Well, now that you know how to run a Roman army, let’s figure out how you’re going to get that army where it’s going. Luckily, someone named Sasha Trubetskoy has made a subway-style map of all the major Roman roads, circa 125 anno domini. And it’s very, very cool:
You can click on it to embiggen it. I would. I did. It’s fascinating. It took a whole lot of work to assemble this. There’s lots of info about how he did it at the link. He makes some interesting deductions about the road network, too:
How long would it actually take to travel this network? That depends a lot on what method of transport you are using, which depends on how much money you have. Another big factor is the season – each time of year poses its own challenges. In the summer, it would take you about two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.
Roman roads were no joke. Some of them are still in use. This is a very serious transportation network that indicates the the Roman Empire was worthy of its name. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake, and most of Europe was a Roman parking lot. And if you add in a recipe for pizza, they ended up conquering the world.
Every once in a while, I wish we had some money. It’s usually when you encounter something so out-of-the-ordinary that you want to go see it or do it. I ain’t talking about going to Dizzyland or eating in a totally different Olive Garden in another time zone. I mean something rare and wonderful. Like this restaurant in Salzburg, Austria:
OK, so a Mozart dinner concert is pretty neat in and of itself. We love us some Mozart. The musicians and singers seem several cuts above your average house band. But maybe the most piquant detail about the joint is Wolfie himself ate there, or at least had a plate in front of him while he guzzled booze and nuzzled opera singers. Hell, Christopher Columbus ate there. The place has been in constant operation since, no fooling, 803. That is not a typo. Not 1803. Eight-hundred-and-three.
How do we know this? Because Charlemagne’s best buddy Alcuin of York mentioned St. Peter’s Stiftskeller in his notes. It’s named St. Peter’s because it’s inside the walls of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg.
I’ve eaten in restaurants where it seemed like the french fries had been under a heat lamp for 1200 years before they served them to me, but I’ve never heard of a restaurant that old, still in operation, anywhere in the world.
The facility has been expanded since its inception. The hall where they try to saw all the way through the violas was added in 1903, for instance:
So, if we had ridiculous money, we jet off to Salzburg and order the most expensive thing on the menu, probably by accident because my German is very, very rusty. We’d listen to Mozart, maybe sitting in the same chair that Mozart did, although not in the same room, I’ll grant you. I’d look for lots of wine stains to be sure it was the right one. But for the life of me, I don’t know where my wife is going to get an outfit like Mina Harker in the picture there.
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an interesting fellow. He was born in Sangerville, Maine in 1840. He eventually moved to England, and eventually became a British citizen. During his fairly long life, he invented and perfected all sorts of things. A pocket menthol inhaler (he suffered from bronchitis a lot), a curling iron, a machine for placing eyelets in clothes and shoes and whatnot, a watch demagnetizer, some sort of thingamabob to keep ships from rolling at sea, a coffee substitute, and what was probably the first automatic fire sprinkler. He made a pretty cool amusement park ride, a kind of merry-go-round with tethered cars that simulated flight. The ride is still in use at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and has been copied a zillion times, including by Disney. He tinkered around with actual flying machines, too. But just between you and me, I don’t think steam was the way to go, there, Hiram.
He also claimed to have invented the lightbulb, and got in a legal beef with Edison over it, and lost bigly. Eventually Edison invented the movie camera, and lucky for us, that allows us to see Hiram’s really big invention: The machine gun.
The video has been colorized, and someone has added some rat-a-tat sound effects, but that’s the man himself, demonstrating the first truly automatic weapon. Just spray and pray.
Then, at 0:48, he demonstrates something else with substantially more oomph. I’m not sure exactly what it is, or Hiram’s relationship to it. It looks like the deck gun on a military vessel. Whatever it is, I bet it could punch some holes in some things.
Hiram smiles, and takes a bow at the end. It’s easy to see why he’s so cheerful. He was stone deaf by that point. He was married at least twice, maybe without a divorce in between, and various women sued him for bigamy and child support for out-of-wedlock kids he supposedly sired. A man with good hearing usually limits himself to a single woman. A deaf fellow can handle almost any number of them.
I read a lot of history when I was a kid. I can’t remember most of it at this point. I’m pretty sure that William the Conqueror invaded Australia in 1923, but was driven back by the kangaroos, but I might be misremembering the details. And I couldn’t tell you the exact date when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. So I appreciate an opportunity to brush up on non-current events.
I’ve been reading a biography of Hannibal recently for some reason. It’s kinda interesting to wonder what would have happened if he had finished off the Romans when he had the chance. He kicked their ass plenty, but the Roman Empire was one of those societies that only had to win once. You could beat them ten straight times, but Jove help you if they won the eleventh bout. Just ask anyone from Carthage, Hannibal’s hometown, how that worked out. Bring a shovel.
Anyway, I’ve read lots about the Romans. This video has more information in it than any ten books I’ve read. And the video game illustrations are wonderful.
The police as an institution are so thoroughly ingrained in the public’s mind that it’s easy to overlook the fact that a professional police force is a fairly recent development. Before professional policing, there were many ad-hoc assemblies of people with varying amounts of authority, organized and paid for by this or that individual or organization, and ultimately relying on nothing more than overwhelming force to perform their duties.
Sir Robert Peel came up with the idea of an official police force in England in the early 19th century. The nickname “Bobbies” is a riff on Peel’s first name. So an official, organized police force is only about two-hundred years old. America more or less followed along with the organization of police in the same way as Merry Olde.
There were ancient laws in England that instructed every freeman to have certain weapons on hand and use them when called upon to serve king and country. That goes back to Henry II. Constables were appointed to call out the citizenry when required to restore order, and watchmen have been looking out for crooks, fires, stolen property, lost dogs, and various other breaches of public security for a millennium. Eventually sheriffs were sworn in to keep jails, collect taxes, and generally keep order over larger areas of the country. This office caught on in the American west, as well, giving birth to lots of good movies, and to Jamaica, where Reggae confessions eventually became popular.
The old ways led to mobs of criminals or disgruntled citizens clashing with loosely and quickly organized mobs of authorities. Civil disorder, whether due to outright criminality or not, was crushed with extreme prejudice, as they say, and only rarely with a detour to any judge when a tree was handier. Peel thought things could be improved if the general public thought that a policeman was just like them, only professionally interested in keeping order continuously. In other words, a policeman is just supposed to do what any good citizen would do in his place, but pay attention to nothing else while the general public got on with their lives.
Robert Peel came up with what he called “General Instructions” given to all policeman in London starting in 1829. Here they are:
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
That sounds pretty good to me. However, it doesn’t sound even 1% like the approach to policing of any current police force I know of in the United States.
Tag: history
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments