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Restitutor Orbis: A Quest of the Roman Empire

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Space Jawa said:
As pointed out, we're going to be hard pressed to push an economic angle since - as pointed out by Simon_Jester - the system of the time means that slavery may in fact be the genuinely most economically viable option for some tasks. To really push anti-slavery from an Economic angle, we both have to ensure that we've established a philosophic groundwork to argue that free men are going to do better work than slaves because free men reap the rewards of their own work while slaves see none of the rewards of their labor; and then ensure that we have a means to provide viable economic compensation to entice people to do jobs that nobody wants to do in a way that that's doesn't make that economic angle unviable for what we're getting.
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To make matters even more awkward, the "slaves see none of the rewards of their labor" argument isn't even universally true of Roman slavery; it depended on the precise terms and conditions of servitude imposed by circumstances.

A slave in a Roman mine wasn't going to benefit much from anything he did. A slave who had useful skills? Different kettle of fish, potentially.
 
Simon_Jester said:
To make matters even more awkward, the "slaves see none of the rewards of their labor" argument isn't even universally true of Roman slavery; it depended on the precise terms and conditions of servitude imposed by circumstances.

A slave in a Roman mine wasn't going to benefit much from anything he did. A slave who had useful skills? Different kettle of fish, potentially.
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So yeah, if there's going to be any legitimate angle for pushing any kind of anti-slavery angle this game, it's almost certainly going to be from a religious/moral angle, and even that is going to be insanely difficult, especially while we still have to save the Empire in the first place.

All things considered, slavery is likely not going away at any point in Synnodus' lifetime. We can potentially put in place the pieces for it to go away in the future, maybe even diminish it, but I suspect that making it actually happen is either to going take more time than Synnodus has before he dies naturally, or else pushing it to happen in his lifetime is going to result in him getting assassinated.
 
Why are people discussing doing away with Slavery in a Roman Empire game? It's kind of part of the setting. May as well talk about starting the industrial revolution.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Why are people discussing doing away with Slavery in a Roman Empire game? It's kind of part of the setting. May as well talk about starting the industrial revolution.
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Eh.
bigbow said:
Yes, it would be somewhat ahistorical, for example, to have a 3rd century Roman Emperor use his high stewardship and "strange dreams and ideas" (read thread influence) to come up with a way of kick starting the Industrial Revolution 1400 years ahead of schedule, building the base of a still pagan steampunk Roman Empire.
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It's completely unrealistic though, I agree.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Why are people discussing doing away with Slavery in a Roman Empire game? It's kind of part of the setting. May as well talk about starting the industrial revolution.
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It's probably as result of living in a society where Slavery is usually equated with Evil, and so when you're playing in a game where slavery is so widespread but we're also playing in a role where in theory we have the means to do something about it, it's probably only natural for the discussion of abolition to at least pop up and be discussed, even if nothing comes of it or people realize that actually doing so isn't viable.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Why are people discussing doing away with Slavery in a Roman Empire game? It's kind of part of the setting. May as well talk about starting the industrial revolution.
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People like to dream.

Personally I'd like to do something that could at least vaguely hope to plant the seeds for the rise of industrial technology in Rome, just as Constantine (unwittingly and largely by accident) planted the seeds for the decline of slavery in Rome by converting the empire to Christianity, a religion that was on the whole neutral to disapproving of slavery instead of just plain neutral.

But yes, this is all firmly in the 'dreams' category.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Why are people discussing doing away with Slavery in a Roman Empire game? It's kind of part of the setting. May as well talk about starting the industrial revolution.
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it's not actually people just dreaming about modernizing Rome, someone was pointing out the Byzantine reforms that kept them afloat another millennia and one mentioned was scaling back slavery without abolishing it entirely.
 
Well, I think it might be popular amongst the freemen, if we were to scale back on slavery, at least in farming, though it would likely be hated amongst the upper class.
 
Basically, the big issue here is land. The overwhelming majority of the population even in relatively high-infrastructure Roman Empire territory are subsistence farmers, that is to say, farmers whose survival depends on getting to eat the crops they personally grew with their own hands. A prosperous farmer is one who owns enough land that he can consistently produce a considerable surplus, or reliably grow a cash crop like olive oil or wine.

Prosperous farmers tend to be the core of a nation's military manpower in this era. Replacing them with huge slave latifundia means you have fewer men eligible for military service, and the owner of the latifundia become very powerful men within the state, whose influence tends to act like extra fuel stoking the fire of political intrigue and instability. At the same time, powerful aristocrats do everything in their power to amass land, because it is the most stable form of wealth.

For a long time, the Romans managed to avoid this conflict by conquering more and more land, and the expanding "pie" of land made it irrelevant that patricians and plebeians were struggling for ownership of it. That's not really an option anymore.
 
How about create Roman banking system?
Coin use a lot of resource like silver that need to mine.Ming Dynasty also face that problem too.

I don't think much about slavery,Rocking the boat and made senate hate us is not a good idea in this time period if we want some stability.

Think of path of civilization quest that player drag nation into war because they are against slavery and implode into multi-nation war.
 
Mortenkam said:
Well, the Roman elite has something of a system for loaning money, but that is mostly about getting the money from friends, patrons and clients, but it ought to have worked well enough, that they did not feel the need for a professional banking system.
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It's constructive to our reign more than abolish slavery thought,I even support digging the canal more than abolish slavery.:p
 
The biggest obstacles to banking in ancient Rome are:

1) Unstable currency.

This is something we can actually fix but would need to fix anyway. For several decades various emperors have been debasing the currency. Society doesn't like functioning that way in this era because conceptions of value are primitive and a coin's value isn't really differentiated from how big a hunk of literal silver or gold it is. And banking systems, which are entirely built around the idea that wealth can be abstracted into a pure number of currency units, absolutely HATE the idea of debased currency, because it is absolute death on accounting.

2) Legal system not well adapted to it.

Right now, the way you borrow money in this era is, you go to a rich man and you kiss his butt until he agrees to loan you the money. If he likes you, he gives you some money and you pay it back whenever. If he doesn't like you and he's a jerk, he charges you interest of some kind. Crudely. A bankruptcy proceeding is when you sell one of your children into slavery to pay your debts.

Now, this system is very beneficial to rich men, especially to rich men who don't take prominent roles in politics and instead stay out of it or fund others to take political risks on their behalf. As such, Roman law surrounding debts is very well suited to making sure those rich men can get their money back. It is NOT well adapted to a bank, or at least a bank that doesn't consist of Crassus keeping track of who owes him money.

3) Economic growth makes investment opportunities limited.

Letting a bank keep your money is a risk; to get clients to accept the risk, the bank has to offer something useful. While there are things other than interest that can be offered, that's a common one. The problem here is that while Roman technology is on the whole the best in the history of this part of the world, it is also relatively stagnant, changing little from generation to generation. The Empire is already heavily populated and built up by ancient standards. Thus, there are few projects where an infusion of capital is highly likely to yield good economic returns, which in turn makes it harder for banks to profitably loan money.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The biggest obstacles to banking in ancient Rome are:

1) Unstable currency.

This is something we can actually fix but would need to fix anyway. For several decades various emperors have been debasing the currency. Society doesn't like functioning that way in this era because conceptions of value are primitive and a coin's value isn't really differentiated from how big a hunk of literal silver or gold it is. And banking systems, which are entirely built around the idea that wealth can be abstracted into a pure number of currency units, absolutely HATE the idea of debased currency, because it is absolute death on accounting.

2) Legal system not well adapted to it.

Right now, the way you borrow money in this era is, you go to a rich man and you kiss his butt until he agrees to loan you the money. If he likes you, he gives you some money and you pay it back whenever. If he doesn't like you and he's a jerk, he charges you interest of some kind. Crudely. A bankruptcy proceeding is when you sell one of your children into slavery to pay your debts.

Now, this system is very beneficial to rich men, especially to rich men who don't take prominent roles in politics and instead stay out of it or fund others to take political risks on their behalf. As such, Roman law surrounding debts is very well suited to making sure those rich men can get their money back. It is NOT well adapted to a bank, or at least a bank that doesn't consist of Crassus keeping track of who owes him money.

3) Economic growth makes investment opportunities limited.

Letting a bank keep your money is a risk; to get clients to accept the risk, the bank has to offer something useful. While there are things other than interest that can be offered, that's a common one. The problem here is that while Roman technology is on the whole the best in the history of this part of the world, it is also relatively stagnant, changing little from generation to generation. The Empire is already heavily populated and built up by ancient standards. Thus, there are few projects where an infusion of capital is highly likely to yield good economic returns, which in turn makes it harder for banks to profitably loan money.
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Thus, we'd have to focus on the T part of the economic ecuation to encourage growth? How would you set about encouraging innovation and tech growth in this period?

Edit: Shipping tech could be a good choice, amongst many. By financing research into navigation, exploration, and ship design, we could open up more markets and make intra empire trade more efficient (faster and less risky). A possible way to leverage the huge captive population of the empire if paired with other efforts. (Chief among them pairing down slavery, as you said. Its just too much wealth stuck at the top of the pyramid).
 
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I don't know. The problem is, to quote Nwabudike Morgan from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...

"Our first challenge is to create an entire economic infrastructure, from top to bottom, out of whole cloth. No gradual evolution from previous economic systems is possible, because there IS no previous economic system. Each interdependent piece must be materialized simultaneously and in perfect working order; otherwise the system will crash out before it ever gets off the ground."

Rome, with its very sophisticated technological and social structures, LOOKS like the kind of polity that could easily have made the transition into the modern era of science and technology. But so very, very many of the pieces of Rome's interlocking puzzle are in fact very foreign to the puzzle pieces that historically led to Europe's industrial revolution. Replacing any one piece of the puzzle, without breaking the puzzle, is a huge challenge.

It's like, you need to incentivize technological innovation. But just abolishing or scaling back slavery isn't enough to do that, as we see from the Byzantines. You also have the problem of so much of the capital, the portable wealth, belonging to powerful magnates who have at most a limited concept of what 'investment' means and an active aversion to engaging personally in business. You have a government that is in dire need of bureaucratic reforms (see Justinian's law codes for reference). You have constant 'barbarian' threats from the periphery that have to be met and pushed back. You have a culture that simply lacks mores that we take for granted but which are in a real sense the contribution of the civilization-that-was, of medieval 'Christendom,' to its modern (nearly unrecognizable) descendant 'Western developed globalized industrial civ.'

It's complicated, complicated arguably beyond the capacity of mortal man to fathom. Especially with no one to step in and pull a Martin Padway and start deliberately spreading the desired technologies within the existing social system.
 
Honestly, most of these ideas sound like so long-term that I doubt we can even do them in our lifetime. And I'm not sure whether this is a Dynasty Quest. Getting our economy back together in the first place is probably going to take our entire life.
 
Yeah you guys need to stop thinking 1500 steps ahead. These are nice ideas and all but it's so far in the future of this game if ever that worrying about it now is at best a distraction.
 
Teen Spirit said:
Yeah you guys need to stop thinking 1500 steps ahead. These are nice ideas and all but it's so far in the future of this game if ever that worrying about it now is at best a distraction.
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You're right.

Even if Synnodus has an uncharacteristically long and successful life as emperor, even if he's a second Augustus, his reign is going to span the reigns of Aurelian, Diocletian, and if we're lucky a sizeable chunk of Constantine's reign. If he can achieve as much as all three of those men put together, he will have earned a place as one of the very handful of the greatest Romans who ever lived, one of the greatest rulers in the history not only of Rome, but of humanity itself.

And yet, as the three of those men put together demonstrated, it still won't be enough to save Rome forever. Nor will it be enough to trigger the Industrial Revolution 1500 years early.
 
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Short term fixes:
1) Expand metalworking demand a shitton.
2) Hope your wallet holds out long enough for the market to adjust to this.
3) Let it go and watch the price of steel drop and all those new smithies selling to more people cheaply to stay in business.
 
Simon_Jester said:
If they relied on the people willing to voluntarily mine, they'd have to pay much higher prices for metal and metal production would drop off sharply, which is exactly what happened in the Middle Ages with the closure of the big slave-operated mining complexes.
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Why did they close the complexes and how did they deal with the loss of metal?
 
[X] Plan Firm Foundation

I'm not going to get involved in these long-term plans when our ascension to the throne at all is still unlikely when viewed from the viewpoint of "We aren't the protagonist".
 
Andres110 said:
Why did they close the complexes and how did they deal with the loss of metal?
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They didn't. The big metalworking complexes were a significant portion of supplying the Legions.

No more legions, no more demand(at least demand on anywhere near the same scale), and the breakdown of order made the expense of operating too high without the influx of cheap ore and labor to keep going for civilian applications.
 
veekie said:
They didn't. The big metalworking complexes were a significant portion of supplying the Legions.

No more legions, no more demand(at least demand on anywhere near the same scale), and the breakdown of order made the expense of operating too high without the influx of cheap ore and labor to keep going for civilian applications.
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I'm talking about medieval times.
 
Andres110 said:
I'm talking about medieval times.
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Which is what was explained. The metalworking complexes shut down due to the twin reasons of not having enough customers willing to pay their prices without large state armies to equip and and the rising costs of operation as the logistics of getting enough ore and fuel designed to work with a continent spanning empire had to deal with there no longer being a continent spanning empire.
 
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