History Summarized: The Roman Empire

hey hey hey guys I did a philosophy in book form you should totally check it out by clicking the link here read can't talk about Rome again what it's been like six months and I've been so responsible you're the history guy do whatever you want man yes yeah Imperium junkies huh the Roman Empire established by the eternally baby-faced Augustus Rome dominated the Mediterranean and Beyond for several centuries playing much of the groundwork for European history to follow as my past few videos on the subject have demonstrated Rome is a dense topic and I'm going to try my best here to be concise so if you're unsatisfied with my two-parter on this most glorious Empire I'll direct you to some further reading go nuts now I could follow the crazy carousel lands talk about palace intrigue shenanigans all day long but instead I'd like to take a broad look at how the Empire functions and how the slow burn of Roman development finally reached its peak so let's do some history to begin we have okay so we got to get through a little imperial dynasty first The Curious Case of Augustus disappearing errors resulted in Tiberius being appointed to the throne whereupon he holed up in his palace on the scenic island of Capri to enjoy an unending Carnival of orgies his successor Emperor Caligula whose nickname adorably means Little Boots wasn't so much of a generic jerk as he was completely detached from reality appointing his horse a senator to insult the rest of the Senate having conversations with the moon and sending a Roman legion to collect seashells off the coast of France needless perhaps to say that pretty much nobody liked him including his personal escort the Praetorian guards who actually assassinated him in 41 ad this will become a shockingly common occurrence in later centuries but speaking of the Roman army the rest of the military remained pretty much as the Caesars had left it the Roman soldier by this point had reached peak form with lorica Armour the Galea helmet the Gladius blade and a gigantic scutum shield soldiers were organized in two centuries of 100 cohorts of 600 and the Legion of 5,000 the cool thing about Imperial legions here is that there is specifically numbered so you can actually track a particularly Jeannot ver centuries of Imperial history also notable is how the Roman army reported not to the Senate as before but directly to the Emperor for now significantly decrease the threat of mutiny or revolt which you may remember was a really big problem in the last century nowadays though the Empire was strong and Roman territory was secured by a constant projection of power beyond Rome's borders speaking of territory let's talk the Mediterranean which the Romans called marenostrum the low cost and high speed of transportation kept the Empire running smoothly in port cities like Ostia markets had stalls dedicated specifically to goods from far-off provinces because the Empire was so interconnected from there Rome's unprecedented road network helped move items and people all over the roads were self-draining resistance to freezing and required no maintenance because that's how Romans do this map is honestly one of the single most beautiful sites that I've ever laid eyes on and my girlfriend Sian is really pretty mm-hmm and it doesn't stop there because lest we forget the Romans were engineering monsters concrete domes arches water highways that ferry delicious h2o from the mountains down into city's sewer systems heated floors the Romans literally had no chill when it came to building stuff they also had no chill when it came to slavery but that's a really big yikes so I will leave you with this cut in and head back to the wacky Emperor's next up we have Claudius and Nero Claudius was fine but weak and Nero has a nasty rep for a lot of reasons we don't know what he was doing while Rome was on fire and we're not sure if he caused it but we do know that he took the fire as an excuse to build himself a shiny new house it didn't help his image that he was murder happy with his family and with Roman Christians so between his imperial successors in the Flavian dynasty and the eventual Christian Emperor's it is not hard to see why pretty much everybody had an axe to grind with him but enough of that let's get a move on following the Giulio Claudian cluster fiasco we get the year of the Four Emperors we're quickly now Nero committed suicide Melville was assassinated although suicided after losing to patellas who was murdered by the station and Vespasian broke the chain of insta murders and successfully reigned for nine years found in the Flavian dynasty in the process by all accounts for spacian was a skilled and just ruler with one big exception we'll get to in a little bit he's best known for his contributions to the ever-growing catalogue of Roman monuments that developed from the time of Augustus throughout the life of the Empire the Colosseum in its day it was known as the Flavian amphitheater after the dynasty that built it the arena today is missing part of its exterior shell because Renaissance architects treated it like a perfectly acceptable quarry but you can still see just how massive it would have been beyond sheer scale it played host to the classical idea toriel matches as well as multiple exotic animals from Africa in the east if the dangers ooh isn't extreme enough the Roman theater doubled as an owl macchia which is like a gladiator fight but with entire navies they'd fill those suckers of water chuck some triremes in there and watch the sparks fly for the record I expect when Manuel Miranda's next musical to include nothing short of a total recreation of the Battle of the Chesapeake get on at Lynn if anyone can do it it's you buddy on the subject of Coliseum fights we should mention the classic Roman pastime of throwing Christians at lions this was an extreme display of persecution that constituted standard practice for the first two centuries of the Empire we'll see how Roman Christianity develops in the next video but for now suffice to say that it was not fun being an early Christian as refusing to respect the Roman gods was considered an insult against the entire Empire and dealt with accordingly back to the big picture let's jump Northwest to Britain where the Empire had a foothold but wasn't able to make much progress since Caesars expeditions a century earlier it was late during Vespasian's rain that Agricola the governor in general of Roman Britain got going in gloms much of the island he then helped establish the city of Londinium on the banks of the Thames river early London was by no means a big city in the Roman world but it does show us how fast Rome could just plop down roots and establish a city and new land out of what seems like thin air and while the city of Rome itself looks like an urban planners nightmare all of their later editions demonstrate urban planning so good it's honestly insulting to the rest of us now you may be wondering why this one tiny corner of the Empire is surprisingly well documented and there's one key reason for that Agricola's son-in-law was the historian Tacitus his account of Britain gives us a pretty clear insight into how the Romans viewed conquered people's Rome wouldn't treat them with any great warmth but they had an interest keeping things running smoothly some territories were made into client kingdoms to preserve their local order while maintaining Roman authority over all usually the big cultural imports came as city's language dress and perhaps most crucially religion the Romans having more or less copy-paste of their entire Pantheon had no trouble seeing opportunities for crossover between cultures and doing DBZ fusions on similar deities famously the Roman goddess Minerva was syncretized with the Celtic goddess Sulis to make Sulis Minerva this is not how Rome treated Judaism for one Judaism is practiced inside a temple with closed doors while most Roman religion was open-air most Romans thought that nothing good came of closed doors so it seems that fears of Jewish conspiracies to take over the world go really far back and also didn't help that Roman Judea had an adversarial relationship since pretty much day one after a really bloody conquest by Pompey a string of notoriously oppressive governor's tightened the screws on Judea until a revolt broke out in 66 AD and it resulted in a full-on invasion by the general and future emperor Titus during the reign of his father force Beijing Jerusalem was ultimately sacked and looted as the commemorative arch of Titus shows legionaries carting off a giant menorah and the Jews were sent into diaspora following the destruction of the second temple not a good time whether it was karma or just bad luck Titus was hit with a parade of crises during his brief two years as Emperor for one he had to pick up the soot covered pieces after Mount Vesuvius went kablooey on the entire Bay of Naples tangent here I kid you not one time I had a dream that I was in modern Naples and Vesuvius went off in the distance my first thought wasn't fear or panic no it was and I quote goddamnit not this bulb again that's classic blue forea anyway aside from the obvious loss of nearly eight cities and several thousand lives an eruption like this should have decimated the Empire's food supply as volcanic eruptions often lead to harsh famines luckily Augustus came in clutch a century earlier because Egypt was the other breadbasket of the Mediterranean and they were able to easily absorb the shock of Italy's drought and keep the empire from starving the next Emperor was a jerk and got assassinated by his advisors and these super nerve at your later of natural causes but he appointed Trajan as his successor and this is where things really start getting shiny Trajan was a military master and pushed Roman territory to its fullest extent throwing up a column to commemorate how dope he is he also funded a lot of Public Works which is a very pleasant running theme for this century any loser can spend money on their own palaces but only a real G gives that stuff back to their people following Trajan Emperor Hadrian consolidated Imperial territory and built two walls in Britannia and gear manya it's around this century that Germanic invasions became a regular pain in the Imperial butt and in my mind Hadrian's fortifications weren't so much to keep invaders out as to stop Rome from overextending itself following Hadrian the grand strategy shifted from conquer everything in project power outwards to hey maybe we should just try to work with what we have now and that policy of restraint worked rather well the Pax Romana was in full swing through the second century not so much peace for Britain and Germany and Judea but peace for Rome and that's what the Romans cared about next up and often ignored Emperor is Antoninus Pius whose reign is remarkable precisely because it's unremarkable being so peaceful and quiet and nice and all it's just 30 years of chill and honestly I respect that the last of the five good Emperor's is Marcus Aurelius Plato's perfect philosopher king who spent all of his time moping in Germany about how bad it sucks to have responsibilities gross stoicism the philosophy of calm self-reliance in the face of frustrations and difficulties had been on the rise since Seneca popularized it as a coping mechanism for crazy Emperor's threatening to kill you and marky-mark loved it from there his son Commodus became Emperor and made a mess of the place fighting gladiatorial games and doing your typical tyranny but will save the unavoidable slow-motion train wreck that is the fall of Rome for next time so when it comes to the Roman Empire the historian Edward Gibbon claims that the second century is without hesitation the best period in human history I am not sure how to feel about that claim I feel like it's way too subjective own preference and also some parts of the Empire major sucked but I will say that as far as the average Roman is concerned there wasn't a better time to inhabit beautiful cities to enjoy brilliant engineering to prosper from expansive trade and to live in a secure Empire it certainly wasn't the best but it was Roman civilization at its best and honestly sometimes doing our best is all we should ask [Music]

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 403,975

Rating: 4.9447651 out of 5

Keywords: Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, Rome, Roman, History, Historical, Blue, Mediterranean, Empire, Imperial, Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Agricola, Britain, London, Religion, Trade, Engineering, Roads, Colosseum, Arena, Christianity, Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus, Aurelius, Commodus, Italy, Vesuvius, Pompeii, Volcano

Id: 9HPj2NggOSk

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Coco_lad]

I lost count, is this the fourth or fifth video Blue made about Rome? JK, can't get enough