Esoteric Roman v. Greek Ranting (was Philosophers)

[SelfishGene]

Ack you guys are overthinking things!
It even explains the logic in the nation's flavor text.

Think of EA Arco closer to Sparta/Athens combined.

[Ironhawk]

Hey, speaking of EA arco: what do you all know about Seduction?

I started messing around with it using the EA Arco top mage - the Oriead or something? And I'm finding it very strange that she is able to seduce undead commanders??

[Kristoffer O]

She is?

Who said undead have no feelings

[Ironhawk]

Yeah. I've got three living and three undead commanders seduced so far.

[Baalz]

I'm sure there's a pun about a boner in there somewhere...

[noname]

Romans? Practical? Maybe at first, during the Republic of Rome, but under the Empire, they degenerated into an orgy of "bread and circuses", used slave labor on a scale which made the Greek notion of slavery seem minuscule, and depended on tribute from foreign lands to keep their economy afloat. That said, they did manage to build aquaducts, roads, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, huge forums, and control a land area that stretched from England to the Middle East. The Greeks, by comparison, managed to build five of the seven wonders of the world (one of those five was in Alexandria, to be fair), constructed the Parthenon and Delphic Oracle, and continued on AFTER Rome had fallen as the Byzantine Empire (Pythium in this game), and the capital was shifted to Constantinople, which was originally a Greek city named Byzantium. And Greece is still a country today. The Romans only managed to conquer the Greeks because the Greeks were disunited and lived in a small, rocky country with little fertile land. As it was, even under the Empire, Greece continued to be vitally important, and possessed many of the Empire's largest cities, as well as exports of enslaved teachers.

The Romans possessed a greater ability to unite themselves. This is how they were able to build a large Empire, rather than live in a bunch of disunited but talented city-states.
This has to do with geography; Greece's mountains make it hard to conquer and hold large areas, and even small cities could defend themselves up on a tall hill behind walls. When Rome came in, Greece was unable to pull together, and thus fell, but the Greeks had the last laugh in the long run...

P.S. I'll stop this line of historical content now.

[SelfishGene]

Heh.

You vastly underestimate the construction prowess of the Romans - they were civic engineers on a scale the Greeks could only dream of.

And the Greeks were never able to set aside their love of fratricadal or civic conflicts even in the face of a conquering enemy, and it's no coincidence the "great" Byzantine military Emperors were not Greeks but Anatolians and Armenians. .