Esotera said:
One of my favourite alternative histories is a world where the Roman Empire didn't collapse, and continued until the modern day. Basically there was never a dark age so technology is more advanced, and the world is united under one leadership. But there is also the backdrop that non-Romans are not necessarily liked, and there are still slaves. I believe someone wrote a book based on this premise.
It is one of my favourites as well, but in all honesty I doubt we'd have reached the same level of technological and scientific innovation we have now had the Roman Empire not fallen. This may be surprising, but if you look at how science as a philosophy emerged you may see my point. After the Roman Empire fell, and following the "Dark Ages" and the "Middle Ages" there was an attempt to re-discover the lost knowledge of the ancient world that was the Roman Empire, this period being known as the Renaissance. What Renaissance scholars started to find though, once they critically examined the works of ancient philosophers, was the ancient Greeks and Romans weren't right about everything. This triggered something of a crisis in knowledge (which is the historical context behind Descartes and his "I think therefore I am) and late Rennaisance philosophers sought new ways to correct and discover new knowledge for themselves. Rather than relying on gaining knowledge from solely ancient books, natural philosophers started to find things out for themselves by doing observations and experiments, this evolved into what we would recognise as science, and underpins the radical technological advances we have made in the past 300 years or so.
Roman civilisation was certainly advanced, but it lacked the scientific philosophy that was developed centuries after its collapse. Had the Romans developed the scientific method though, we would probably have colonised Mars by now, but it it pretty unlikely they would have discovered the scientific method given the conditions needed for it to emerge in the first place.
Sleekit said:
eh "the Romans" were "a dark age"
2000 years and they virtually never advanced technologically at all.
everything they did have they basically took from others and they discarded, or even worse destroyed, everything they could not see a use for.
oh they codified stuff and they spread stuff about...but they didn't innovate.
HUGLEY overrated as a civilization....but hey they have that cool looking militaristic thing going on, they lasted a long time and wrote great histories of themselves (mostly for political purposes) so people think they are all round awesome.
you can't name one Roman inventor tho.
You're defining a "dark age" in terms of a lack of scientific innovation, you are not considering the other aspects of civilisation that the Romans excelled out. The Romans build some incredibly advanced engineering infrastructure throughout their Empire, building roads, aqueducts and sanitation systems and constructing buildings which their European descendants could not reproduce until the Rennaisance Era and in most cases didn't become as widespread until the 19th. Roman Europe, I would say, was more
developed than medieval Europe, and that we only really started to overtake the Romans on most counts in the 15th and 16th century.
(And if consider ethnic diversity as a measure of development, we didn't beat the Romans on that count until the mid 20th century really...)
but the "Roman" legions that defended Constantinople were virtually indistinguishable from those of 2000 years earlier.
That's like saying that an Afgan army soldier is virtually indistinguishable from a US Marine because they both wear khaki and carry automatic weapons. The Byzantine Army in the 15th century was a spent force, mostly reliant on militia troops and mercenaries, its professional elements having been largely demobilized. With the power of time travel a legion from Ceaser's time would have gone to town on them.
solemnwar said:
There actually is a sort of steam-punk roman empire sort of trilogy out. I own the first two (haven't gotten around to book three yet). The first book is called "Cold Fire", and they're written by Kate Elliot. They're actually rather interesting! 0:
Thanks for the recommendation, I will keep an eye out for those books!
