skipped an archetype like time before last?

[Kinser79]

(05-13-2019, 12:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-12-2019, 06:32 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: PBR, there is no such thing as a failed crisis.  Every 4T in history has been resolved at some point.  Often through a war or civil war.  Sometimes not.  Often with economic calamity, but sometimes not.  War and economic hardship do not in themselves indicate one is in a 4T.  Indeed in the so-called American High of the 1950s there was not one, not two, but four recessions.  There was also a very bloody war--though most people seem to have forgotten about it these days.

The point of a 4T is that it ends the saeculum.  This is an inevitability.  I believe that the current 4T will fizzle out setting the stage for the Mega Crisis which is a whole saeculum long and will end approximately in 2100.

Very simply, a failed Crisis solves nothing. The overall community gets no institutional change to improve anything. No semblance of stability appears that can allow people to pick up the pieces and build something more sustainable than what preceded. I look at the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 as a failed Crisis. To be sure, the Roman Empire was by then a rotten order, but it was in no way renovated. In AD 476 Odoacer overthrew the Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus and decided to not set up another Caesar -- even an abject puppet. The Roman Empire, at least in the West, no longer had any value as a political concept. This is not an annexation of a country; this is a complete breakdown of a political order.

In essence a large part of a civilization goes from a going concern to something moribund.

I also see the Servile Wars of the late Roman Republic as a failed Crisis. It might have been better for Roman civilization to have lost this war rather than getting a Pyrrhic victory. Slavery became an even-more powerful institution in Rome, and although the Republic survived, the regime became increasingly inegalitarian, repressive, and hierarchical with no compensation. Wealth became more concentrated, and what passed for a middle class (by classical standards) shrank under the stress of rising taxes from which the big landowners exempted themselves. Slavery ensured the absence of a middle class that might have offered entrepreneurial and technological innovation that might have even pushed modernization upon the Classical world. With steam power the Romans could have developed steam ships (and needed no galley slaves), powered saw-mills (which might have allowed the Romans to take over the forested lands of what are now Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Scotland), and perhaps even railroads and a printing press. Steamships make it possible for the Romans to make trade with places like Ethiopia, India,. and China less costly -- and reach the Americas and Australia. Just imagine a Roman city named Scicago on Lacus Missiganus with a glorious amphitheater that has a startling resemblance to Soldier Field.


I am not saying that they would invent any form of football, American or association. But that is alternate history.

476 was the final act of the last Roman Mega Crisis.  The one before that saw the rise of the Empire itself with Augustus. in around 4 BCE or so (been a long time since I studied Roman history in detail).

Galley slaves were highly skilled people.  However, the presence of Slavery retarded and would retard industrial development in Rome just as it did everywhere else that slavery was practiced.  (Which was everywhere--but the example in particular I'm thinking of is the US South during the industrial revolution.

I'll leave the alternative history to the likes of Harry Turtledove.  But it might be something you wish to pursue.