Who needs inventing when you’ve got logistics?
We have no navy
Punic ship crashes on our shore
copy the ship 200 times
We now have a navy
But it’s better.
See? It’s got the pointy bit at the end.
Who needs superior naval power when you can just turn any naval battle into a land battle? Well… Infantry battle, anyway.
They even stole the Greek gods.
And the Etruscan gods. And the Carthaginian gods. And the Egyptian gods. And the … you get the idea.
The Romans even had a standardised ritual for stealing gods from a city they were about to conquer: Evocatio. In the ritual, priests would call upon the enemy god(s) to abandon their city and come to Rome, where they would receive a bigger temple and more devoted worship than in the city about to be conquered.
I find it fascinating that, unlike today, where every religion thinks that their own gods exist and others don’t, the Romans believed that all other gods existed alongside their own.
When the Romans were conquering Britannia, they were attacking a small river island. There they encountered a group of Druids. As the Romans cut them down they realized that the Druids were actually sacrificing themselves at their hands in some unknown ritual. The Romans saw this as a bad omen since they had just inadvertently participated in some foreign god’s ritual. Shortly afterwards, Boudicca started her campaign against the Romans.
Another fascinating facet is that the Romans took a certain aspect of Greek theology and ran with it full speed. Under the Interpretatio Graeca, all gods were actually the same gods - more or less. The Greek god of war was the German god of war - just worshipped under different names, seen in different clothes, with some different stories passed down. They were still, ultimately, the same god; and thus, all the world shared in a common faith.
The Interpretatio Romana is the exact same thing, just as applied to Roman religion instead of Greek religion. As the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, and shamelessly stole the bits they liked, they applied this theology to the world they conquered. Everyone’s gods are everyone’s gods.
While occasionally the Romans would import a foreign cult, even then they often equated that foreign cult with an established god in addition (something which later Graeco-Roman Platonism would use to espouse the view that all gods are emanations of the same, singular divinity). You get a lot of Roman religious epithets from this - the Romans liked addressing their gods with specific relevant titles or sub-names, like Mars Silvanus, Mars of the Woods, or Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, when calling upon gods. This becomes relevant in Interpretatio - Romans and provincials would worship the same god under the same name, by using these dual-names - such as Mars Lenus - ‘Mars who is also Lenus (a Celtic god of war)’.
Goes a long way towards defusing concerns that the foreign conquerors are godless heathens - or that the conquered provincials are dirty superstitious savages. Whatever the mutual recriminations leveled between each other, they could at least be assured that the outsiders weren’t risking the wrath of the gods with their strange, foreign ways - after all, they’re paying respect to our gods!
The Roman baths in Bath, England, are dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva. I imagine it went something like…
Romans: What have you got here?
Brits: Springs that are blessed by our goddess.
R: Which goddess is that?
B: Sulis, the goddess of wisdom.
R: Ah, we know her! Back in Rome she’s Minerva. Henceforth these shall be the springs of Sulis Minerva.
B: But these are the springs of Sulis!
R: Yes, and they still will be, but they will be the springs of Sulis Minerva, because otherwise we would have to kill everyone.
B: Sulis Minerva it is!
Interpretatio
GraecaRomanaSo good at stealing things, they even stole the idea that stolen things weren’t stolen!
“See? You stole it from those guys!”
“Steal? We would never! It’s simply been incorporated into our society.”
I wonder what they’d do when encountering a god that has no equivalent in the Roman pantheon. Do they then invent a new equivalent god?
While the Romans were not averse to inventing new gods, more often they just really stretched the interpretation of foreign gods to fit - like interpreting the Germanic Wodan (Odin), the one-eyed god of wisdom and war, as their equivalent of Mercury, the god of trade and travel (they’re both wandering gods, it MUST be so!).
Other times, they’d just adopt the new god wholesale and assign it a suitably Roman name, like Magna Mater for Cybele, an Anatolian goddess.
“The enemy general just stole our god.”
“What!? Bullshit! He can’t do that! You can’t just steal a god!”
Can’t have shit in Italia. 😔
Hey you stole our ship design.
Nope, look we added this pointy bit here, come closer and let us show you.
Caw caw smash.
Now I want a trireme with a Corvus painted to look like a crow.
And I will definitely be referring to it as my ship’s Corvid. Any time a newcomer tries to correct me, I’ll just point to it and ask “You sure about that?”
“See? Totally different.”
I thought they copied Carthaginian ships
Not only copied, but also improved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
I would say romans iterated well.
Why invent when you can get a jump start on iterative design?
It’s a bit harder without CAD, but they made it work.
i never said they did any thing wrong, and they iterated really well. They were not the smartest fellows, but they learnt to use whatever they had really well.
i never said they did any thing wrong,
I wasn’t trying to imply you did. I was agreeing with you.
