Author: stevenattewell

Couple Roman military history questions for you. What advantage did the Roman gladius and shield wall have over the Macedonia phalanx that predates it? And, why didn’t the Romans ever train their own cavalry and archers on a large scale, preferring to rely on foreign mercenaries? It seems to me that a loyal cavalry force especially would have come in handy in dealing with the barbarian invasions.

Question 1: Romans vs. Macedonians

Chiefly, flexibility. Because phalanxes fought shoulder-to-shoulder in deep ranks, they were rather slow to move, especially laterally; this meant that they were vulnerable to being flanked. By contrast, the Roman maniple system, being much looser and more decentralized, could respond rapidly to new developments.

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This difference was famously worked out at the Battle of Cynocephalae, where the Roman legions initially struggled against the weight of the Macedonian phalanx on the left, but the Romans were able to quickly move twenty maniples to take advantage of the withdrawl of the Macedonians on the right and attack the Macedonians from the flank and the rear, causing a complete panic that shredded the phalanx.

Question 2: Roman Cavalry

I think this has to be understood as a matter of opportunity costs. Training good cavalry takes many years training and a not-inconsiderable amount of resources in terms of horseflesh, so you tend to see premodern societies choosing whether to invest their time and resources into cavalry or infantry. (Same principle goes for archers, btw.)

Since the Romans had primarily an infantry culture, it was much more efficient to hire allied cavalry when and if they were needed and rely instead on their infantry to win the day. 

Now this did change over time as the Roman Empire’s borders stretched and came under pressure from horse-riding tribes from outside the Empire, which made the cavalry’s rapid response capabilities more important. 

RFTIT Tumblr Weeklyish Roundup (Part II)

RFTIT Tumblr Weeklyish Roundup (Part II)

Quotes have been put into the outline for Sansa III, which is going to be a rather difficult essay to write, because it requires a very delicate touch. The mountain of signature books has been successfully moved from front door to living room, so I plan to start signing them tomorrow.

In the mean-time, lots more Tumblrs:

ASOIAF:

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There’s a lot of talk about people being given “offices and honors” but outside of the Small Council and Wardens, we don’t seem to see a whole lot. What do you imagine these “offices and honors” would be?

I don’t think we need to need to examine, exactly, as much as we need to extrapolate from what we know. 

Thanks to Littlefinger’s importance to the plot, we know quite a bit about the offices that fall under the office of the Master of Coin:

“The keepers of the keys were his, all four. The king’s counter and the king’s scales were men he named. The officers in charge of all three mints. Harbormasters, tax farmers, custom sergeants, wool factors, toll collectors, pursers, wine factors; nine of every ten belonged to Littlefinger.”

Now, as I’ve written, not all of these people are royal officers, but a lot of them are. So those are offices that can be handed out to people as royal favors, and I would imagine you’d see a similar level of staffing in the other offices of the Small Council:

  • the Master of Ships oversees dozens and dozens of captains, and probably hundreds of lesser ship’s officers, then you have the officers of royal navy yards, quartermasters who handle naval logistics, etc. 
  • the Master of Laws…sigh, so much is unknown here. But we know that at the least there are chief gaolers, chief undergaolers, undergaolers, the King’s Justice, and the officers and rank-and-file of the City Watch.
  • the Master of Whisperers must have handlers and clerks and the like as well as spies. 

While not exactly canon, we also have Westeros.org’s MUSH, which has a more well-developed list of the court offices of King’s Landing. 

Not sure if you’re the right person to ask about this, but do you know how the timeline of events in ASoIaF was constructed? GRRM has told us what years certain events happened, but he’s never created a Tolkien style, on this date, this, this and this happened to these characters timeline.

Thankfully, obsessive fans have been working on timelines in GRRM’s stead. There’s a couple floating around which are well-annotated, see here. 

All Might is a Supes analogue? How’s that? Toshinori always struck me more as a Steve Rogers expy. I’d actually lost intrest in MHA relatively quickly because I felt it wasn’t as good as the American comics it does homage to, untill it had a very anime-like tournament arc that outright led me to stop comparing it to comics alltogether. Isn’t MHA such a Japanese thing now that comparing it to DC or Marvel comics or drawing parallels is kind of moot

I don’t think the parallel is particularly hard to draw:

You’ve got the mild-mannered secret identity versus the OTT physique, a set of superpowers that includes super-strength/speed/toughness and even the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc…But most importantly, All Might is defined by practically-unlimited power and unbounded altruism to the point of having a martyr complex. It’s missing a romantic relationship with an ordinary human woman, but the rest is a distillation of Superman’s essence.

Steve Rogers is different, because he’s not all-powerful. Indeed, for the longest time his Super Soldier Serum only boosted him to the peak of human potential, and even after he got super-strength in the 70s it was exceedingly modest compared to the rest of the Marvel Universe:

Especially when the Avengers places him in a context of gods and monsters, what makes Steve Rogers unique is that he’s able to hold his own despite being a “normal” human. As for whether you can make comparisons, I would definitely say so given how inspired MHA is by American superhero comics.

A few questions about medieval universities. 1).Would attendance still be limited to the very wealthy, due to costs? 2). Would Nobles attend or would there high birth Grant them a education automatically from home? 3). Would having an administrative job within the government require some sort of education from a university?

  1. Not particularly. As I said before, costs could vary enormously. You could find quite a few “poor scholars” who managed to make a go of it by taking on a part-time job as a tutor or through the patronage of the rich or by taking holy orders.
  2. Some nobles did attend, although they tended to prefer taverns to lectures; also, they rarely took degrees and tended to view Oxbridge as one finishing school among many, where one didn’t become an academic (that was for more modest people) but rather was lightly educated in passing. Indeed, the British system of higher education’s emphasis on tutorials over lectures was an outgrowth of the fact that the upper crust tended to prefer to hire people to do the education for them rather than do it themselves.
  3. The gradual professionalization of British government and civil service didn’t get started until the late 17th century and wasn’t finished by the late 19th century, so for quite some time a degree was not required. Didn’t hurt, tho.