Roman Kutna Hora

Rome had at least one large fort in what is now the southern Czech Republic by 170AD. Suppose Rome discovers the Kutna Hora mine, a very rich silver lose found about 1000 years later. Does Commodus use this as pretext to annex Macromannia and push past Pannonia to potentially settle the OTL Czech Republic and might this reinforce Roman efforts in Germania around the same time?
 
They find the ore there, they're probably going to do some more exploring, find the whole Erzegebirge....
At that point, they're committed to holding Bohemia and parts of OTL Germany. Which is going to be a pain if they don't pacifiy Germany, so you might get a Oder border for the Empire.

All that extra silver might pay for the military expenses, and encouraged colonization of Germania.

All that extra land and the difficulty of travel overland will have people working on a Rhine-Danube canal and a Rhine-Rhône one.

Said canals probably don't have pound locks, at least initially, as they probably haven't been invented yet. So you'd need to portage at every lock. Which is still better than carrying everything by wagon the whole way. This would provide a LOT of encouragement for someone to invent a pound lock, which would massively improve internal transportation all through the land portions of the Empire.

This would be HUGE!!! IMO
 
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