DBWI: Rome Wank

So those with even a basic familiarity with Ancient Phoenecian History will have heard of this Italian city -- about 23 centuries ago, they managed to unite most of the peninsula, and subsequently even managed to defeat Carthage in a massive war (or fight them to a draw, depending on who you ask), and spread their power over several islands in Oursea [the Mediterranean].

Of course, Hannibal the Great put a stop to that, but the capability and sheer persistence of the Latins made them a very worthy adversary of even one of the greatest military commanders of the era. So much so that, as members of this board well know, people have imagined for centuries how Rome might have won the war.

So let's say they do -- just how powerful might this "Roman a Empire", if you will, have gotten? And how would history be changed?

OOC: To be clear -- PoD is Metaurus, 207 BCE
 
I'm not sure how this is possible the Latin's were barely holding down revolt in their own Italic subjects as it was.

Also they ran out of manpower and the great Lord Hannibal managed to capture the city after a six year siege.

They were poor seafarers and that would have hindered any empire building in OurSea, also they didn't understand the value of trade. Their brutishly simplistic "attack" "attack" "attack" didn't work in an era where trade, vassal relationships, and gold meant more than how many men you could send with swords.
 
Their brutishly simplistic "attack" "attack" "attack" didn't work in an era where trade, vassal relationships, and gold meant more than how many men you could send with swords.
It's really interesting, when you actually dig into the histories, you see that Roman understanding of tactics was... well, I guess "uneven" would be the best word for it. Sometimes you had smart commanders like one Fabius Maximus, who would avoid direct confrontation with Hannibal's army, tying the invading army down and forcing them to whittle down their supplies; at other times, you get insanity like the Battle of Cannae, where Rome lost something like a fifth of its male fighting age population in a single battle (accounts differ).

More than one historian has said that this was a war where both sides were forced out of their comfort zones -- Carthage, a mercantile city used to utilizing mercenary forces, was now diving headfirst into use of "personal" armies under command of the Barcas; Rome, a super martial society that prized battlefield glory, at times managed to strategically avoid battle for long periods. Of course, in the end, it was the Carthaginians who managed to adapt more consistently and more successfully, and so they won the war (or so the narrative goes).
 
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Easy. The POD is the Battle of Metaurus. First, you have to remember, the battle of Metaurus was an accident from the Carthaginian perspective. Hannibal's brother was careless, getting his messenger caught, thus revealing his plans to the Romans. The Roman commander of the army facing Hannibal decided to dash away with most of his army. The POD here is obviously that Hannibal doesn't realize this in time to crush the skeleton force the Romans left behind, before sandwiching the Romans between his army and his brother's and annihilating them. If Hannibal doesn't discover this, his brother gets crushed, and then it's pretty much game over for Hannibal. I don't see how he can survive much longer-he was relying on his brother's army for desperately needed reinforcements, and now that army is crushed. I think the Romans defeat him within another year or two, honestly. Maybe they invade Africa instead. Either way, the Carthaginians are toast, since the war in Spain was nearly a lost cause at this point as well.


After that, Rome is the undisputed master of the western oursea. That's a pretty big Rome wank right there. I'm not sure how much further you could have them expand. It's only a few years after this that the Seleucids take Egypt and then Macedonia, so they seem too strong for Rome to really be able to successfully take on IMO. On the other hand, they could expand into Celtica and Spain. So you'll have two great empires with the Adriatic Sea being the dividing line.
 
@SlyDessertFox I thought of that PoD too when reading up on this; that said, I suppose I should note that some classical historians were skeptical of claims that Hannibal was in such desperate straights when his brother's reinforcements arrived; then again, I would also like to note that plenty of other historians take issue with these revisionists. I'd say the latter camp is pretty clearly in the right here -- the tactics recorded to have been used by Fabius Maximus and other Romans (when they weren't charging full speed) have been shown in plenty of other conflicts to be an effective counter-measure to an otherwise superior invading army, so I can't see why they wouldn't pose just as much of a threat to Hannibal's army as well.

Would this "Roman Empire" manage to outlast the Seleucids?
 
Maybe if Hanno the Perfidious and his peace faction had actually taken over the senate from the Patriots, they would have gotten skittish after the loss of Syracuse and sued for peace; having the political support for his Italian strategy, to the point of sacrificing Sardinia, Spain, and Sicily to win the war in Italy, was invaluable for Hannibal the Great.

@SlyDessertFox I thought of that PoD too when reading up on this; that said, I suppose I should note that some classical historians were skeptical of claims that Hannibal was in such desperate straights when his brother's reinforcements arrived; then again, I would also like to note that plenty of other historians take issue with these revisionists. I'd say the latter camp is pretty clearly in the right here -- the tactics recorded to have been used by Fabius Maximus and other Romans (when they weren't charging full speed) have been shown in plenty of other conflicts to be an effective counter-measure to an otherwise superior invading army, so I can't see why they wouldn't pose just as much of a threat to Hannibal's army as well.

Would this "Roman Empire" manage to outlast the Seleucids?
Even if his army wasn't in dire straits, Hadsdrubal's reinforcements were instrumental in bringing an end to the war. Hannibal needed to have armies on both sides of the Apennines to drive on Rome, lest a Roman army in Apulia threaten his base in Campania. Once he had a secure base, he could actually march into Latinum, take the harbor of Ostia, and win the freedom of Italy after the Siege of Rome.
 
Considering Rome had a reputation for being far, far less mercantile than Carthage (see @Sheliak Lawyer comment above), how might having them prevail a second time affect the further rise of trade and exploration in antiquity?

We can also talk about how a this affects the eventual dawn of "globalization" (though I realize the debate of what exactly that is defined and when it began is a topic of contention, which could potentially get us off topic).

OOC: I should note that OTL records show Phoenecians were sailing down the West African coast centuries before our PoD; as to what this means for future centuries TTL, develop that how you will.
 
I think the POD is completely plausible. The Romans won the earlier war after all and could well have beaten Carthage.

And they were far from being tactically unsophisticated. In fact Carthage more or less later wound up copying the Roman legion as their main tactical formation.

I'm surprised more historians haven't really got into the effects of a Roman dominated OurSea instead of the IOTL domination by Carthage.

And the domination from a city in the center of Oursea would not have changed. The Greek monarchies in the East would not have been able to resist a victorious Rome any better than they resisted Carthage, and you would have had the same conquests of the Celtic dominated areas in the north.

Both cities were republics presiding over alliances or confederacies with smaller city states, and dominated by aristocrats, though the Roman ones were landholders instead of merchants. The issue with Carthage of victorious generals dominating the republic and replacing it with something more like a monarchy would have happened with Rome as well. And Rome would have adopted a good deal of Hellenic culture, against some resistance from traditionalists; Rome started out as culturally closer to Greece anyway.

But Carthage was a Semitic city with cultural ties to the Levant. The Roman language was closely related to Celtic and culturally they seem to have been mainly Etruscan. This leads to big differences obviously in the history of language, which is fascinating in and of itself. You would have had Latin law be the basis for most of the world's law codes instead of Phoenician law. I suspect classical architecture would have looked more, well, Greek.

And there is a big divergence with religion. Would the followers of Jesus gotten much of a hearing in Rome? I don't see a Roman governor of Judea being able to understand the situation as well and here you could have a big butterflied POD.
 
The followers of Jesus came from from an Israelite sect. They had much closer ties with the Phoenicians and their ancestors the Canaanites.

Roman religion came from a different environment and would not have been so tolerant of eastern sects.

However to our shame the Carthaginian empire did engage in some persecutions against the Christ followers until Lord Jarabaal granted universal tolerance.
 
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Wow, talk about a dystopia. The Latins were mean SOBs, especially compared to the egalitarian multicultural empire that Carthage became. They adopted those Etruscan blood rites pretty enthusiastically, if nothing else. Contemporary chroniclers talk that up a lot. I can't imagine what them ruling the known world would be like, with their "make the world us" model of conquest. Some have interpreted this as allowing other peoples full franchise in their burgeoning hegemony through Latinization, but I really don't see that extending beyond their peninsula to more alien cultures. They didn't have a very touchy-feely model. They were into hard power as opposed to Carthage's soft power.

Not to mention that from what I've seen of their language it's... well, guttural. The many languages derived from Phoenecian are as a rule very beautiful, but if we had Latin-derived languages everywhere instead then most of Eurafrica is walking around sounding like they've got bronchitis or something.
 
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And the domination from a city in the center of Oursea would not have changed. The Greek monarchies in the East would not have been able to resist a victorious Rome any better than they resisted Carthage...
Well yeah, the Seleucids we're going to collapse regardless of who was top dog in the western Oursea, under their own stress if nothing else; the subsequent Macedonian re-domination of the Hellenic peninsula would still have in turn led to rebellion of the city states (though I do wonder if Rome would have supported these rebellions, or whether they take advantage of Macedonian weakness some other way); and any Anatolian kingdom who tried to control access to the Black Sea was going to inevitably make an enemy out of some other trading power. And of course, Egypt would eventually overthrow the Ptolemies for another dynasty, but that should really go without saying; I mean, no royal dynasty lasts forever, as Carthage herself can attest.
and you would have had the same conquests of the Celtic dominated areas in the north.
Now this, I'm not so sure of; I mean yeah, the Celts were ridiculously powerful once they united into a confederacy and then an empires, that was always going to happen; but if Rome had managed to beat Carthage again, you don't think they could have held off Celtica's advance in northern Italy? I mean, I realize Phonecian Spain lost a lot of territory to them OTL, but I'd think a victorious Rime would care more about securing their own peninsula?

OOC: So yeah, not only does @Galba Otho Vitelius contradict the one thing we could all agree on last time we discussed this -- that no power builds the same empire that Rome built OTL -- but came pretty close to contradicting IC things said by @SlyDessertFox in the thread already. So I've tried to walk it back as much as I can here.

As to mentions thus far of the Phonecian cultural legacy... not sure as yet. And I'm not even going to get into how Christianity could even exist TTL, other than just treat it as a Jewish sect TTL.
 
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Thanks to our sea navigating abilities we reached the far ends of the north and the south.

We reached the lands across the western sea and the islands east of India. The Romans didn't possess our imagination much less our capacity for sea travel.
 
Thanks to our sea navigating abilities we reached the far ends of the north and the south. We reached the lands across the western sea and the islands east of India. The Romans didn't possess our imagination much less our capacity for sea travel.
Well TBF, most of that was due to the rivalry with Egypt -- when the latter built those ports, you started to see their trading vessels pouring into the Sea of Bharat, bringing back exotic trading goods which peppered the markets of Oursea. Of course, Carthage couldn't have a rival getting this rich of trading goods; the rest, of course, is history. Point being, even a less mercantile power in western Oursea like Rome will likely want to find someway of getting in on Egypt's eastern trade.
 
Thanks to our sea navigating abilities we reached the far ends of the north and the south.
We reached the lands across the western sea and the islands east of India. The Romans didn't possess our imagination much less our capacity for sea travel.
Well TBF, most of that was due to the rivalry with Egypt<snip>
The rivalry with Egypt didn't really affect the western explorations, though. The Romans were very land-focused, as someone else said up-thread, so I don't see them exploring down the coast from the Heraklion Rock* or going out into the Western Ocean to find the Kliebian Islands, which were an important stepping stone across to the west.

* I wonder if they'd have kept this name - it was derived from Greek, so maybe?

OOC: Heraklion Rock = Gibraltar, Kliebian Islands = Canary Islands (based on the Maltese for 'dogs', as I don't know what the Carthaginian/Phoenician would be :p )
 
I can't imagine the Romans reaching the western continents and if they did I can't imagine what barbarism they would have inflicted on the native peoples.

We had a common heritage with them in fact the kingdoms of the mid isthmus in between we shared an official mass offering. They offered us jade, spotted leopards, slaves, and beautiful birds. We offered them bronze, wheel working, and so on.
 
@FriendlyGhost I read once that Phonecians ships evolved pretty substantially in the century or so leading up to them crossing the oceans, and that this was due to both an arms race with Egypt and aggressively looking for alternative foreign markets. But I may be wrong here.
We had a common heritage with them in fact the kingdoms of the mid isthmus in between we shared an official mass offering. They offered us jade, spotted leopards, slaves, and beautiful birds. We offered them bronze, wheel working, and so on.
You know, I never did get why the leopards and parrots get such attention when talking about the early oceanic trade; I mean, lions and such had that niche filled already, didn't they? Weren't crops (like cocoa, etc) the real draw for traders anyway?
 
@FriendlyGhost I read once that Phonecians ships evolved pretty substantially in the century or so leading up to them crossing the oceans, and that this was due to both an arms race with Egypt and aggressively looking for alternative foreign markets. But I may be wrong here.

You know, I never did get why the leopards and parrots get such attention when talking about the early oceanic trade; I mean, lions and such had that niche filled already, didn't they? Weren't crops (like cocoa, etc) the real draw for traders anyway?
Yes but the animals were an exotic bonus.
 
And they were far from being tactically unsophisticated. In fact Carthage more or less later wound up copying the Roman legion as their main tactical formation.
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This is because both the Carthaginian and Roman infantry were modelled off the Scutarii of Iberia in tactics. People severely underestimate barbarian contributions to the Carthaginian military.

OOC: This is actually OTL. The romans copied more than just their swords from Iberia, they also copied the use of heavy javelins to disrupt the enemy before the charge and the relatively loose formation compared to phalanx infantry.
 
I read once that Phonecians ships evolved pretty substantially in the century or so leading up to them crossing the oceans, and that this was due to both an arms race with Egypt and aggressively looking for alternative foreign markets. But I may be wrong here.
I had a quick look at some net-sites dealing with the development of ship-building and it seems you're right. The Egyptian domination of the easier routes to the east in those couple of centuries (both the sea route and the land route, because of their expansion to the to the north-east then*) forced the western merchants to look for another route. Since the route down the western edge of Afreka was already known, making the ships bigger and more sea-worthy to cover longer distances between ports was a natural development. Yes, it was a freak storm which led to the first landing on the western landmass, but it was inevitable that someone would get there sooner or later.

* and we're still dealing now with the problems that caused, imho :mad:
 
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