Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
NAAAA NA NA NANA NANA NA NA KATAMARI POLICY!
Magna Graecia: Titanomachia (A City State Quest)
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
- Original Alt. History
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- 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
To be honest I always had Eretria figured out as some kind of shounen anime protagonist.
We're obsessed with getting stronger and heavily oriented around conflict.
Our story is structured in "arcs", each of which has an escalating antagonist and set of stakes, as our strength grows.
Also, we have a habit of "befriending" regular series antagonists by defeating them, then being generous to them in victory and turning them into allies.
There is no explicit proof of a ridiculous hairstyle, but at this point I think we can come to the logical conclusion.
We're obsessed with getting stronger and heavily oriented around conflict.
Our story is structured in "arcs", each of which has an escalating antagonist and set of stakes, as our strength grows.
Also, we have a habit of "befriending" regular series antagonists by defeating them, then being generous to them in victory and turning them into allies.
There is no explicit proof of a ridiculous hairstyle, but at this point I think we can come to the logical conclusion.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think that's what our beards are for?
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Of course. A ridiculous beardstyle.
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
Behold: The average beard style endemic to Eretria.
The pompadour of beards.
In a number of accounts the celts would also style their hair into bleached spikes using lime water when they went into battle, so they are quite well-supplied in the outrageous anime hairstyles department.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Don't forget the woad. Ridiculous blue hair was well within their capacity.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
As you say. The quintessential "weird" Eretrian beard-style is an Abe-Lincoln looking motherfucker.
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Godsdamn it Drako
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- Location
- Texas
So, in short, we've been roleplaying as a city full of crossdressing blue-haired Greek Abraham Lincoln cosplayers?
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Well, the blue hair would be a Celtic thing.
We'd be more likely to use kermes for our hair dye, since we can source it locally. Men who want to pretend they aren't starting to go gray tend to abruptly become redheads. Women too, come to think of it.
We'd be more likely to use kermes for our hair dye, since we can source it locally. Men who want to pretend they aren't starting to go gray tend to abruptly become redheads. Women too, come to think of it.
Alias
Lord of Otters
- Location
- Northrend
Except you know for that fact Lincoln would never be born and the USA would never form due to increasingly alternate events in Europe. Unless this becomes some strange Turtledove timeline.
- Location
- his hidden lair
I mean, if we survive intact culturally even as an 'ally of the Romans' we could potentially leave a massively disproportionate cultural footprint in the bedrock of a lot of Western civilization.
It's probably not anyone here's idea of a victory but surviving as a powerful economic and cultural center as a socii and trying to exert influence that way would be fascinating.
- Location
- Hungary
This anti-piracy plan of ours looking better everyday. If we manage to gain the trust and friendship of at least some of the Adriatic powers then we can perhaps form some sort of defence league there which can guarantee our trade and boost our colonial project too. Onwards to the Drakonian Dream! :-D
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
So, I'm going through the first arc of Magna Graecia, and the first meeting with Taras struck me as a bit tragic in retrospect:
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
@Cetashwayo, did the Classical Greeks go further into the field of archaeology than trying to search for the places that are mentioned in the Illiad and the Oddysey? I recall some Greek Philosopher saying that by his time roughly half of the places are unknown.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I suspect they didn't have the right frame of mind for archaeology. Ancient attempts to engage in archaeology tended to dissolve into sensationalism and treasure hunting.
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
Speaking of Archaeology...do we have a Library in Eretria Eschate? Scrolls in houses?
What exactly are we doing archaeology-wise? I know we had managed to preserve the foundation stones of the old Peucetii buildings in Old Bare by...girdling it inside the houses? And our cemetery...hope we don't forget that place centuries afterwards.
What exactly are we doing archaeology-wise? I know we had managed to preserve the foundation stones of the old Peucetii buildings in Old Bare by...girdling it inside the houses? And our cemetery...hope we don't forget that place centuries afterwards.
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Droman
𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍
From what I recall, it was more common with less professional mercenaries.
Mercenary bands have a reputation, and while abandoning a sinking ship because they wouldn't pay you(or wouldn't increase the pay due to greater hazard, which is a thing they can demand) is one thing and mostly expected, betraying your paid contract just means you wouldn't get any more hires.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To be fair, we did sink a knife in pretty hard there, as I recall.
"Taras was not a city of grudges... until the Eretrians taught us how."
We definitely have scrolls and written works belonging to various people and collected by those people who are interested. We almost certainly don't have a library, because libraries were not, as far as we can tell, A Thing in this time period. Books (or rather, scrolls) were stored by people who felt like storing them and had the money to devote a room in their house to the purpose. If you wanted to read something on a topic you didn't know about, you found a friend who knew about it and asked them if you could borrow their scroll(s).
So for example, if you want to find something on mathematics and you're not sure who in the city has it, you would go around and ask. Leukos the Accountant is into that kind of thing, so he might have a copy. There are some other mathy-geometer types in the city, too, and Leukos probably knows all or almost all of them personally. After all, there less than 23,000 adult males in the polis, and most of the ones who aren't primarily farmers by trade live within the same set of city walls, so Leukos would have had occasion to get to know them over the course of his life.
So that scroll you're looking for on the applications of Thales' Theorem? If there's a copy in the city, Leukos probably knows who has it, or knows someone who knows, and if you go running around the city in circles for a few days being referred back and forth, you'll find it. If there's a copy in the city, which is not a given of course.
There's a pretty good chance that if any of them have ever read it, they can just tell you whatever it was you wanted to know, too- the ratio of written knowledge to knowledge stored in human brains was a lot lower in this era.
As I recall, many of those foundation stones were subsequently removed to add bulk and strength to the Hill of the Divine Marriage.
It's important to understand that the ancients didn't have a concept of "archaeology" the way we understand the term. They just had a concept of "old stuff." Old stuff could be interesting, but there wasn't any inherent moral value in preserving it exactly the way it was, as a rule, with rare exceptions. There was no systemic, scientific study of the old stuff from the past, any more than there was a systematic, scientific study of anything else. There were scholars and antiquarians, who would no doubt collect old relics and texts and have their own ideas about what it all meant, but that's not the same thing as "archaeology."
...
Moreover, building things was very hard, or at least building durable structuers was. It was often much much harder than modifying them or tearing them apart for materials to make a new building. Building stones had to be chiseled out of rock. By hand. With metal tools that were kind of crappy. The reason the ancients often tore apart old structures for building stone is because it let them build things without wasting thousands of man-hours on back-breaking manual labor to quarry new stones. Almost anything made out of metal would be recycled rather than thrown away, too.