Rome HBO is a phenomenal show, highly recommend it.

[LordFall]

About done season 2 of it, I never watched the show previously because I thought it was old and boring. Oh boy how wrong I was. It's top 3 show I've watched for sure, maybe tied with it's successor Game of thrones. 

It's one of the most historically accurate representations of the Roman Republic that existed. I think its worth watching to study history in a fun and entertaining way.

Some takeways I've had it from it

1) The structure of the world hasn't changed much in 2000 years. Class warfare and social status dictate a lot of how your life will go. Be born a patrician and you're set. Be born a wealthy merchant's kid and you're doing pretty good. Being born a plebian(lower class) or god forbid a slave and you're fucked. 

2) The lower class has it pretty good today. I can't really imagine the reality of being a slave in the mines. I did one summer of manual labor and I was amazed at how much suffering that existence entailed. And that was working on a farm with a bunch of cool dudes vaping and getting high everyday and working only 9 hours a day. Can't imagine these 12 hour days getting whipped. Anything after the industrial revolution and workers right is not bad in comparison. In those times people that thought themselves moral and virtuous had no trouble killing and abusing slaves. Civic rights are a godsend and you can see the evolution of spiral dynamics quite clearly.

3) War has a very strategic purpose in human history. It allows for the relieving of basically the equivalent of "late stage capitalism" in histories throughout time i.e. capital saturation. You send the young men to war and the ones that live get rewarded with the spoils of war. One of the main characters in the show Pullo seems himself as a soldier and his life gets much worse everytime Rome gets a period of peace. Seems that a lot of the reason men are struggling these days is we are bred for warfare and some of us struggle with a boring domestic life. 

4) Alliances and reading people is very important. Trusting the wrong people in those times and in today is perhaps literally suicidal or at least will cause you great misery. 

5) Empire is inevitable. It seems that a disunited society will always run into an edge and the road to least effort is attacking your neighbours. Caused me to reflect on where we are right now with WW3 looming around the corner. It seems hard to find a way forward that's perpendicular, I think it will clash towards unity one way or another. Hopefully violent warfare is not required but there's no such thing as a stable multipolar world order. We will end up with a united world government at some point. 

6) World peace is coming. Watching the history of warfare throughout the time it seems that the reasons for it are predictable and solvable. I have great hope that AI will unlock new avenues of capital that don't require the subjugation of the lower classes. Space travel also shows great promise in letting expansionism get it's way without our self-destruction. Our society revolves around labor one way or another, it was the case in roman times and in caveman times and today. Artificial labor has never been achieved before, industrialism caused the greatest wealth boom in history and surely artificial labor will do the same.

 

Edited 17 hours ago by LordFall

[enchanted]

Thanks for the rec looks great , will check it out !

Edited 15 hours ago by enchanted

[LordFall]

For sure! The ides of march is very sad, Brutus is truly one of the worst traitors in history. I won't spoil more then that but how they explore his character and what happens in season 2 is masterful media. Enjoy the story of our people. 

[Leo Gura]

Yup.

Deadwood and Carnivale too.

[Cireeric]

Interesting I might gonna watch it, thx for sharing! If you havent seen succession you definitely should watch it to, Im sure you would like it, my absolute favourite show in the last years also on HBO.

[Leo Gura]

Rome is so good it's worth re-watching every 5-10 years. It's evergreen.

I re-watched it like 4 times.

Edited 6 hours ago by Leo Gura

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

The 2 of the most OP empires in history - Roman Empire (kicked ass for so long we still have their vocabulary, infrastructure and laws) and the Rashidun/Umayyad caliphates (kicked ass so hard 1/4th of the world believes in their religion)

Edited 5 hours ago by NewKidOnTheBlock