TOS - Bread & Circuses

[clearspira]

You know, at a certain point this feels more like a "Sliders" episode akin to "Mirror, Mirror".

What if...Rome NEVER FELL! (and also became the dominant power over the entire Earth, and continued to advance in technology and culture for centuries, but plateaued around the late 20th century in tech...)

The limitations of makeup, costuming, and other production factors often made the parallel worlds idea much more viable than alien world and they should have used it more often to explain things. Like Kirk reading the Constitution to barbarians or the world of only children and disease.
Parallel universes being more woven into the core mythos of Trek early on, I feel, would have been a good tool going forward.

Sliders is one of those shows that I hope Chuck gets to one day. The first two seasons were top quality TV... but ''The limitations of makeup, costuming, and other production factors'' is also a good description of that show too.

Its actually kind of amusing because we know that the Trek writers were aware of parallel universes given ''Mirror, Mirror'', they just kept on forgetting/not bothering with it. They could have explained it so easily too.

''Captain, i am detecting a planet identical to Earth.''
''Herm, another example of the Great Schism of 2167, Mr Spock?''
''Exactly, Captain.''

[Beastro]

Kicking off this week's discussion with perhaps an obvious observation: seems like this episode would have been better if it were reworked into a showcase for the Romulans. I mean, Trek already had a "Romans but in space" antagonist, why not use them instead of doing another "parallel earth" thing?

But I suppose that would have either gutted the ending or made it more difficult to achieve.

It would mean making new, possibly single use costumes and sets when preexisting ones laying around the studio could be reused for no cost.

Incidentally, Rome falling is one of the great ''what if's'' of history, and I wonder that if it survived whether this soft attitude towards slavery would have persisted and it would have ended up being abolished in the West far earlier than it actually was.

Why? Into the Middle Ages it faded away into near obscurity. It didn't need to be abolished because almost everyone simply stopped enslaving others (And yes, there's crucial differences between slavery and serfdom, at least when it came to the period when the latter began to kick in around the 11th Century). Modern slavery in the West began when the Portuguese, and later Spanish, found the Church wasn't happy with them enslaving fellow European Christians to work sugar cane (They didn't do will in hot climates anyway), and so went looking elsewhere for heathens that would be tolerable. That also happened to be where Muslims were getting much of their slaves from and they were all black, which got the race connotations dragged into the mix from the Western perspective.

[Beastro]

Its funny what Chuck noted about the slaves of Rome Planet having more perks that he does because the slaves of the real Rome were incredibly well treated compared to the slaves of Greece, Egypt or the later black slaves. They had an array of rights under the law - including the right to inherit, the right to own property, the right to earn their own money and the right to buy themselves free. They could even file complaints against their masters for mistreatment which is incredible when you think about it (of course, what we today would consider mistreatment and what the Romans considered mistreatment are completely different). Many of them were even highly educated - there are reports of practising doctors being slaves. That may sound hard to believe but the punishment for debt in Ancient Rome was often to be enslaved by the state.

If you were unfortunate enough to be a slave, Rome was the place to be. (And that is never going to be taken out of context ever - no sir.)

Incidentally, Rome falling is one of the great ''what if's'' of history, and I wonder that if it survived whether this soft attitude towards slavery would have persisted and it would have ended up being abolished in the West far earlier than it actually was.

I believe that greatly depended on the situation of the slave. Julius Caesar's slave, Posca for example, who was his personal assistant was a man of some importance and even authorty. However, that came from being an educated Greek in the service of a powerful patrician. If you were enslaved for your physical labor and were not able to get into the personal service of your owner, you would likely have a fairly miserable existance. Also, Romans of the upper classes derived status from the number of clients they cared for and their former slaves were an important source of clients.

I forget the man's name, but a Roman Patrician was murdered by one of his slaves for his nasty treatment of his property. As punishment, his family had all 600 of his slaves executed for the crime.

[slochmoeller]

Kicking off this week's discussion with perhaps an obvious observation: seems like this episode would have been better if it were reworked into a showcase for the Romulans. I mean, Trek already had a "Romans but in space" antagonist, why not use them instead of doing another "parallel earth" thing?

But I suppose that would have either gutted the ending or made it more difficult to achieve.

It would mean making new, possibly single use costumes and sets when preexisting ones laying around the studio could be reused for no cost.

Boooo, no one asked you for the realistic, practical answer!

...But yeah, the romulans always were a budget buster for TOS. That's why they had such few, though very memorable, appearances in that series.

[Elric4985]

"The Lights in the Sky are Stars"? Is that a Gurren Lagann reference?

[CharlesPhipps]

lients.
It is interesting to realize that the Roman Empire existed as a political entity until 1458, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople, less than forty years before Columbus opened the New World to the Old.

Much of what we consider "common knowlege" Roman history was the work of Edward Gibbon's THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, which was a proto-fascist work written in 1776 and effectively blamed Christianity for the "softening" of Rome and its defeat by barbarians.

The thing is that Gibbon's work basically ignored the existence of the Byzantine Empire (more precisely considered it inferior in every way--a dubious assertion) due to wanting to make the point that he was making ("peace and good, BAD! War and conquest, good!") as well as the fact that it was a society he loathed for its orientalism as well as perceived decadence (another quality he blamed for Rome's fall--decadence being defined as women not being property and baby making machines plus looser sexual mores).

GENIUS BONUS: Almost 90% of what Caesar says in New Vegas is actually from Gibbon including the world profligate that is not actually a Roman word.

Essentially the Roman Empire never even actually fell, it just moved and eventually got taken over by the Turks who made it their own Empire with an even larger territory--more like China and its dynasties.

I forget the man's name, but a Roman Patrician was murdered by one of his slaves for his nasty treatment of his property. As punishment, his family had all 600 of his slaves executed for the crime.

Yeah, Roman slavery was still slavery and there was all the mutilation, torture, and rape that such an institution carries. It also is what destroyed the Western Empire's economy and left it collapsing because the plantation and miner class left everyone unemployed.

[clearspira]

Meh. Its understandable that people think that the Roman Empire fell considering that Rome itself fell. Besides which, the Byzantines did not think of themselves as Roman after a few centuries anyway. This would be like Britain falling in 1775 and me claiming that it still exists because our American colony does.

[CharlesPhipps]

Meh. Its understandable that people think that the Roman Empire fell considering that Rome itself fell. Besides which, the Byzantines did not think of themselves as Roman after a few centuries anyway. This would be like Britain falling in 1775 and me claiming that it still exists because our American colony does.

I suppose that would be a good argument if not for the fact that the leader of the American colony was called The King of England in this respect. Byzantine isn't even what they called themselves. They called themselves Romans.

[Rocketboy1313]

Meh. Its understandable that people think that the Roman Empire fell considering that Rome itself fell. Besides which, the Byzantines did not think of themselves as Roman after a few centuries anyway. This would be like Britain falling in 1775 and me claiming that it still exists because our American colony does.

No they called themselves Romans.
The idea of "Byzantium" is an invention centuries after the fall of Constantinople.
You have to recall that the various powers of Western Europe wanted to think of themselves as the successors to the idea of ROME, and the idea that the real Roman Empire had kept going as a world power for centuries after it left the west kind of ate away at their ability to position themselves as modern Caesars.

I mean, the Holy Roman Empire, was none of those things. It was not Holy, it was based in Germany so it wasn't Roman, and had no imperial agenda. But they wanted to rewrite history a bit. And to take away from the Muslim world's victory over Constantinople, "You didn't defeat ROME, you beat the Asylum direct to DVD mock-sploitation knock off of ROME!"

[Beelzquill]

Hey, wasn't one the Holy Roman Emperor's declared the AntiChrist by the Pope for some bs. I think his name was Frederick the nth or whatever.