The Man Who Sacked Rome | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Sacked Rome

theatlantic.com

26 pointspseudolus20 comments

People romantically (har) think walls were there to keep the enemy out. It's actually to do the opposite, keep them in. They're chokepoints - takes a long time for even an organized body of people to cross an obstruction. But an unorganized horde? It's a death trap.

Hence the Roman engineering solution to this problem, the Roman roads. They could put a large organized army anywhere within their borders in an insane amount of time, camps always built on the march in the same exact configuration, with predictable roads and ditches. Though restructured to a point historians call fragile, Rome was still a bastion of engineering and organization. There was nowhere to run to and a price to pay.

In those days battles were always a matter of frustrating chase and escape. And once an engagement was forced, the Roman fighting style was terrifying and as equally organized as their infrastructure, nothing like a Hollywood confrontation with copied and pasted CGI fighters.

Lanes of soldiers in a checkerboard pattern called quincunx, timed by a whistle. Enemy faced a human chainsaw, basically. Imagine being their enemy, standing at the forefront of a ragged well-fed line with consistent kits and gear, each man carrying two spears, a sword and a shield.

Whistle blows, and the front line guys sprint at you full speed. At forty yards out they throw their light spear with a barbed tip and it gets stuck in your shield. Guy is still sprinting full speed at you. At ten yards out he throws the heavier spear and it too gets stuck in your shield. He shield slams you, hacks at you a few times unsuccessfully. You survived.

Then the whistle blows again.

Your shield feels noticeably heavier with two spears stuck in it. Guy turns around and runs back and there's another guy sprinting at you, about to throw a spear. You've just now realized first-hand how the Roman Imperial army fights.

Best HN comment I’ve read in a long time.

Besides they weren't "normal" spears, the Romans cleverly designed a particular weapon, the pilum, with a long soft iron stem and a hardened point, which was "one use only", i.e. upon hitting a shield (or when attempting to remove it from the shield) the point would bend so that it couldn't be thrown back.

> Enemy faced a human chainsaw, basically.

Enemies must have been crying in their sleep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Parthian_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI_of_Pontus#Mithr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Punic_War

There were plenty of other punctuated failures to add to your point, like the missing legions that got ambushed in Spain, England, and near home while in pursuit of enemy. Centuries apart.

My point is that Rome was a system and its might was a deterrent, not that its citizen soldiers (then turned into professional soldiers) were invincible.

Collapsing centuries of Roman history into a few broad sweeps, like we read about, is a naive depiction. The military structure certainly wasn't monolithic, there were series of reforms throughout the centuries, series of equipment changes, economic sweeps, but most importantly, redefining of what citizenship and conscription was like.

For what it's worth, I didn't pull this infantry depiction out of a coloring book. Specialized in ancient military history for my degree. My intention was to make it human relatable to the time period in the article.

Fair enough. My point is that Roman legions as you have described were terryfying for primtive and not unified tribes like Germans, Brits or Gaulls even for Carthago. But more sophisticated enemy like in Asia Minor, Parthia or Persia were more then equal match for Roman military science.

PS. Eastern Roman Empire had more sophisticated tactics and strategems in my opinion.

> Rome’s defenses had not been breached in 800 years—not since a sack by the Gauls at the beginning of the fourth century b.c., long before Rome became an imperial power

Every time I am amazed for how long Rome ruled large parts of the world. Fascinating

The eastern half lasted another 1000 years after this.

Another, fascinating way to look a it: The area they ruled (from England to Syria and Egypt) had never been under a unified rule before the Romans.

And it has never been under a unified rule again since the Romans.

If you consider how many different countries and cultures occupy that space today, it really puts the magnitude of their empire into perspective.

> The area they ruled (from England to Syria and Egypt) had never been under a unified rule before the Romans.

To be fair, you can say that about almost every empire - mongol, greek, british, ottoman, persian, babylonian, etc. I doubt the mongol empire stretching from vietnam to korea and moscow to baghdad will ever be unified under a single empire.

> If you consider how many different countries and cultures occupy that space today

To be fair, most of the countries and cultures that occupy that space today weren't ruled by the romans. Rome never ruled england as england came into existence after the anglo-saxons conquered roman britannia. As for syria and egypt, the romans never ruled the arabs who dominate the region.

> it really puts the magnitude of their empire into perspective.

Rather than the magnitude, I think the legacy of the roman empire is what separates it from others.

The roman empire wasn't particularly that large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires

Even more amazing IMO is the length of time that Egypt ruled. Ancient Egypt (Old Kingdom until Alexander the Great) lasted longer than all of the history that came after it...

Julius Caesar and Cleopatra lived ~2000 years ago, and lived ~2800 years after the pyramids were built. They lived closer to our era than they did to the time the pyramids were built.

And the pyramids were build closer to our era than the Gobekly Tepe [1], by a good margin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

I've heard this fact phrased as "the time between the construction of the pyramids and 0 AD is more than the time from 0 AD to present day" which blows my mind every time I think of it.

Conversely, the original IBM PC was closer in time to WWII than to now.

And the discovery of quantum mechanics was closer to the war of 1812 than to now.

And it's been almost 100 years since the first patent (1934) on maglev trains, as built in 2002 in Shangai.

That's why lay people wonder about not seeing scientific progress since the 70s or 80s - it seems like decades since giant steps were made.

But incremental progress adds up, too.

One day we'll merge all those low-temperature superconductor or graphene experiments into something bigger.

And there's been a bunch of nice proofs coming from random places annually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#First_maglev_patent

There's this idea that we should add 10000 years to our calendar. It's called the Holocene calendar.[0] The argument for using a calendar like this is that it would make it easier to understand historical dating and it would roughly align with the appearance of the first settlements. The Holocene epoch started at about 9700 BC. This would be around year 300 on this calendar ("of the human era").

If we used this calendar then the current year would be 12020. Cleopatra died in 9971. The Great Pyramid at Giza was finished around the year 7441. Alaric's sack of Rome would've been in the year 10410.

Note that the reason events from the BCE time have a 1 at the end is because our current calendar does not have the year 0. It goes from 1 BC to 1 AD.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

And the Eastern Roman Empire lasted another ~900 years!

(Calling them the "Byzantines" is a modern invention)

Not breached by non-Romans. It's easy to discount all the internal conflict.

If you are interested in history, I can’t recommend enough Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.

I’ve just listened recently to The Celtic Holocaust episode [0], which is pretty much Caeser vs the Celts, and I’m astonished of how well organized the Roman military was. Also, while the Celts were considered barbarians, it seems they may have been quite developed, even if not at the same level as Rome. For instance, they had elected magistrates to run things, and they were in office for just a year and no one of their family could hold another such position during the lifetime of a magistrate.

Other interesting facts, Caesar apparently had large debts back in Rome, so his motivations for attacking the Celts are dubious.

How much the world has NOT changed, isn’t it?

I strongly recommend checking Hardcore History.

[0]: https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-60-the-celtic-hol...

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