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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 809994" data-attributes="member: 6533">Past the formation of the Empire Rome was among the most stable empires in history.  The lesson that every successful dynasty learned from the civil wars that brought them to power was that the military was extremely dangerous to political stability, and that the best way to keep the military small was to avoid expansion.After the final war between Augustus and Marc Antony, Rome expanded in bulk, or attempted to, exactly four times.    The Claudian conquest of Britain, the Trajanic conquests of Dacia and what is now Iraq, and Marcus Aurelius's attempts to subdue the Germanic tribes.    The Roman military was very hard for the state to finance, but this was primarily because of flaws in the Roman taxation and salary system not due to the wealth or lack of wealth of the Empire.  Many of these flaws were deliberately designed to reinforce the power of the emperor over the military and the Senate.By every account I've read the Imperial period saw the army shrink to a dangerously small size in relation the Empire that was only possible given the extreme quality, high success rate, and infrequency of campaign use that the army saw.  If the Legions of this period lost even a single major battle, then the Empire found itself in terrible danger.   As was seen at Teutonoberg forest, a crisis that forced Augustine to call up retired legions in order to cover the hole left in the Northern defenses.Periods prior to the Imperial period had much much larger build-ups of troops.  In the late Imperial period the Empire attempted to achieve higher levels of militarization, but things were so disorganized at that point that I doubt anyone could make an accurate guess at the size of military formations versus the population.I've always been under the impression that Thucydides didn't deserve the skepticism that Ceasar or Herodotus do.  The largest armies he mentions are in the low hundred thousands and he comments on them as being unusually large and not very well organized.</blockquote>

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