Roman Civil War sources

[Tim]

Patrick, I know that it runs counter to my original assertion but as was said to me many years ago when first seriously studying the Romans - the victors tend to write the history. It is possible that life outside the Empire was an anarchists collective run on Athenian Democratic lines with free love in the land of milk and honey but the Roman's don't write it like that. Given how many people outside the Empire wanted to get in I suspect being protected by Roman military power and paying Roman taxes must have been preferable to the alternative but I can't prove that.
Tim

[Jim Webster]

I suspect that the English speaking world has picked up on the Romans because of the 'enlightenment' and the 'grand tour.' They brought the wealthy young of the English speaking world into contact with the world of Rome in a real way. Previously 'Rome' had been the Pope and all that entailed.
(Edinburgh calling itself the 'Athens of the North' is perhaps something from the tail end of the same period)

Entwined in this lot is the fact that Caesar, because of the quality of his writing, tended to get used a lot in the Public Schools and the Third British Empire found in their version of Rome an ideological underpinning

[Patrick Waterson]

Patrick, I know that it runs counter to my original assertion but as was said to me many years ago when first seriously studying the Romans - the victors tend to write the history. It is possible that life outside the Empire was an anarchists collective run on Athenian Democratic lines with free love in the land of milk and honey but the Roman's don't write it like that. Given how many people outside the Empire wanted to get in I suspect being protected by Roman military power and paying Roman taxes must have been preferable to the alternative but I can't prove that.
Tim

On the one hand, we have peoples keen to join the Roman sphere of influence because it gets them help dealing with difficult neighbours, while on the other we have people like the Cilicians and Illyrians who remain pestiferous piratical nuisances and end up being incorporated by force.

The experience of Britannia is interesting because we can see it unfold through multiple, albeit mainly non-British, eyes.  Caesar pops over with high hopes of conquest but goes back to Gaul having been told thanks, but no thanks.  Caligula launches his campaign which gets as far as defeating Neptune.  It would be intriguing to have a view of Rome through British eyes around that point.  Then Claudius decides upon what seems esentially to have been a prestige conquest, and like it or not, Britain is gradually subdued, part by alliance and part by outright conquest.  This is never the nice part.

Then we get the reign of Nero, and the British allies of Rome find out that being part of the Empire can be bad as well as good.  The result is the Iceni revolt and a somewhat more cautious Imperial approach in future.  Enter the age of the Antonines and Britain, like the rest of the Empire, would seem to have few if any complaints.  This is when the Romans arer having a definite 'good guy' period: the alternatives are arrogant and arbitrary Parthians or grubby barbarians who do dreadful things to houses, sheep and women.

Then comes the 3rd-4th-5th century AD period, characterised by civil wars and barbarian invasions.  A good opportunity to Britain to throw off the yoke of Rome, and under Carausius this is exactly what happens, but the Britons retain the Roman cultural baby while throwing out the Imperial bathwater.  Constantius Chlorus brings Britannia back into the fold, and for the next century or so Britain is making occasional emperors who go on to conquer the Empire - or as much of it as they can reach, depending upon what happens when the said imperial hopeful gets to Italy.

The end result of this process is that Britain is effectively abandoned by the Empire - and the inhabitants are last heard pleading with the representative of Imperial power in Gaul for assistance against barbarian incursions.

Britannia had a rocky road, during which the Empire was loved, hated and became a habit, but subsequent Brythonic (or Brittonic) tradition tended to depict the Saxons, not the Romans, as the 'bad guys'.

[Edit: fixed typos]

[aligern]

Rome's influence on the modern West and thus the modern world is much much deeper than the grand tour  or reading Caesarvat school.mIt goes back to the Renaissance at a point where European thinkers were looking to enlargebtheir knowledge and researching into the models that Greek and Roman literature provided.
I suggest that in the Middle Ages Vegetius was published and read, but without a deep effect on the way that war was organised, perhaps the strategic advice was understood, but the times and particularly the importance of drill and training and having homogeneous units of permanently embodied infantry was ignored, or rather not grasped. However, over a period of a century or so mainly after 1500 the information and data on Rome became absorbed and actually applied. European leaders, such as the Nassaus applied the lessons of discipline and the drilling of small mobile units combining missile and shock and crucially the same throughout the army so that a general coukd take any group of units, move it to a position and know that it would be able to fulfil a full tactical function...an enormous advantage of a Roman army. over say a Hellenistic army .
This fundamental reorganisation of Western armies along Roman lines then spread into the ways that European society operated an it became more ordered , more disciplined and much more productive. Let us nit forget tgat Rome was hugely successful and, once education spread from the XVth century onwatds Roman ( and GreeK) models became available tona large section of the popukace. Of course its also about technical developments and allowance of the carrying out and publication of scientific enquiry, geography,ntrade etc, but the Roman contribution to the rise of the West is huge. When Westerners decided to go look there before them was this huge bidy of knowledge to be researched and understood, a huge treasury of examples. We share many things with the Romans previsely because we learned it from them!
Roy