Sorry for leaving this timeline dead and gone.
I have no plans to return to it so I thought I'd leave some of my half-remembered notes on how things were to progress from there:
Rome:
- Very dramatically, the successor to Agrippa as the Prefect of Rome was to be hellbent on conquering all of Germania. This would provoke a reaction from the Germanics, fearing the Romans, to form a rather massive federation. This would ultimately fail and the Romans take over all of Germania as well as some of modern-day Poland, which they end up naming Agraria, in reference to their exceedingly large and successful farms, with Roman Veterans-turned farmers dominating the region. In the heart of Germania, the Prefect creates a capital for himself.
- The Curator of Rome is an office that drifts into less and less relevancy with each oncoming generation. The Prefect, based in Germania, is the true master of Rome in a lot of ways, controlling the military and putting pressure on more and more military provinces being added to their domain. There is also a significant rise in Germanic members of the military, and campaigns begin to spread further east, into the Carpathian Basin and modern day Ukraine. This is around the time that Britannia is taken as well (much later than OTL)
- In the first century CE, which for Rome in TTL starts about 9 years early, the Curator of Rome is the most powerful office that is exclusively civilian. Curators, by tradition, are not allowed to campaign militarily, with few exceptions, and so the sole responsibility of the office is to govern Rome. This leads to an office far more focused on developing society in one way or the other. For examples beyond Octavius and his sucessors' eventual standardization of Roman Law and the Vigils growing into a police/firefighting force, there were some major inventions that begin to bring the world down a different path, including the invention of a train-like system that operates somewhere between a horse-drawn-carriage-on-rails and a train-canoe. This invention was the pet project of a Curator and was seen as an overall failure where it was initially implemented. Another important one is imported from China, where it was discovered sooner than IOTL: woodblock printing becomes a major invention that sweeps through Eurasia. Initially this is mostly used for law and trade (which is how it arrived after all), but also gets taken up by the military, philosophers, and as a way of spreading news quickly from town to town. One just simply hand-writes a single copy of a book or testimony and it can be mass produced on a scale less than a printing press but much higher than writing it all out again.
- A crisis breaks out not long after (some time in the early 100s CE, maybe around 120) where the Prefect of Rome dies on a campaign into the Baltics (more scouting and bringing tribes there under Roman influence than outright conquering the region) and one of his lieutenants, a man of partial Germanic birth, is the desired successor by the main army force (which has a lot of Germanics, as well as many Romans who had grown up, or at least lived in, Germania. This is throwing aside the well established tradition of the Curator picking the Prefect's successor upon the Prefect's death (which also works the other way). But it's very hard to declare the Commander-in-Chief of the military illegitimate, isn't it? The Curator does so anyway and attempts to use the Vigils as his own personal army ends in an internal coup where the Vigils imprison the Curator and bring him to the now-totally-legitimate Prefect, fearing what several real Roman legions plus Germanic mercenaries could do to them.
- The new Prefect abolishes the office of the Curator of Rome, establishing that a Curator shall be a governor-like office in each province, with each city in Italy having their own as well. The matters of their local Vigil are the primary concern of each Curator, along with generally running the province, funding their own projects, etc. This is to decentralize the power of potential rivals, as well as concentrate power into the Prefect. He is to appoint all Curators and the Master of Horse to the Prefect is his undisputed heir. This is the time where Rome enters a period of solid, absolute military dictatorship. Ironic that the first true military dictator of Rome is Germanic, but that doesn't remain consistent, as the next several after him are all generally of the upper class from very old Roman families and have significantly less of an interest in military matters, despite having achieved a high rank.
- During this time, somebody invents the steam ball, much like Heron's own work, and the use of steam, and power sources in general become intensely studied for a period (it's really more of a fad at that time), but then somebody else, decades later, builds something resembling an extremely rudimentary steam engine. This quickly gets adopted for the before-mentioned rails that had little other use. These steam propelled carriages are slower than horses, but they don't need food or rest. It's an extremely niche thing at first, but slowly gets adopted, finding particular use among the military for moving supplies and heavy cargo. The super rich find use for it too, for the purpose of seeming fancy while traveling.
- Notably, the trajectory of slavery continues the same way in Rome. Foreign conquest and debt slavery result in about half of Romans being slaves, with income inequality spiraling out of control.
- For the entirety of the 200s CE, Rome sort of continues like this. Their borders do not expand, the population is gradually growing, and new technologies are slowly becoming introduced as part of day to day life. Rome's dictatorship is mighty and its control over all aspects of the state is intense. Whatever sort of news press exists is managed by local governments, with controversial matters reading more like propaganda than anything else.
Around this point, I run out of notes. I wanted to put Rome on a trajectory where they rule everything from Iceland to the Urals, with Northern and Eastern Europa being taken over at an extremely slow rate. This comes about from pacifying tribes that get violent and from the need to claim more lands, not from overpopulation, but for the rich to own more property when they basically already have everything they need. Another factor is the need to give lands to veterans, but that's like priority #5 on the list. At the same time, Rome becomes a steam-powered society, with steam transportation and later factories becoming a bigger and bigger deal. First things factories make are cheap clothing and household items (glass dishes primarily), while transportation and building with cement remain way more popular.
China has a lot less notes, but basically it goes down a route that's similar but different. They get emperor after emperor that pushes for either Legalism or Confucianism to govern the country for a long while. They also go down a similar sort of series of technological advancements, but with factory-like production becoming more widespread faster than it is in Rome. The main use are for household items that are largely exported (Chinaware is the main thing shaped in factories). China is also more outward looking than it ever had been, with Korea, eastern Siberia, and parts of Central Asia being primary targets of expansion for the country.
Looking at a nation that has gotten extremely little love thus far, Persia benefits immensely from industrialization, building proto-trains that crisscross the entire nation. They have their own homegrown use for steam power, but its somewhat dwarfed by what they end up getting out of trade.
As the time moves on, through the 300s and 400s CE, it becomes a lot bigger and a lot smaller in certain ways. The domains of Rome, Persia, China, the eventual two empires of India (north and south) are large, the empires of Southeast Asia and modern Indonesia, as are their populations, and their governments are strong. Rome dominates all of Europa by 500 CE, China dominates essentially all of mainland East Asia (while not ruling Southeast Asia, it is firmly in their sphere of influence), and Persia rules the Middle East and the rest of Central Asia.
Other cool, interesting things:
- The empire that rules over Indonesia ends up colonizing Australia and New Zealand, bringing their multi-cultural imperial peoples to these countries and creating a mix of people. Inland and to the south, the Aboriginal people continue to exist and eventually end up with technologies that lead their population to bloom. A yet unspecified mix of cultural peoples that existed in eastern Australia would go on to settle New Zealand. There will end up being 3-5 well defined cultural groups in New Zealand, with the north and south islands both operating as basically separate countries.
- Madagascar ends up being settled by waves of mainland Africans and Persian merchants sent off course. They have a polytheistic religion with some obvious elements of Zoroastrianism and use the Persian written script, when they are encountered in the 1300s by Roman explorers.
This all continues to exist just fine up until about the 800s, where it all comes crashing down. Societal upheaval and unrest are all too common, these countries all end up collapsing into civil war at some point, and this is all compounded by a weakening of the state and invasions. Berber and Steppe invasions sweep Roman North Africa, and Roman Eastern Europa, as well as into China and Persia. This semi-collapse completely reshapes the world in a way comparable to what is sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, but has some more things in common with the modern collapse of empires into nation states (just not them collapsing into recognizable nation states). The Prefect in Rome, the Emperor in China, they all very obviously lose actual control of their nations when they hardly held it to begin with by that point. These societies chug on, but no longer as continent sized empires. This doesn't end the globalization or these empires though, it really just re-contextualizes it.
The Americas are discovered by these nations in the 900s, with the Romans having been searching for a new route to China that doesn't have to pass through India and Persia. The Romans have little interest in the Americas, a far away place that wasn't their intended destination, but some thousands of people from Rome end up migrating to the Americas for any multitude of reasons, just as they always had to other nations. China takes a much more consorted effort to actually take over land in Western North America.
These globalizing moves and an entirely new world emerges. One with different philosophies, different sorts of governments, different technologies, and all sorts of other assorted things with varying amounts of actual realism. It does make an extremely interesting story and I really wish I had been able to write it. It's one of my major regrets on this site that I never did.
If anybody wants any more info lmk.
