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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26875 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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just as the Roman system acted as an insane pressure cooker for military talent until they could outcompete the elites

What do you mean by that? Military service was a required stage of the cursus honorum, you couldn't be a Roman senator if you hadn't served in the military. And you couldn't be appointed a propraetor or a proconsul if you weren't a senator, and thus a member of the elites.

I mean that on paper, the Roman system was designed to select for any number of positive attributes, but what it really ended up selecting for is military genius, to a point where they became the real heart of the Roman world, and the republican institutions were like some awkward growth inessential to its subsistence in later years. And to the extent the senate tries to justify its continued existence in the face of obsolescence by staking claims on the military, it faces immense pressure not only from the generals, but from the populares who feel the senate's authority is far out of proportion to their real importance.

Which period of the Roman history do you have in mind?

Late Republic

Then I disagree that the republican system was designed to select for that. I think its biggest issue was that it was simply unsuited to managing an empire. Proconsularship was a band-aid that ruined the concept of "one consul - one term". If you could spend a year managing a province as a consul and then another year as a proconsul, then extending the term for a third year started to sound plausible. This made a proconsular appointment much more attractive than a regular consularship.

Why do you disagree that they selected for it? The link is undeniable. Especially because consular appointments are annual, and it's very hard to judge the wider decisions or impact of a consul on that time scale, and conquest is one of the lone things that's obviously an immense positive, just like rhetoric, except proconsular appointments shatter that dynamic and form an even greater imbalance of power. If we're not selecting for great orators or great generals, then what are we selecting for?

Power-hungry politicians. A simply great general would have been content with triumphs and adoration. Someone like Pompey or Caesar viewed conquest as a stepping stone towards their main goal: political domination.

Right, but if the main road to political domination is military genius, the selection pressure falls on tactical brilliance.

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