Hadrian's Consolidation - reboot
- Thread starter Hecatee
- Start date
Not sure that's a great idea from a security standpoint. The Roman state wants to keep a monopoly of long distance communications otherwise coordinated uprisings is very possible.
On other sode it will give state opportunity to read private citizens mail.
Hecatee
Donor
I know I've not published last week nor this week, for I'm afraid my trip to Noricum took more of my time than I expected and work had piled in Brussels during my absence, but on the other hand their will be a full holliday season publishing sprint with a post a day from next monday to the new year, for your what I hope will be your enjoyement.
I'm not sure it is seen as a factor, their were a lot of private correspondance going on even without an official post, but with TTL higher number of officials working in the various provinces and the overall greater mobility of the elites I can see a public postal service appear (public as in open to all instead of a state only system). Caravanserai I see more as an eastern invention that could spread all over the empire given the larger needs for trade infrastructure in the east...
I'm not sure it is seen as a factor, their were a lot of private correspondance going on even without an official post, but with TTL higher number of officials working in the various provinces and the overall greater mobility of the elites I can see a public postal service appear (public as in open to all instead of a state only system). Caravanserai I see more as an eastern invention that could spread all over the empire given the larger needs for trade infrastructure in the east...
What I meant was how long distance rapid communication is always a bane for empires. Since the Romans have semaphore they should get a heads up on coordinated uprisings that would be made easier if communication time was cut allowing for uprisings in say Egypt, Germania, Mesopotamia to happen all at once. I suggest the semaphore telegraph be kept absolutely out of public access.
Probably not any time soon, the army was already eating a VERY large portion of the budget and the empire economy would still be fragile for, at least, a few decades
Hecatee
Donor
No, in this version there is no new legion formed, but the legion has evolved as have the auxiliary units, with larger number of men in each and a standardisation of the auxiliary cohors toward the full cohors equitata, for the details I refer you to this post. Add to that the numerous new independent centuries of local security forces in all the provinces, in charge of police, road patroling and brigand hunting inside the empire, who make an effective reserve as their officers are mainly retired "NCO" and centurions
Hecatee
Donor
They are currently not seen as such, but could become one in case of a barbarian raid deep in the empire although the areas first affected would be those with the least population and thus the least police force. It could also be of some effectiveness in case an early viking like situation arrose.
Well, here we go for the season's marathon, one new chapter a day until the new year !
Bibliotheca, Pergamon, September 177
Hecatee
Donor
Bibliotheca, Pergamon, September 177
The noise made by the builders of the new extension of the library was constant, as was the irritation this caused to the teacher. Yet he knew it was suffering for the better as the new building the stonemasons were working on would double the book storage and add eight new rooms to the complex along with a new temple to Mnemosyne. The donation of the imperial doctor Gallienus had been doubled by the local council so that plans for a monumental addition to the sanctuary of Athena had been devised and were now being enacted.
The eastern stoa had been torn down and replaced by four rooms on both sides of a wide staircase leading to two terraces, one on which four other teaching and study rooms opened and a top terrace on which the new small temple had been erected.
The extension was necessary. More and more students were sent to the library by their parents or, in some cases, by their patronus. Often freedmen but in some time bright children from smaller towns, this new type of students got an education financed by their former owner or by a town’s patronus, often a wealthy member of the equestrian order or a senator.
This new kind of students had been source of new problems at first, as they needed a place to stay : the southern stoa of the sanctuary had thus been transformed, a new floor being added with a number of sleeping rooms, a latrine and a kitchen able to feed the twenty resident students. At night those had to stay in the sanctuary, but this also gave them more access to the books when compared to the other students who stayed in the city.
The cursus taught was on mathematics, theoretical engineering and natural philosophy, with the library’s traditional focus on identifying the hidden aspect of things whereas the Alexandrian library was looking for the more immediately apparent and practical. Thus there were no workshops in the Pergamon library…
Further in the city, in the Asclepios sanctuary, similar building work was taking place to accommodate the demand for new medical trainees, with a number of city council sending bright youths to study at the famous sanctuary and medical school. Here too it was initially money given by the imperial medicus that had given the impetus for the transformation, and local money that helped expand the scale of the work.
The teacher was not thinking about all this. He was trying to introduce the concept of the nihil as used in mathematics to his students, and the idea of marking nothingness seemed to be very strange to most of them, to the point they could not get the point of it. Yet they would need it to work with base 8, 10 and 12 for arithmetic and geometry... Well, that was what he was there to teach them…
The noise made by the builders of the new extension of the library was constant, as was the irritation this caused to the teacher. Yet he knew it was suffering for the better as the new building the stonemasons were working on would double the book storage and add eight new rooms to the complex along with a new temple to Mnemosyne. The donation of the imperial doctor Gallienus had been doubled by the local council so that plans for a monumental addition to the sanctuary of Athena had been devised and were now being enacted.
The eastern stoa had been torn down and replaced by four rooms on both sides of a wide staircase leading to two terraces, one on which four other teaching and study rooms opened and a top terrace on which the new small temple had been erected.
The extension was necessary. More and more students were sent to the library by their parents or, in some cases, by their patronus. Often freedmen but in some time bright children from smaller towns, this new type of students got an education financed by their former owner or by a town’s patronus, often a wealthy member of the equestrian order or a senator.
This new kind of students had been source of new problems at first, as they needed a place to stay : the southern stoa of the sanctuary had thus been transformed, a new floor being added with a number of sleeping rooms, a latrine and a kitchen able to feed the twenty resident students. At night those had to stay in the sanctuary, but this also gave them more access to the books when compared to the other students who stayed in the city.
The cursus taught was on mathematics, theoretical engineering and natural philosophy, with the library’s traditional focus on identifying the hidden aspect of things whereas the Alexandrian library was looking for the more immediately apparent and practical. Thus there were no workshops in the Pergamon library…
Further in the city, in the Asclepios sanctuary, similar building work was taking place to accommodate the demand for new medical trainees, with a number of city council sending bright youths to study at the famous sanctuary and medical school. Here too it was initially money given by the imperial medicus that had given the impetus for the transformation, and local money that helped expand the scale of the work.
The teacher was not thinking about all this. He was trying to introduce the concept of the nihil as used in mathematics to his students, and the idea of marking nothingness seemed to be very strange to most of them, to the point they could not get the point of it. Yet they would need it to work with base 8, 10 and 12 for arithmetic and geometry... Well, that was what he was there to teach them…
Tabularium, Rome, november 177
Hecatee
Donor
Tabularium, Rome, november 177
Five years ago Titus Manlius Caledonius was a centurion on duty on the Rhenus border, where he used his free time playing with large tablets to see if numbers could help him better manage his unit. Now he was a member of the equestrian order, and a centenarii in the imperial treasury administration, in charge of fraud control. Working from historical data, he’d built tables of provincial revenues that allowed the administration to detect variations in incomes and predict future revenues by looking at the parameters that influenced it.
He had been promoted to the position three years before and he’d immediately started to ask for historical information on grain production, tax incomes and similar topics, making great tables of information for each province for each year of the past century. Some of the information was available from the regular census data, other he’d had to ask to local administrations, which had taken their own sweet time to answer until an order from the Emperor himself had made sure to shorten any delay. He’d then made great tables summarizing the information for each province, and then put together large summaries for the empire. This had taken two years before he could show true results…
Working with great mathematicians working at the Academia and at Trajan’s library in the forum Trajanus, he’d begun to identify patterns, and from there irregularities, a number of them turning out on further examination to be frauds. Some were known, other not : soon the first few trials were started in court where his information proved accurate and large sums of ill gotten gains retrieved for the state.
Now Manlius Caledonius was in his office talking with a machinatorum, a bronze device sitting on the table between them : “So you tell me this tabullator is able to do common mathematical operations and display the result, whether this operation is an addition, a soustraction, a multiplication or a division ?” asked the official to the engineer.
“Yes it is. It is actually the second generation of calculating machine. At first I used simple disks but it proved to be unsatisfactory for multiplications and divisions. But a colleague of mine had a brilliant idea, making cylinders with teeth of variable height and this led me to build the contraption you now see.”
“I must say it is most unusual to look at, although not unpleasant to see.”
“Well I’ve seen machines both in Alexandria and in some collections here in Rome, including the Emperor’s, that gave me a lot of ideas. There is also research coming from Alexandria that inspired me, including a mechanical horologium that a colleague invented a year ago and which has been described to me in great details by a friend that was coming back from an assignment in Egypt. We still meet a lot of issues with gears and cogs but when one decides to look into them one never knows what he’ll be able to achieve…”
“Well we shall see if it is as interesting and useful as we expect it to be. As you can see I’ve had a table of information brought, from which a number of calculations can be made. Hirtius here is one of my best employee, he has not worked on the calculations our service made from this table so he’ll start from the same point you do although I do have all the result double checked and copied on this papyrus. We’ll see if your machine is faster and provides correct answers !”
“I’m glad for the challenge !”
--
Three hours later Hirtius put his pen down on the table, his calculations finished. The machinatorum had already turned in his results quite some time before, allowing Manlius Caledonius to check them against the information he’d been provided with. He took a few minutes to check the results of his clerk and smiled before turning toward the two men :
“Well it seems the Academia has once more delivered a miracle ! Prefect Prigonus will certainly be most happy that his institution has once more delivered. Not only did the result come very fast but it was also correct. You Hirtius must not be disappointed though for your calculations were correct and none in the departement could have done them better. We’ll need to do some more tests on the machine to ensure it is indeed as good as we expect it to be, but I think we’ll soon order a number of them. In fact every provincial or local administration should have at least one of those machines !”
-----
The machine discussed is a Leibnitz type of calculator, itself a late 17th century improved version of the Pascaline invented earlier that century by French philosopher Blaise Pascal
Five years ago Titus Manlius Caledonius was a centurion on duty on the Rhenus border, where he used his free time playing with large tablets to see if numbers could help him better manage his unit. Now he was a member of the equestrian order, and a centenarii in the imperial treasury administration, in charge of fraud control. Working from historical data, he’d built tables of provincial revenues that allowed the administration to detect variations in incomes and predict future revenues by looking at the parameters that influenced it.
He had been promoted to the position three years before and he’d immediately started to ask for historical information on grain production, tax incomes and similar topics, making great tables of information for each province for each year of the past century. Some of the information was available from the regular census data, other he’d had to ask to local administrations, which had taken their own sweet time to answer until an order from the Emperor himself had made sure to shorten any delay. He’d then made great tables summarizing the information for each province, and then put together large summaries for the empire. This had taken two years before he could show true results…
Working with great mathematicians working at the Academia and at Trajan’s library in the forum Trajanus, he’d begun to identify patterns, and from there irregularities, a number of them turning out on further examination to be frauds. Some were known, other not : soon the first few trials were started in court where his information proved accurate and large sums of ill gotten gains retrieved for the state.
Now Manlius Caledonius was in his office talking with a machinatorum, a bronze device sitting on the table between them : “So you tell me this tabullator is able to do common mathematical operations and display the result, whether this operation is an addition, a soustraction, a multiplication or a division ?” asked the official to the engineer.
“Yes it is. It is actually the second generation of calculating machine. At first I used simple disks but it proved to be unsatisfactory for multiplications and divisions. But a colleague of mine had a brilliant idea, making cylinders with teeth of variable height and this led me to build the contraption you now see.”
“I must say it is most unusual to look at, although not unpleasant to see.”
“Well I’ve seen machines both in Alexandria and in some collections here in Rome, including the Emperor’s, that gave me a lot of ideas. There is also research coming from Alexandria that inspired me, including a mechanical horologium that a colleague invented a year ago and which has been described to me in great details by a friend that was coming back from an assignment in Egypt. We still meet a lot of issues with gears and cogs but when one decides to look into them one never knows what he’ll be able to achieve…”
“Well we shall see if it is as interesting and useful as we expect it to be. As you can see I’ve had a table of information brought, from which a number of calculations can be made. Hirtius here is one of my best employee, he has not worked on the calculations our service made from this table so he’ll start from the same point you do although I do have all the result double checked and copied on this papyrus. We’ll see if your machine is faster and provides correct answers !”
“I’m glad for the challenge !”
--
Three hours later Hirtius put his pen down on the table, his calculations finished. The machinatorum had already turned in his results quite some time before, allowing Manlius Caledonius to check them against the information he’d been provided with. He took a few minutes to check the results of his clerk and smiled before turning toward the two men :
“Well it seems the Academia has once more delivered a miracle ! Prefect Prigonus will certainly be most happy that his institution has once more delivered. Not only did the result come very fast but it was also correct. You Hirtius must not be disappointed though for your calculations were correct and none in the departement could have done them better. We’ll need to do some more tests on the machine to ensure it is indeed as good as we expect it to be, but I think we’ll soon order a number of them. In fact every provincial or local administration should have at least one of those machines !”
-----
The machine discussed is a Leibnitz type of calculator, itself a late 17th century improved version of the Pascaline invented earlier that century by French philosopher Blaise Pascal
I think this is supposed to be subtraction. Aside from that an awesome update.
