Q : Galatia - Gallic factions

[Elmetiacos]

All intriguing... wonder if there's a way of modelling this possibility in the game...

[blacksnail]

Somewhat. I think we can do it better in EB2 due to some of the newer options available. With EB1 the answer is pretty much unrest and rebel stacks.

[cmacq]

Right,
thats why I posted that they effectively became the engine of Keltic cultural expansion. You'll also note a similar phenomenon in the late 2nd and 1st centuries in Italy, among the land holding class, that helped fuel the late Roman expansion and move to imperial rule. However, in reverse this was not causality, rather it occurred as a direct result of their wars of conquest and the inability the vast majority of small-farmers to cope with the very small minority of wealthy large-landholders engorged with dirt cheap labor.

[Watchman]

All intriguing... wonder if there's a way of modelling this possibility in the game...

Arguably, the way every faction makes war on everything in the immediate vicinity the second an opportunity shows up achieves the effect pretty well...

[cmacq]

I agree with Watchman, you may not see them gears a'turn'n, but its already there.

[Watchman]

Plus what blacksnail said. Thas' yer domestic trouble roight 'ere, lad.

[paullus]

Did the Celts practice primogeniture? Or shall I be terribly anachronistic and wonder whether they divied up lands among sons like the Merovingians? Non-successor sons certainly make great manpower for military endeavors--the Ptolemies populated a good many units through military sons who didn't inherit a land estate, and in a slightly different way, military obligation was the price for gaining a landed estate in the Spartan population drives of the late 3c.

Cmacq, I'll recommend a book to you, N. Rosenstein's Rome at War, which argues that the era of real Roman expansion, which is from the late 3c to the mid 2c, was fueled by the large small-farm population and the ability of these small-farm families to produce enough mature sons to sustain the viability of the farms. I don't agree with everything Rosenstein says, but he argues that the end of the major wars and settlements led to overpopulation in the late 2c. I hope I'm not misrepresenting his argument by trying to condense it to a couple of sentences, but the point is that we find a population link to expansion.

[Elmetiacos]

I'm not sure whether individuals owned land at all or whether it was the property of the family collectively, but with one person as its head. Nevertheless population pressure could be created if the land couldn't support everyone, or perhaps if a family feared a young man bringing home a new wife and the ensuing little bundles of joy might be too many mouths to feed, they would send him away to join the Gaesatae...?

[cmacq]

Right...

Timing,
Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic. Yes, Rosenstein and another look at an old issue. Please, don't take this personally as I think its extremely important to get several points of view on a subject. Yet, a quick review of the causes of the three Servile wars BC 135-71, combined with the reasons for both the Marsic/Social War and Marian Reforms, and one may not be inclined to except Rosenstein's argument, per se. These all occurred within the time frame of the late Mid. or early Late Republic. Collectively, they seemed to have directly fueled the various Sullian and Caesarian Civil wars, in the Late Republic.

A little Servile and/or Social War, two, or thee for any successful EB faction would be nice.

[cmacq]

Based on Ceasar's notes from the 1st century, land was inherited by both males and females, yet a single adult male seems to have received the lion's share. Its these relatively larger landholders with their feudalistic authority that made up the back-bone of various local senates. Ceasar seemed very adapt at using familia relationships in Gaul and Britain to consummate his ultimate goals.

[cmacq]

paullus,

the following is from Rosenstein's Rome at War; which was preceded by an outline of the view that I presented herein.

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Although this reconstruction is internally consistent, supported by ancient literary evidence, and explanatory of much that caused the fall of the Roman Republic, doubters have increasingly questioned whether the growth of vast, slave-run estates in fact led to a crisis among smallholders during the early and middle decades of the second century. As early as 1970 Frederiksen placed the problem on an entirely new footing when he observed that although the archaeological record for the Italian countryside in the second and first centuries B.C. ought to reflect some trace of this massive decline in the number of small farms and their replacement by large estates worked by slaves, surveys of the remains of rural habitations in this period have strikingly failed to detect evidence that would confirm this hypothesis. Instead, the surveys have uncovered a complex situation that resists blanket characterization and cautions against monocausal explanations for declines where these occurred. Although evidence for small farmsteads is scarce in some areas, it abounds in others and may therefore indicate that independent farmers continued to work these holdings. On the other hand, few villas of the type associated with the new plantation agriculture appear in the literary or archaeological record before the mid-second century at the earliest. Evidence for their existence only becomes widespread more than a half century subsequently, in the age of Sulla.

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Here, Rosenstein plays a little slight of hand when he 1) argues that the conventual view places the rise of large landholdings in the early and middle 2nd century. Actually, from the literary sources it has been very clear for a long time that the change from small to large occurred in the Marian period, or late 2nd century. 2) He cites evidence from archaeological surveys as an anecdote (no numbers provided), that supports his first argument. First, depending on who conducts the survey and the very nature of survey data (surface evidence), this information may not provide an accurate temporal picture. Secondly, as you see above the survey evidence in fact supports the claims of the literary sources that the change took place in the late 2nd century.

Overall, Rosenstein claims that because the changes didn't occur in the early and middle 2nd centuries, then the causality has to due to a factor other that Roman military expansion. Of course one would simply counter his argument by pointing out that the numbers of slaves dumped on the market in the late 2nd to the middle 1st century, part due to the wars of conquest, dwarfed anything seen before. I think this work was the result of a dissertation that was not properly vetted.