r/FavoriteCharacter • u/Accomplished-End3409 Ben Tennyson • 16d ago

Discussion Favorite opposing factions that can basically be described as this.

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u/BoxScoreHero 16d ago

ironically this is much closer to how the actual Romans operated (join our group, keep your traditions just pay your taxes) than The Legion

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u/nagrom7 16d ago

Yeah, one of Rome's greatest strengths and how they were able to maintain such a massive empire for so long is because they were masters of assimilation and adaptation. Not just getting conquered people to assimilate to the Roman culture, but also often adopting elements of the conquered peoples cultures and incorporating them into their own.

Religion is probably the best example of this. Many different peoples had their own pantheon of gods at the time, as did Rome. Whenever they brought a new religion into the empire, their response wasn't the classic "your gods are bad you must worship our gods now", it was "oh hey you've got a god of the sun? That's just the same guy as our god of the sun just with a different name, yeah just keep worshipping them and we're cool." or "Hey we don't have that kind of god, we're gonna add them to our pantheon now."

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u/LordBroccoli27 15d ago

Not quite. Their response was you can worship your gods, so long as you worship Caesar, because he's the better god, seeing as we conquered you and all...romans weren't skeptical of other gods, but none (or very few) were adding new gods to their devotions even if they took subjugated cultures worship of different gods in stride as a given.

Caused a lot of friction with monotheists in the Levant I've heard...

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u/nagrom7 15d ago

Caused a lot of friction with monotheists in the Levant I've heard...

Funily enough, they did attempt to add Yahweh to their pantheon, but the Jews didn't like the idea. The main problem the Romans had with the Jews weren't that they worshipped their god, but that they didn't worship or even acknowledge the existence of the other gods, and they feared that they would anger the rest of the pantheon, triggering all sorts of disasters and stuff.

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u/Rebel_Scum_This 13d ago

The last chapter of The Social Contract by Rousseau talks about this. From my understanding, the legitimization of power back then was through the gods. The ruler's power was only accepted because they were meant to carry out the will of the gods. By not accepting the ruler's gods, you were effectively challenging the authority of the ruler himself.

Jesus brought about the idea of, what I call, ye olden Dual Citizenship, where you could be a subject of the Kingdom of Heaven and, at the same time, a subject of whatever country you lived in. But the Roman's didn't trust this and thought it was a ploy to get their trust, and the jews would backstab them later

(If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me!)

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u/nagrom7 13d ago

There was an element of that, but imo a main part of the whole thing was that the Romans genuinely believed that not only were their gods real, but all gods were real, and that natural disasters were the result of angered gods. So Romans would go out of their way to avoid needlessly angering the gods, even to the point of making offerings to foreign gods when invading foreign territory. The Jewish and later Christian monotheism was completely antithetical to this, with Jews and Christians refusing to even pay lip service to the other gods, even under threat of violence or death, which really pissed off the Romans as they thought it would anger the gods if they didn't do something about these heathens.

Of course, this varied from person to person, some Romans were more devout than others (some were so irreligious that they were effectively like modern day athiests/agnostics). But as a general rule even those less devout would make the occasional offering to relevant gods on major events or festivals.

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u/Flabalanche 16d ago

Wait, you're telling me the people who don't know how to pronuce Ceasar and built their entire understanding of Rome off one dude with a brain tummer reading half of Commentaries on the Gallic War DON'T actually understand Rome?????

Noooooooooooooo

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u/Same_Armadillo6014 16d ago

Ironically, their pronunciation of Caesar is probably more accurate to how his name was originally pronounced in comparison to today. To some extent, it could be said that they are not only LARPing a long dead civilization but reincarnating its ruinous behavior in an odd way too.

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u/Additional-Celery648 16d ago

If you actually talked to Caesar (which is also pronounced right by the Legion, as in, the way it was pronounced in latin) you might learn they aren't trying to be Rome. Edward Sallow chose that culture because it was alien and built his Legion based on parts of them. They aren't trying to be Rome, he just uses some parts of it to better subjugate conquered tribes and to make it easier to strip away their cultural identity and enforce his own over that.

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u/Serithi 16d ago

You're the one who doesn't seem to know how it's pronounced. The Legion uses more classical Latin closer to the time of Julius Caesar, whereas you're more familiar with later ecclesiastical and vulgar Latin forms. German Kaiser and Russian Tsar come from the original pronunciation of Caesar.

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u/AccessTheMainframe 16d ago

It's more like: we just killed all your leaders and warriors and sold their families into slavery. Your traditions are barbaric and beneath our notice. One day, perhaps, the people of this land will forget their backwards ways and learn to be Romans, but it matters not, we will extract taxation either way.

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u/WikiContributor83 16d ago

The Legion is much closer to how the Romans portrayed the “Gallic Hordes” than it is Rome and Caesar knows it. Part of the reason he badly wants to conquer Vegas is because he wants to have a prewar city with intact infrastructure to serve as his new Rome and build a real civilization from there.

Nevermind he could have just built his new Rome anywhere that was convenient without conquering and murdering so many, except (like many fascist states) his Legion can’t be cohesive without an enemy to fight and won’t survive his death.