WI: Nova Roma circa 250 BC

Bill Cameron

Banned
wormyguy said:
If this could cross the Pacific, then a vessel tens of thousands of years more advanced could cross the less violent Atlantic.
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Wormguy,

Sure thing, skippy.

After being towed out to sea to reach an ocean current they knew would take them into the Pacific, the six men aboard a floating heap of balsa wood ate mostly tinned rations and drank water produced by desalination equipment as they drifted along at an average of 1.5 miles per hour for 101 days until they smashed into a reef.

Just the sort of mechanism that could plausibly bring a few hundred Romans to Cuba, don't you think? ;)


Regards,
Bill
 

Epimethius

Sorry but the Heyerdal expeditions prove that Winner's best case scenario is the most likely, though I would disagree with him on the point that there would just be soliders in the fleet. A lot of roman soliders had basic engineering skills as well (Anyone remember the videssos series? not using it as proof as my point, it was just the first thing that illustrates my point that sprang to mind) and could craft basic tools given the raw materials. However, given the fact that both Roman and Carthaginian ships are built for coastal sailing and mediterranean style seas its more likely they would not make it at all (the atlantic is a far different sea then the Med, even the less storm tossed mid atlantic).
 

Winner

CanadianGoose said:
Well, there's a small question of numbers. "Chief of Indians" is unlikely to control more than 1000 or so population, so several hundreds to couple of thousands legionnaries are likely to double local population and actually control the chief. And why do you think that legionnaries didn't know squat about how to farm or do crafts?
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Prince Charon said:
Probably means he doesn't know much about the Roman army. I'm not exceptionally knowledgeable in that area, and even I know that they weren't nearly that specialised, and were required to know how to set up what amounts to a small town, among other things.
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Better late than never:

What I meant was, that the Roman soldiers could have hardly survived as farmers without the basic necessary things - European crops, European animals etc. If they were introduced into a completely unfamiliar enviroment with less than a bare minimum to survive, they'd have to either deal with the natives, or take the food from them by force.

Which leads me to the second point: I don't think that more than a hundred of them would survive the journey. Most ships would sink, the rest would scatter and the remaining survivors would be in a very bad shape. Certainly bad enough to prevent them from conquering anybody right upon landfall.

Cooperation with the natives would be absolutely essential for their survival. In the end, they'd assimilate into the local population and enrich it with some parts of their culture and technology (shipbuilding, construction, alphabet etc.).
 

burning down one side

It seems the consensus is that it's highly unlikely, but not impossible, that a small number of ships either Roman or Carthaginian could have landed in the Caribbean or perhaps northern South America.

During the First Punic War the Romans demonstrated their navagational ineptitude on a number of occassions. There were no naval battles of note during the second war for us to guess if the Romans had gotten any better, though I seriously doubt it as part of the issue for the Roman navagators was arrogance. So on the possibility of ineptitude, combined with arrogance and lack of knowledge of the Atlantic, a Roman fleet going astray for a time is pretty good.

Combine the above with just the right/wrong kind of weather, and a small Roman fleet could have found itself on its way to the Caribbean. :)
 
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