The idea of incorporating the Germans into the Roman Army was a giant mistake. Dual loyalty within an army is catastrophic and resulted in the betrayal carried out by Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest.
Battle of the Teutoburg Forest - Wikipedia
After this event, the Roman Army never really recovered.
The idea of cultural Marxism, that is to deteriorate a society, was of course not known to the Romans. But it was known to the members of the Frankfurt School who had studied the implications of multiculturalism in ancient Rome. They knew they could not get the working class to lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie. Instead they wanted a coalition of non-whites, students and feminist women to do it for them. They implemented the political correctness ideology that is now “making America fall apart”, as Donald Trump said. I don’t think it will be violent though, but I think that some states will soon break loose, just like Scotland will be independent too one day.
Although it did manage to struggle on for another fourteen centuries.
I wish we could have such successful giant mistakes. The Roman state lasted for at least 400 years after this giant mistake. This didn’t even bring the expansion of Rome to a halt except in the local area.
Utter nonsense. Teutoburger Wald was fought in 9 AD. The collapse of the Western Empire lay more than 350 years in the future.
It’s true that Teutoburger Wald marked the end of Roman attempts to conquer Germany. But it’s not because the army had been irreparably damaged. They just decided it wasn’t worth the effort – the supply lines were too long, the country was too poor, and the Germans were too fractious. Instead the Empire turned its attention to Britain, which was invaded by Claudius about 30 years after the defeat at Teutoburger.
It isn’t that the date is wrong but that I’m conflating baptism with conversion. And of course I have a more topical understanding of ancient Roman history. Still, this conversation is far more to point than anything Fox news presents. I even threw in a dig at conservatives, but 1. it was accurate and 2. my whole agenda here is not to promulgate a political perspective but to simply answer the question. Obviously the kinds of issues faced by America and Rome are almost not comparable, even if you go so far as to paint America as an ‘empire’. The president can be impeached if he goes nuts, and is in any case rotated out every 4 or 8 years in a rather stable system.
As for Julian’s questionable performance, in part it is a glaring example of the trouble with an Imperial system. We have a guy in his late 20’s making decisions from an autocrat’s position. He had success fighting in Gaul, decided the only thing he liked more than war was philosophy, then probably made his decision to go to war based on his personal preferences. America has a CIC, sure, but still it isn’t so easy to set an agenda on one person’s whims.
America could become a theocracy if there was enough political will for it, but the change would be a lot harder to make than an emperor issuing a decree. Heck, the lack of autocrats means our system is more likely to accomplish nothing at all than perform constant, sudden jerks in policy on the scale of, ‘Which religion must we adhere to or die in this generation?’
Are you for real, dude? I’m starting to have some doubts with all those “pearls” you keep posting.
Just to set the record straight, there is a better answer to this too.
The emperor Constantius was a bit of a paranoiac and had pretty much hoped to eliminate Julian from the beginning- Julian wasn’t supposed to survive his mission in Gaul in the first place, and it seems Constantius had different long-term plans for relations with the Germans besides driving them out and re-asserting control.
After that, we may never be able to know for sure if Julian much wanted to become Augustus. Yes, his army mutineed and declared him Augustus, but it was at the point of a sword. Julian’s only real alternative to accepting that was death. The reason they mutineed was that Julian had promised them that they would not be asked to fight outside of Gaul- part of the reason he was so effective there. However, Persia under Sapor was invading Rome from the east, burning cities &etc, and Constantius demanded Julian send his troops to help with that fight. He obeyed, some were sent, but he also got crowned Augustus in the meantime.
Constantius meant to treat Julian as another usurper and planned to invade Gaul and wipe him out, even though he bears most of the blame for Julian’s elevation. Julian fought back, becoming an actual usurper himself, but might have been more of an object of circumstance during this episode. Anyway, Julian’s self-defense/civil war didn’t have to go far because Constantius spontaneously died soon after it started, leaving Julian Augustus of the empire anyway.
Maybe I mis-spoke when I said Julian was being impulsive in invading Persia. They had just invaded Rome in the previous years and sacked cities. The invasion was an extension of a policy that was already in place. Sapor was suing for peace, sure, but maybe it was a natural enough decision to strike back at them.
Anyway, that said I am still getting schooled here :o Always appreciated, 'dope!
The first quote was in response to a person who seemed stupid and I tried to level with him. The second quotation I maintain, because the Roman army never regained the same strength again. The conquering of two thirds of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon migration was hardly a feat.
Were you there?
I wish I had gotten in earlier on the discussion of Julian. My interpretation is a lot more charitable than Captain Amazing’s, to say the least.
You might want to check your maths. That would seem to indicate that everyone either likes or tolerates (the collective) you. But… if it is correct, then perhaps you’d like to come and pick up the armies you’ve inadvertently left at your friend’s house. 
:o You mean they’re still . . . I know we never said anything, but after all this time, we were kinda hoping, ya know . . . You could always tell the kids they went to a farm upstate or something . . .
Oh, is that ‘all’?
From The Decline etc, pg 522:
Gibbon’s is one interpretation, and it is by no means the accepted one. You are better off with AHM Jones. From p.169 of the first volume of The Later Roman Empire:
Read Gibbon if you care about historiography or about the history of ideas. But for Roman history? Less enthusiastically.
It might be worth adding to the above that AHM Jones does not particularly like Theodosius, so it is certainly not the case that Jones is just making excuses for him.
I’m not familiar with AHM Jones, but okay…
Wait a minute. How is that ‘winning the day’? He succeeded in banning a religion, with capital punishment (under torture!) as the punishment for disobedience.
Is Gibbon so unacceptable then? Why would I be better off with AHM Jones?
Yeah, I’m not really that big a fan of Julian. I’m not really any great lover of Theodosius either, honestly. The man was impulsive, he was brutal, and his Visigoth policy, even though it temporarily stabilized the empire, contributed a lot to its decline. But, I also don’t think that the man was some sort of singular villain, or even that the suppression of paganism and Christianization of the empire was itself a particularly destructive thing.
Regarding Gibbon, I like the Decline and Fall a lot. It’s a great book, probably the first modern history in English, and it’s a fun read. But Gibbon had his biases.
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Hugh_Martin_Jones you are.
In this context, Theodosius “winning the day” refers to his war with Arbogast and Flavian. Theodosius defeated them, obviously. The pagans themselves had lost, a long time before that.
The nominal penalty for a huge number of offenses under Roman law was torture and capital punishment. These sentences were frequently commuted. I don’t recall offhand some examples of prosecutions under the Theodosian decree, but that’s easy enough to look up.
Gibbon is good for a bunch of things, but his interpretation of the Late Empire is not one of them.
Maeglin didn’t include the paragraph before that. Jones is talking about Theodosius’s war with Eugenius:
Tea Partiers would have you believe that Obama is most like Philip the Arab. 