Interesting, despite living in Croatia I had never heard of this rebellion, neither in school or in my spare time history reading.
On the other hand, the rugged eastern Adriatic coast and interior, with its many isolated islands and hills, was apparently a pirate sanctuary since records began so not too surprising.
Still, I would've thought that by Caesar's and Octavian's time the immediate vicinity of Italy would've been firmly under Roman control.
I had never heard of this war, but apparently it was considered by Romans to be the most significant foreign conflict since the Punic Wars with Hannibal. I assume that the Civil Wars are not included.
The Roman historian Suetonius described the uprising as the most difficult conflict faced by Rome since the Punic Wars two centuries earlier.
After serving with distinction in the Great Illyrian Revolt, he was sent to Germania to aid the local governor Publius Quinctilius Varus in completing the Roman conquest of the Germanic tribes. While in this capacity, Arminius secretly plotted a Germanic revolt against Roman rule, which culminated in the ambush and destruction of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
> Bato promised to surrender if he and his followers would be pardoned. Tiberius agreed and then asked him why his people had rebelled. According to Cassius Dio, he replied: "You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians of your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves."[37]
This seems to be a common cause of Roman rebellions. For example, Boudica rebelled after the Roman governor tried to seize her kingdom and then raped her daughters. The Jewish rebellion started after a Roman governor seized money from the Temple.
You're a bright young thing from an aristocratic Roman family, burning with entitlement and ambition. Your cursus honorum means you have to accumulate experience before you can run as senator or other high office of state, so you accept a post as governor of some far province.
You get there, and it's all very underwhelming. The place is even filthier than Rome, sometimes little more than a village built with sticks. Food and weather are atrocious. The locals can't understand you, and you can't understand them without going through some local translator you may or may not trust. There is nothing interesting to do except adjudicating the occasional squabble between neighbouring tribes. You are too far from the action in Rome to keep up with the political winds, and you know people are forgetting you with every passing day. Your troops are bored and restless, corruption and moral decay are everywhere in your ranks. You're increasingly paranoid and fearful for your life - if one can be assassinated in Rome, where it's full of people at all times and eventual scrutiny is inevitable, think of what could happen here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is watching...
So one day you snap out of it. You will be glorious, peasants be damned. You will be a Caesar, you will conquer and embiggen Rome's glory. What are these idiots going to do anyway, with their little wooden sticks? Let's remind them how we got here in the first place! And off you go into unprovoked conflict.
That summary is sort of the early life of Julius Caesar, but it actually worked out for him[0]. Also the story of this great little game that came out last year[1]
Lol, interesting - I'd never heard of this game, I'll check it out.
I was just riffing on what was a pretty standard story for governors and similar officials in far-away posts - precisely because Caesar's success in engineering favourable military campaigns established a sort of blueprint.
Welcome to the Balkans, where this kind of ancient stuff is used as arguments in historical disputes for modern nation building and pride. Whether your genes have traces from the Illyrian, Thracian, Dalmatian, Greek, Slavic or proto-Bulgarian tribes, is a major force in international relations on that peninsula.
you mean where entire nations are created after the balkanisation(ha ha) of yugoslavia by using false history to base nationalism on and create a national identity ?
coughcoughNorthern Macedoniacough
Macedonia is particularly egregious because its genesis as an ethnic group is still within living memory and would make as much sense as Pennsylvanians declaring themselves the last true Vikings, erecting statues with horned helmets and talking about retaking their true homelands.
All other major ethnic groups in the Balkans have at least two or more generations from their creation, either synthetic or organic, and as such are as easy to take seriously as any other ethnicity, be it Han or English.
> this didn't happen centuries ago, this happened in the 1960s to 1990s
The point is every ethnic group was made up by people at some point. Most retroactively. There isn't a rational reason to prefer old over new ethnic identities.
Culture is what you do when you stop thinking. When everyone in a group does the same thing when they stop thinking you have a nation.
Give it another 60 years and Macedonians will be on par with Israelis for a made up nation that is now real. We aren't there yet because there are people alive and well in their 40s who know just how made up it all is, since they were the ones that made it up.
This is a very hard concept to explain to liberal americans because they have no culture or nation. Thinking the wrong thoughts gets you excommunicated and what those wrong thoughts are changes constantly. So they have to constantly think about what acceptable behaviour is.
The Macedonian culture seems to me to have become distinct from Serbian and Bulgarian cultures by around WW1 at the latest. At the very least, all of the ethnographers being used to divvy up the Balkans recognized them as a distinct ethnicity at that time.
I don't understand this comment about Macedonians. They seem like a pretty distinct ethnic group, as evidenced by the unique language and culture. That was not just created out of thin air in any kind of recent time.
Yes. Oh yes are many Greeks peeved about the name of Macedonia, claiming that it means the country now called North Macedonia has designs on the Macedonia region of Greece.
Modern Macedonians are Slavic-speaking people, who moved into the region ~1500 years ago. Ancient Macedonians (whose most famous person was Alexander the Great) were a Greek-speaking people.
Not exactly. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, but my direct ancestors did run a printing house, as well as a lot of revolutionary work, in Macedonia during the late 19th and early 20th century. So I would have been a Macedonian if not for the violent suppression of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising :) Additionally, what bothers me with the "Bulgarian perspective" is that Bulgaria chickened out on Macedonia on multiple occasions, yet some people go around saying "Macedonia is Bulgarian". Well, you can't have your cake and eat it, right? After the Young Turk Revolution, even my family (Bulgarians through and through) seems to have gotten frustrated with Bulgarian politics and started leaning towards independent Macedonia. So, I'm totally okay with the situation as-it-is.
As for Balkan people being half-Turk, I have to disagree. You probably meant the Bulgars? They were some 30,000 men and their families, and were quickly assimilated into the local population (mostly slavicized, romanized Thracians). Check out the yDNA/mDNA haplogroups for Bulgarian (or Macedonian, they're almost the same) people, then compare this to (for example) Tatars, and you'll quickly see there's not much in common.
Sorry for the wall of text, but since you asked.. :)
My Turk comment was somewhat inspired by me realizing just how many of our words across the ex-Yu region are Turcisms. I had this epiphany when I watched the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul on Netflix, and couldn't go 60 seconds without hearing a familiar word that I never would have guessed the source of.
Now as for the uniqueness/culture, I'm biased having an ex-Yu background, where we tended to have a culture of equality/inclusivity and things like labels or instructions or competitions tried to represent all the constituent languages, and we always ended up with the 4 interchangeable ones (Croat/Serb/Bosniak/Montenegrin) and the 2 unintelligible ones (Slovene and Macedonian). From that perspective the Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty. However, I could not tell how close it was to regions outside its borders - presumably it was a spectrum, the way most Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language. It seems that you have by far a better data sample set for comparison :-)
> many of our words across the ex-Yu region are Turcisms
Oh, I got you now, komşu. I guess we picked up most of these during the Ottoman rule.
> I'm biased having an ex-Yu background
Btw Bulgaria was very close to joining the party in 1934, and again in 1947. Would have meant nicer Socialism. But also probably wars in the 90's. So I'm not sure what to think of it.
> Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty
Yeah, beautiful country, good people. Can't wait to hike there again once international tensions settle a bit... which can take 2 or 200 years.
> Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language
Right, at the end of the day, we all essentially speak dialects of Old Church Slavonic (aka Old Serbian/Croatian/Bulgarian/Macedonian depending on who you ask).
While this has been a more recent development for (Ex) Yugoslavia, nations and nationalism followed a similar pattern elsewhere. You can see a lot of diversity between regions in i.e. Germany, Spain, Italy which is more or less unified by a shared history narrative.
Not arguing it's good or bad. Just saying it's about how and when you define what a nation is.
edit: And to clarify some more, the reason why divisions here are harder is due to the lack of the shared history narrative. :D
if anything, Yugoslavia itself was created using false common history as a glue for enforced national South Slavic identity that never took a strong hold, precisely because most of its constituent peoples always felt stronger connection to their specific ethnic identities than this forced common identity.
Croats, Serbs, and some others who made up Yugoslavia had separate and firm national identities in the modern sense of the word for at least 150 years before Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, and in the more extended sense some of them had written history, rulers, institutions, their own language and script going back for more than a thousand years before.
i used to do some work for the french-german youth office where french and german students would meet over activities and translated discussions during a week; since the office had too much money there would sometimes be further partner countries invited. so here we were once, a french-german team trying to solve a conflict between 1990-born hungarians and romanians “but you don’t understand” one told me, “we were at war against each other up until 90 years ago”
I see this in a lot of historical Wikipedia articles now. I'm not sure what to think of it. It feels like a modern tag added to articles that feels somewhat out of place.
My understanding that at the time, and most of history war, what we think of as war crimes were a standard practice of war.
It seems strange to me to tag the end of an article about a large scale war and saying "hey this one group committed war crimes" and just leave it at that if you're not talking about specific events.
IMO adding that line seems to skew things to indicate one group committed war crimes, not mention other groups involved (it would seem to indicate they did not), and skews / hides the fact that the practice of war at included war crimes as a standard practice.
It’s something along the lines of accusing the Romans of violating the Geneva Conventions. Out of time. Reporting what kinds of things likely happened is not just advisable but necessary. Applying modern terms and standards by just saying “atrocity” doesn’t fit. Also the historical context that everyone did it is important.
Funny how these articles seldom mentioned the war crimes of the sympathetic side. Like how these rebellions started by killing all Romans in the province, after raping the women and children first of course.
More seriously, are we going to have a put disclaimers on an all encyclopedic articles that “standards of conduct were much different then”? How much pretext then becomes necessary?
Considering that encyclopedias are meant to be pedagogical in nature since they were invented during the Illustration, yes, that would be helpful; if a teenager would come off with the wrong impression from reading an encyclopedia, it doesn't serve the function of one.
Material for people who are knowledgeable in the area are specialized books that can assume more background knowledge or journal articles meant for people keeping up with the state of the art.
There should be a separation between historicism and ethics and factual data. If you want to blame the school curriculum because they dont teach ethics or morals, im fine with that but moralizing what should be a factual recount of some events is another thing. This is like me opening a chemistry book and reading, the formulation and process of synthesizing cyanide, despite its multiple uses in crime and assasinations by the soviet union, is .....
Those rebellions in those provinces start after Romans export half of the population as slaves and send the rest to work in the local mines. There's the catch.
Actually, its worse - even if you were a saintly society neighboring Rome or within the reach of Rome, Rome would invent a 'reason' to invade you if you had something they wanted or they lacked enough slaves. Like how the Syracuse invasion was done on literally manufactured consent by disguised legionnaires committing acts of atrocities against the Romans. All the wars of Rome from Early Republic and on were done on such manufactured consent and false flags.
At the end of the Republic period, everything changes - they stop needing to manufacture 'reasons' for invasions. By this time, the empire is already nascent as a social and political format and the slave-reliant economy is already dominant so there is no need to manufacture consent for the need for acquiring slaves.
Only half? That's so civilised. Inter tribal wars ended with all the men dead or in slavery, all the old women murdered and all the young women taken in as sex slaves. Same for the children too.
> Only half? That's so civilised. Inter tribal wars ended with all the men dead or in slavery
Well yes, that's true. But one could consider the central Italian unification wars as even nastier affairs. However yes, its not like Romans were not as brutal in other periods as they were in social wars...
As these events occurred more than a millennia prior to the Geneva conventions which defined war crimes, I would strongly argue that these acts did not constitute war crimes at the time and that comment is simply misplaced.
> I see this in a lot of historical Wikipedia articles now. I'm not sure what to think of it. It feels like a modern tag added to articles that feels somewhat out of place.
> My understanding that at the time, and most of history war, what we think of as war crimes were a standard practice of war.
Nah. They werent - Romans were famous for being particularly brutal even in their time. Which was one of the reasons for their easier conquest against weaker targets. Much better to become a Roman province or client state than get yourself conquered a few years later, half of your population enslaved and exported and the other half sent to work in the local mines.
Solely what Julius Caesar did in Gaul would give shivers to even his contemporaries. That's why he so slyly wrote the history of his own Gallic conquest himself - to shape the narrative.
There were other societies in history that employed brutal 'conqueror's rights' formats, like Assyrians, and after Assyrians this became kind of standard practice in Near East. But even Assyrians were not as brutal as Romans, who even discarded their unwanted babies into a trash pile outside their cities.
> It seems strange to me to tag the end of an article about a large scale war and saying "hey this one group committed war crimes" and just leave it at that if you're not talking about specific events.
For any other society or period, you might need to do that. But the atrocious behavior in Roman practices was so widespread that there would be no end to it if you started detailing the acts individually. Granted, what you described is something that is obvious to students of history, but its not so obvious to the general public.
As others mentioned here, the contemporaneous audience may be unaware of that era's lack of many conventions which are more or less assumed nowadays, including for conflicts/wars, so mentioning (unbiasedly) the brutality of a given interaction may paint a clearer picture, which is (or should be) the point of these articles. And as the time goes on and we distance ourselves from memorable conflicts, that may be increasingly more necessary if less and less of the audience would assume it by default.
Regarding the difference in the level of war brutality that the involved parties experienced in history, one notable example comes to mind - mongols. I have yet to encounter someone willing to argue that the suffering that medieval mongols inflicted in their campaign was comparable to that of their opponents.
If memory serves it explains that Octavian was pretty ineffective here, but gets all this glory and name recognition while Agrippa did all the dirty work.
63 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 79.8 ms ] threadOn the other hand, the rugged eastern Adriatic coast and interior, with its many isolated islands and hills, was apparently a pirate sanctuary since records began so not too surprising.
Still, I would've thought that by Caesar's and Octavian's time the immediate vicinity of Italy would've been firmly under Roman control.
The Roman historian Suetonius described the uprising as the most difficult conflict faced by Rome since the Punic Wars two centuries earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminius
After serving with distinction in the Great Illyrian Revolt, he was sent to Germania to aid the local governor Publius Quinctilius Varus in completing the Roman conquest of the Germanic tribes. While in this capacity, Arminius secretly plotted a Germanic revolt against Roman rule, which culminated in the ambush and destruction of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
This seems to be a common cause of Roman rebellions. For example, Boudica rebelled after the Roman governor tried to seize her kingdom and then raped her daughters. The Jewish rebellion started after a Roman governor seized money from the Temple.
You get there, and it's all very underwhelming. The place is even filthier than Rome, sometimes little more than a village built with sticks. Food and weather are atrocious. The locals can't understand you, and you can't understand them without going through some local translator you may or may not trust. There is nothing interesting to do except adjudicating the occasional squabble between neighbouring tribes. You are too far from the action in Rome to keep up with the political winds, and you know people are forgetting you with every passing day. Your troops are bored and restless, corruption and moral decay are everywhere in your ranks. You're increasingly paranoid and fearful for your life - if one can be assassinated in Rome, where it's full of people at all times and eventual scrutiny is inevitable, think of what could happen here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is watching...
So one day you snap out of it. You will be glorious, peasants be damned. You will be a Caesar, you will conquer and embiggen Rome's glory. What are these idiots going to do anyway, with their little wooden sticks? Let's remind them how we got here in the first place! And off you go into unprovoked conflict.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Juliu...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeditions:_Rome
I was just riffing on what was a pretty standard story for governors and similar officials in far-away posts - precisely because Caesar's success in engineering favourable military campaigns established a sort of blueprint.
All other major ethnic groups in the Balkans have at least two or more generations from their creation, either synthetic or organic, and as such are as easy to take seriously as any other ethnicity, be it Han or English.
The point is every ethnic group was made up by people at some point. Most retroactively. There isn't a rational reason to prefer old over new ethnic identities.
We’ve been telling others their culture isn’t real for about as long as we’ve been inventing ethnicities.
Give it another 60 years and Macedonians will be on par with Israelis for a made up nation that is now real. We aren't there yet because there are people alive and well in their 40s who know just how made up it all is, since they were the ones that made it up.
This is a very hard concept to explain to liberal americans because they have no culture or nation. Thinking the wrong thoughts gets you excommunicated and what those wrong thoughts are changes constantly. So they have to constantly think about what acceptable behaviour is.
Are people upset about them adopting the name?
Yes. Macedonians of antiquity were Greek. "Northern Macedonians" are Slavic. Greeks are very protective of their identity.
Yes. Oh yes are many Greeks peeved about the name of Macedonia, claiming that it means the country now called North Macedonia has designs on the Macedonia region of Greece.
Modern Macedonians are Slavic-speaking people, who moved into the region ~1500 years ago. Ancient Macedonians (whose most famous person was Alexander the Great) were a Greek-speaking people.
As for Balkan people being half-Turk, I have to disagree. You probably meant the Bulgars? They were some 30,000 men and their families, and were quickly assimilated into the local population (mostly slavicized, romanized Thracians). Check out the yDNA/mDNA haplogroups for Bulgarian (or Macedonian, they're almost the same) people, then compare this to (for example) Tatars, and you'll quickly see there's not much in common.
Sorry for the wall of text, but since you asked.. :)
Now as for the uniqueness/culture, I'm biased having an ex-Yu background, where we tended to have a culture of equality/inclusivity and things like labels or instructions or competitions tried to represent all the constituent languages, and we always ended up with the 4 interchangeable ones (Croat/Serb/Bosniak/Montenegrin) and the 2 unintelligible ones (Slovene and Macedonian). From that perspective the Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty. However, I could not tell how close it was to regions outside its borders - presumably it was a spectrum, the way most Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language. It seems that you have by far a better data sample set for comparison :-)
Oh, I got you now, komşu. I guess we picked up most of these during the Ottoman rule.
> I'm biased having an ex-Yu background
Btw Bulgaria was very close to joining the party in 1934, and again in 1947. Would have meant nicer Socialism. But also probably wars in the 90's. So I'm not sure what to think of it.
> Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty
Yeah, beautiful country, good people. Can't wait to hike there again once international tensions settle a bit... which can take 2 or 200 years.
> Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language
Right, at the end of the day, we all essentially speak dialects of Old Church Slavonic (aka Old Serbian/Croatian/Bulgarian/Macedonian depending on who you ask).
Not arguing it's good or bad. Just saying it's about how and when you define what a nation is.
edit: And to clarify some more, the reason why divisions here are harder is due to the lack of the shared history narrative. :D
Croats, Serbs, and some others who made up Yugoslavia had separate and firm national identities in the modern sense of the word for at least 150 years before Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, and in the more extended sense some of them had written history, rulers, institutions, their own language and script going back for more than a thousand years before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Xk9b92oKY
At that point how much of it is a science or honest investigation and how much is it a tool?
right, ever heard of wwii?
I see this in a lot of historical Wikipedia articles now. I'm not sure what to think of it. It feels like a modern tag added to articles that feels somewhat out of place.
My understanding that at the time, and most of history war, what we think of as war crimes were a standard practice of war.
It seems strange to me to tag the end of an article about a large scale war and saying "hey this one group committed war crimes" and just leave it at that if you're not talking about specific events.
IMO adding that line seems to skew things to indicate one group committed war crimes, not mention other groups involved (it would seem to indicate they did not), and skews / hides the fact that the practice of war at included war crimes as a standard practice.
The bigger problem is being so unspecific about the atrocities committed.
To what gauge? What was the last warcrimes-free war to occur?
I think that’s a bad assumption.
More seriously, are we going to have a put disclaimers on an all encyclopedic articles that “standards of conduct were much different then”? How much pretext then becomes necessary?
Material for people who are knowledgeable in the area are specialized books that can assume more background knowledge or journal articles meant for people keeping up with the state of the art.
Actually, its worse - even if you were a saintly society neighboring Rome or within the reach of Rome, Rome would invent a 'reason' to invade you if you had something they wanted or they lacked enough slaves. Like how the Syracuse invasion was done on literally manufactured consent by disguised legionnaires committing acts of atrocities against the Romans. All the wars of Rome from Early Republic and on were done on such manufactured consent and false flags.
At the end of the Republic period, everything changes - they stop needing to manufacture 'reasons' for invasions. By this time, the empire is already nascent as a social and political format and the slave-reliant economy is already dominant so there is no need to manufacture consent for the need for acquiring slaves.
Well yes, that's true. But one could consider the central Italian unification wars as even nastier affairs. However yes, its not like Romans were not as brutal in other periods as they were in social wars...
Nah. They werent - Romans were famous for being particularly brutal even in their time. Which was one of the reasons for their easier conquest against weaker targets. Much better to become a Roman province or client state than get yourself conquered a few years later, half of your population enslaved and exported and the other half sent to work in the local mines.
Solely what Julius Caesar did in Gaul would give shivers to even his contemporaries. That's why he so slyly wrote the history of his own Gallic conquest himself - to shape the narrative.
There were other societies in history that employed brutal 'conqueror's rights' formats, like Assyrians, and after Assyrians this became kind of standard practice in Near East. But even Assyrians were not as brutal as Romans, who even discarded their unwanted babies into a trash pile outside their cities.
> It seems strange to me to tag the end of an article about a large scale war and saying "hey this one group committed war crimes" and just leave it at that if you're not talking about specific events.
For any other society or period, you might need to do that. But the atrocious behavior in Roman practices was so widespread that there would be no end to it if you started detailing the acts individually. Granted, what you described is something that is obvious to students of history, but its not so obvious to the general public.
Regarding the difference in the level of war brutality that the involved parties experienced in history, one notable example comes to mind - mongols. I have yet to encounter someone willing to argue that the suffering that medieval mongols inflicted in their campaign was comparable to that of their opponents.
If memory serves it explains that Octavian was pretty ineffective here, but gets all this glory and name recognition while Agrippa did all the dirty work.