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shokwave comments on How would you take over Rome? - Less Wrong
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My existence obviously invalidates some of my knowledge of how the history of Rome played out, but the broad political strokes remain similar. After fifteen years of backing the winning side in nearly every conflict I should have a phenomenal powerbase; a coup is almost a formality at this point.
After backing the winning side once or twice, things change, and your knowledge of specific details of history will become less and less valuable.
I plan on displacing some other backer so that the total support is roughly the same, such that the events proceed as similarly as possible. Once the disjunct becomes too big, I have to actually think to pick the winning side, but that's not that much harder.
The butterfly effect is going to screw you over long before 15 years have passed, in many ways, but even directly via the weather: how many naval battles could have turned out differently if the weather changed?
Land battles, too. Before modern communications, the direction of the wind had a large effect on how fast and far orders could be heard.
How much did you do to back them? Are you just a boot-licker, or have you been contributing in some way as to draw support away from the historical winner and to yourself?
Agreed. Political power is much less interesting than building an army but I think it's a much safer path to ruling rome than trying to take over either through rome's military or through your own. You can use your patrician wealth and knowledge of the future to jumpstart a fortune that can dwarf any other roman's and become the foremost citizen in rome, and from there it's not a long path to being emperor.
You actually don't even need knowledge - you just need a low discount rate. I read a little bit about Roman banking once, and they were charging 10+% interest in periods of essentially no inflation, with apparently fairly low bad loan rate.
And as I pointed out on XiXiDu's post, knowledge of black powder alone is valuable and very feasible in an Italian setting. Even if we generously assumed that our omnicompetent individual couldn't develop gunpowder suitable for small arms (or the metallurgy necessary), crude gunpowder is fantastic for siege warfare, which the Romans engaged in plenty of and had well developed and expensive siege weapons. Sell it to the military and profit.
Augustus would quickly capture you if you produced black powder. Tiberius would torture you for the formula and then kill you and nearly everyone who he suspected you might have given the formula to.
See:
Yes, that's a cool story, but it's not like innovation stopped in the Roman empire.
Is this story considered likely true? Did he invent plastic?
Apparently, Pliny himself was skeptical.
I'm not sure.