Earlier by Steve Sailer: And Then They Came For The Byzantine Empire
That Washington Post article on “anti-Blackness and transphobia” in the Byzantine Empire reminds me that many of the the key events in Roman history involve war against more northern people than themselves, what could be called from a Counter-Woke perspective: Rome’s War on Whiteness.
Rome conquered roughly as far north as south, but Roman conquests southward merely petered out (a drive up the Nile under Nero failed in the great swamp in South Sudan and the Romans lost interest in sub-Saharan Africa). In contrast, the northern frontier was always central to Roman history, as the following magisterial list of Roman events I can remember off the top of my head proves:
390 BC: The Gauls cross the Alps and sack Rome. According to Peter Turchin, this northern intrusion is when the Romans, after centuries of petty squabbles with Italian neighbors, got serious about conquest.
Carthaginian Wars — OK, Carthage was to the south of Rome in modern day Tunisia (although it had started as Phoenician colony). And the three Carthaginians Wars were a really big deal in the history of the Roman republic. But … uh … huh … OK, Hannibal attacked from the north!
The Conquest of All of Gaul in 52 BC: Julius Caesar’s conquest of what is roughly today’s France and Belgium was the central cause of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.
The Conquest of Egypt: Hmmhhh, Egypt was pretty far south, but Queen Cleopatra was a Macedonian, so there.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD: Germans led by Hermann permanently stopped the Roman advance into central Germany; Augustus adopts a policy of more or less being satisfied with the extent of the Roman Empire.
Marcus Aurelius dies at his military headquarters in Serbia in 180 AD: The end of the peak decades of the Roman Empire
Emperor Valens lets the barbarian refugees cross the Danube because he was told it would be good for the economy in 375 AD: seriously, it was a lot like Merkel’s Mistake in 2015 but in the opposite direction, if she’d been blown up by Muslim terrorists in 2018.
