I also suspect that a lot of the views of the Senate are driven in part by dated sources. There’s a lot of good work on the republic being done by scholars recently that suggest that the Roman People were a lot more powerful on the political stage than is often thought. The electorate wasn’t just a hapless pawn of an all-powerful oligarchy, and the senators had to be a lot more in tune with the voters than was traditionally thought.
Nope, this is also dated. The old view that senators retreated to their estates and became feudal lords is not supported by recent scholarship.
The senatorial class didn’t really survive into the Middle Ages outside of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy. In Italy, the actual Senate of Rome remained resolutely urban and focused on their traditional relationship with maintaining the city until the Gothic Wars and Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian made that impossible. This is why you see them fade away by the 600s.
In Spain and and Africa, their landholding was pretty much immediately usurped by the Visigoths and Vandals respectively. The barbarian elite became the new landholding class.
It’s only in southern Gaul — Aquitaine and Provence — that the old view of senators surviving as feudal lords and as Catholic clergy has any real evidence. But they’re pretty unique and it’s all down to local politics.
That’s not to speak of the eastern senatorial class, which was much weaker and more tied in to the imperial bureaucracy than independently wealthy with landholding…
on what level dose gender fluidity exist in Gruthungia? are there many woman in army? or is it activly discureged and only happens in special casses or its not discureged but just most woman dont whant to join, also what about man who are in female genderd roles what are there expcetations and how dose socity look at them?
I never said anything about trickle down economics. I said y’all were way too eager to support murderous dictatorship if it means some rich folk get screwed in the process.
Good luck with that indeed. Dictatorships are famous for thinking about the people’s interests over those of the rich and powerful, after all.
I suspect y’all are just replacing one elite with another.
The Senate path is the only one where the People’s interests are considered at all — you might argue that in the foederati path, you’re playing Napoleon and crushing the People in chapter 6 with a whiff of grapeshot.
In fact, for folks who’ve never played it — you’re not forced to be a cats paw of the rich. You can outright tell Consentia that you support the People, not the rich.
And you don’t have to necessarily help the criminal Ceto either.
corection its Ceto path. i dont think she would like geting considered same as senate
you can also help people without bieng on senate path by funding watch(im not sure but i think people like it) and then giving food alotments to them. so not totaly senate dependat.
Ceto is fun. i think she is actaully only person who likes people and really whants to help them, funny thing about is that geting her to open up about it is quite hard to get. and if she likes you she tells a lot of interesting things.
I don’t like Ceto very much. I note that Ceto’s approval is tied to criminal approval (as Consentia is tied to the Senate). Ceto’s approval, as near as I can tell, is not the same as the People’s approval.
Edit:
Yes I think you’re right about this — but there’s z tension between the people of Kyro and the foederati, and you’ll be fighting rebels of Kyro in chapter 6 in the foederati path.
It exists in the sense that you claim your gender (and therefore your place in the hierarchy) with what role in society you serve. A weaver or a fisher would be a woman’s role, but a soldier or scholar would be a man’s role. There are no female soldiers in Gruthungia for the simple reason that if you are a soldier, you are a man. No matter what you were before you took up arms.
Obviously, being a King is something you are for the rest of your life, Grimhilt firmly considers himself a man. A Iudian considering him otherwise might not meet such a pleasant end, because that would be a mark of denigration against him.
Gruthungians also have rituals for coming into new roles in life. Here’s an example of the ceremony Grimhilt describes to a trans man prefect:
Honestly, my Prefect is just down bad for his precious warcrime snookums and wants the best for their kid.
After watching my own fandom be unhinged factionalist fanatics, it’s a bit of a refreshing sensation to get the have the sandal on the other foot for once.
Oh boy, now you’re reaching into my field of expertise.
13 Vendemiaire wasn’t exactly a clear-cut case of ‘The people vs General Buonaparte’. The Directory was corrupt, and its outreach to the left (including Napoleon himself, who had actually been left without a command because of his supposed Jacobin sympathies) was a cynical attempt to retain power - but the forces arrayed against them did include organised and armed royalist militias. The idea that Napoleon “saved the Republic” by firing on them is not entirely without basis. Carlyle (and others) can claim that the “Whiff of Grapeshot” betrayed the Revolution, but that completely elides the fact that the targets of those guns were instigated and led primarily by those who would have rolled back the Revolution altogether.
The royalists did have some levels of popular support, but to equate them to “the people” is less based on fact and more on counterrevolutionary propaganda.
Thanks! It was definitely mostly for the zinger – I do not mean that she is actually Pol Pot. I just really do not like unaccountable, one-person rule. You might say that it’s a bit of a sore point.
I also think that whatever the flaws of Greco-Roman republicanism (and there were many! Slavery high among them!), it was vastly superior to the feudal world that emerged after.
Yes, I think the protagonist factor is a huge part of it. I see this a lot in stories where audiences get mad at people who frustrate the protagonists’ goals – and sometimes I want to be like “but wait, they’re right though??? Our heroes are in the wrong??”
But being on “our side” (whatever “our” means) is a powerful motivator for people, instinctively, it seems.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Yes, Minister. Even love House of Cards (the original british version that is), despite the utterly icky protagonist Urquhart.
But there’s just something less fun about caping for a parliament than a Senate. For one thing, parliament fans are called roundheads. How terrible.
Personally, I think Julia is (was, I guess) beyond help when it comes to dealing with any kind of popular rule. All you can really do is give Augusta a stable enough position of power, the right mindset, and a childhood sufficiently free of trauma to get her to consider engineering a genuinely democratic parliamentary system when she becomes secure on her throne.
I’ll raise a toast to “wants the best for their kid” at least, haha. My poor prefect replaced his Duty motivation with Love for a reason, so I’m with you there.
I mean, it is fun, isn’t it? I complain about y’all hating the Senate but if everyone agreed with me this thread would be very boring for me, haha.
Absolutely agree. I should have caveated that I knew it was a royalist uprising, but as someone who word vomited a bunch of Roman history earlier, I absolutely appreciate your post here. The popular image of Napoleon’s actions here isn’t necessarily the full story.
I draw the analogy though because of what came after – I have rather mixed feelings on Napoleon (though I am a fan of Chambaceres) and I think the re-imposition of hereditary monarchy was a terrible mistake, as was his general inability to win a war without imposing a peace so humiliating that it guarenteed another.
Exactly. This is why I’m raising her as a paragon on the “Senate” path, in hopes of creating some sort of lasting non-hereditary system based on the public interest.
It might be worth playing the Senate path at least once to hear what Consentia actually proposes, by the way – she has a decided Enlightenment take on mixed government… she’s not Sulla, haha. Or just code snooping on chapter 6.
I am on record as a Berthier stan, so I should probably make clear that my appreciation for Napoleon’s overlooked indispensable inner circle also definitely extends to Cambaceres.
Same, but on the Foederati one. My take is more or less that she’ll have an easier job re-engineering a legislature from scratch with absolute powers than she will trying to rework a gigantic jumble of landed interests into something which would even be remotely fair for the proletarii.
Berthier’s great. I am more interested in the civil side than the military side of things, but even I know what an incredible role he played. Administrative skills are underappreciated – part of the reason why I appreciate that we play a prefect in this game.
And as much as I lament the re-imposition of hereditary privilege under the First Empire, I do have to admit the First Empire had style – especially in their swanky court attire and furnishings.
I suppose Napoleon and the French Revolution is a good comparison here, imagine trying to make sense of the bewildering Ancien Regime overlapping legal interests when trying to draft a civil and administrative code. Yipes.
But I will stick with the Senate, primarily because the biggest tragedy of late antiquity to me is still the demise of civic governance – particularly at the city level – and its replacement by rural feudalism. My goal such as it is would be to first work towards limiting the power of the monarchy in a high empire / “five good emperors” (even though I disagree that all five were good) type of adoptive system, and then see if civil society can emerge from a re-empowered republican system. I see value in working with a long-established system of civic self-governance and harnessing that.
But if we were working with a feudal system here, I’d be with y’all and say sweep it all away.
I actually doubt Julia would kick a puppy. She quite likes dogs, especially her childhood pet, who she ordered the ashes of interred in the imperial crypt beside her. There’s a scene lost on the cutting room floor of my outline where she visits a kennel of hunting dogs in Chapter V and feeds them that I couldn’t make fit in my structure.
She certainly wouldn’t be above stealing from a child, however, if she thought it benefitted her. She wasn’t above ordering one killed, after all.
