Step 3b is especially problematic; even if your guards are too loyal to sell you out (why?), you can't conceal that you're doing something in secret with a pack of metalsmiths.
I'm only concerned about the technological prowess, not knowledge of its existence. I want to maintain my technological advantage. The guards can't convey information they themselves lack; and I'd make sure the job was lucrative enough.
But as soon as you start training your infantry, the clock starts: the emperor sends an envoy ordering you to turn over your new weapons, you refuse, you're ordered to appear before a Roman court, you refuse, you're declared to be in rebellion, and it's on.
Well -- plantation owners were allowed to maintain their own household troops (within reason) -- and I'd have fewer than a thousand such. It'd be pretty easy to hide the total number of individuals involved; especially since the efficacy of my troops would be totally inconceivable. Careful bribery of provincial leaders and arguments/justifications involving guarding my own wagons, keeping troops always on the move to make them less apparent.
Also -- I'm expecting to face charges of rebellion; they are an integral part of the plan. It would be best if they didn't come until somewhere between three and four years in. It's important to recognize that the usual response to 'wild' stories of 'incredible' weapons is skepticism. There's very strong odds that the initial inquiries/investigations would simply not recognize the scale/scope of the threat involved. But you are quite right; additional maskirovka should probably be involved to ensure that the total number of troops being trained is vastly under-reported. The usefulness of the weapons should also be down-played. It would be very easy (use clay bullets, undercharge the guns) to make it appear that they are only useful against poorly-armored highway robbers. That would stave off 'official' inquiries quite well.
Surviving the next year would be tricky, though.
The Romans as a culture placed a lot of stock in the notion that victory in combat represented worthiness as a person. You can coast pretty far on such a victory. Capitalizing on it would be tricky -- how does one guarantee the loyalty of a personal elite guard?
Yeah, ok; you have more scope for camouflage than I appreciated at first. It will eventually become obvious that you're training an army (you'll have to train them to fight in formation, and volley, and things like that), but when the provincial governor shows up wanting to know what you plan to do with it, you might well be able to get away with saying "I'm planning to conquer Rome and install myself as emperor, and if you go along with it I'll find you a nice fat province in the East to be governor of". And if that doesn't work, well, you pro...
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.