DBWI: Horse lords don't take over the Roman Empire

"Caligua may have been insane in many ways, but this happens to be the most sane thing he or indeed any Emperor has done"
-Aeneas on the promotion of Incitatus to the heir to the Roman Empire - 60AD"

At the time it must have seemed insane. If you took this out of context it sounds quite absurd. It seems to have worked out in the end through. With Incitatus on the throne the Emperor could no longer make any decisions (spoiler alert: horses can't talk or write... yet :eek:). After some shenanigans this ultimately resulted in the Senate of Rome regaining power and leading a technically republican Rome into a new golden age.

The legacy of the horse lords even persist in democratic governments across the world today. Seems to have become a tradition to have a defeated king abdicate to a horse to transition a nation into a technical republic. Talk about taking emulating Rome to an extreme. Today royal marriages are just marriages between horses. Raised an interesting situation when the insane King of France tried to run in the royal races and got trampled.

What would have happened if the horse lords had not come to power?
 
Let's not get this thread locked like the others guys, no insulting latin pagan traditions or religious reverence for horses. Whatever your personal opinions are on the Roman cults don't be rude to other posters.
 
I think tbh it was overall a bad thing.

I'm no Monarchist, but the "equine line" of kings made a lot of Roman politics overly complicated in a way that the imperial period just wasn't. Sure the Republic had back its senate, but it also had to hold ceremonies, deal with a degree of international embarrassment (the joke of being unable to tell an Italian woman from a horse being still in play to this day) and of course the various crackpot dictators that arose out of those "horse divining" cults. Let's not forget Augustine the tyrant, and the effective theocracy that Rome became under the Ecclesiarchy.
 
Without the chaos of the event I can't imagine the sudden emergence of the Germanic tribes who proceeded to run roughshod over the empire in many places and taking de facto control over large swaths of the empire, the empire never did push the Germans back across the rhine even after the Senate got it's feet under it but without the decline of the empire while it got it's act together I can't imagine Germanic tribes becoming such a prominent force in the world.
 

Deleted member 97083

Innovative as it may have been, Emperor Caligula's horsing around and tendency to buck the trend had night-marish consequences for Rome in the long term. The human viceroys of the so-called "horse lords" and their unbridled control over Roman politics saddled the Empire with a string of new problems, problems to which the Senate was behooved to respond, distracting them in a time when usurpers were chomping at the bit to unseat the imperial throne. In following years the empire became quite un-stable, its provincial governors began jockeying for power. The limites were weakened, the Rhine crossed. Soon afterward the Empire was unable to prevent the Germanic tribes from running roughshod over the northern provinces. As far as Romanitas was concerned, those early Germanic kings like Odothoric had no horse in the race, which led to the decay of imperial institutions and the assassinations at the Hippodrome.
 
Innovative as it may have been, Emperor Caligula's horsing around and tendency to buck the trend had night-marish consequences for Rome in the long term. The human viceroys of the so-called "horse lords" and their unbridled control over Roman politics saddled the Empire with a string of new problems, problems to which the Senate was behooved to respond, distracting them in a time when usurpers were chomping at the bit to unseat the imperial throne. In following years the empire became quite un-stable, its provincial governors began jockeying for power. The limites were weakened, the Rhine crossed. Soon afterward the Empire was unable to prevent the Germanic tribes from running roughshod over the northern provinces. As far as Romanitas was concerned, those early Germanic kings like Odothoric had no horse in the race, which led to the decay of imperial institutions and the assassinations at the Hippodrome.
Id be careful with those puns "equine" Europe takes this stuff pretty seriously, we all remember what happened between Hispania and the Berbers after the Hispanic "king" was "assassinated"
 
Top