I tend to rankle when people compare the colonialism of the last few centuries with the pre-capitalist expansion and settlement of ancient societies. It seems like there's a lot of daylight between the English founding Jamestown and ancient Ionians founding Massalia or w/e.
But what do Hexbear's historians think? Is it fundamentally the same social phenomenon across time or is capitalist settler-colonialism its own unique thing?
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Good post like many posts in this thread, but the Romans did have economic reasons for genociding everyone, not just Germans. Ancient Rome used the slave mode of production which means you get rich by having more land and more slaves. There is a huge incentive therefore to conquer and enslave people. The empire only started running into problems when they literally couldn’t conquer anyone else. Deserts / oceans/ forests blocked them on every side, and the barbarians were also starting to figure out how to fight the legions (horse archers at the Battle of Carrhae) while Roman wealth itself was transforming the virtuous warriors of Caesar’s day into pleasure-loving hedonists before they became stoics and then finally Christians (specifically because they were running out of shit to steal and society therefore needed a way to get people to consume less and have fewer kids (thus the creation of monasteries)).
Ancient Greece and Egypt used the same mode of production, it was just less developed.
That is a fantastic explanation for the birth of stoicism! Thank you.