- Location
- Luton Airport
How do the Pythagoreans feel about those beans?
Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
- Original Alt. History
-
- Tags
- ancient greece alternate history empire builder civ quest democracy gods save us granary management hubris it's an eretrian thing. let lose the weasels of war lithocracy lithocracy is my fetish maximum hellene my big fat greek divine wedding this granary aint gonna fill itself cetash unwinnable
Dutch
Bored Spearman of the Wind
- Location
- CET
Hmmm. Now that you mention that. Is there any way the festival of Ploutos could interact with the insurance/proto banking activities of the Temple of Ploutos?
Droman
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍
Honey leads to mead. Not sure if the Greeks would enjoy mead but I'd be curious enough to introduce it!
Eating seaweed may be a bit of a jump, although equally we may already be doing it. "Lava bread" made from seaweed is a traditional Welsh delicacy, so it's not just a Pacific thing. Either way, seaweed makes an incredible fertilizer. This is still used in some farms in Cornwall today. You can also feed it to cattle.
Now, how it would occur to us to do this, I'm sure I don't know. We are a long coastal strip with a lot of sea access though, so you might see farmers have more incentive tor try new things as population grows and land reaches more of a premium.
Thinking about it, actually, if there were farmers on the islands of the Venetian Lagoon, where that colony has been conjectured, then that's also definitely the kind of thing you'd see people trying. They might even learn it from the locals.
Now, of course, you actually have to have access to a lot of seaweed. Not all coastlines are made equal.
Probably!
Now, how it would occur to us to do this, I'm sure I don't know. We are a long coastal strip with a lot of sea access though, so you might see farmers have more incentive tor try new things as population grows and land reaches more of a premium.
Thinking about it, actually, if there were farmers on the islands of the Venetian Lagoon, where that colony has been conjectured, then that's also definitely the kind of thing you'd see people trying. They might even learn it from the locals.
Now, of course, you actually have to have access to a lot of seaweed. Not all coastlines are made equal.
Probably!
- Location
- his hidden lair
So out of curiosity, are there any interesting ideas, technologies or other goods we might import from Northern Europe if we get involved with the Amber Road?
I know it brought a lot back from the Mediterranean in terms of culture and ideas but I don't know any of the finer details.
I know it brought a lot back from the Mediterranean in terms of culture and ideas but I don't know any of the finer details.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
*screams offscreen about the insanity of the Greek numeral system, and the need to have a symposium to fix it already*
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
The study collected samples from the very modern day polluted shoreline of the very modern city of Alexandria, Egypt.
PubMed Central Image Viewer.
So if an edible seaweed, multiple species of edible seaweed even, can grow in THOSE conditions, then the answer to it growing inside the harbor of an ancient city like Eretria or even the harbor of ancient Athens is "Yes, it can."
As for eating only seaweed, I rescind my opinion of seaweeds being able to significantly increase food production in the style of wheat or rice or potato. I now see it as a valuable source of minerals that could help alleviate malnutrition in a port city's poorer inhabitants. A dietary supplement, if you will.
- Location
- Luton Airport
First one that comes to mind would be soap. The Celts are also some of the more innovative metalworkers of the era.
Eretrians: *establishes luxury trade route for soap*
Celts: "Fantastic, we're glad you now see the benefits of-"
Eretrians: *proceeds to use it on their horses*
Celts: "..."
Celts: "Fantastic, we're glad you now see the benefits of-"
Eretrians: *proceeds to use it on their horses*
Celts: "..."
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
The Celts developed chainmail.
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
I have read that some Celts, the ones living near Massalia, used Greek Armor. But did Classical Age Greeks use chainmail armor? I thought Greeks only deigned to adopt chainmail once they became part of the Roman Empire. Or was it when the Celts invaded Greece?
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
The celts only developed it in the hellenistic period.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Leukos:
We DoN't NeEd CoHeReNcE wHeRe We'Re GoInG!"
[seriously a large part of his success as a professional number-cruncher comes from his bullshit-tier ability to cope with that monstrosity of a numeral system, which is sheer luck on his part]
Let's try to actually learn something from this.
It's not that trying new things is impossible.
It's that trying new things is costly.
...
Check out this blog post, a book review that summarizes "so this is why low tech societies are often very traditional." Basically, when you live in a Stone Age tribe, you probably have a lot of very complicated practices that you and your people follow to find edible meat and plants, to prepare food so that it won't kill you, to avoid overhunting and destroying the natural resources you need to survive, and to protect yourself from disease and injury.
Not all of these complicated practices are easy to explain. One can easily imagine some genius rational hunter-gatherer who says "I'm going to stop listening to these pointless auguries that send me all over the forest at random to hunt, and just hunt where I expect to find the most deer!" And indeed, the hunter could even perform a controlled experiment for a month or two, and would probably find that they get more deer by going where there are a lot of deer than when they listen to a random augury.
But if the whole tribe does this, for a little while it's Meat City... and then the deer learn to avoid the places the tribe hunts the most, or the tribe hunts down enough deer that the population starts to crash, and a year or three down the road there's a famine. Oops.
Or there are places where the predominant staple plant food of the local tribes is something that has to be carefully processed or you will die of cyanide poisoning from eating it- and you have to do ALL the steps of the careful processing, or you will slowly suffer cyanide poisoning that weakens you and hurts you over time. You may never even realize how your inadequate food preparation is screwing you over... but it will still eventually disable you and kill you, and you'll be easy prey for any tribes that do prepare their food more thoroughly and thus don't spend their whole lives suffering low-level cyanide poisoning.
...
Now, Eretria is a fairly successful Iron Age city-state, and it has a lot more surplus and flexibility for people to try weird things and maybe screw up than would a Stone Age tribe of hunter-gatherers. But a lot of the same basic logic applies. If a bunch of people spend a year cultivating seaweed and it turns out that all the seaweed gets eaten by tiny crabs in the fall when the Tiny Crab Spawning Season hits, those people have wasted a lot of time, and may have nothing to eat. If someone "rich" by Eretrian standards subsidized that experiment, well, a significant chunk of his life savings, maybe all his life savings, is gone. It is not especially easy to recoup lost wealth in Eretria; there is nothing like a stock market. The only way to make Big Money fast is by undertaking big risks (joining an expedition to loot a well defended settlement, going on a long sea voyage where your ship could be destroyed by pirates or storms).
There is no large scale welfare system to fall back on if you lose your livelihood. The society as a whole doesn't have the resources to guarantee that everyone will have enough to eat in a hard year, let alone to guarantee free food for random people who tried something risky and had it fail badly.
And the Eretrians- this is important- cannot possibly know whether things like seaweed farming would work out. Maybe it turns out seaweed gives you cancer if you eat a lot of it for a few years. Maybe it turns out all the seaweed predictably gets eaten by tiny crabs every autumn. Maybe it turns out seaweed has the nutritional value of wet cardboard and the only reason to eat it is for the texture or as a garnish on some other food- note that the Eretrians have no concept of chemistry, let alone nutrition, except for very basic and often wrong beliefs like "meat good, more meat more good."
In a modern society, we handle this problem with things like government research grants to have some food chemists look into the nutritional value of seaweed, and some medical researchers to look into whether it gives you cancer, and some marine biologists to figure out if seaweed can be farmed without tiny crabs eating all of it. And this works, because modern societies can afford to have a lot of highly educated scholars who do literally nothing but figure out whether obscure ideas will or won't work, without anyone starving.
Eretria, to put it mildly, is not in this position. The only people who can afford to be scholars at all are those who are independently wealthy, those who spend most of their time getting paid to engage in at least vaguely scholarly pursuits for which there is limited demand (e.g. Leukos the Accountant wants to be a mathematician or something, but in reality he's an accountant and tracker of supplies, and 80-90% of his mental energy is spent thusly).
...
Obviously, people did experiment with stuff like this in ancient times, or they never would have figured out how to grow grain or domesticate livestock or make olive oil or any of the dozens of other things that ancient peoples DO do all the time. But such experiments usually come about because someone is desperate, or as very slow incremental changes over thousands of years to traditional practices.
Eretrian fishing techniques exist as slow adaptive evolution going back to the first day when Ug the Caveman decided to lash together several pieces of driftwood as a raft and try to bait some fish with a dead bug skewered on a stick or something.
Eretrian farming techniques are a gradual evolution over thousands of years of at least trying to selectively breed for highly edible crops that are relatively not horribly hard to take care of, plus a lot of accumulated knowledge about how to prepare the soil and how to keep weeds or whatever from destroying the crops.
In both cases, these techniques could be improved- but which actions would be improvements? The Eretrians, IC, do not know, and experimentation is risky and costly. Because failure means famine for society at large if practiced on a large scale, and individual ruin for individuals if practiced on a small scale. And the techniques to enable productive experimentation of any kind are still in their infancy.
So introducing new crops and new products that no one has any idea how to productively integrate into the existing system of the city? It's only a good idea if there is some obvious benefit. If chocolate somehow became available to the Eretrians, we'd try to integrate it because chocolate is absurdly delicious. If tobacco became available we'd try to grow it because tobacco is absurdly addictive. If potatoes became available we'd try to integrate it because you can grow an absurd amount of calories worth of potatoes with limited amounts of land and labor.
But that "because" is critical. People need a damn good reason to do something totally different from what they did before, in such a low-margin society with little room for error.
And if the "because" isn't strong enough to motivate experimentation and risk-taking behavior, the new idea simply doesn't get adopted.
So before you even think about "what if we adopted Technology X," you should ask yourself "what is the 'because' that justifies this, from the point of view of the Eretrians?"
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The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
There's a reason why I had my character take a year or two going on a Mediterranean trip to Rhodes and Cyrene: glass and silphium are luxury goods that are actually plausible for us to make, assuming we can import the necessary prerequisites (craftsmen and natron for glass, farmers and whole plants still in soil for silphium).
Which, no offense intended to kilopi, I think would be more productive to discuss as a future development than the use of seaweeds that don't grow in the Mediterranean to provide a food type we already have land crops for.
Which, no offense intended to kilopi, I think would be more productive to discuss as a future development than the use of seaweeds that don't grow in the Mediterranean to provide a food type we already have land crops for.
[X] [Taras] Accept the Tarentine terms.
[X] [Spring] The Return of Persephone. Favored by many married women, the return of Persephone is a re-enaction of the drama of Persephone's departure from Hades. Having been married happily to Hades for six months of the year, for in this interpretation she is not kidnapped but seduced away from her domineering mother, the young Persephone must say goodbye to her beloved husband and lord of the underworld. Persephone is presented here as a traditional woman, but also an icon of femininity, beloved by many women in Eretria for giving them someone to look up to. Embued in mystery and icons of the dead, the Return of Persephone is a festival that celebrates the transition from winter to spring and from death to life, the birth of new children, and draws heavily from the Eleusinian mysteries near Athenai, that famed mystery cult.
[X] [Honors] Pass the motion proposing the reward of a Wreath of Apollon and inscribing on the Painted Relief of Athene as the highest rewards that can be given to a citizen, to be decided by a 60% vote in the assembly for the wreath and an 80% vote for the Painted Stone.
Okay I just found and caught up with this quest, the vote is still open right? I want to make a character too because it looks fun as hell but I don't have the time yet. Really excited to be joining this quest.
[X] [Spring] The Return of Persephone. Favored by many married women, the return of Persephone is a re-enaction of the drama of Persephone's departure from Hades. Having been married happily to Hades for six months of the year, for in this interpretation she is not kidnapped but seduced away from her domineering mother, the young Persephone must say goodbye to her beloved husband and lord of the underworld. Persephone is presented here as a traditional woman, but also an icon of femininity, beloved by many women in Eretria for giving them someone to look up to. Embued in mystery and icons of the dead, the Return of Persephone is a festival that celebrates the transition from winter to spring and from death to life, the birth of new children, and draws heavily from the Eleusinian mysteries near Athenai, that famed mystery cult.
[x] [Winter] The Conquest of the Sea. A grand festival involving mock sea battles and swimming contests which celebrates Poseidon's subjugation of all the creatures of the sea. Poseidon is a popular god across Italia and Sicilia, in sharp contrast to his sometimes muted worship among Ionians on the Mainland. The Conquest of the Sea, conducted in the chilly mid-winter, promises to bring fantastic seafood to the mouths of hungry Eretrians and celebrate the city's naval and commercial traditions as well as thank the Gods for the first voyage that Eretria ever undertook. The greatest part of the festival is the battle between rowers in painted boats representing the dolphins allied to Poseidon and the krakens who oppose him, who conduct a mock ram battle with their boats, trying to tip each other over in the harbor of the fifty masts.
[X] [Honors] Pass the motion proposing the reward of a Wreath of Apollon and inscribing on the Painted Relief of Athene as the highest rewards that can be given to a citizen, to be decided by a 60% vote in the assembly for the wreath and an 80% vote for the Painted Stone.
Okay I just found and caught up with this quest, the vote is still open right? I want to make a character too because it looks fun as hell but I don't have the time yet. Really excited to be joining this quest.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Vote is still open, yes. I'm busy during the week and the next update will take a while given it will contain some of the most important votes made so far in the quest, so I don't have a problem keeping the vote open, esp. since the only option still in contention is Ploutos vs Persephone which is currently tied.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
How is our salt production? Obviously the sea is full of it, but how good are we are getting the salt out of the sea to be sold or used?
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Well, one of the reasons we want to carve off a big chunk of Dauni territory is the massive salt lake that nobody can currently exploit due to ongoing hostilities.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Enough for the city's own needs. Lake Salpi, at this point a salt marsh partly connected to the sea (the road going through it is really quite inaccurate) is the best center for salt production in the area but is not very well-developed right now because it's a frontier, so if you want salt production, go there.
Though it'll need some real work to get going.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Something to think about once we finish our current projects.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Silphium might be a toughie, because despite considerable incentives to cultivate it better, it never was cultivated better and in fact went extinct.
Himmelhand
Giant Sinkhole 2020
- Location
- Midwestern US
I'm curious - what stone is quarried to build the city? Is it all local limestone? Do we have any marble of decent quality available to us nearby or would it need to be imported?
Well its likely that if potatoes suddenly become available, somebody's going to eat the green bits, get poisoned and then the news is out on how this lumpy thing will randomly kill you.
Which admittedly in historical societies was a 50/50 tossup between avoiding it and eating it to show off how macho you are.
Might be that it was dependent upon a specific plant or bug.
These things happen.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
OK basically yes.
I was trying to provide an example of a new foreign crop that was such a big deal that a significant number of countries actually DID radically alter their agricultural and culinary practices to accomodate it. Because potatoes, given some basic awareness of how to prepare them safely, really do provide the kind of advantage that encourages a bit of risk-taking and experimentation.
At the same time though, that's a great example of the pitfalls in attempting to introduce even the most absurdly beneficial food crops to a new society unfamiliar with the cultural practices of how to prepare them.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Despite potatoes being "obviously" extremely nutritional, it took the active and vocal efforts of a french Agronomist for potatoes to actually gain popularity in France. So it's not actually just that simple.