified classical civilization of Rome. They kept themselves separate from their Berber counterparts – a half-assimilated collection of frontier nobles and aristocrats whose families supplied the backbone of the frontier armies and provided Roman Africa’s first line of defense. At the bottom of the pile, sustaining the other three groups were the settled Berber peasantry, who generally did not speak Latin and worked the farms and estates of the aristocracy.
From time to time, this system came under considerable stress. In 386, a rebellion by the Berber prince Mascezelus brought much of the countryside into revolt. The nobles either hid behind the walls of their villas or retreated to their urban apartments to wait out the chaos, and order was only restored by the arrival of several legions. Mascezelus’ rebellion, though it primarily mobilized the Berber underclass, appealed to all who were generally impoverished. As it swept the countryside, it cut off grain supply to Rome for a time, forcing the Emperor to intervene directly. When Mascezelus was ultimately defeated and tortured to death along with his followers, it did not alleviate the core reasons for the uprising, but merely pushed dissent along different avenues.
Apart from the typical mystery cults, it was the Anagogic mysteries which caught on most profoundly among the educated men of Africa. As one of the richest Roman provinces, something in its message of spurning the material world was deeply appealing. Over time, the Anagogic cults would even begin to organize – adherents from many monasteries gathered together and formed the Synod of Utica. This Synod would meet once yearly to debate matters of philosophy and doctrine, and under its guidance the Anagogic establishment grew.
The Anagogic movement thus became the imported faith of the establishment and elite, while a primitive and syncretic form of Isis worship mobilized the underclass. Devotees of Sophia and Isis went to war for their respective goddesses in the streets during times of civic upheaval, and the Carthaginian mob was deeply divided. Rebels – and there were increasingly many rebels as the centuries went on – went into battle carrying crude icons of the Great Mother and the Lord of Totality, while their adversaries carried the Imperial Eagle and universally crushed these peasant rebellions. By 386, when Mascezelus brought the Berber nobility along in the cause of rebellion, he only ensured the annihilation of the native landholding class. The Roman soldiers who fought in Africa were given grants of confiscated land there, and after those grants Roman rule was assured.
These new rich and their heirs accepted the lay version of the Anagogic mysteries well enough. It was a way to gain acceptance among the more entrenched aristocracy, who in contrast with their northern cousins did not, for whatever reason, treasure their classical heritage as closely as their Italian brethren. Thus when the Nicomedian Emperors snatched Africa from their western counterparts, they encountered a countryside deeply divided – on one hand their stood the traditional cults of the peasantry, largely unified under a Neoplatonic framework which emphasized the role of Isis and her son Idir, and on the other the Anagogic elite, whose struggles to reconcile their immense worldly fortunes with the spiritual goals they hoped to attain were the subject of countless texts and treatises.
Of course, the Nicomedians were accustomed to such controversies. Their civil administration was used to sectarian troubles and the politics of careful compromise necessary to rule a vast and cosmopolitan empire. The foreign bureaucrats who arrived from distant Nicomedia were clever and generally more than capable at fulfilling their mandates. These mandates, however, treated Africa more as a tool than a province of the Roman Empire. Africa and Egypt, the two great breadbaskets of the Mediterranean world, were used to control the swollen cities of Italy. The Eastern Romans brought large armies of Greek-speaking soldiery to garrison the cities and frontiers, and their rule was generally seen even by the Latin elite as a foreign occupation of sorts.
However, the Nicomedians worked tirelessly to solve the disputes between peasantry and rural elite. New laws were put in place to protect slaves from the worst excesses of their masters and certain nomadic groups were made “allies in perpetuity” of the Roman state, turning them from brigandage to paid mercenaries whose sons would fight as far afield as Iran and the Danube. The Nicomedians promoted the monastic life, knowing that those who retreated into holy isolation were less of a threat, and as an unintended side effect the literary and philosophical achievements of the era were previously unmatched in North African history. Countless classic Latin works were also preserved thanks to these monasteries.
[The second part of my post guys. "To Ourselves, To New Paganism" is rapidly coming to a close. As ever I welcome questions and comments, and I will be providing background on any topic that people ask about to the best of my ability.
However, I expect there shall be maybe two or three more posts before I wrap it all up around the beginning of June and get back to the White Huns in earnest. Thanks for reading!]
To the average citizen of North Africa during the long centuries of military anarchy, despotism and disorder the presaged the fall of Rome, little changed. Under Aurelian, the whole province had been made into the Diocese of Africa, and it would remain so until 466, when it was reformed into a Prefecture and later, during the Hellenization of the Nicomedian Empire, an Exarchate. However, there was no great barbarian invasion of North Africa. The Mediterranean was a strong shield against would-be plunderers, as was the Roman fleet. Where in the rest of the West, barbarian disruptions and civil war disrupted the social fabric of Latin society, in Africa the tensions and struggles of Roman civilization were allowed to play out as if in a vacuum, generally divorced from the chaos of the fifth century and the fall of Rome.
Since the establishment of Africa as a collection of Roman provinces, a large and cosmopolitan Latin speaking urban class had come to settle the coasts. As in most of the West, these new transplants regarded themselves as distinct from the surrounding population – more civilized and more educated. It was them who maintained Africa’s contact with the broader world. They were a small percentage of the overall population, but they were not truly Africa’s elite. In a pattern that should be familiar to those aware of the social stratification of the Latin West, the aristocracy and landholders were also Latin-speaking, but these men saw themselves as true Romans, keepers of the calcified classical civilization of Rome. They kept themselves separate from their Berber counterparts – a half-assimilated collection of frontier nobles and aristocrats whose families supplied the backbone of the frontier armies and provided Roman Africa’s first line of defense. At the bottom of the pile, sustaining the other three groups were the settled Berber peasantry, who generally did not speak Latin and worked the farms and estates of the aristocracy.
From time to time, this system came under considerable stress. In 386, a rebellion by the Berber prince Mascezelus brought much of the countryside into revolt. The nobles either hid behind the walls of their villas or retreated to their urban apartments to wait out the chaos, and order was only restored by the arrival of several legions. Mascezelus’ rebellion, though it primarily mobilized the Berber underclass, appealed to all who were generally impoverished. As it swept the countryside, it cut off grain supply to Rome for a time, forcing the Emperor to intervene directly. When Mascezelus was ultimately defeated and tortured to death along with his followers, it did not alleviate the core reasons for the uprising, but merely pushed dissent along different avenues.
Apart from the typical mystery cults, it was the Anagogic mysteries which caught on most profoundly among the educated men of Africa. As one of the richest Roman provinces, something in its message of spurning the material world was deeply appealing. Over time, the Anagogic cults would even begin to organize – adherents from many monasteries gathered together and formed the Synod of Utica. This Synod would meet once yearly to debate matters of philosophy and doctrine, and under its guidance the Anagogic establishment grew.
The Anagogic movement thus became the imported faith of the establishment and elite, while a primitive and syncretic form of Isis worship mobilized the underclass. Devotees of Sophia and Isis went to war for their respective goddesses in the streets during times of civic upheaval, and the Carthaginian mob was deeply divided. Rebels – and there were increasingly many rebels as the centuries went on – went into battle carrying crude icons of the Great Mother and the Lord of Totality, while their adversaries carried the Imperial Eagle and universally crushed these peasant rebellions. By 386, when Mascezelus brought the Berber nobility along in the cause of rebellion, he only ensured the annihilation of the native landholding class. The Roman soldiers who fought in Africa were given grants of confiscated land there, and after those grants Roman rule was assured.
These new rich and their heirs accepted the lay version of the Anagogic mysteries well enough. It was a way to gain acceptance among the more entrenched aristocracy, who in contrast with their northern cousins did not, for whatever reason, treasure their classical heritage as closely as their Italian brethren. Thus when the Nicomedian Emperors snatched Africa from their western counterparts, they encountered a countryside deeply divided – on one hand their stood the traditional cults of the peasantry, largely unified under a Neoplatonic framework which emphasized the role of Isis and her son Idir, and on the other the Anagogic elite, whose struggles to reconcile their immense worldly fortunes with the spiritual goals they hoped to attain were the subject of countless texts and treatises.
Of course, the Nicomedians were accustomed to such controversies. Their civil administration was used to sectarian troubles and the politics of careful compromise necessary to rule a vast and cosmopolitan empire. The foreign bureaucrats who arrived from distant Nicomedia were clever and generally more than capable at fulfilling their mandates. These mandates, however, treated Africa more as a tool than a province of the Roman Empire. Africa and Egypt, the two great breadbaskets of the Mediterranean world, were used to control the swollen cities of Italy. The Eastern Romans brought large armies of Greek-speaking soldiery to garrison the cities and frontiers, and their rule was generally seen even by the Latin elite as a foreign occupation of sorts.
However, the Nicomedians worked tirelessly to solve the disputes between peasantry and rural elite. New laws were put in place to protect slaves from the worst excesses of their masters and certain nomadic groups were made “allies in perpetuity” of the Roman state, turning them from brigandage to paid mercenaries whose sons would fight as far afield as Iran and the Danube. The Nicomedians promoted the monastic life, knowing that those who retreated into holy isolation were less of a threat, and as an unintended side effect the literary and philosophical achievements of the era were previously unmatched in North African history. Countless classic Latin works were also preserved thanks to these monasteries.
[The second part of my post guys. "To Ourselves, To New Paganism" is rapidly coming to a close. As ever I welcome questions and comments, and I will be providing background on any topic that people ask about to the best of my ability.
However, I expect there shall be maybe two or three more posts before I wrap it all up around the beginning of June and get back to the White Huns in earnest. Thanks for reading!]
Fascinating stuff, really. The writing quality is top notch and just the concepts...yeah this story is pretty awesome. I wish I knew more about this stuff in order to make more intelligent commentary on this timeline, but alas ancient religious development is my weakest area in ancient history knowledge. Still, superb job.
Britain declines
Roman Britain was at once a distant frontier and a dagger pointed at the heart of the Empire. The fearsome northern tribes which haunted the provincial imagination necessitated the deployment of several legions across the province – legions which were sufficiently distant from the Mediterranean that ambitious commanders often found themselves operating with minimal insight. More often than not in times of military anarchy, it was veteran British legions marching on Rome, dispatching opposing forces many times their size.
Apart from raw materials, Britain had little to offer the broader Roman world – in pottery and finished goods it had to compete with a much more advanced Gallic market with far finer products. Most of its industry was geared towards domestic production. As a colonial hinterland, it provided territory on which soldiers could be settled and a place for generals to test their mettle in punitive raids against the Picts to the north.
Accordingly, it is little wonder that after the usurper Claudius was defeated in 394 by the eastern Emperor Ammianos, no further legions were sent north. Ammianos and the puppets he left in Mediolanum had little patience for Britain’s trend of insubordination. While there was no official abandonment – indeed the very notion of such a thing was impossible, after 394, Britain was on its own. Local, municipal authorities were expected to handle the defense of the province and raise their own soldiers from the local populace. Gone were the days of eastern soldiers being sent north to defend the Empire. Gone too was the veneer of Imperial administration – when the provincial authorities received no aid, they simply stopped sending taxes north.
It is apparent that not all the soldiery of the Empire went south with Claudius to die. His second in command, Majorian, ruled Britain for several decades as a strongman. Majorian seems to have raised fresh soldiers and maintained the northern defenses – but notably he never had any ambitions to sail across the channel and cross into Gaul. Rather, he continued to acknowledge the distant authority of the Roman Empire and rule as simultaneous Prefect and Doux. After Majorian’s death however, the notion of a united Britain died with him. The rapid dissolution of the Romano-British state into warlordism and anarchy caught many contemporaries by surprise. There was still a strong state apparatus, after all, and Majorian had an adopted son and heir perfectly capable of succeeding him.
To understand why Majorian’s regime collapsed with such astonishing speed after his death, we must go back to the beginning of the fourth century CE, or possibly earlier. With each period of military anarchy on the continent, the economic fortunes of Britain had declined. However, the fourth century was truly brutal to the province’s prosperity. Urban centers contracted as they did across the western half of Europe. Many rural villas, particularly in the north were abandoned as the wealthy retreated to more defensible positions in the south. A larger and larger proportion of the population became engaged in subsistence agriculture and as usurping armies left and did not come back, the military, long the engine of the British economy, became replaced by levied soldiers from the rural poor. For all his successes, Majorian brought back neither these professional troops nor the influx of currency into the economy that they represented. He relied on border levies equipped to a far poorer standard, and paid them far less than the Imperial government had – when they were paid at all.
While the “castra” cities of the southern interior did survive, they did not prosper. As early as the second century these cities had been founded and settled largely by Romanized foreigners; these foreigners were traditionally former soldiers. They brought Mithra, Sol Invictus, and the broad pantheon of the mystery cults to Britain, and the officers among them enjoyed large landholdings and provincial villas – aping the Gallic aristocracy they envied. Unlike this Gallic aristocracy however, they abandoned classical pretensions. The Roman aristocracy and the Britons they adopted into their ranks remained martial in their inclinations. They decorated their villas not with pastoral scenes and iconographic depictions of myths but scenes of war and triumph. Mosaics in Roman Britain were boastful and proud. “Titus breaking the Dacians along the ridge” for example, was a typical epigraph caption on a Roman mural of the area. A host of snarling barbarians would be beneath, rushing the ridgeline while waving their falxes as stoic Romans bashed them down with heavy shields and long spatha swords.
A century later, as fresh waves of soldiers came to the islands from Illyria and Sarmatia, Aletheism was introduced to the island. Aletheist temple-communities, along with an Egyptian monastic sect known as the Therapeutae, provided community and identity for the rural poor and the intellectual class respectively. The Therapeutae were a unique sort – brought over with a group of Greek soldiers in the late third century, their religion mixed Jewish and Buddhist philosophy, while abandoning the elements of both that might have been unappealing to Romans, particularly when it came to such extreme notions as nonviolence and circumcision. Britain was unique perhaps, in its willingness to adopt Roman religion. In Gaul and particularly in the East, indigenous faiths prospered and often were imported back to Rome. There are countless examples of foreign cults becoming vogue across the Empire, but in contrast to the rest of the continent, the British religion had been thoroughly annihilated by Roman colonialism. The destruction of the Druidic caste ensured a sort of religious vacuum into which first the Roman gods, and later Aletheism, would be able to penetrate with ease.
However, what this meant was that by the fall of the Empire, Britishness was not a strong identity. The aristocracy of the island were more warlike than their timid, classical counterparts to the south. What urban middle class had survived the slow collapse of the Roman Empire scarcely identified as part of a broader British or even Roman society, and those who did were subsistence-level peasants tied to their local villas. It was a perfect recipe for internecine warfare. Loyalty only stretched as far as the nearest town or villa, and the rural classes, by now devout Aletheists, looked with vast suspicion upon the urban intellectuals with their mysterious cults and strange rituals.
By the end of the fifth century, Britain was a patchwork of Romanized warlord states. The settlement of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries on unused land (which by that point was plentiful) had begun in earnest, and would introduce even more gods to the islands – Woden, Thunor, and Tiw chief among their numbers. While the changes caused by the Anglo-Saxon invasion are a topic for another text, this early synthesis of cultures should be understood to represent the primordial beginnings of modern Britain. The inclusion of Latin loanwords into the Saxon dialects and the conflation of Tiw and Mithras represent early examples of the fusion culture which would ultimately emerge.
The Afairian Dynasty
When Plato’s Socrates said of the Greek world “We who live between the Pillars of Herakles and Phasis inhabit some small part of it around the sea, just like ants or frogs around a pond.” He spoke quite accurately of the limits of the Hellenic world. Apart from the great Anabasis of Alexandros and the later conquests of Kyriakos the Arab, Hellenism was for the Iranian plateau and beyond often little more than a veneer. Baktria was the great exception to this rule, and it contributed immensely to Buddhist philosophy and art. Depictions of the human form of the Buddha, and of the Hindu gods in the style of conquering Greek heroes became vogue during the era of the Indo-Greeks, and persisted even during the era of the Kushan.
In general, the Greco-Roman world in contrast to the expansive Greco-Iranian ambitions of Alexandros, was clustered around the frog-pond. The sea was life, and the river valleys that lay beyond it – the Danube and the Rhine in particular – were distant worlds distinct both culturally and socially from the worlds they guarded. However, there was one other frontier, equally alien perhaps, but no less important: Mesopotamia, the country from which Aletheism blossomed. After Parthia was unseated from her position of prominence by the meteoric rise of Osrhoene and the conquests of Antiochus Avadius, a momentary power vacuum emerged, and while the Parthian clans bickered over what dynasty would have the opportunity to fill it, the Afairians arrived from the north.
The Afairians, sometimes called Apairig, are often called a Kushan dynasty. Hailing from Chorasmia, where our Greek sources claim they were Satraps, they broke off from the greater Kushan Empire to pursue ambitions of conquest in Iran, later restoring the borders of the Parthian Empire after the fall of Osrhoene. Like the Parthians before them, they took the titles and epitaphs of the new dynasty. The Afairian Shahs were quick to give their sons Persian names and call themselves friends to the Greeks. They were remarkably tolerant, accepting Aletheism and various sects of Zoroastrianism alongside the state “orthodox” form.
In some ways, the Afairians were a harbinger of later “Saka” invasions from the steppe. While they themselves were a settled people with a long and civilized history as patrons of the arts and philosophy, they were always somewhat foreign, always somewhat aloof and aware that they were interlopers on a long and ancient cultural tradition. As Kushan dynasty, they patronized Buddhist and Hellenic philosophers and built temples to a multiplicity of gods. When Iranian nationalism reached a head in the fifth century, the Afairians were forced to fight against rebellions in Pars, and no sooner did these die down than the Aletheists began rising up to form their own kingdom in Mesopotamia. They never made a great effort to be seen as anything other than foreign kings maintained by their own prowess, and ultimately that would be their undoing.
Kyriakos the Arab, who after his great conquests would be called Kyriakos Theos Epiphanes, swept the Afairian away in no small part because the Kushan nobility were isolated and distinct from the people they ruled, and though they might have been Iranic, were never seen as Iranian by their countrymen. After the Afairian Shah Ardavan was defeated in battle and killed, his army deserted and in the span of two years Kyriakos had reached Baktria and shortly thereafter India.
Even this was in many ways transitory. Greek soldiers were settled along the frontier, but their settlements were largely short lived. The varied demands of frontier life required continuous service either in an administrative or martial capacity. Accordingly, they were largely unable to interact with the subject population in any way conducive to assimilation or shared cultural experience. If the Danube seemed far from Nicomedia, Baktria was far, far further. The conquest was a prestige coup beyond all others, but it would not alter the fundamental orientation of the Greco-Roman world. The Hellenic “frog pond” was all that mattered to the bureaucrats of Nicomedia. Beyond lay the intractable Aletheists of the Mesopotamian floodplains and the vast Iranian plateau – insurmountable obstacles for an empire that was in its fundamental character maritime.
Roman Britain was at once a distant frontier and a dagger pointed at the heart of the Empire. The fearsome northern tribes which haunted the provincial imagination necessitated the deployment of several legions across the province – legions which were sufficiently distant from the Mediterranean that ambitious commanders often found themselves operating with minimal insight. More often than not in times of military anarchy, it was veteran British legions marching on Rome, dispatching opposing forces many times their size.
Apart from raw materials, Britain had little to offer the broader Roman world – in pottery and finished goods it had to compete with a much more advanced Gallic market with far finer products. Most of its industry was geared towards domestic production. As a colonial hinterland, it provided territory on which soldiers could be settled and a place for generals to test their mettle in punitive raids against the Picts to the north.
Accordingly, it is little wonder that after the usurper Claudius was defeated in 394 by the eastern Emperor Ammianos, no further legions were sent north. Ammianos and the puppets he left in Mediolanum had little patience for Britain’s trend of insubordination. While there was no official abandonment – indeed the very notion of such a thing was impossible, after 394, Britain was on its own. Local, municipal authorities were expected to handle the defense of the province and raise their own soldiers from the local populace. Gone were the days of eastern soldiers being sent north to defend the Empire. Gone too was the veneer of Imperial administration – when the provincial authorities received no aid, they simply stopped sending taxes north.
It is apparent that not all the soldiery of the Empire went south with Claudius to die. His second in command, Majorian, ruled Britain for several decades as a strongman. Majorian seems to have raised fresh soldiers and maintained the northern defenses – but notably he never had any ambitions to sail across the channel and cross into Gaul. Rather, he continued to acknowledge the distant authority of the Roman Empire and rule as simultaneous Prefect and Doux. After Majorian’s death however, the notion of a united Britain died with him. The rapid dissolution of the Romano-British state into warlordism and anarchy caught many contemporaries by surprise. There was still a strong state apparatus, after all, and Majorian had an adopted son and heir perfectly capable of succeeding him.
To understand why Majorian’s regime collapsed with such astonishing speed after his death, we must go back to the beginning of the fourth century CE, or possibly earlier. With each period of military anarchy on the continent, the economic fortunes of Britain had declined. However, the fourth century was truly brutal to the province’s prosperity. Urban centers contracted as they did across the western half of Europe. Many rural villas, particularly in the north were abandoned as the wealthy retreated to more defensible positions in the south. A larger and larger proportion of the population became engaged in subsistence agriculture and as usurping armies left and did not come back, the military, long the engine of the British economy, became replaced by levied soldiers from the rural poor. For all his successes, Majorian brought back neither these professional troops nor the influx of currency into the economy that they represented. He relied on border levies equipped to a far poorer standard, and paid them far less than the Imperial government had – when they were paid at all.
While the “castra” cities of the southern interior did survive, they did not prosper. As early as the second century these cities had been founded and settled largely by Romanized foreigners; these foreigners were traditionally former soldiers. They brought Mithra, Sol Invictus, and the broad pantheon of the mystery cults to Britain, and the officers among them enjoyed large landholdings and provincial villas – aping the Gallic aristocracy they envied. Unlike this Gallic aristocracy however, they abandoned classical pretensions. The Roman aristocracy and the Britons they adopted into their ranks remained martial in their inclinations. They decorated their villas not with pastoral scenes and iconographic depictions of myths but scenes of war and triumph. Mosaics in Roman Britain were boastful and proud. “Titus breaking the Dacians along the ridge” for example, was a typical epigraph caption on a Roman mural of the area. A host of snarling barbarians would be beneath, rushing the ridgeline while waving their falxes as stoic Romans bashed them down with heavy shields and long spatha swords.
A century later, as fresh waves of soldiers came to the islands from Illyria and Sarmatia, Aletheism was introduced to the island. Aletheist temple-communities, along with an Egyptian monastic sect known as the Therapeutae, provided community and identity for the rural poor and the intellectual class respectively. The Therapeutae were a unique sort – brought over with a group of Greek soldiers in the late third century, their religion mixed Jewish and Buddhist philosophy, while abandoning the elements of both that might have been unappealing to Romans, particularly when it came to such extreme notions as nonviolence and circumcision. Britain was unique perhaps, in its willingness to adopt Roman religion. In Gaul and particularly in the East, indigenous faiths prospered and often were imported back to Rome. There are countless examples of foreign cults becoming vogue across the Empire, but in contrast to the rest of the continent, the British religion had been thoroughly annihilated by Roman colonialism. The destruction of the Druidic caste ensured a sort of religious vacuum into which first the Roman gods, and later Aletheism, would be able to penetrate with ease.
However, what this meant was that by the fall of the Empire, Britishness was not a strong identity. The aristocracy of the island were more warlike than their timid, classical counterparts to the south. What urban middle class had survived the slow collapse of the Roman Empire scarcely identified as part of a broader British or even Roman society, and those who did were subsistence-level peasants tied to their local villas. It was a perfect recipe for internecine warfare. Loyalty only stretched as far as the nearest town or villa, and the rural classes, by now devout Aletheists, looked with vast suspicion upon the urban intellectuals with their mysterious cults and strange rituals.
By the end of the fifth century, Britain was a patchwork of Romanized warlord states. The settlement of Anglo-Saxon mercenaries on unused land (which by that point was plentiful) had begun in earnest, and would introduce even more gods to the islands – Woden, Thunor, and Tiw chief among their numbers. While the changes caused by the Anglo-Saxon invasion are a topic for another text, this early synthesis of cultures should be understood to represent the primordial beginnings of modern Britain. The inclusion of Latin loanwords into the Saxon dialects and the conflation of Tiw and Mithras represent early examples of the fusion culture which would ultimately emerge.
The Afairian Dynasty
When Plato’s Socrates said of the Greek world “We who live between the Pillars of Herakles and Phasis inhabit some small part of it around the sea, just like ants or frogs around a pond.” He spoke quite accurately of the limits of the Hellenic world. Apart from the great Anabasis of Alexandros and the later conquests of Kyriakos the Arab, Hellenism was for the Iranian plateau and beyond often little more than a veneer. Baktria was the great exception to this rule, and it contributed immensely to Buddhist philosophy and art. Depictions of the human form of the Buddha, and of the Hindu gods in the style of conquering Greek heroes became vogue during the era of the Indo-Greeks, and persisted even during the era of the Kushan.
In general, the Greco-Roman world in contrast to the expansive Greco-Iranian ambitions of Alexandros, was clustered around the frog-pond. The sea was life, and the river valleys that lay beyond it – the Danube and the Rhine in particular – were distant worlds distinct both culturally and socially from the worlds they guarded. However, there was one other frontier, equally alien perhaps, but no less important: Mesopotamia, the country from which Aletheism blossomed. After Parthia was unseated from her position of prominence by the meteoric rise of Osrhoene and the conquests of Antiochus Avadius, a momentary power vacuum emerged, and while the Parthian clans bickered over what dynasty would have the opportunity to fill it, the Afairians arrived from the north.
The Afairians, sometimes called Apairig, are often called a Kushan dynasty. Hailing from Chorasmia, where our Greek sources claim they were Satraps, they broke off from the greater Kushan Empire to pursue ambitions of conquest in Iran, later restoring the borders of the Parthian Empire after the fall of Osrhoene. Like the Parthians before them, they took the titles and epitaphs of the new dynasty. The Afairian Shahs were quick to give their sons Persian names and call themselves friends to the Greeks. They were remarkably tolerant, accepting Aletheism and various sects of Zoroastrianism alongside the state “orthodox” form.
In some ways, the Afairians were a harbinger of later “Saka” invasions from the steppe. While they themselves were a settled people with a long and civilized history as patrons of the arts and philosophy, they were always somewhat foreign, always somewhat aloof and aware that they were interlopers on a long and ancient cultural tradition. As Kushan dynasty, they patronized Buddhist and Hellenic philosophers and built temples to a multiplicity of gods. When Iranian nationalism reached a head in the fifth century, the Afairians were forced to fight against rebellions in Pars, and no sooner did these die down than the Aletheists began rising up to form their own kingdom in Mesopotamia. They never made a great effort to be seen as anything other than foreign kings maintained by their own prowess, and ultimately that would be their undoing.
Kyriakos the Arab, who after his great conquests would be called Kyriakos Theos Epiphanes, swept the Afairian away in no small part because the Kushan nobility were isolated and distinct from the people they ruled, and though they might have been Iranic, were never seen as Iranian by their countrymen. After the Afairian Shah Ardavan was defeated in battle and killed, his army deserted and in the span of two years Kyriakos had reached Baktria and shortly thereafter India.
Even this was in many ways transitory. Greek soldiers were settled along the frontier, but their settlements were largely short lived. The varied demands of frontier life required continuous service either in an administrative or martial capacity. Accordingly, they were largely unable to interact with the subject population in any way conducive to assimilation or shared cultural experience. If the Danube seemed far from Nicomedia, Baktria was far, far further. The conquest was a prestige coup beyond all others, but it would not alter the fundamental orientation of the Greco-Roman world. The Hellenic “frog pond” was all that mattered to the bureaucrats of Nicomedia. Beyond lay the intractable Aletheists of the Mesopotamian floodplains and the vast Iranian plateau – insurmountable obstacles for an empire that was in its fundamental character maritime.
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What comes next?
Contextualizing and understanding the cultural impact of the Roman Empire is a challenge. As history marched on, the very notion of the Roman Empire changed and evolved. From humble origins as one Italian city-state among many, the Empire would give rise to newborn versions of many of the institutions and religions which persist in Europe to this day. A judge in Gallia can trace the origin of his legal codes to Roman law. A young man participating in a Simuotic orgy today could recognize similarities in the ecstatic rituals of an Isis cultist. Neoplatonism would form the foundation of metaphysical philosophy for centuries to come, until the rise of Empiricism in the eleventh century.
Thirteen centuries after the rise of Augustus, there were still people of importance who called themselves Roman Emperor in all the varied tongues of the Mediterranean world, and cloaked themselves in the antique prestige granted by that title. Of course thirteen centuries after the establishment of the Principate, those Emperors would have been unrecognizable. The Emperor in Africa was a decadent puppet of Mauri tribesmen. His rival in Nicomedia had no power outside of the palace. The swollen city on the sea of Marmara proved impossible to defend without the power of an Empire behind it, a fact which was often taken advantage of by his new Pakthani overlords in Syria.
But the legacy of Rome continued. Modern European faith, culture, and law had their beginnings with Hellenism, and it was first Rome and later the peoples of Germania who propagated that culture across the world. Even the notion of Democracy and elections can be traced to a mixture of Hellenic Republican notions and the Germanic understanding of Kingship. The first Parliaments sought to imitate Rome and Greece, their illustrious forefathers to which they owed so much. Up until the past two centuries, Koine (in various modified forms) was the language of science, philosophy, and religion.
The story of Rome is one of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness mirrored by our modern era of communication and the “global oikoumene.” Where now the whole world is connected by elektronic optics, and ideas disseminate themselves instantaneously, in Roman times the transformation of culture required physical legwork, legwork which only became possible with the security of Roman peace. For all their splendor, Alexandros’ successors were very much provincial – Makedonians lording over “barbarians.” What Rome did most effectively is slowly transform and hegemonize the varied identities of the ancient world into a cohesive singular whole. In the Roman era, travel was safe and affordable. Saka from the steppes settled in Britain. Mauri merchants plied their wares on the Crimea. Gaul was settled by Greeks and Latins. Ideas and cultures spread and became unified under a combination of civic nationalism and religious syncretism. Along the global trade routes which crossed through the Persian Gulf and Egypt, Neoplatonism and Anagogism met the varied philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, to say nothing for the exchange of medical, mathematic, and scientific knowledge.
The urban middle class of the Roman world came to define the new society, rather than the isolated provincial aristocracy or the heterogeneous rural peoples so prevalent across the Empire. Their language, their culture, their dreams and aspirations became the bedrock of the new eastern order, even long after the decline of the Roman Empire. And as trade grew once more and the disruptions of the 5th and 6th centuries came to a close, the west went through a period called the Renascere, the great rebirth of urban culture. While this culture might have been vulgar by the standards of the old and now almost entirely vanished Latin aristocracy, it preserved and expanded upon what came before. Through the mercantile medium of Koine and the multifaceted by not incompatible religious traditions of the Mediterranean, knowledge and learning blossomed once more.
The inevitable backslides of progress, such as the eleventh century dark ages of plague and superstition, were ultimately brief. The destruction of great libraries, while tragic, was not fatal because in the Roman era classical and post-classical learning had begun to be disseminated on a large scale. Such was the legacy of Hellenism. The decline of traditional paganism and the rise of “new paganism” was the start of a fundamental transformation in the Roman world. The dawn of universal religion in the west heralded totalizing changes which altered society forever. In some senses, those changes never wholly abated.
The long story of human history, since the first words scribbled in clay, has been one of communication and interconnectedness. The invention of agriculture allowed the establishment of larger and larger communities. Larger communities were able to specialize labor to a greater extent, and were more capable of innovation due to a larger pool of ideas and increased ease in facilitating and adopting those innovations. This trend has continued until today, but it could be argued that it only began in earnest with the dawn of the Roman era, when new paganism was born.
[Thus ends "To Ourselves, To New Paganism." Hope everyone enjoyed the ride. For those who enjoyed my writing and happened to see this short little timeline first, please check out "Rise of the White Huns" in my signature.
Also, I have a nascent blog where I post my creative writing. Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.]
Contextualizing and understanding the cultural impact of the Roman Empire is a challenge. As history marched on, the very notion of the Roman Empire changed and evolved. From humble origins as one Italian city-state among many, the Empire would give rise to newborn versions of many of the institutions and religions which persist in Europe to this day. A judge in Gallia can trace the origin of his legal codes to Roman law. A young man participating in a Simuotic orgy today could recognize similarities in the ecstatic rituals of an Isis cultist. Neoplatonism would form the foundation of metaphysical philosophy for centuries to come, until the rise of Empiricism in the eleventh century.
Thirteen centuries after the rise of Augustus, there were still people of importance who called themselves Roman Emperor in all the varied tongues of the Mediterranean world, and cloaked themselves in the antique prestige granted by that title. Of course thirteen centuries after the establishment of the Principate, those Emperors would have been unrecognizable. The Emperor in Africa was a decadent puppet of Mauri tribesmen. His rival in Nicomedia had no power outside of the palace. The swollen city on the sea of Marmara proved impossible to defend without the power of an Empire behind it, a fact which was often taken advantage of by his new Pakthani overlords in Syria.
But the legacy of Rome continued. Modern European faith, culture, and law had their beginnings with Hellenism, and it was first Rome and later the peoples of Germania who propagated that culture across the world. Even the notion of Democracy and elections can be traced to a mixture of Hellenic Republican notions and the Germanic understanding of Kingship. The first Parliaments sought to imitate Rome and Greece, their illustrious forefathers to which they owed so much. Up until the past two centuries, Koine (in various modified forms) was the language of science, philosophy, and religion.
The story of Rome is one of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness mirrored by our modern era of communication and the “global oikoumene.” Where now the whole world is connected by elektronic optics, and ideas disseminate themselves instantaneously, in Roman times the transformation of culture required physical legwork, legwork which only became possible with the security of Roman peace. For all their splendor, Alexandros’ successors were very much provincial – Makedonians lording over “barbarians.” What Rome did most effectively is slowly transform and hegemonize the varied identities of the ancient world into a cohesive singular whole. In the Roman era, travel was safe and affordable. Saka from the steppes settled in Britain. Mauri merchants plied their wares on the Crimea. Gaul was settled by Greeks and Latins. Ideas and cultures spread and became unified under a combination of civic nationalism and religious syncretism. Along the global trade routes which crossed through the Persian Gulf and Egypt, Neoplatonism and Anagogism met the varied philosophies of the Indian subcontinent, to say nothing for the exchange of medical, mathematic, and scientific knowledge.
The urban middle class of the Roman world came to define the new society, rather than the isolated provincial aristocracy or the heterogeneous rural peoples so prevalent across the Empire. Their language, their culture, their dreams and aspirations became the bedrock of the new eastern order, even long after the decline of the Roman Empire. And as trade grew once more and the disruptions of the 5th and 6th centuries came to a close, the west went through a period called the Renascere, the great rebirth of urban culture. While this culture might have been vulgar by the standards of the old and now almost entirely vanished Latin aristocracy, it preserved and expanded upon what came before. Through the mercantile medium of Koine and the multifaceted by not incompatible religious traditions of the Mediterranean, knowledge and learning blossomed once more.
The inevitable backslides of progress, such as the eleventh century dark ages of plague and superstition, were ultimately brief. The destruction of great libraries, while tragic, was not fatal because in the Roman era classical and post-classical learning had begun to be disseminated on a large scale. Such was the legacy of Hellenism. The decline of traditional paganism and the rise of “new paganism” was the start of a fundamental transformation in the Roman world. The dawn of universal religion in the west heralded totalizing changes which altered society forever. In some senses, those changes never wholly abated.
The long story of human history, since the first words scribbled in clay, has been one of communication and interconnectedness. The invention of agriculture allowed the establishment of larger and larger communities. Larger communities were able to specialize labor to a greater extent, and were more capable of innovation due to a larger pool of ideas and increased ease in facilitating and adopting those innovations. This trend has continued until today, but it could be argued that it only began in earnest with the dawn of the Roman era, when new paganism was born.
[Thus ends "To Ourselves, To New Paganism." Hope everyone enjoyed the ride. For those who enjoyed my writing and happened to see this short little timeline first, please check out "Rise of the White Huns" in my signature.
Also, I have a nascent blog where I post my creative writing. Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.]
Bravo! A most excellent epilogue.
So, since there is no Christianity, is this "After the founding of the Empire?" From what you say later, it doesn't seem to be AUC.
Pakthani - word origin?
So Greek rather than Latin: I guess the eastern Empire ended up overshadowing the western one as an intellectual source without a Catholic Church preserving Latin.
Very much so.
Bruce
So, with no Christianity, the world has remained sexier?
So, since there is no Christianity, is this "After the founding of the Empire?" From what you say later, it doesn't seem to be AUC.
Pakthani - word origin?
So Greek rather than Latin: I guess the eastern Empire ended up overshadowing the western one as an intellectual source without a Catholic Church preserving Latin.
Very much so.
Bruce
Thank you!
So, with no Christianity, the world has remained sexier?
Or perhaps the entire broad sweeping statements of the epilogue should be taken with a grain of salt. After all it's hard to even hint accurately at world developments in 500 words or so.
Ritual cults with an emphasis on sexuality are a good bit more prevalent than in our world. In general, of course, this is a world where lines between religions are substantially blurred - and indeed most historians of this world would probably not draw strict lines between faiths but rather try to identify distinct traditions and their products. I tend to assume that those countries which are part of the developed world in this timeline have also seen a sort of sexual revolution happen with the advent of alt-modern contraceptive technology. So probably about equally sexy?
I've been applying a translation convention to the dates in this timeline, this is no exception. However, After the Founding of the Empire works just as well, I suppose. Without a single monolithic church, timekeeping in this universe is much more fragmented and there exist many more calendars. Presumably several of the great powers have sought to address this issue. One particularly revolutionary power invented some sort of alt-metric time, maybe.
Pakthanoi are what the Greeks of this timeline have ended up calling the Afghans that eventually rose to prominence and installed satraps as far east as Syria well beyond the time-frame of this story. Envision if you will a sort of Baktrian Alexandros or Muhammad whose conquests reshaped the political terrain of the near east and Indus valley for a good long while.
Yep. Latin in all of its various vulgar dialects became the languages of the west, but didn't last as a prestige language. I can see in this timeline some people who aren't particularly versed in their history crowing about how modern Koine is the language of the Romans and thus the best language. Undoubtedly they'd be doing this mostly on the alt-internet, which in this timeline is used primarily for pornographic films, funny ostrich videos, and angry debates between extreme political factions.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Thank you! This little timeline will always have a special place in my heart, especially when I get bored and start considering the Hellenic philosophers again and again. Maybe one day I'll write a bit more in it.
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