Talk:Rise of Rome
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Under the technological view, I was tempted to add:
- This also appears to be the view of Microsoft, whose first add-on to its popular Age of Empires strategy game was in fact entitled the rise of Rome, and in which the player (as Rome) must achieve absolute dominance over other peoples and is required by the structure of the game to not only employ, but rely on, such tactics as scorched earth and genocide using ever-escalating technologies. This may be more of a comment on Microsoft than on Rome, however. Interestingly, in the game, trade seems to continue normally in many respects even as great powers war.
Hmm. Seriously, can anyone make a serious argument that the current text is anything but an extended expression of POV? Sheesh, I wouldn't hold the Roman Empire as an example of an enlightened state (except, perhaps, against some of its contemporaries), but this article is so harsh on that extinct political entity that one would have a vaguely guilty feeling just for knowing how to speak Latin -- even if that knowledge was enforced by the sharp edges of the rulers of countless nuns! -- llywrch 02:01, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- I've looked at this a couple times, hard to know where to begin. It really looks like amateur revisionism by some student with bad professors. :-) This is a reasonable article topic though; I'd want to raid the university library, find a couple books that treat the subject (I've seen such, but none of them seem to be on my shelf :-( ), and summarize their analysies. Stan 03:12, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
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- The topic is very interesting indeed, but the existing analysis is so flawed and amateurish that, yes, revision is just about impossible -- right now it reads, in factual content and style, like an Adequacy article. The author seems to have woven together a thesis from a few vague impressions about Rome, mainly from secondary or tertiary sources, while ignoring entirely some very important threads of history -- the Germanic migrations, for examples -- and Roman influences on the modern world: the United States government, just for example, was consciously modeled after Roman legal structures. That said, I'd love to work on a serious rewrite of this article. --MIRV 04:49, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I've added accuracy and NPOV dispute headers, and I'm going to copy this thing to a subpage of mine to see if I can improve it; anyone who wants to should feel free to jump in. But I think that this entire article really needs to be junked and rewritten from scratch; you can polish troll droppings all you want, but they're still troll droppings. --MIRV 10:48, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Unhelpful article, needs to be written from scratch
The author of this article assumes, and pretty much says so in the first couple of paragraphs, that the only people who would want to read this article are politicians and people of power who are concerned about retaining power. The topic is only interesting because it concerns power. Therefore, the article will have a POV to address the retention of power.
I am not a politician. I don't need to retain power. I need a timeline and a quick summary for an article I'm writing. At the risk of making wild assumptions like the author, I'd say 90 percent of the people looking at this article are like me and have similar needs.
Yes, yes, I know the Wiki credo. If you don't like it, roll up your sleeve and write. In fact, I may do that. The last section of the restructured article would explore the fascination with the rise of Rome. But that section would be secondary, even tertiary.
And I won't be offended to hear a vigorous defense from the original author about why the current structure is the most appropriate.
- Really unhelpful. Someone searching about the Rise of Rome should know about the wars agaisnt Carthago, the fall of the Republic and the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, etc. This article is good as a kind of essay about the consequences that the Roman Empire brought to the western civilization. --Neigel von Teighen 17:55, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
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I'm not sure what to say except the article looks like the musings of a community college sophmore parroting an instructor's comments out of context rather than any analysis of the rise of Rome.
