Naldiin
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ACOUP Senate Open Thread I
🕑 Added 2021-07-01 16:58:05 +0000 UTCOur first open thread for the posing of potential Q&A questions by the ACOUP Senate. In future Senate Open Threads, my plan is to put a poll up here for topics from the last open thread that were a bit too big for a Q&A response, with the winning topic getting a longer post on it.
My plan for the Q&A posts (which naturally will be titled Senatus Consultum, 'the opinion of the Senate') will be to lead each question with, "So-and-so asks..." followed by your question. I'll use your patreon handle by default; if for some reason you'd rather me not do so (or make the question anonymous) be sure to note that.
Comments
Adam
I know I'm late to the party, but I was wondering about mercenaries. I didn't have a time period in specific nailed down, but I know your specialty is in the ancient Mediterranean, so that's a great jumping off point. I wasn't wondering about mercenaries and their use in battle so much as I was wondering where they came from. What sorts of people took up renting themselves out as fighters? Especially because as I understand the ancient mediterranean, there wasn't much of a notion of professional fighting forces. Were mercenaries notably more practiced, and for lack of a better term than "professional" than the more conventional forces polities usually raised when they were fighting? If they were, how did they manage to be more organized along those lines than almost all the states then current? If not, what did they really offer to these states, outside of a new pool of manpower they could tap? Were people just kind of "Seasonal" mercenaries, taking it up if and when there was a demand for such forces, or were there actual "career" mercenaries?
In a fireside in June you had discussion of the different perspectives of historians and political scientists. Is there a similar relationship between historians and economists? Relatedly, what do you think of attempts by economists to apply modern economics to (ancient) history, e.g. Peter Temin's "The Roman Market Economy"?
